Waaah Zunni escaped I&S, APOCALYPSE!
Patch PR is an absolute....... female dog.
On one hand, some people can react normally to "we changed X and Y because our reasoning was Z" and accept it and drive on.
Sadly its the percentage who go "OGMWTFBBQ lame change ololol observe my flawed logic saying u r teh wrongzorz" which knacker the whole thing.
PG and structure costs were very obviously a nod to complaints about the lunch portal and an enhanced aliens earlygame (hello SC).
I don't even mind so much about the missboxes, its just the fact that the marine game is cookie cutter. Maybe that IS an LM only issue, so fair enough, but even without FF you've still got A1 being effectively mandatory for 2/3 of games.
I say 2/3 because, as I stated elsewhere, if you are of equal or lesser skill to the aliens, then A1 will give you enough edge to either equal or outclass them. W1 is pretty pointless unless you are 100% certain of outskilling the aliens. This doesnt change even if you take into account chambers, because armour is superior to MC/SC, and evens out DC. W1 is pretty foolhardy versus MC/SC (unless you're outskilling your opponents, natch).
Server specific variables are interesting, I mean thats how most servers tweak their game. Released games have all sorts of scoring and weapon variables that people can use. AvP2 allowed you to change the points won from killing each class of player. You had servers that gave few points for killing huggers/bursters, and gave more for killing drones, encouraging players to make big kills as opposed to bodycamping.
In NS, you could translate this as allowing different RFK scoring for certain lifeforms/upgrades. Thats one example. Another would be custom costs for upgrades/etc. While this would lead to an initially chaotic pub circuit, it would soon balance out.. then you would only need serverspy or similar in order to see how the players are voting with their feet.
It also means you could truly have some sort of competitive setup versus a public setup. Again, thats how it works for other released games. There's the defaults, competitive play tweaks, and public server tweaks. NS is a strange beast because there's not an awful lot to be tweaked on the server end, afaik.
Yes, you would get some silly servers, like the AvP2 ones with lifecycle on, one kill = queen, 5 exosuits, and tracking weapons only...... but for each of those, there would be many more servers where admins had made only minor tweaks.
Hm, maybe I should have put that in I&S.
Anyhow, I agree with Nully, more tweak options would be fun.
