AdambeanCardiff, South WalesJoin Date: 2005-06-03Member: 53038Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Shadow
edited June 2018
Just wondering what the skill rank boundaries are?
So far I've observed that frontiersman (2/silver) is 550, team leader (3/gold) is 1000ish, veteran (4/white) is 1600ish, and special ops (6/shadow) is 3000ish. Not sure where the rest are.
I would love for you to show me how to heal/build silently as Gorge by pressing shift..
That was the #1 best use for silence = silent Gorges.
They claim it was removed because silence was too frustrating to play against... Yet cloaking is infinitely more frustrating. I never ever cared about silent aliens when on marine, but when they have cloak I just give up because I can't see them with my crappy monitor.
Silent gorges and quick gorge tunnels was nerfed in this build. Is that a bad thing? Perhaps if you're a gorge that doesn't play near your team or goes for sneaky tunnels. It's definitely a nerf to gorges, but it forces the team to play together more. It's still a minor nerf compared to other things talked about...tunnels needing infestation. Let's see it play out.
So even more of a asymmetry between the two sides removed?
Focus and Silence are meant to be strong upgrades; what makes them a hard choice is the power of the upgrades they should be exclusive with.
It seems like every version seems to bring us closer to the same two teams fighting one another, which is exactly the opposite of what made NS popular in the first place.
I would take what you said and change it to: focus and silence were really strong, so the nerf to those makes the game more fair and interesting. Focus before allowed for really easy clears. Now...as skulk, if the marine has 0 armor left, you can focus bite and add a parasite to get the frag in the current build. The focus nerf is a strong nerf to the focus fade, which was OP!
Making the point that the game is now aliens and marines being closer to the same...is going to an extreme argument, right? Sure Focus and silence were strong upgrades, that's why they were looked at. Aliens have to work together and communicate more in this build to win. I'm enjoying it, but maybe it depends on the people in the server. I haven't felt like the late game has been this fair in a pub since I can remember.
That was the #1 best use for silence = silent Gorges.
It really wasn't. If anything that's a good change, too, because it makes cheesy tunnel rushes harder. The fact that the patchnotes explicitly mention trying to nerf those tunnels puts it in line with the intent of the patch.
They claim it was removed because silence was too frustrating to play against... Yet cloaking is infinitely more frustrating. I never ever cared about silent aliens when on marine, but when they have cloak I just give up because I can't see them with my crappy monitor.
This is, pardon my directness, because you're a bad player. Silence allowed skulks to pull of moves they just shouldn't be able to, including unnoticeably flying across the map if no one had direct line of sight to them. If you didn't find silence frustrating you honestly can't have been using your ears.
Just wondering what the skill rank boundaries are?
So far I've observed that frontiersman (2/silver) is 550, team leader (3/gold) is 1000ish, veteran (4/white) is 1600ish, and special ops (6/shadow) is 3000ish. Not sure where the rest are.
As far as I can tell shadow is more like ~3300, not taking variance into account.
AdambeanCardiff, South WalesJoin Date: 2005-06-03Member: 53038Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Shadow
Ah are the boundaries dynamic based on a proportion of the players? (e.g. level 7 is always the top 1% of active players no matter what skill figure the lowest of that top 1% is)
Ah are the boundaries dynamic based on a proportion of the players? (e.g. level 7 is always the top 1% of active players no matter what skill figure the lowest of that top 1% is)
I assume so, from the way the blog post is phrased. It also makes the most sense, otherwise a longterm shift in hive score values across players could lead to some skill groups becoming meaningless.
And marine have absolutely no real effective strategy counter to that
Camouflage
#bring motion-tracking back
I haven't heard anyone say camouflage is OP. The old vamp was really hard to see in certain situations which made going shade hive first happen all the time on TA before this build. Wasn't fun to play against. I haven't seen anything be OP yet in current build. I would say the strongest thing in the game is 2 hive onos stomp but that takes awhile and moves the game along. You can also still win against it.
Great. Now every skulk takes Camouflage.
