Herakles, I discussed this with Sonder ages ago. We agreed that there's not that much commander can do relative to skill level. In NS1 with some knowledge either of the opponent or map and killer strat you can pull of rounds here and there against imba teams.
The problem is that for commander to have better role, players must lose. Its a zero-sum to some extent. You need hard counters to have bigger RTS. Take cloak, something all players hated, that is something you would need more of to have bigger RTS part. There are 5 field players and 1 commander. Its not very feasible if field players don't have fun and commanders are playing chess with them. This was a problem in FPS/RTS concept that Valve pointed out long time ago.
I think the AC role in NS2 was horridly boring and NS1 achieved a decent balance. I think NS commanding side could have been explored a lot more, especially regards to upgrades. Even though commanding was boring on general basis, commanding in NS1 with a decent team was fun. And it sure did make a difference when teams were evenly balanced. You think Peach achieved his fame for nothing? Maybe you cannot capture that on frag movie but RTS is like that.
Imo. I think FPS is inherently more fun than RTS matter what you do, but I'm sure personal preferences are involved.
Bottom line is that whatever you wanna call NS is just semantics. I doubt any other balance would have been much better. Even with its flaws, I think NS1 was a game I wanted to play over any other MP game.
p.s. Piano has more "APM" than Starcraft fyi, much more harder.
Hmm yes, i get your points and kind of agree Fana and Jiriki, but in your competitive careers how many rounds did you win because of a stroke of genius from your comms vs an incredible action of your top sg/fade/lerk/jp?
I understand the comm (especially marine comm) is a big part of the win, and my post was not do diminish this playing role.
Anyway i may just be frustrated because of the game ns has become with this sequel.
Yeah, I saw that vid on the uwe forums. At least it confirms that PC gamers are the only true gamers.
I understand your frustration, and agree with you that ns2 is a step back from ns1.
UWE unfortunately made two major mistakes during development; (1) the spark engine; and (2) the alien commander. Both have had disastrous and wide ranging effects on the game's success and quality of gameplay.
Disclaimer: This is purely from a public comm perspective!
For me the fun in commanding was never so much about the strategies or techpaths, but much more about trying to control random strangers in a fashion to achieve a common goal. Didnt even had to be the real comm, just organizing aliens in NS1 as a sort of fieldcomm (who found the button for the minimap) was deeply satisfying to me (and frustrating when it didnt work.)
I wrote years back "Public ns is a bit like a negotiation where you’re the guy trying to explain why the marines should do what you say and not just run around."
And my biggest problem with NS2 is that UWE made it harder on both teams to encourage teamplay. The selfbought equipment on both teams fails to give players an awareness of them using a scarce! RESOURCE and not just buying an upgrade like in COD style games. In ns1 a commander had incentives (and thereby punishments too) to get marines to do something useful, but trying to control on a public server that not all 10 players buy exos at the same time or all constantly waste their res on sgs is nearly impossible. The game just doesn't make the players feel the need for efficient!! resource control and this took (for the average player) the RTS out of the equation, leaving a shooter with some building placements. And for a shooter, NS2 performance is just not up to par.
TLDR: NS2 gave up on the RTS part for the average player and reduced itself to a badly optimized shooter. Hence lots of people try it, dont realize the depths (how should they?) and leave.
Yeah, its the serious flaw in FPS/RTS hybrids. Many RTS concepts translate into features that conflict with good FPS design principles. However, I don't think it can't be solved.
I've been partial to the idea of having a system in which its more like a traditional RTS (e.g. comm controlling mostly NPC units), but having a few FPS players acting like 'hero' units. It'd be more PvE, but I think you could design it in a way in which it didn't feel like PvE because there is an actual person (the comm) controlling the units. Also, it would be much closer to the 8-12 playercount, than the 24-32 person scrums, that I see many successful online multiplayer's are using today.
Also, more on topic:
I'll be frank, I didn't think the free weekend would be this successful. At this point, we've beaten the peak playercount at launch and the previous free weekend/sale.
I can't really comment on NS2 but I can't agree that RTS part is the biggest flaw in NS2. I had most fun in NS1 as a field marine, and yes great RTS part played a big role, but physics and engine feel were the biggest contributors to awesome FPS experience. I similarly enjoyed other HL1 mods even though they didn't have equal RTS depth. Not maybe to same extent.
