The community is killing this game.
lncabin
Join Date: 2013-07-10 Member: 186024Members
Join Date: 2013-07-10 Member: 186024Members
I honestly can't play this game anymore. 90% of the time I can tell who is going to win within the first few minutes. I can't bare the frustration of back to back to back 10min surrenders anymore. The team stacking be it skill wise or actual number wise seems to be a problem no matter what server I play on. All it takes is a single OP player to completely shut down the enemy team. Too often do I see a single player go something along the lines as (double digit kill)/(single digit death) while everyone else on both teams isnt even close. Add another OP player to that same team and its obvious who's going to win as soon as the game starts.
I dont know why this game suffers from a lack of player balancing mods. There were a good number of player balancing mods for the half-life games, NS's roots, so I'm not sure why someone or even the devs have made something a long this line.
There also seems to be a stigma by the community against a forced team switch, separating these players that are always on the same team, or even kicking pub stompers. I'm sorry but, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
I dont know why this game suffers from a lack of player balancing mods. There were a good number of player balancing mods for the half-life games, NS's roots, so I'm not sure why someone or even the devs have made something a long this line.
There also seems to be a stigma by the community against a forced team switch, separating these players that are always on the same team, or even kicking pub stompers. I'm sorry but, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
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Comments
This game is geared towards skilled players. Not-skilled-enough players can still enjoy the game if they are not sore-losers.
Also please do not take this as an insult, that's just how this game works.
Then dont take this as an insult either but that comment of yours is utter crap. I dont "have" a team. I play on random servers with random people. My original post isn't exclusive to being on the losing team either, like your post implies. Being on the winning side of a pubstomp is equally lame.
Wanting to have a balancing game and complaining about how its not is being a sore-loser? Give me a break.
Your demeanor is a good example of why the community is killing this game.
If you haven't considered that, I'm genuinely curious: why not?
If you've /tried/ that and it failed, I'm /really/ curious: what about that experience compelled you to return to random play?
If the players actually playing the game dont count then this game is already dead.
Can't cop out that easily, he's right.
There are a few players that single-handedly win the game for their team, especially if they play marines. As marines can they dominate from the first minute and for the entire length of the match, as aliens do they have to wait until they can go Lerk or Fade. You can mix the players all you want, but sometimes it's just glaringly obvious that there is the one guy with a 40-3 KDR while all other players in the server end up with something around 10-10.
It's simply an inert issue of the game's mechanics.
In other team-based shooters is it usually not an issue because you don't gain much of a persistent advantage from winning your battles. You will just respawn with your full loadout and the other guy does not earn any additional weapons throughout the match that would give him an advantage over you in future encounters, so the chances for you to get a drop on him always remain the same.
In NS2 do you already start with the asymmetric factions. As the game progress, each side only gains more power depending on how they performed in the match thus far, resulting in an ongoing and inescapable snowballing effect. And eventually you reach a point where the enemy just gets upgrades that make it extremely hard to kill him if you don't tech up in the same way - the basic units become a waste of time and effort until you can afford the better ones. The risk-reward mechanics are also rather asymmetric. Marines can risk more, since stuff can be recycled by team mates and themselves, so dying is not that bad. If aliens lose a high lifeform, that player is back to several minutes of just getting slapped around as cannon fodder by superior, recycled enemy technology. The skill floor just got raised dramatically for him if he still wants to have fun at this point.
Name one. I've played on basically all the servers that show up on my list that have a green latency which includes TG. I've seen consistently stacked games on every single server. It seriously just boils down to that this game has no ability to balance by skill and the players arn't willing to remove the player or groups of players that stack their server.
(HINT HINT, look in his signature
Including me now. Omfg....
Seriously, is this the first time you play multiplayer games? This is common problem. Matchmaking is no ultimate solution, look at Battlefield 3 and now 4. One team of 6 average players joining the same team can win every round. In NS2, one progamer from div. 2 can win the game on his own, how do you want to balance a single player? I bet you got the single-best genious ultimate solution, and everyone will gratulate you for it.
edit: Oh and btw., please don't talk about "the community" if you obviously have no clue about it. "The community is killing the game" .... seriously?
I hope you're not out to prove wrong any/every idea contributed by folks trying to help. You're far from coming off that way, but you're headed in the right direction.
We have lots of regulars, some from the competitive scene, who create seemingly insurmountable challenges for the rest of us mere mortals. The reason I asked about your experiences finding friends and folks you know night after night is because, when you /know/ the players you're teamed with, attacking the challenge of that really high skill on the other side can be far more rewarding (in /my/ experience.. I was hoping to hear about yours) than if it's just you and a bunch of strangers.
Maybe you don't play with strangers. Maybe you know all of the players on the sundry servers you play on. I'm at great risk of assuming incorrectly if you can't tell me about your experiences.