And marine have absolutely no real effective strategy counter to that
You kidding right ?
Camouflage is easy to spot. Actually it's worst because people think now they are now cloaked while moving so they move more. The thing is that it makes them more easy to spot.
On a side note:
The viability of the 3 Kharaas strategy can only be achieved with 100% full effect. Yes Cloaking as it was originally. But if no changes are made to the economy it becomes OP.
The solution is to slower economy depending on the chamber chosen. As there will be no drastic changes in the Marine tech tree to create the dedicated counter upgrades (like motion tracking). It would be too much work and would break balance things for good.
Crag economy should be fast, while Shade should be slower in order to let the Marine team cope with the threat. It's ONE single multiplication at the end of the res flow calculations.
- Total res income * economy speed factor
Ex :
give it a base number like 0.8, add every hive "flavour" (Crag/Shift/Shade) if present.
0.8 + 0.1 for 1 Shade hive -> 0.9
0.8 + 0.3 for 1 Crag hive -> 1.1
0.8 + 0.1 + 0.3 for 1 Crag & 1 Shade hive -> 1.2
Of course it would require fine tuning but it will allow the upgrades to be quite effective instead of left overs. It would also encourage Kharaas to choose a strategy. I mean more than the single "all in" plan like a fast hive which basically kill the game if it succeed.
Kharras need 3 equally viable options in all situation (number of slots etc..).
I was having a hard time tracking the half cloaked lerks, or really anything half cloaked going in the vertical direction. A skulk coming at me head on is pretty easy to see and shoot.
Also, the half cloaked skulks is creepy as hell. It made my neck tingle more than once.
In what way is positional audio revamped? Just by reducing clutter and tweaking reverb?
This is something that has irritated me since day one. Stock HL even without windows 98 and a delicious Aureal A3D 2.0 sound card has much clearer directional audio and it's not, AFAIK, doing anything particularly special. I've ascribed this to NS2 using more reverb and possibly some simple occlusion effect when you don't see the sound source directly and HL just outright ignoring walls and providing clear unfiltered positional audio always.
The tunnel, lerk, silence, and (probably to a lesser degree) focus changes have had a positive impact on pub play.
All stages of the game feel better than they did previously--lategame especially. I'm seeing fewer lerks early on (meaning skulk engagements w/ gorge support are more important for a longer period of time than they were), but the lerks themselves are no less effective than they were before. Killing them just means a bit more than it used to for the marines.
I'm sure the alien winrate has dropped. I'd be curious to see how dramatically it has dropped, and whether it inches back up in the days and weeks ahead. I'm not convinced that it's not a self-correcting problem.
If players who formerly felt they needed a sneaky tunnel rush to win take some time to rethink their playstyle, their experience will improve. Players need to keep in mind that tunnels weren't even part of this game's initial release and were later added in at a cost of 30 team resources (research) and 10 player resources. Since that time they've been buffed in extraordinary ways. The already-mobile aliens collectively got used to rapidly building low-cost (still the case), research-free (still the case) portals with trivial transit times (still the case) behind marine lines, often silently. When paired with the marine team's numerous vulnerabilities (main base power nodes, bile rushes on the chair, easily downed observatories and gates, etc.) and too few incentives for second chair insurance policies during the midgame where developing a capacity to resist lifeforms is essential, the result was boring and predictable.
This phenomenon became so ingrained that select alien players would often gorge in vents all game, just biding their time and waiting for an opportunity to drop a tunnel that might end the game. I've spectated players hiding at the top of marine start in veil for over 15 minutes. This isn't good for the alien team. The player doing it learns nothing.
And the counters to this phenomenon have had an equally negative effect on the game's flow. Marines who should be pushing to victory would frequently step things back, with commanders dropping observatories in as many viable junctions as is possible. The logic is simple: if a single unexpected rush can win the game, and if I do not trust myself to perfectly scan and beacon, and if I do not trust my team to perfectly lane and zone, then I can solve the problem by ensuring that no rushes can be unexpected. And yet this approach only works when marines would otherwise win the game anyway. Why? Because it implies that the marines are winning the engagements and holding the res sufficient to drop that many observatories in the first place. This ground the game down to a miserable pace and I believe it can be understood as a byproduct of the community's fixation with tunnel rush attempts.
