Ns 3.0 Thoughts

[Uranium - 235]

- Combat: I love it. I usually go Damage 1 - Shotty - HMG - Armor 1 - Armor 2 - HA - Resupply, and I almost always end with the most kills. However, jetpacks in combat are horrifyingly unbalanced, as the marines just fly past you and blow the hell out of your hive. Die, repeat. Though all the reserved slot holders being able to vote maps means every game is combat, it's beginning to piss me off.

 - NS 3.0:

1) Skulks are way too weak. I went through a game with 6 deaths and about 40 kills because they're so easy to kill. Most of em couldn't even get close.

2) Electricity is WAY overpowered. I could put a TFac in Engine Room on Tanith and it'd launch a bolt of lightning across the map and up an onos' ass in Feedwater hive.

3) Stomp was "fixed" by making it only 1 second. However, Flayra actually managed to skate around the whole fact that the reason it's overpowered is that a stomp is longer then most hallways.

4) Hand grenades are neat, but overpowered. A lot. They're like handheld siege cannons. Just whip 'em at an OC and it gets blown halfway to hell.

5) I've almost never seen an alien win. In co_ or ns_.

[crack]

Stomp is fine with the hitboxes and all

#2: TRUE- but it costs 15 res more

#4 false

#5 80% true. marines are overpowered

[Uranium - 235]

On that gunmetal blue snow map, I threw a hand grenade against a wall. The explosion killed 4 skulks on the other side.

[BobTheJanitor]

Don't spam[/color]


Spam? I thought it was rather humorous. And now no one can enjoy my comedic genius.  =p

[confused!]

Having spent 14 hours today playing 3.0 i was wondering what y'all thought of it. I am very excited about it. Many people have been unhappy, or even openly hostile toward me, as a contie, for even allowing the new version to exist. i was wondering where you all fit in. i knwo the guy who was yelling at me for being a contie and for the fact that we turned out " this$^%$&#%$ game" is really a totally wrong.  but  scince i trust your judgement more tahn his i thought i should ask you guys

[Uranium - 235]

Pessimist View: Horribly unbalanced, it "fixed" everything that wasn't broken, and broke everything that needed fixing. Not enough new material to warrent a '3.0' release (compare it to 2.0 which was like a whole new game).

Optimist View: Well... hand grenades are cool...

Combat is fun, that is, when our dumbass reserved slot holders aren't spamming vote_map co_core.

BTW: WHat the hell is with hand grenades? They fly like they weigh half a pound but they hit something and just plop to the ground.


By 'unbalanced' I mean sickeningly unbalanced. I'm sure you've all seen me end the game with 100+ kills, as I mow through skulks like they're paper.

[Sancho]

Hostile towards you because you're a const member?  Pshh, people need to come to glimpse that 3.0 beta != 3.0

I don't like it at this point at all.  Combat is fun, but vanilla NS is horribly off-balance.  I'm not going to go flaming people for it, though.  Trying to balance the game for combat and NS messed things up, and it will be fixed eventually.  Life goes on.

[Uranium - 235]

Okay here's my breakdown:

Combat:

1) Jetpacks pretty much ruin the game. Once again, in NS's traditional fashion, the old creedo 'if the marines get to the endgame they deserve to win' applies en force. Jetpacks allow the marines to literally skip past every alien on the other team, to the hive, shoot it a lot, get experience, and come back and do it again, with even bigger guns.

2) Take the damn chair out of the pit in co_kestral. Honestly, no one likes lost, no one will like Kestral, for the exact same reason.

3) I want to devolve into a skulk.

Regular NS:

1) Skulks are like paper. Really now, I never noticed a fixed hitbox. Maybe it's because I've always aimed at the skulk. Whatever reason, I can kill three skulks with my LMG, down another with my pistol, whip out my knife and take down a fifth. You've seen me do it. Repeatedly.

2) Stomp, for the love of god, needs a range decrease. Okay, yeah, making it too short wouldn't be healthy for the onos. But he shouldn't be able to stomp people that he will NEVER be able to reach and devour/gore. The current range just makes it super-lame. Stomp should last one second, not have this rolling wave of doom that flows across the map and stuns the commander in the dropship that's circling another planet. I probably wouldn't mind the range if stomp's duration was proportionate to the range. At short range, you're stunned for a while. At long you're stunned very short.

