Deck says

Other people believe when you nerf something enough, you should just take it out of the game like focus.

Imagine if LoL or Dota went with this ideology. "Oh that champion needs a nerf. *SNIP SNIP* -> trashcan." Same goes with almost any other competitive game. I can't recall any big esports game completely removing something from the game, because it was unbalanced. At most they nerfed it hard, and then started to buff it slightly, step by step. They however had a huge datapool to get results from, which allows them, what could be classified "careful guessing"

Its not a great way to think, and hurts games and further development, for a extreemely shortsighted boost, which never actually has any severe impact.

just remove it to be closer to the vanilla gameplay.

everything at once tbh

Ixian says

when cysts had tons of HP. Now that they dont, they just die too fast, and it is one of the most boring things to do as a comm. Its easy anyway to clear the cysts now that its only 180 HP

Cysts haven't had tons of HP in ages. Why would you change anyhting about that now? You're just totally biased towards cysts because of reasons.
Do you, the winner of prem div under the old comp mod, really dare say that elements of old comp mod are bad?

Ixian says

To counter spores better, change how the medpacks work instead. Meaning the healing of the 25 HOT from the medpack is active for, what, 5 seconds, and keeps healing despite reaching 100 HP.

If you want to keep the game similar to vanilla (which I agree with), changing the core medpack mechanic is not the way to go.

>Some Ixian quote about how we don't need compmod and should instead send all code to UWE bc they will fix it themselves, using boneshield as an example

Yeah and how long have we been waiting for vanilla boneshield to be usable now?
In general it doesn't make sense to rely on UWE for all of our changes. It would be nice if we could rely on them, but we can't. UWE and ENSL have different goals, both nebulous sometimes. UWE, as a real studio, moves slowly.



oh and i forgot to say: if you want to make catpacks more used, i suggest lowering research time or cost instead of use cost.

Right now we dont need a comp mod in the degree that it is being taken too. Later, once the scene is more lively again, we could diffenetly look into a more changing metagame, to make sure that the game doesn't become stale, which was the idea from comp mod at the very beginning. That just cannot be done, as the scene needs players atm.

"At its very core, we would simply like games to be played, in the hopes that this fosters tangible and meaningful relationships among its participants." UWE has the mantra: "Unite the world through play". I dont see how that differs from each other, keats :)

Ixian says

Right now we dont need a comp mod in the degree that it is being taken too. Later, once the scene is more lively again, we could diffenetly look into a more changing metagame, to make sure that the game doesn't become stale, which was the idea from comp mod at the very beginning. That just cannot be done, as the scene needs players atm.

"At its very core, we would simply like games to be played, in the hopes that this fosters tangible and meaningful relationships among its participants." UWE has the mantra: "Unite the world through play". I dont see how that differs from each other, keats :)

Ixian says

Right now we dont need a comp mod in the degree that it is being taken too. Later, once the scene is more lively again, we could diffenetly look into a more changing metagame, to make sure that the game doesn't become stale, which was the idea from comp mod at the very beginning. That just cannot be done, as the scene needs players atm.

"At its very core, we would simply like games to be played, in the hopes that this fosters tangible and meaningful relationships among its participants." UWE has the mantra: "Unite the world through play". I dont see how that differs from each other, keats :)

jansjdnajsndjads WAAAAAAT?

Uhm.. wasnt the season 9 and 10 halted due to the comp-mod? Realise this.. the vanilla game of NS2, the thing developed by UWE may work in a public game, but when you've got developers with 0 competitive experience, spewing out things like recharge onos armor with boneshield?

Nah, ENSL should deffo take away Comp-Mod.. insert vanilla gameplay/meta in a 6v6 season.. Let the huge clusterfuck of a season begin! :D

Is it really so hard for pubbers to learn and adapt to these minor tweaks? That's a central assumption of Ixian's main argument, but it's not obvious to me. I've never heard a new-to-comp player complaining about those darn cysts, or whatever. And having only recently made that transition myself, I can say that this wasn't an obstacle for me.