The new 12 v 12 standard has only amplified the aforementioned phenomena because it allows for far more gorges over the course of a single round. This style of play feeds back into the community and deepens over time. Marines stop learning how to push hives in favor of slow territory expansion with heavy pve support (metaphenomenon: marines never leaving gates even when in groups of 4-5). Skulks stop learning how to traverse the map in the absence of tunnels, or how to get around marines in order to bite res. The early game's importance becomes overly weighted, with the mid and lategame becoming a slog with conclusions that are usually foregone. And in the midst of that mid to lategame slog, the alien team's desire for all-in rushes increases.
It's not that truly ninja rushes can't still happen, but that the opportunity cost has increased. That's good. It means that timing is more important.
It also means that aliens need to think more about the value of rushing two locations at once. If one group forces a beacon (as opposed to going all-in on the chair) and another group is posed to collapse on the gate that has been supporting a marine push, that's good. That's success. That's how you take the map back. It's not absolute knock-out success, but it's the kind of play that wins games in public servers. And it's nice that it serves as a broader scale metaphor for what also works in micro alien group engagements: some aliens baiting marine attention / ammo while others sweep in to collaborate. Compared to the equivalent of a nuclear bomb detonating in an otherwise winning marine team's base in under half the time it takes for a perfect beacon to complete, it's a big improvement for all parties involved.
And I know, I know - the same old tired argument will probably crop up: get good, get gamesense, watch lanes, learn to scan. All of that is still true but the opportunity costs have been rebalanced for sanity. One shouldn't expect public NS2 commanders to make zero mistakes over the course of a round (and it only takes one mistake). Some mistakes are still fatal but the costs of attempting an all-in and the difficulty of executing one have changed. And one should also not expect marine carries to devote themselves to the thankless task of patrolling lanes all game, every game, especially when their absence is part of the reason that these tentative marine pushes so often fail (meanwhile: aliens devote their best players -- almost never the ninja gorges -- to mopping up).
So aliens:
Learn map geometry. Virtually every map that gets played is rife with spots to ambush from, even in the absence of cloaking. If you're a player that prefers cloaking (I'm not), then start using your cloaking to augment and improve your ambush setups as opposed to just standing in hallways. Learn to bait bullets for your teammates. Practice wall-jumping. Collaborate with your gorges and vice versa. Now room clears must be earned and gorges must be supported. Strong tunnel positions are still possible but require more of you. And why shouldn't they?
Gorges, it's okay if a more conservative and defensible tunnel placement is the best you can do. Position your team to succeed, to resbite, to clear lanes that you can then fill into and set up more optimal tunnels in. Walk away from a perceived "meta" in which your primary goal is to repeatedly gear up for all-in rushes. Learn to support your team's pushes, when to fall back, how to avoid pinches, and how to support your tunnels.
The vamp changes reward good play / accuracy and I think we'll see more effective uses of it soon.
Cloaking really isn't significantly different if you're using it to properly ambush and not merely walk around with (perhaps some type of %-based visibility meter would be useful for the aliens so that they're never misled as to their 'true' cloaking level).
The silence changes are important: aliens already have a speedy sneak ability, and it needs to be used. The reason silence had a disproportionate effect on the game is that it could 1) occasionally allow an underskilled alien to remove a high skill marine from the field through sheer chance and 2) reliably allow average skilled skulks to succeed against average skilled marines. The net cumulative effect on the flow of a round was simply overpowered. Between wall jumping, climbing, backpedaling, strafe rotations, leap, and early access to vent networks, I have trouble believing that skulks truly need silence to reliably win engagements.
