The big discussion thread on the recent and coming balance changes.
Nordic
Long term camping in Kodiak Join Date: 2012-05-13 Member: 151995Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Shadow
Long term camping in Kodiak Join Date: 2012-05-13 Member: 151995Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Shadow
I am making this thread because the balance discussion is spilling over into the healthbar thread. How about we discuss it here?
B297 balance changes:
Alien Commander ability changes ◦Contamination now spews Bile briefly when initially placed (equal to two bile bombs)
◦Rupture now Parasites anything in its effect radius ◾Reduced the view-blocking visuals by 40%
◾Rupture charge time decreased by 42% (was 3s now 1.25s)
◾Increased Team Resources cost to 3 (was 2)
◾Increased cooldown time to 4 seconds (was 2 seconds)
•Grenade Changes – Guaranteed Explosions! ◦It now costs 2 personal resources to buy 1 grenade (previously it was 3 for 2)
◦If you die after pulling the pin or while attempting to throw a grenade, it will fall at your feet and explode
◦If you die with a non-primed grenade, it will respawn with you
◦Cluster grenades’ secondary explosion is now fire type
◦Grenade deploy animation is now affected by catpacks as well as the pin pull and throw animations
•Power Surge Changes – “Overcharge“: ◦Power Surge is now researchable at the Command Station for 15 team resources and needs 45 seconds to be researched.
◦Power Surge costs 5 team resources and has a cooldown of 20 seconds
◦Does not work at Command Stations and Power Nodes
◦Applying power surge is now easier as it auto selects a building close to where you clicked (similar to Nanoshield)
◦New Effects: ◾On powered structures: ◾Deals 50 healthpoint damage to nearby aliens
◾Lowers the energy regeneration rate of nearby aliens for 5 seconds
◾On un-powered structures: ◾Restores power for 20 seconds.
Upcoming balance changes noted on trello:
25% faster pres acquisition.
A comeback tres mechanic.
It also looks like gorges are going to get some love in the next patch.
https://trello.com/c/tMfbUYEn/128-298-lower-gorge-tunnel-cost-to-3-p-res
https://trello.com/c/Oq07TsHW/122-298-gorge-babbler-tweaks
https://trello.com/c/oPkZnJyI/119-298-gorge-webs-now-biomass-0
I invite @Deck_ , @F0rdPrefect, @Kouji_San , @HeatSurge, and @devel from the healthbar thread to discuss balance. I am really just mentioning you guys so you see this thread.
Anyways, discuss.
B297 balance changes:
Alien Commander ability changes ◦Contamination now spews Bile briefly when initially placed (equal to two bile bombs)
◦Rupture now Parasites anything in its effect radius ◾Reduced the view-blocking visuals by 40%
◾Rupture charge time decreased by 42% (was 3s now 1.25s)
◾Increased Team Resources cost to 3 (was 2)
◾Increased cooldown time to 4 seconds (was 2 seconds)
•Grenade Changes – Guaranteed Explosions! ◦It now costs 2 personal resources to buy 1 grenade (previously it was 3 for 2)
◦If you die after pulling the pin or while attempting to throw a grenade, it will fall at your feet and explode
◦If you die with a non-primed grenade, it will respawn with you
◦Cluster grenades’ secondary explosion is now fire type
◦Grenade deploy animation is now affected by catpacks as well as the pin pull and throw animations
•Power Surge Changes – “Overcharge“: ◦Power Surge is now researchable at the Command Station for 15 team resources and needs 45 seconds to be researched.
◦Power Surge costs 5 team resources and has a cooldown of 20 seconds
◦Does not work at Command Stations and Power Nodes
◦Applying power surge is now easier as it auto selects a building close to where you clicked (similar to Nanoshield)
◦New Effects: ◾On powered structures: ◾Deals 50 healthpoint damage to nearby aliens
◾Lowers the energy regeneration rate of nearby aliens for 5 seconds
◾On un-powered structures: ◾Restores power for 20 seconds.
Upcoming balance changes noted on trello:
25% faster pres acquisition.
A comeback tres mechanic.
It also looks like gorges are going to get some love in the next patch.
https://trello.com/c/tMfbUYEn/128-298-lower-gorge-tunnel-cost-to-3-p-res
https://trello.com/c/Oq07TsHW/122-298-gorge-babbler-tweaks
https://trello.com/c/oPkZnJyI/119-298-gorge-webs-now-biomass-0
I invite @Deck_ , @F0rdPrefect, @Kouji_San , @HeatSurge, and @devel from the healthbar thread to discuss balance. I am really just mentioning you guys so you see this thread.
Anyways, discuss.
Comments
Dying as a skulk must be so frustrating for new people. They turn a corner and get mowed down and feel absolutely helpless.
If they could at least see how they died, see the perspective of the guy who shot them, it would really soften the blows of getting killed over and over.