Of course, there should be *some* generic bias in favor of vanilla. We shouldn't make changes for the sake of making changes. But if there's a good argument establishing that a change improves balance/fun, then I think that's enough to overcome the bias.

We have discussed items Ixian has brought up. So far, seems like multiple people agree that rupture change in comp mod probably can be reverted back. Doesn't seem like there is much sense in the change from vanilla. I think it was mostly a fear that a parasiting rupture would be too strong early in the game. Based on everything we have seen, doesn't seem like that would be the case. This will probably be reverted back.

ryssk says

but when you've got developers with 0 competitive experience, spewing out things like recharge onos armor with boneshield?

Rantology was a part of titus, who won several championships in this very scene. Ghoul was a proffesional cs 1.6 player for nFaculty - he even got his old teammates to play against Archeia, having his own team practice for an hour or two. They then played against Archeia, with the result 1|1 - both marine wins. McGlaspie was a national UT champion.

Several of the developers have more competitive experience than many players in this competitive scene. Why boneshield happened like the way it did, I haven't the faintest fucking clue. When I asked, they wouldn't give me the exact reason, but suffice to say, that these three developers who all have won money playing games, were outnumbered. But that is just guessing as I never was given an exact reason.



I have never said we dont need comp mod. Even the quote you point to only says, that I dislike the degree it currently alters the game, when considering the points I have put up.

Ixian says

ryssk says

but when you've got developers with 0 competitive experience, spewing out things like recharge onos armor with boneshield?

Rantology was a part of titus, who won several championships in this very scene. Ghoul was a proffesional cs 1.6 player for nFaculty - he even got his old teammates to play against Archeia, having his own team practice for an hour or two. They then played against Archeia, with the result 1|1 - both marine wins. McGlaspie was a national UT champion.

Several of the developers have more competitive experience than many players in this competitive scene. Why boneshield happened like the way it did, I haven't the faintest fucking clue. When I asked, they wouldn't give me the exact reason, but suffice to say, that these three developers who all have won money playing games, were outnumbered. But that is just guessing as I never was given an exact reason.



I have never said we dont need comp mod. Even the quote you point to only says, that I dislike the degree it currently alters the game, when considering the points I have put up.

Pretty much never heard of Ghoul in nFaculty considering i followed the 1.6 scene quite heavily...

McGlaspie a national UT Champion? Where did you hear that? You mean he won some tournament at a small shitty LAN? Oh that's hard to achieve

Rant i do understand, but she's a competitive player recently.. But the others? Are we going to talk about how people invented the wheel aswell?

Where do you come up with this information LOL? Did you really became a UWE fanboy all of a sudden? Oh god..

So they have several of competitive experience you say? How can they spew out so much utter garbage as their own "Balance"?

Even here you actually state aswell that several of the changes made into the game are downvoted by the "competitive players" but yet you want to play without CompMod?

ixian is a uwe spy, dont believe his lies.
direction of this game is quickly going south. yall need some inspiration, or else anyone who previously thought this game was fun and balanced will quickly find new things to play

soon we'll have buncha fools runnin comp mod and this whole thread will be pointless.
try 2 hire ppl based on merit deck, not status

Ryssk i would love to discuss this with you, but you seem to only read half of what I write. I never said that we should play without comp mod. This is like the 4th or 5th time I repeat this statement. If you are unable to read, and comprehend, I cannot find a reason to have any discussion with you, despite me actually wanting to.

I'm as much a fan of UWE, as i am of you guys.

I won a spindle of blank CDs at the big day in lan in 2003, let me know if you want some tips

Ixian says

Deck says

Other people believe when you nerf something enough, you should just take it out of the game like focus.

Imagine if LoL or Dota went with this ideology. "Oh that champion needs a nerf. *SNIP SNIP* -> trashcan." Same goes with almost any other competitive game. I can't recall any big esports game completely removing something from the game, because it was unbalanced. At most they nerfed it hard, and then started to buff it slightly, step by step. They however had a huge datapool to get results from, which allows them, what could be classified "careful guessing"

Its not a great way to think, and hurts games and further development, for a extreemely shortsighted boost, which never actually has any severe impact.