They claim it was removed because silence was too frustrating to play against... Yet cloaking is infinitely more frustrating. I never ever cared about silent aliens when on marine, but when they have cloak I just give up because I can't see them with my crappy monitor.
This is, pardon my directness, because you're a bad player. Silence allowed skulks to pull of moves they just shouldn't be able to, including unnoticeably flying across the map if no one had direct line of sight to them. If you didn't find silence frustrating you honestly can't have been using your ears.
Oh make no mistake I am a terrible Marine player, but I honestly think that's besides the point.
Before when I would notice they had silence, I could just adjust my playstyle accordingly = keeping my back to walls and back checking way more often... Thus I never felt frustrated because 9 times out of 10 I'd still see them coming... (and even when they did get the drop on me, It was never frustrating or irritating the way being killed by cloaked skulks is)
On the flip side with cloaking there is no way for me to adapt or adjust because I simply cannot see most cloaked aliens the way some others can... Yeah I can use my ears, but that doesn't help when I walk right past them and they can just shift walk a couple steps forward for a super ez kill.. (sometimes I've even had them shift walk right up in front of me and I can't see them until they attack)
For certain people a cloaked skulk is super super easy to see, but for others like myself they are so hard to spot that it's as if their player models aren't even being rendered... Which is why cloaking has always been by far the worst part of playing Marine for me.
After more time playing though the real concerning issue is the overkill with nerfing Gorges... Particularly the combination of both tunnels and adrenaline...
Tunnels taking over twice as long to build has the side effect of taking just over half your energy to build them...
Couple this with adrenaline basically doing nothing for Gorge now, and you have a problem. I switched from celerity to adrenaline to do some healing support in a push.. Literally saw no difference at all in the rate of energy regeneration. It was just as slow with adrenaline as it was with celerity. If adrenaline still does anything for Gorge it is too minor to be noticeable.
The DX11 memory leak is alive and well.
I just tested it and the game stuffs itself with RAM in DX11 mode until it crashes (triggered it by alt-tabbing to desktop - even took Steam with it).
What speedy sneak ability???? Surely you can't be talking about shift walking because that's slow as hell?
/confused
Sneaking (shift walking) is already faster than it once was and is more than enough to position and reposition for successful ambushes when out of marine line of sight, especially with celerity and when combined with walljumps or leaps. Obviously any amount of sound prior to a successful m1 attack is going to give marines more time to react, but that's precisely the aspect of silence that was overpowered. Aliens have tools at their disposal to achieve good ambush results without silence, but they have to develop their capacity to use those tools rather than relying on a crutch.
AdambeanCardiff, South WalesJoin Date: 2005-06-03Member: 53038Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Shadow
edited June 2018
^ That, also hold CTRL (crouch) to move silently as gorge. I remember silence coming in build 250 when NS2 took a big step back towards NS1, very glad it's gone (again) now.
Spotting cloaked aliens is usually easier with the highest gamma setting and your flashlight on. Having a monitor with high brightness will also help. The shimmering light becomes visible enough when you're pointing at them. Skulks also tend to sit in the same usual convenient "snug fit" spots too, so once you know shade hive is available, you can turn on your mindset to predict where the skulks will be invisibly waiting for you.
--
I too am definitely seeing more marine wins (though not disproportionately more) over this weekend, and a lot less games ending with the classic sneaky tunnel by marine main base.
I assume so, from the way the blog post is phrased. It also makes the most sense, otherwise a longterm shift in hive score values across players could lead to some skill groups becoming meaningless.
Makes sense. I like that. (If it really is like that.) I don't think I'll ever make it to Sanji Survivor (and have probably fluked my way to Special Ops), but at least it'll be limited for the real top 1%.
--
Finally not sure if it's been noticed amongst many of you, but I'm also seeing many more server crashes with build 323. Today I've experienced 5, and yesterday experienced 2, across different servers. (8-Bit, survival of the fattest, and lost in space.) Not always late game either, one of them today was only 2 minutes into Veil.
Oh make no mistake I am a terrible Marine player, but I honestly think that's besides the point.