Also, assuming the kill-cams were accurate and reliable, it would help assuage any concerns of "hackusations" since it'd be easier to tell when a guy is just pressing the lock-on key to rek you, versus just having naturally good aim. Yes, aimbots can be smoothed or whatever, but still.
A developer on kill cams:
Imo this thread is pointless. We can only hope for modders to fix this game every new week, but would that be a good thing to rely even more on mods?
This is a thread for people to talk about the balance stuff, so other topics can stay on topic.
Sounds like it's OP for marines because they have skulks to kill. A marine team would now be able to support a hive push with meds and ammo while holding only 1 RT when aliens have capped the map so long as they can kill the skulks as they come. That's a big change and robs the aliens of their just rewards for winning up to then. If such a play caused the aliens to lose their fades then the marines are handed more than they've deserved, and it's not a comeback mechanic.
Overall I think res-for-kill is good for the game and I'll love to have it back, but getting 7-8 res per kill will be ridiculous and just make the team that was winning exit the game after they lose thanks to the mechanic. Most likely this will be a big concern in competitive and hopefully it'll be disabled. A good commander can take huge advantage of this. It all just sounds too free.
that sounds like it could be avoidable if:
Aliens get Tres for kills.
and
Marines get Pres for kills.
like this the Marines can afford guns to come back but not the Tpres to get medded trough on the hivepush and these guns still have to be bought at home (delayed impact).
also the Aliens can get more PvE hives Drifter abtilitys (maybe even lifeform eggs) to buy enough time for more Lifeforms to comeback.
And while it may "smooth the winrate" we don't know if it directly "improve the chances of comeback".
And it is like using FXAA , it may reduce slightly edges and all but at the same time makes everything blurrier.
I think it's far too binary as it is right now.. if you don't play precisely in just the right way for one particular metagame, it's over and it is typically predictable.
Having another goal present creates less of a binary or predictable experience, and can actually decrease unpleasant slippery slopes in public matches that inevitably lead players to demotivated end of rounds.
I always ask this question because it strikes me as such poor design : "Why isn't NS2 always engaging to play until the very last second of a round?"
I somehow doubt that Overwatch/TF2 would be as popular if the winner was highly predictable 1/5 into the round, with a highly impractical to non existent chance of coming back.
A better concern to have over this change is the large difference between Aliens and Marines in regards to Tres. They are not equal, so this change most definitely would benefit Marines more as you predict.
If Aliens had a single economy again then I don't see how that could still be said.
Also, for what it's worth @ShamelessCookie 's mod was very fun to play when a Marine.. probably produced the most enjoyable games I've had in public NS2 in a long time - there was always a reason to keep trying to win!
And if you look at the data in that link, with the same sample size of games (500) the round times are the same and the winrates weren't wildly impacted in a negative way. (In fact, they're closer to the ideal 50/50)
For "good" games you have to have great balance, especially in a game like this, which is really an RTS game, where the more you win the more you win, and the more you lose, the more you lose. Usually, in RTS games, it comes down to a battle or two, and 90% you have a winner. That's why a lot of people argue that "traditional RTS is dead." Maybe. Because once you start losing res game and map control, you're almost guaranteed to lose more. So usually the winner of the first battle is the winner of the game. That's NS2 as well. The winner of the first engagement(s) is almost certainly the winner of the game (assuming nothing else changes like a "star" player leaving which really is the root of any "great comeback" that anyone online ever told you about).
For pubs, there are incredibly many issues to good balance, which is absolutely critical before you can have a close game, which is worth "playing until the very last second of a round." If ANY ONE of these isn't met 100% of the time, the game is probably not worth playing beyond a point of clarity where you can see who will win, which is around 2-2:30 into almost every round:
- Skill balance. The obvious one. The fact is, today, right now at this second, players who have to be at 2500 hive are instead at 1300. Næbs which should be at 200 are at 900. Næbs start at 1000 which is hilarious, considering they should start at 0. I would say that even a 500 "combined error" in skill for players overall wrecks the game.
- "Star players" aka "skill gap too high." This is another huge problem not just in this game but others. In theory, "skill" assumes that a player with 2500 hive against a player with 500 hive will win an engagement 5 times and lose 1. In fact, the 500 player is so bad and the 2500 player so good that the 2500 player can never, ever die. Ever. The star player will have an infinite KDR against the crap player who will have zero KDR. So, at a certain point, the skill gap becomes "too high" i.e. meaningless, i.e. the "high" player may as well be infinite skill and the crap player zero.
- Good player being commander. This has been a huge pet peeve for me for a while. 2500 player with greens, 2500 player goes commander. Of course, he is considered in the eLOLs average, so his team is screwed. If I see a high eLOL player in the com position in my team, I instantly lose motivation to try because I know that my team is instantly at a HUGE disadvantage.