This is a good point in principle. The reason why people are against the current comp mod it seems like is not mainly because it plays terribly or that they disagree really strongly with a specific change (maybe now people do). It seems like it more just irks people that we removed things like focus instead of finding a way to include it. But Ixian, this is similar to my conversations with Kash. The difference it seems like is your line is slightly different than his. You don't like the current boneshield and probably can see the comp mod change as making sense where Kash didn't like that. But your line stops before focus where other people line goes beyond that.

Focus to me is very similar to boneshield in terms of trying to balance it, and how it plays is more annoying for the overall game-play than fun (imo). The game played for years without 1 hit kills for aliens. I don't think you can honestly know that the balance in comp mod would work with 1 hit focus kills in the game. Sure you could nerf it below a 1 hit kill but then the trade off and timing of your attacks being different starts to not make sense. It's not like we hate change, we just couldn't see how 1 hit kills would be fun for the marine team. The negatives outweighed the positives. We also have to balance on huge team fights, not just 1 on 1 gameplay. If we nerfed it to the point where it makes no sense to use, you also create another issue. You have people coming from vanilla and trying to use focus and it making less sense why it's not worth using. All these factors pointed to us taking it out of the game.

I don't think we can really compare this to other games. What other games have ranged team vs melee team and introduced a 1 hit kill melee attack into a game after years of not having it? Also the other major difference other than ns2 having unique game-play is that comp mod is balancing a game on 6v6 where pub ns2 is a free for all in terms of players on a team. Other games force the developers to see what is op'd over time in matches because you are always seeing the same numbers compete. In NS2, you never see the balance of 6v6 in pub play. How could you? You can only do it inside the world of comp, which is exactly what we are trying to do. Also perhaps people could consider this... Let's say NS2 was 6v6 in every pub ns2 server, Would the current boneshield and focus be in the game? It could be different in that universe.

Update to Comp Mod:

Catpack duration changed to 8 seconds from 12 seconds

I don't even understand what you're trying to accomplish

Golden says

I don't even understand what you're trying to accomplish

Deck says

We also wanted to make additional changes to Comp Mod to hopefully change the game-play on marines somewhat. The idea is, there might be too much incentive for marines to sit on their res and wait for jps. We are changing Catpacks and Jps (testing in gathers, we can always make additional changes or change it back). I want to make this clear, this idea is not intended to make marines way stronger. If the cheaper cat packs result in that, we will change the cat packs back. The goal is to make marines consider using cat packs over jp's as we feel like the gameplay could be stronger. So even if we have to make changes later, it might result in more cat packs being used, and marines rushing earlier in the game.

The Catpack changes for example can be easily reverted. We felt the game-play was getting a little stale on marines. We thought this could add some more fun/speed to the game, but still keep the risk/reward element. We understand that this might not be balanced well for the top level of the game, so we are willing to revert. We haven't changed our focus of trying to balance this game from the top down.

I think this has potential to add some life to gather rounds. I think the game plays better with catpacks being used more often in a ratio of catpacks or jp's. Doesn't mean people won't use jps and catpacks in the same round with the recent changes. We also don't intend to take jp's out of the game. I think it allows for some rounds to play out differently though, and hopefully more fun.

lets mmake a gather comp mod then a Real comp mod

We will discuss the catpacks. Due to fear of them being op'd at the highest level for next season, we are considering changing the catpacks back to the way they were (duration and res).

This is probably the safest route to go with catpacks. Looks like we will leave the jp pres and drop jp res where it's currently at. This keeps the slight nerf to marine pres (increase jp res needed) which helps balance the rounds where the marines have tons of pres. I also saw that in div 1 last season.

Thoughts? If people would like to share their thoughts on how the catpacks are playing, this would be a good time for that as well.