Before when I would notice they had silence, I could just adjust my playstyle accordingly = keeping my back to walls and back checking way more often... Thus I never felt frustrated because 9 times out of 10 I'd still see them coming... (and even when they did get the drop on me, It was never frustrating or irritating the way being killed by cloaked skulks is)
Bit of a misunderstanding here: You as a marine are only a secondary objective to a silenced skulk. It really just wants to get past you to your RTs, and it's perfectly fine if you sit somewhere in a corner and wait for it to pass, because there's always another way around. With silence you can be an absolute pain in the ass running circles around marines and keeping their RTs down, and I've done so in the past many times.
I like the current version of cloak much better. It's easier to see, thanks to a bugfix where some parts of aliens would apparently become perfectly invisible, and marines can deal with it using all of their senses.
It's primary use now seems to be being harder to spot at long ranges and being harder to track during engagements. In a chaotic engagement with distractions, try switching to shift walking while behind some cover; that happened to me today and it really threw me off. I actually enjoyed fighting against it so far.
HandschuhJoin Date: 2005-03-08Member: 44338Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Community Developer
I think it is an issue, if less players go Lerk. We don't need a Lerkarmy but, if you play 12vs12 and you don't have instantly at least 2 Lerks it gives the Marines quite the Air to breath, because even a bad lerk that soaks a bit of bullets for Skulks can help a lot.
I think the game plays very even late game now. The issue is, it’s very hard for aliens to clear the marine pres. You see marines with 60-100 pres so often. It’s annoying that aliens can play a good round. Make some good plays but marines just have too much stuff and eventually win. I’m proposing to nerf the marine pres rate. I don’t think both teams need identical rates. It doesn’t play well with marines always having a ton of res.
I think the game plays very even late game now. The issue is, it’s very hard for aliens to clear the marine pres. You see marines with 60-100 pres so often. It’s annoying that aliens can play a good round. Make some good plays but marines just have too much stuff and eventually win. I’m proposing to nerf the marine pres rate. I don’t think both teams need identical rates. It doesn’t play well with marines always having a ton of res.
Nerf the marine PRes rate but increase the TRes rate to match.
The DX11 memory leak is alive and well.
I just tested it and the game stuffs itself with RAM in DX11 mode until it crashes (triggered it by alt-tabbing to desktop - even took Steam with it).
Comments
So far I've observed that frontiersman (2/silver) is 550, team leader (3/gold) is 1000ish, veteran (4/white) is 1600ish, and special ops (6/shadow) is 3000ish. Not sure where the rest are.
Silent gorges and quick gorge tunnels was nerfed in this build. Is that a bad thing? Perhaps if you're a gorge that doesn't play near your team or goes for sneaky tunnels. It's definitely a nerf to gorges, but it forces the team to play together more. It's still a minor nerf compared to other things talked about...tunnels needing infestation. Let's see it play out.
I would take what you said and change it to: focus and silence were really strong, so the nerf to those makes the game more fair and interesting. Focus before allowed for really easy clears. Now...as skulk, if the marine has 0 armor left, you can focus bite and add a parasite to get the frag in the current build. The focus nerf is a strong nerf to the focus fade, which was OP!
Making the point that the game is now aliens and marines being closer to the same...is going to an extreme argument, right? Sure Focus and silence were strong upgrades, that's why they were looked at. Aliens have to work together and communicate more in this build to win. I'm enjoying it, but maybe it depends on the people in the server. I haven't felt like the late game has been this fair in a pub since I can remember.
It really wasn't. If anything that's a good change, too, because it makes cheesy tunnel rushes harder. The fact that the patchnotes explicitly mention trying to nerf those tunnels puts it in line with the intent of the patch.
This is, pardon my directness, because you're a bad player. Silence allowed skulks to pull of moves they just shouldn't be able to, including unnoticeably flying across the map if no one had direct line of sight to them. If you didn't find silence frustrating you honestly can't have been using your ears.
As far as I can tell shadow is more like ~3300, not taking variance into account.