- Players not being there, going AFK, not playing at their full potential/drunk, team balance not kicking in fast enough, etc. etc. All of this assumes a well-functioning team with zero AFKs playing at their full eLOLing potential. That just doesn't happen in pubs.
So anyway, that's just the beginning of "balancing a team RTS." And I would say, good luck with all of that. Some is solvable easily, some is not.
P.S. BTW that mod that gives a shit team free res is an atrocity. Bad teams have to lose, not to be handed out free help to "come back." Winning by being better is the very essence of competitive gaming. The very concept of this should be extremely offensive to anyone who values competition and "fairness" (as much as that word even means anything really).
However, I want to throw something else into the discussion: Have you guys (the devs) considered doing a balance mod, like what Sewlek did back in the day? Imo this would solve most of the issues of publishing half-finished updates, and would allow you to get community feedback without risk of breaking the game.
This is more powerful than 2 Xenos, which costs 2 skulks and 25(30)? res vs nearly free at bio level 9.
Contamination +1
Rupture +1
Grenades +1
Power Surge -999; much too powerful in the hands of a good commander, completely can cripple aliens, needs to either be nerfed, do damage overtime or give you time to react.
Gorge tunnels +999; this should have honestly been added a long time ago.
Gorge webs +1; kind of useless now, may this makes them worth using?
Babblers -1; they're really strong as they are at the moment, if only players knew how to use them properly..
Comeback mechanic =0; I'm not sure this is the best way per say to make the game less snow bally but it does work towards stopping that so much.
P res change =0; no clue how this change would work, this does seem like it would make the game less brutal to play but it might be too strong a buff to aliens. Needs to be tested
Can gorges get bunny hopping like in comp already? They would be so much more viable..
COD, over 1 million more players than ns2 - no enemy health bars.
Battlefield, over 1 million more players than ns2, no enemy health bars.
CS, etc etc.
Why have you tied client side animations to server side hit reg?
1. With cheaper tunnels, we'll see even more/better fortified gorge forts. I think making them a research in turn might be a good idea - biomass 1 or 2. So you have to decide whether you want fast ups or gorge tunnels.
2. Pleasepleaseplease make webs available earlier.
3. I'm not too happy about the babbler thing. Frankly, I'd rather see them get nerfed and have the pres cost removed instead. I will never spend pres on a temporary ability. (edit: I just realized there's also grenades - but those are a lot more straightforward, and you can carry them around. They are also a lot more useful.)
4. Yeah, powersurge is kinda op.
edit: Free webs from the start might go well with locking tunnels behind a research, btw. They give you an alternative way of defending.
edit2: They'd also probably mean we would get to see more grenades early game, which could be nice.
The problem with gorge tunnels at the moment is that a gorge cannot place it at the start of the game. Best example is Veil here because you NEED an instant tunnel to Nano what is not possible atm. THe tunnel is already delayed. Making it a researchable thing would only cause the same issue and removes options for the aliens early game.
I also think babblers should never be free because they are free armor for an alien. That you do not spend pres on temporary abilites (everything you buy in this game with pres is temporary, it is lost when you die) is more a problem with your attitude, not really a balance issue.
1. They are experimental - We understand that, and we are not above reverting them if it turns out that they have a negative impact on the game.
2. It's not a change solely for rookies. It will help rookies by allowing them to get more "stuff" more often, yes (help them learn lifeforms a bit easier in specific). But It's also a change aimed at the general feel and fun-factor of the game. I've always considered the resource model in ns2 to be not fully polished or realized- ever since the dark days of No-Res-While-Dead, it just didn't feel right. After the removal of No-Res-While-Dead the p-res tickrate was reduced from 1.25 per tick to 1 and has been left as such since. Lifeforms come out much slower than they did in ns1 and they are generally less frequent. With these experimental changes, we want to try and shake up how this feels a little bit, ideally there will still be adequate windows for your team to push if they take down expensive tech (fade/exo/onos) - but that it also doesn't feel quite as devastating as it does currently to lose one of these. Lifeforms will still come out at roughly the same timings (possibly a smidge earlier, but not by much).
3. The Comeback mechanic is not mean to take teams that are clearly going to lose and give them a get out of jail free card. Instead, if it's a relatively close game, it might give teams the small economic boost they otherwise would not have had to recover some of their lost territory after winning engagements on the back foot. This change is again more to see if we can make the game "feel" a little better.
It's very hard to predict exactly how the res changes are going to play out, but I would really suggest keeping an open mind when thinking about them- and especially give them a try for a few days when we release 298 before making up your minds about it.
StarCraft 2 has comeback mechanics because you can transition between unit compositions that counter each other, i. e. one composition is more cost-efficient against the other and you have your game back.
The key is mindgames: trying to hide stuff and lie to the opponent with your actions.