I think a lot of the time a team lost, the commander put the marines into suboptimal position or made a mistake but that being said, I think it is just psychological thing, more is expected of the leader than others. Its very easy to find flaws in commanding because everyone knows what the commander did. Player micro decisions are mostly available to others via demos and rarely discussed in equal detail. I think the "logical" nature of commanding makes it seem easier to fix than individual performance even though they are both mostly intuitive.
My honest guess that if you would do simple statistical analysis, the player skill would account for 80% of game score difference alone. There were quite some commanders who weren't tactically that smart but good meds + basic strats + skill is enough in many ways. However such commanders are vulnerable to unorthodox moves by the alien team. I do agree that having great field players is the key to success.
That being said, from the player point of view, playing with a good commander was a lot more fun.
On aliens, it is just individual performance but then again there was. Strats matter but skill + team play were most important.
haters, just enjoy yourselves. if you don't enjoy the game then move on. if I were to reminisce about all the old great games (HL and HL mods in particular) i would become very depressed with the current state of competitive gaming across the board.
Lol at the believers...
It's too bad i'm pretty optimistic but let's be real, the game is dying allready.
More and more players are quitting, teams are disbanding, next season div1 will be what 4 maybe 5 teams of the same kind of level, the nations cup will be dominated by 3 or 4 nations (not by lack of skill by the others but by lack of players), they take time of their dev team to release some mods no one play or will play, they promised optimisation a year ago it still runs at 50 fps on my 4.2ghz i5 3570k after 10 minutes in a room with 2 crags, 2 lerks, hydras and a hive (dont even want to think of the competitive guys on lesser rigs :/), each of their "updates" breaks the competitive mods or some game mechanics (good beta testers!) etc...
Look at the stats the free weekend lost every single players who tried the game and more of it's allready small player base.
Tbh i spoke to some other players in top teams and a lot of them including me (not that i think i'm important) don't know if we will play the 3rd season.
The graph more or less speaks for itself. It's clear that NS2 has failed to gain a "critical mass" of population that can sustain itself over time (compare with different versions of CS and TF2, for example). The population will continue to decline, but the speed of the decline will probably slow down and updates, free weekends, sales, and other efforts, will cause temporary growth which will extend the life of the game.
Two important things to note:
(1) SUMMER IS COMING (I couldn't resist). The phenomena known as summer inactivity will hit soon, we're probably experiencing the early beginnings of it right now, as it has every summer, every year, for the ten years I've played NS2 and NS1. A lot will happen over summer and my experience is that the post-summer competitive landscape is usually very different from the pre-summer one. Some teams will stick together, but many will die, and from their wreckage new ones will be created.
(2) As NS1 proved, it is quite possible to have good games and an interesting community in a game with less than 1000 concurrent players.
I can't say for sure that I'll still be playing next fall (I've been having some motivational issues for the past few months, leading to me playing very few hours, leading to poor performance, leading to...), but even though many of us may quit, it is highly unlikely that the community will die over summer, no matter how dire it might seem during the dreaded summer inactivity.
I have to agree with Fana. We feel that post-summer and lets see what happens during the "real" summer. Finaly.. NS2 was released 7 month ago. I think we have to give UWE more time. The issue of bad computer technics and low fps isnt acceptable and causes much quits of players. I personaly dont want to invest thousands of €'s only to play NS2 stable. I hope they will change this in the near NEAR future :-(
As long as UWE keeps developing NS2, I'm not worried. Anyone whose been following Andi's Balance mod work knows that there are some pretty drastic changes that would really shake up the game if/when released.
As long as UWE keeps developing the game .. I AM WORRIED !
Because every release basically ruinins every competitive game for about a week .. BECAUSE THOSE UWE DOUCHES DO NOT COMMUNICATE with the competitive scene or the NS2Stats guys!
And that is a huge hit for the game with every update!
Especially considering that to me it seems perfomance got worse with last update .. i mean srsly???
What i mean is... it cant be that a player with a highend gaming system plays the game with lags, especially micro lags. Ok, we got information that the game need a 120Hz monitor.. but guys.. we spent much € for the computer. CPU, Grafics.. eg eg.. last night i try to look up what i have to spent to got a system which runs NS2 "nearly stable"... --> 1800€ (with 120 BENQ Monitor). But guys.. can that be? CAN THAT BE? :P
I dont think so. I fully agree with Gamerkatze, the first priority have to be the performance. They can have that big amount of players if they only focus on getting the game more stable. Simple but they wont reach that goal...