3) Electricity is a sick joke. A sick sad joke. It's like Conan O'Brian cracking dead baby jokes on a tequilla bender. Not funny, sick, and sad, all in one.

4) Our comm spent all his res on turrets instead of giving us guns to kill the fade.

5) Onos is stupid. It went from an unstoppable, terrifying juggernaut in 1.0, to a weak as paper annoyance and outpost eater in 2.0, to a hit and run res whore wet dream in 3.0. Really now, bilebomb got a beef. Yay. Sorry, that still won't help the aliens crack open a marine base that has a TFac shooting bolts of lightning through a gorge's ass and killing the hive across the map while seven marines are flinging exploding sex toys around and turrets are blasting away at everything.

6) Jetpack/shotguns in good hands are still overpowered, aliens still have no effective way to counter HA marines outside an onos, and, well, basically the marine ENDgame is STILL overpowered. The only gameplay change was that instead of the marine early game being underpowered, it now is overpowered as well. In short, after playing about 90 bajillion games, seeing only four alien wins is just sad.

7) Really now, does anyone use a catpack? Ever?

------------------------------

What pisses me off even more is everyone saying 'ITS IN BETA FFS!'

You realize how long this has been in beta? You REALIZE HOW LONG THEY'VE HAD TO FIX BALANCE!?! I mean, you know, if this was the product of maybe, uh, a month? That'd be understandable. But how many months has this been in progress? Any guesses? I can't remember, but I know it's been about three, maybe four months? At this point, balance should be rough around the edges, but largely in place. The fact that a solo marine (me) can kill keyser, fatty, and a civilian in one LMG clip while flipping off a railing like Chow Yun Fat is unacceptable.

I was half expecting a Valve logo to show up instead of 'UWE' splash screen.

[Venmoch]

I thought that it was 3.0 was almost perfectly balanced.

The one hour + (I had to leave about an hour in) game that I took part in only prooves it.

And is it me or are the games getting much more "Epic" an Onos isn't a definite win now and its kinda cool to go against one with a team of marines now rather than in version 2.0 where it became more of a "Great An Onos I'm dead" type of thing.

Oh that and 3.0 runs perfectly on Steam!

[Satanic Monkey]

I have to agree with Uranium on the part where skulks die like nothing, casue most of the time , I was the skulk  :lol: . Doesn't stomp last one second? I never seen anybody use mines or cat-packs , honestly what's the point of cat-packs, at first everyone was excited about 25% more fire rate but i never seen it used. Also I don't know if they fixed the bilebomb bug , but i was a gorge in the vent above double in veil and started bilebombing for a while and when I checked , nothing got hurt.

[Lito]

:lol: hilarious, u-235

[Malevolent]

Yeah, I though it was weird that skulks die so fast. In 2.01, you would've been said to be using h4x when killing skulks left and right. Although it does need balancing, I still find it fun to play just because of the additions. Combat is really fun but could also use some balancing (*cough* upgrading for aliens *cough*). It's also by far more fun to be a rine in Combat.

EDIT: I forgot one of the most important things: it's laggy as hell. I have my nice dial-up modem and could play the game relatively well before, but now when it starts to lag, it's unplayable. It didn't lag bad yesterday for a long time, but then on co_kestrel, I believe, it was as if skulks were teleporting. And for some reason, the aliens didn't seem to have a big problem with the lag as much as us rines...

[Lightning Blue]

Catpacks don't work on Free SunnyD or any other server with metamod enabled.

Thread merged with the one in the NS forum.

[BobTheJanitor]

The real question is what they're going to do about it now. Once the forums come back up (if they ever come back up...) people are going to be pointing out all these little details to the folks who can fix them. Now we can find out if the devs are worth their salt. Will they say 'gee, those are good points that 500 people just agreed on... maybe we SHOULD fix stomp/skulk health/grenade power/HA trains that don't die/whatever.' Or maybe they'll say 'this game has been balanced and tested by hundreds of vets and constellation members!' And assume that the will of the masses is unimportant.