Cat packs have been reverted. Changed back to 3 res, 12 second duration.

If you are still up for experimentation changing the research cost of cats from 15 to 10 might be worth trying. 3 res for a single catpack is a fair price, 2 is most probably OP. I find the research a bit difficult to squeeze in however at 15 res, which IMO is the biggest reason why we don't see them more often. (The same change could be tried with nanoshield btw. also research time on those things is faaar too long)

caperp says

If you are still up for experimentation changing the research cost of cats from 15 to 10 might be worth trying. 3 res for a single catpack is a fair price, 2 is most probably OP. I find the research a bit difficult to squeeze in however at 15 res, which IMO is the biggest reason why we don't see them more often. (The same change could be tried with nanoshield btw. also research time on those things is faaar too long)

My first reaction is changing 15 tres to 10 or the idea I've heard of shortening the research time when you aren't researching anything else on the command station is minor. I do think this is a good suggestion though. The reason is, if it appears really easy for commanders to get cat packs, might be more willing to get them more often. Which was the whole point of the cat pack change. So even if I think this suggestion should be very minor, it could change behavior for the good of the game.

Regarding nanoshield, I don't really see a reason to make this easier to do. We can review this as well though.

Ideally you would make nanoshield and catpacks having both the same worth researching.

doesn't matter what changes you make, CanMercForFinals will win either way.

Deck says

how the catpacks are playing

everythung is playing real nice dekc thank you

Update to Comp Mod:

Change to Power Surge:
- works with a powered robo
- 3 tres cost to use
- no research time
- doesn't hurt or change aliens around a powered surge.

Posting this while I remember, can talk more about it later.

There is a big problem with hitboxes right now: they are honestly too big on the skulk + lerk.
It seems you reverted the fade one but left it pub like on those 2?

UWE doesnt really balance the game around people who can aim, otherwise they would never have changed those.
You balance a game around (potentially) it's best "performance" ie: good framerate, minimum latency.
On lan I can honestly tell you marines were allready massively overpowered.

So rines are OP and it comes down (in part) to something people talked about a long time ago: the SG is just too fucking good in this game.

Right now when SG pop up they have an insane snowballing effect on the game, you literally can't crush a group of marines with skulks and lerks, or it takes a far too big commitment from the alien team: 5 aliens, every drifter abilities, higher lifeforms tanking in shots etc... and even then because of the hitboxes what happens 90% of the time is 1 lmg being able to mitigate lerks involvement and 1 SG destroying 4 skulks because it's so easy to hit them.

Strategically speaking we would always try too SG push the 2nd hive before it built up sometimes winning the fight sometimes losing it, but right now it just doesn't make sense not to try to push it since this kind of push is massiveley in the marines's favor.

herakles says

Posting this while I remember, can talk more about it later.

There is a big problem with hitboxes right now: they are honestly too big on the skulk + lerk.
It seems you reverted the fade one but left it pub like on those 2?

UWE doesnt really balance the game around people who can aim, otherwise they would never have changed those.
You balance a game around (potentially) it's best "performance" ie: good framerate, minimum latency.
On lan I can honestly tell you marines were allready massively overpowered.

So rines are OP and it comes down (in part) to something people talked about a long time ago: the SG is just too fucking good in this game.

Right now when SG pop up they have an insane snowballing effect on the game, you literally can't crush a group of marines with skulks and lerks, or it takes a far too big commitment from the alien team: 5 aliens, every drifter abilities, higher lifeforms tanking in shots etc... and even then because of the hitboxes what happens 90% of the time is 1 lmg being able to mitigate lerks involvement and 1 SG destroying 4 skulks because it's so easy to hit them.

Strategically speaking we would always try too SG push the 2nd hive before it built up sometimes winning the fight sometimes losing it, but right now it just doesn't make sense not to try to push it since this kind of push is massiveley in the marines's favor.

+1

I agree that shotgun is too strong currently. How to deal with that (reverting hitboxes or nerfing shotgun) is a thing I leave to the hands of the compmod council