If you just assume there is going to be a summer drop off, and keep telling people that there will be then it will always be worse that it should be and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Whilst the summer drop of may well be a fact, there should be damage limitation. I don't see why there can't still be a league format in place for those that wish to play the game during this time.
For me, there have been too many assumptions on how the competitive community should work based on the elite few. People say that people don't play as much during the summer, and point towards summer holidays etc. This is all fair, but in its current format you're actually only asked to play 1 game per week - if it happens your best player or 2 is away on holiday its the opportunity for someone else to play.
Personally I just think shutting our league down based on historical drop off only serves to exacerbate the effect it will have.
I understand there are efforts for Nations Cup and other cups - but in general, the bread and butter of a thriving competitive scene has to be a league structure IMO. The cups are good, and people appreciate the effort that goes into them I'm sure, but the ones that I have seen are nailed down to time frames that are pretty hard for "causal" teams to play to. Why don't we just appreciate the summer is going to be slower and run the most casual formats to play to which is the league, and during the busier times you can fit more cups around.
the engine was just never suited for the speed and precision that this game needs
maybe after few yrs people will have fast enough PCs to play, but it'll be too late by then
only thing they can do (other than make it free-to-play) is to redesign a bit.
- remove stuff that makes the game run poorly
- design it for smaller games with matchmaking instead of giant games with servers & hour-long turtles
the performance thing is funny though. all the full servers (at least in America) are the 16v16 and 12v12 even though that's where performance is worst
Performance is pretty god awful in 6v6 games as well
Even if the balance mod is comming along nicely it will still play on an underdeveloped and horrible engine. A lot of cred to Max for basically coding the whole thing himself, but looking at it from purely a player perspective it's horrible.
On an engine with so, so many flaws and not having implemented a single thing to nurture competitive players like a basic tournament mode with "ready" cmd's (instead we have to rely on ns2stats which breaks every patch because the engine is still such a mess of shit) I don't really want to speculate in how big the comp scene will be in a year.
I know the matchmaking is comming, but in all honesty, too little too late. Too many issues.
I dont need a matchmaking system.. ok its nice for some situations. As i said in my post before, if they dont want to let NS2 die.. they have to fix the performance problem. Main target nr.1 ; we said this to charlie on the finals in cologne - but who are we? =D
The matchmaking system is a completly useless thing in NS2 ..
This will never work properly .. and how can it?
I dont even know how they intend to put a matchmaking system in NS2 .. matchmaking works if it is a game that is played 1 on 1 or maybe 2 on 2 .. but 6 on 6 .. SRSLY??
IT WILL NEVER WORK !
And as said before i agree with everyone that says perfomance needs to be improved!
Yeah for me it might run stable cause my PC is just really good(€1600,- without a monitor) but i am still not happy with the way the game is running tbh.
wiry: AFAIK, matchmaking is not coming. That was what Flayra told us in Cologne, at least.
It is the right call, too, because matchmaking is pointless for NS2 right now. The game would need a significantly larger active player population to make it remotely feasible.
The game should've been designed as a 6v6 with matchmaking to begin with, on the source engine, but can't do anything about that now.
There are potentially some large performance improvements coming in the future (rumor has it +50% due to better lua performance), but no idea when, and too little too late to have a meaningful impact on the player population.
LOL I have to agree with u guys... every single time UWE messes with game balance it gets worse hahahaha...
First they screwed skulk movement... then marines won 7 round straight in saunamen vs nexzil... then they fix the skulk movement... but they increase the cost of IPs and upgrades, and mess with nano and medpacks ... and BOOOM alien starts winning all... I fear that everysingle time they twitch with game balance it gets worse XD
That isn't accurate at all, nor is it fair to UWE. All of these changes were suggested by the competitive community. The problem is that different groups of different comp players all made different suggestions, some at odds with each other. I, for example, didn't want skulk movement "fixed" (spastic walljump skulk is not something I want in the game), but I did want marine nerfs to balance the teams with limited skulk movement. In the end we got a little of both, muddled by the effects of the ever-changing metagame, leading to a very unpredictable result.