I assume so, from the way the blog post is phrased. It also makes the most sense, otherwise a longterm shift in hive score values across players could lead to some skill groups becoming meaningless.
Great. Now every skulk takes Camouflage.
And marine have absolutely no real effective strategy counter to that
#bring motion-tracking back
I haven't heard anyone say camouflage is OP. The old vamp was really hard to see in certain situations which made going shade hive first happen all the time on TA before this build. Wasn't fun to play against. I haven't seen anything be OP yet in current build. I would say the strongest thing in the game is 2 hive onos stomp but that takes awhile and moves the game along. You can also still win against it.
You kidding right ?
Camouflage is easy to spot. Actually it's worst because people think now they are now cloaked while moving so they move more. The thing is that it makes them more easy to spot.
On a side note:
The viability of the 3 Kharaas strategy can only be achieved with 100% full effect. Yes Cloaking as it was originally. But if no changes are made to the economy it becomes OP.
The solution is to slower economy depending on the chamber chosen. As there will be no drastic changes in the Marine tech tree to create the dedicated counter upgrades (like motion tracking). It would be too much work and would break balance things for good.
Crag economy should be fast, while Shade should be slower in order to let the Marine team cope with the threat. It's ONE single multiplication at the end of the res flow calculations.
- Total res income * economy speed factor
Ex :
give it a base number like 0.8, add every hive "flavour" (Crag/Shift/Shade) if present.
0.8 + 0.1 for 1 Shade hive -> 0.9
0.8 + 0.3 for 1 Crag hive -> 1.1
0.8 + 0.1 + 0.3 for 1 Crag & 1 Shade hive -> 1.2
Of course it would require fine tuning but it will allow the upgrades to be quite effective instead of left overs. It would also encourage Kharaas to choose a strategy. I mean more than the single "all in" plan like a fast hive which basically kill the game if it succeed.
Kharras need 3 equally viable options in all situation (number of slots etc..).
Starting somewhere is better than never starting.
Also, the half cloaked skulks is creepy as hell. It made my neck tingle more than once.
This is something that has irritated me since day one. Stock HL even without windows 98 and a delicious Aureal A3D 2.0 sound card has much clearer directional audio and it's not, AFAIK, doing anything particularly special. I've ascribed this to NS2 using more reverb and possibly some simple occlusion effect when you don't see the sound source directly and HL just outright ignoring walls and providing clear unfiltered positional audio always.
All stages of the game feel better than they did previously--lategame especially. I'm seeing fewer lerks early on (meaning skulk engagements w/ gorge support are more important for a longer period of time than they were), but the lerks themselves are no less effective than they were before. Killing them just means a bit more than it used to for the marines.
I'm sure the alien winrate has dropped. I'd be curious to see how dramatically it has dropped, and whether it inches back up in the days and weeks ahead. I'm not convinced that it's not a self-correcting problem.
If players who formerly felt they needed a sneaky tunnel rush to win take some time to rethink their playstyle, their experience will improve. Players need to keep in mind that tunnels weren't even part of this game's initial release and were later added in at a cost of 30 team resources (research) and 10 player resources. Since that time they've been buffed in extraordinary ways. The already-mobile aliens collectively got used to rapidly building low-cost (still the case), research-free (still the case) portals with trivial transit times (still the case) behind marine lines, often silently. When paired with the marine team's numerous vulnerabilities (main base power nodes, bile rushes on the chair, easily downed observatories and gates, etc.) and too few incentives for second chair insurance policies during the midgame where developing a capacity to resist lifeforms is essential, the result was boring and predictable.
This phenomenon became so ingrained that select alien players would often gorge in vents all game, just biding their time and waiting for an opportunity to drop a tunnel that might end the game. I've spectated players hiding at the top of marine start in veil for over 15 minutes. This isn't good for the alien team. The player doing it learns nothing.