This game gets so much better when you know every single person on the server and have played tens, hundreds, or sometimes thousands of games with them as /people/. Getting your ass kicked by good people still sucks, but it sucks a lot less due to the social dynamic of familiarity.
Guess you read only the first two words of my post.
I've been playing online games since the 90's.
I'm talking about balancing, not matchmaking. Matchmaking where you click the play button and the game sorts you with a group of people based on similar stats. Balancing where you join a server and if a team is doing too good/too bad it will auto-sort based off the current need.
I mean, have you never played FPS computer games with balancing mods?
The design of sh_balance has adapted over time, and it will continue to change as we think improvements are possible. And it will continue to satisfy only some. It uses ns2stats and local data presently. I've been meaning to adapt it to use Hive data. I need to educate myself about that data and its representative powers more first.
So, yet /another/ part of the TGNS mod is what we call Captains Games. It's basically an ad hoc PUG, but with a bunch of friends (yay community?).
This would be part of our social attack on balance, I suppose. Teams are picked by two captains familiar with those on the server, such that they're each fighting for the available skill.
Sometimes it falls down, and you spend more time picking teams than playing. But we also have some AMAZING (I mean AMAZING) games from Captains.
We play Captains anytime it's voted in (82% of players), and we reserve one of our servers for Captains Games all night every Friday night.
Also, and this is nice!: reserved slots are disabled during Captains Games, to raise players' gameplay continuity.
I think he is including the TG servers in his blanket statement as he mentioned TG in his post.
Thing is a balance mod is run on the TG servers 95%+ of the games (prime time) and very often even outside of prime time and games STILL end up unbalanced. Yes, there are some people that go out of their way to team stack on public servers but the TG servers are an example of how just having balance mods does not magically solve the issue. The high skill ceiling and the advantage given by winning more resources early will still usually end up as the deciding factor regardless of balanced/randomized/shuffled teams unless the disadvantaged team is capable of using teamwork and strategy to make a risky play to start a turnaround (bile/SG rush a TP).
If you want to avoid people who team stack find servers that use mods to balance teams (literally any server with shine admin mod will have options to balance teams) and lots of NA pub servers run it... LF... DFA... KKG... Hyperion. In my experience the DFA and LuckyF server's regular players are pretty good about getting the team shuffle done. People still seem to complain about stacks after shuffles and randoms anyways so best of luck to you really.
edit: since they ended up being discussed above, even the TGNS captains games and PUGs can end up very stacked for one team or the other, the difference is that the team that is down/disadvantaged has players willing and capable of working and trying to turn the game around. While not always successful it is much more enjoyable than the typical alternative in a normal public game of turtle and wait for death.
Stacking and skill differences exist, and can ruin games, and everyone knows it. UWE (according to rumor) is working on a system that should help alleviate this.
And this may be but people still refuse to remove offending players that constantly make it unfun for the opposite team. These people and the stompers themselves contribute to the constantly unbalanced, 10min surrender, bad games, hence my post title.
Rarely do I see a skill shuffle go through. Hell, people even have problems with the Force Ready Room.
Relevant:
And why not?
That may be your prerogative but some of us dont care about being the very best. Some of us just want to have fun. I mean, if you were hosting a community football game and an NFL player showed up and proceeded to stomp all over the other team do you think its wrong to tell them to leave?
Most of the people who play the game are not registered in this forum. In addition, I should imagine a lot of them do not care about its future as much as you and I. So I don't really see how he's mistaking the community at all.
All I can really say is play on servers with an admin presence and a good community, easier said than done true but it is what it is. The best way to work on fixing the issue to get involved in the individual server community, if a server does not have a community then there is no group of people working to make the community better and addressing the concerns of people such as yours so your complaints will just fall on deaf ears.
edit: I just realized you are in favor of removing skilled players regardless of their actions based on your above posts, I think this thread is going to go no where fast.
I do think, when/if your community's (or your personal) priority is getting the euphoric high of victory, it is fitting to remove those which keep you from that.
But it's fitting because it's your community (or your personal experience, which is yours and yours alone to design), not for any other reason.
Glad you don't share his opinion on that one Wyz...
Some servers tend to go on streaks w/ a few very good players stompin, but if it goes more than a map or two, and there's not enough skill to float on both teams, I've found this very simple solution... Find another server. Also, I find it very hard to believe that you cant find a serv to regular on. There's only so many out there...
I've got nearly 700 hrs into ns2 and I still get rocked, OFTEN. I'm far from comp level play, and I don't really care. I enjoy the game and enjoy the challenge. When I get rocked, I don't come to the forums claiming that the community is killing this game (LOLOLOL). Cuz that'll get you a whole lot of "Aim, nub" and, well all the stuff you've seen so far. You're tearing down every reasonable response you've been given here. Someone's gotta lose in the end.
Learn to aim, nub (kidding)! And turn yourself into a stomper!