In 2.01 it seemed that with a low skill level, aliens always won, and with a high skill level marines always won. I've seen too many games where aliens are getting stomped even if the marines are terrible now. Every advantage added has been for the marines, it seems. They get all the new toys, and aliens get... focus. Something that already HAD a counter in the game. (Hint: armor) Much alien stuff got nerfed, and no marine stuff. And to reiterate, as if it hadn't been said enough, electrification is COMICAL now. It's supposed to be a freaking skulk deterrent. Not something that makes a fade say 'oh hell, I can't walk down THAT hallway, there's an electrified Tfac in it!' Frankly, I don't mind if they want to stretch the range out a teeny bit. But it stretches like 8-10 feet from the source now. And it's more powerful, AND regen has been nerfed to tick slower. So now a fade taking down an elec'ed RT takes much longer and much more time healing, while a marine taking down an alien RT is still knife, knife, knife.

Meh, it is a beta. But it's version g of said beta. Uranium's right: that's worrisome.

[Anarki3x6]

only problem that bothers me is the rines winning every normal 3.0 game
which now leads to everyone piling into the rine door   :huh:

[sonic]

Only uranium can put it in words like that , bravo!  :p

[rad4Christ]

only problem that bothers me is the rines winning every normal 3.0 game
which now leads to everyone piling into the rine door   :huh:

Add a plugin that forces random ... At least for non regs (of course I try to random every time).

I say vote in the reg forums to go back to 2.01. We can play 3.0 on the 30 billion ones that are goign to pop up, but when we want true gameplay, go with 2.01.


Or, in my truest opinion, go with 1.04.

[JHunz]

I'd like to point out that many of these points have been brought up and discussed in the Constellation forum, and probably in the other hidden forums as well.  If it is unbalanced now, it is no fault of the testers, because Flayra does with the game as he sees fit.

[Diablus]

I truly think the reason why marines are "overpowered" are for these reasons:

1) Onos armor along with the rest of the aliens drops fanatically fast from level 1 LMGs (it goes down faster then your health) skulks need thier armor back at 20, in co_maps marines dominate the beginning 98% of the time.
2) Stomp is almost a waste now, it does NOT save retreating onos like it used to thus celerity is vital and requires a movment chamber and no other chamber tactic
3)Grenades are powerful but the good counter is it takes a few seconds to prime it.
4) i have no clue why electricity can zap an alien 10 feet away
5) Sensory chamber cloaking time for aliens is horrible, dont bother going sensory first anymore for the ambushes, by the time u set up and wait to cloak by a sensory chamber the mariens are already shooting at you.
6) lerk flight FREAKIN SUCKS i have no clue why people "love" it so much when u cant fly sideays or backward anymore along with the fact the lerk flys like it has 5 cinderblocks on it and the adrenaline cost for flying sucks seeing how  u have to frantically hit jump, walking is amazingly slow and u have to be on the ground to bite becuase the adrenaline cost for flying is so freakin much.
7) people say onos is 75 or 85 res but it seems i cant go onos at 75 or 90 res only at 100 so people say they changed it back to 100, now why the HELL would someone be stupid enough to waste 100 resources to die to 3 marines with level 2 weapon lmgs so quickly? well i am and it seems im not helping the team im only trading 100 of my resources to give marines 1-3 resources, gg aliens lose.

the main factor to marine pwnage endgames is that stomp completly blows, excuse my language but im just stating the truth. How do the devs expect a "devour counter" to a train of HA with level 1-3 weapons when stomp is 1 second and devour range is shortened? Devour TAKES 1 second to prime then switching back to stomp brings you down to 400/0 out of 700/500, now stomping while trying to retreat brings you to 250/0 then running out of adrenaline your screwed or will make it out alive with 60/0 with 83 regen assuming u devoured that HA. now that your at 60/0 marines are FOLLOWING behind your tail so u have to repeat the same process with say 160/0 this is definetly NOT working out, put 2 second stomp back at least.

seems fades are the "tanks" of the kharaa now. why post this? i know any devs who read this will say go back to 2.0 were not fixing it becuase of what u think. but its not what i think, its mine mixed with some of the communities thoughts. If anyone knows a dev who will be intrested in changing all of our ideas that will be posted in this thread please do so, cause as of 3.0 right now. it aint too hot. But then again that statement was my opinion

[JHunz]

Lerk Flight in 3.0:
Frantic flapping is not the way to go.  It's a complete waste of energy.  Point the lerk at where you want to go, double-tap your jump button for a decent burst of speed, then hold it down for a fast glide that costs no energy.  Save that for biting and maneuvering.  Also, I believe backwards flight is in the works.