And the counters to this phenomenon have had an equally negative effect on the game's flow. Marines who should be pushing to victory would frequently step things back, with commanders dropping observatories in as many viable junctions as is possible. The logic is simple: if a single unexpected rush can win the game, and if I do not trust myself to perfectly scan and beacon, and if I do not trust my team to perfectly lane and zone, then I can solve the problem by ensuring that no rushes can be unexpected. And yet this approach only works when marines would otherwise win the game anyway. Why? Because it implies that the marines are winning the engagements and holding the res sufficient to drop that many observatories in the first place. This ground the game down to a miserable pace and I believe it can be understood as a byproduct of the community's fixation with tunnel rush attempts.
The new 12 v 12 standard has only amplified the aforementioned phenomena because it allows for far more gorges over the course of a single round. This style of play feeds back into the community and deepens over time. Marines stop learning how to push hives in favor of slow territory expansion with heavy pve support (metaphenomenon: marines never leaving gates even when in groups of 4-5). Skulks stop learning how to traverse the map in the absence of tunnels, or how to get around marines in order to bite res. The early game's importance becomes overly weighted, with the mid and lategame becoming a slog with conclusions that are usually foregone. And in the midst of that mid to lategame slog, the alien team's desire for all-in rushes increases.
It's not that truly ninja rushes can't still happen, but that the opportunity cost has increased. That's good. It means that timing is more important.
It also means that aliens need to think more about the value of rushing two locations at once. If one group forces a beacon (as opposed to going all-in on the chair) and another group is posed to collapse on the gate that has been supporting a marine push, that's good. That's success. That's how you take the map back. It's not absolute knock-out success, but it's the kind of play that wins games in public servers. And it's nice that it serves as a broader scale metaphor for what also works in micro alien group engagements: some aliens baiting marine attention / ammo while others sweep in to collaborate. Compared to the equivalent of a nuclear bomb detonating in an otherwise winning marine team's base in under half the time it takes for a perfect beacon to complete, it's a big improvement for all parties involved.
And I know, I know - the same old tired argument will probably crop up: get good, get gamesense, watch lanes, learn to scan. All of that is still true but the opportunity costs have been rebalanced for sanity. One shouldn't expect public NS2 commanders to make zero mistakes over the course of a round (and it only takes one mistake). Some mistakes are still fatal but the costs of attempting an all-in and the difficulty of executing one have changed. And one should also not expect marine carries to devote themselves to the thankless task of patrolling lanes all game, every game, especially when their absence is part of the reason that these tentative marine pushes so often fail (meanwhile: aliens devote their best players -- almost never the ninja gorges -- to mopping up).
So aliens:
Learn map geometry. Virtually every map that gets played is rife with spots to ambush from, even in the absence of cloaking. If you're a player that prefers cloaking (I'm not), then start using your cloaking to augment and improve your ambush setups as opposed to just standing in hallways. Learn to bait bullets for your teammates. Practice wall-jumping. Collaborate with your gorges and vice versa. Now room clears must be earned and gorges must be supported. Strong tunnel positions are still possible but require more of you. And why shouldn't they?
Gorges, it's okay if a more conservative and defensible tunnel placement is the best you can do. Position your team to succeed, to resbite, to clear lanes that you can then fill into and set up more optimal tunnels in. Walk away from a perceived "meta" in which your primary goal is to repeatedly gear up for all-in rushes. Learn to support your team's pushes, when to fall back, how to avoid pinches, and how to support your tunnels.
The vamp changes reward good play / accuracy and I think we'll see more effective uses of it soon.
Cloaking really isn't significantly different if you're using it to properly ambush and not merely walk around with (perhaps some type of %-based visibility meter would be useful for the aliens so that they're never misled as to their 'true' cloaking level).
The silence changes are important: aliens already have a speedy sneak ability, and it needs to be used. The reason silence had a disproportionate effect on the game is that it could 1) occasionally allow an underskilled alien to remove a high skill marine from the field through sheer chance and 2) reliably allow average skilled skulks to succeed against average skilled marines. The net cumulative effect on the flow of a round was simply overpowered. Between wall jumping, climbing, backpedaling, strafe rotations, leap, and early access to vent networks, I have trouble believing that skulks truly need silence to reliably win engagements.