Now we balance around subjective feelings? Great. Well my feeling is then: This is idea is probably the most terrible one made since I am playing this game.
Contamination is looks like a strategy-free nuke. Alien com can just bile wherever he feels like as long as he has the res and marines can't do anything about it. That's bad. Even if something like flamethrowers could counter it it's still too cheap in opportunity cost.
Rupture is a nice, but small change. The old semi-blind never really did much at all (in my personal experience it never really bothered my aim), so now at least rupture has a use. I don't really see it as being overpowered since it's still limited to where the infestation is and where the alien com knows marines are.
Grenades seems a little bit cheap, removing some of the tactical depth from buying grenades, but then they didn't have too much to start with so it's not a huge loss.
Power Surge is definitely too strong, but I'm not sure if I hate the mechanic itself or just how it's tuned.
Tunnels I thought were deliberately priced so they could not be dropped at the start of a round, forcing aliens to actually WIN their first engagement in order to control territory. Allowing for faster early tunnels could make the early center rush on several maps to easy for aliens.
Webs seem like a good idea. I know they are fun to use in the rare games that they ever even get researched, so I'd like to see what happens if we get them early. Could be OP though.
Babblers looks alright to me. Cheaper to use, somewhat more effective (about 50% compared to 3 eggs) against structures, less effective against marines but exactly the same as armor. I don't think reducing the cost for using them as armor by 1 res is going to make them OP.
Comeback mechanic goes to -∞. That one will get me to drop the game instantly if it goes through. Even if the mechanic itself has relatively limited effect one gameplay as testing on tactical freedom seemed to prove, knowledge of that mechanic has a dramatic effect on player behavior, enough to flat out ruin the game. Note that most of the would-be "testers" of the mechanic were completely oblivious to it, meaning that there was no deliberate strategy involved to take advantage of or counter it, so we really have no idea how it will properly affect game balance. The idea of kicking rookie feeders though is a very obvious problem.
P res change looks like it could be disastrous for balance. You have shorter gaps between fades for instance, less time to build up before fades take and dominate the field etc. I don't feel it does anything to harm the gameplay inherently like many of the other changes do though, so I'm not against it on principle. Of course it could lead to some other changes down the road, cheaper lifeforms leading to weaker lifeforms and throwaway strategies, but I'll take this one one step at a time.
Worth noting that if swapping them, being able to bile anywhere will take longer, be dependent on whether marines kill the Contamination spore first, and will cost more (Contam + Rupture)
TL;DR - Swap Contamination and Rupture abilities. Profit!
Other fantastic feedback that should totally be implemented
Hive 3 abilities should give aliens game-ending tools. Contaminate helps this, and now it helps even more. I pray for the day projectile spores at bio-7 from comp mod comes to pubs.
I do agree with the points sotanaht raises about lifeforms, though. Killing lifeforms is already very hard in pub games; a fair share of pub games is lost simply because you cannot kill that one fade (or, in extreme cases, lerk). If aliens will be able to pump out lifeforms even faster (again, imagine the onoses late game!), marines will have a really hard time. And they have a hard time as is.
I enjoy the early game the most too, but moving spikes to hive 3 is no good idea. Lerks are pretty much useless versus shotguns then and cannot defend a hive push at all. Also they cannot assist their fades with spiking down armor then. They extremely rely on their spikes and moving them to hive 3 would make many other balance changes needed to compensate for that.
Spores were primarily used to soften up marines in ns1 and potentially followed up with a risky bite if needed. The Lerk in general was meant to be a support class with it's spores/umbra/and primal scream, this changed for whatever reason in ns2 as it turned into a player killer lifeform on par with the fade due to it's 360 degree infinite range hitscan spikes and questionable survivability.
Plus Fades had acid rockets in ns1 as well, which helped fades wittle down marine armor before engaging them.
Taking territory at the beginning of the game is exciting. For Marines, retaking territory later in the game is a tedious slog and so slow that it is rarely successful because of the slow power nodes.
If you want to help marine comebacks, make the time to rebuild a power node a function of the number of built structures attached. This would let you keep the mechanic of rushing the power in base unchanged, but would let Marines retake territory at a reasonable rate
Adding another res mechanic just muddies the game. I really don't like it
I understand what you are saying and see you point... But keep a few things in mind.
1. Nothing hurts a team more than a rookie commander... Especially marines. Going phasetech etc before armor/weapons upgrade
2. There is a lack of people willing to play commander on pubs. I always end up doing it because no one else will. Not that my ELO is particularly high but there really is no other choice.
Everything depends on how you view the commander. Is the commander only a support feature or is he the most important piece in the puzzle. No commander can help you aim, but winning late game engagements without proper medpacks: good luck with that.
And commanders ALWAYS take the blame after a lost game no matter what :-)