Oh make no mistake I am a terrible Marine player, but I honestly think that's besides the point.
Before when I would notice they had silence, I could just adjust my playstyle accordingly = keeping my back to walls and back checking way more often... Thus I never felt frustrated because 9 times out of 10 I'd still see them coming... (and even when they did get the drop on me, It was never frustrating or irritating the way being killed by cloaked skulks is)
On the flip side with cloaking there is no way for me to adapt or adjust because I simply cannot see most cloaked aliens the way some others can... Yeah I can use my ears, but that doesn't help when I walk right past them and they can just shift walk a couple steps forward for a super ez kill.. (sometimes I've even had them shift walk right up in front of me and I can't see them until they attack)
For certain people a cloaked skulk is super super easy to see, but for others like myself they are so hard to spot that it's as if their player models aren't even being rendered... Which is why cloaking has always been by far the worst part of playing Marine for me.
After more time playing though the real concerning issue is the overkill with nerfing Gorges... Particularly the combination of both tunnels and adrenaline...
Tunnels taking over twice as long to build has the side effect of taking just over half your energy to build them...
Couple this with adrenaline basically doing nothing for Gorge now, and you have a problem. I switched from celerity to adrenaline to do some healing support in a push.. Literally saw no difference at all in the rate of energy regeneration. It was just as slow with adrenaline as it was with celerity. If adrenaline still does anything for Gorge it is too minor to be noticeable.
What speedy sneak ability???? Surely you can't be talking about shift walking because that's slow as hell?
/confused
I just tested it and the game stuffs itself with RAM in DX11 mode until it crashes (triggered it by alt-tabbing to desktop - even took Steam with it).
Spotting cloaked aliens is usually easier with the highest gamma setting and your flashlight on. Having a monitor with high brightness will also help. The shimmering light becomes visible enough when you're pointing at them. Skulks also tend to sit in the same usual convenient "snug fit" spots too, so once you know shade hive is available, you can turn on your mindset to predict where the skulks will be invisibly waiting for you.
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I too am definitely seeing more marine wins (though not disproportionately more) over this weekend, and a lot less games ending with the classic sneaky tunnel by marine main base.
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Makes sense. I like that. (If it really is like that.) I don't think I'll ever make it to Sanji Survivor (and have probably fluked my way to Special Ops), but at least it'll be limited for the real top 1%.
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Finally not sure if it's been noticed amongst many of you, but I'm also seeing many more server crashes with build 323. Today I've experienced 5, and yesterday experienced 2, across different servers. (8-Bit, survival of the fattest, and lost in space.) Not always late game either, one of them today was only 2 minutes into Veil.
Bit of a misunderstanding here: You as a marine are only a secondary objective to a silenced skulk. It really just wants to get past you to your RTs, and it's perfectly fine if you sit somewhere in a corner and wait for it to pass, because there's always another way around. With silence you can be an absolute pain in the ass running circles around marines and keeping their RTs down, and I've done so in the past many times.
I like the current version of cloak much better. It's easier to see, thanks to a bugfix where some parts of aliens would apparently become perfectly invisible, and marines can deal with it using all of their senses.
It's primary use now seems to be being harder to spot at long ranges and being harder to track during engagements. In a chaotic engagement with distractions, try switching to shift walking while behind some cover; that happened to me today and it really threw me off. I actually enjoyed fighting against it so far.
Nice changelog !
Nerf the marine PRes rate but increase the TRes rate to match.
If you're on Windows 10, please take a look at this thread: https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/154778/disable-windows-10-focus-assist-if-youre-having-issues
Ah the memories of the good ol' NS RivaTuner gamma "hax"
We've clearly gone full circle, you know what that means.
Thank you!! At least one other person gets it...
For the record I do have the gamma maxed out and even with the flashlight on I still can't spot 9 out of 10 cloaked aliens.