so far I never rly had a problem with any changes in the compmod. But srsly I never had (and I don't know anyone who had) problems with the lerk being silent while gliding. If you wanna keep a sound for lerk gliding then make it faster again (and fix the first person sound for lerks if not done already)

Btw I can already see marines preparing ambushes for lerks who just want to scout marine movements like they always used to be and can't anymore because they make sounds now and can't do something about it. They don't have much health anyway and the skulk has a skill to move silent. Following that logic you can also take the sneak ability away from skulks. If they wanna move silently, get the silence trait right?
(ok the last 2 sentences were coming out of rage and I see the stupid idea behind removing sneak ability. just saying removing silent glide is a stupid idea aswell in my oppinion)

It used to be a lerk, now it's called Jetplane, so please change the name In-game also, i mistakenly picking a "Lerk" but it's actually a jetplane im choosing.. So confusing!

I mean, it was fun when Snails played the "Airfrance" but you dont have to do it so serious to actually make the lerk sound like a freaking double decked Airplane -.-

Fiskbit says

I dislike the lerk changes. Why has glide been double-nerfed, and in such a short period of time? Increasing glide deceleration should give marines a greater opportunity to notice the lerk coming in for a silent kill, but it's unnecessary if they make noise when gliding. At the very least, I think these two changes shouldn't coexist. Alternatively, if flapping is loud, gliding is quiet, and gliding decelerates quickly, a lerk either has to spend a long time approaching the marine to avoid tipping him off, or flap to accelerate and thus clue in the marine that he needs to be watching his back. This should largely achieve what you want without destroying a method of play people enjoy. The current change is also making it easier for silent marines to hunt lerks, completely changing the lerk dynamic. I think it would be more enjoyable to rely on flapping as the audio cue and allow lerks to avoid that if they sacrifice significant time and speed, increasing the odds they'll be seen.

+9001

@The lerk bite poison damage. The problem i see, is that the lerk can make an engagement without any consequence at all, get a bite in, leave and cost the marineteam up to 3 t-res. If there has been no medpacks thats basicly a dead marine, for next to no risk. As to the alternative balancing was just brainstorming - not actual stuff able to be implemented.

As an FYI the lerk decel changes were removed when the glide sound was 'fixed'. So only the sound is whats changed anymore. Since the glide sound is in vanilla I cannot alter the base volume, only hack around it with scaling. Hopefully I can get access to the base sound and change the volume, so its not as loud.

Also, if there are supposed comp mod problems with 268, they are more then capable of telling me about it... Why that information needs to come from a third party on a competitive forum is just mind mindbogglingly stupid to me.

There is currently a speed cutoff where the glide sound stops playing completely. That is also something that we can adjust, so you can still 'silent lerk', just at a lower speed. Its currently set at 6 speed. The issues with forcing more flapping via a decel is that it just makes the lerk feel terrible in the air.. I tested many values and any that had a notable impact on the ability to glide through multiple rooms always made the lerk feel like a tank.

NotDragon says

Also, if there are supposed comp mod problems with 268, they are more then capable of telling me about it... Why that information needs to come from a third party on a competitive forum is just mind mindbogglingly stupid to me.
.

Compmod played by competitive players on a competitive forum/site... doesnt sound so mindbogglingly stupid to me, and i dont think im just speaking to myself?

People are trying to find the problems, and gathering info. Who said that you just have to use ONE place?

I'm not going to explain the entire situation in detail.. but when I am in direct contact with the CDT about keeping my mods working for new versions of NS2, the information should come directly to me. This is the first I had heard about any redplug issues, and its my mod being blamed for it?

I'd like to ask some questions, so we can get in teh core of these lerk changes and I will add my opinions, for anyone is interested.

1. What is the problem?
a) Silent lerk overall, never get supprised by lerk again.
b) Silent lerk on shorter distances (say half what of what is now possible)

- I feel like fiskbit already mentioned, that it would change the lerk marine dynamic if silent glide is completely gone. I also never seen an issue with it. On the other hand I understand the opinion of gliding distance too long.

2. Why is it a problem?

3. What kind of nerf should be implemented?

- So far we tried negative acceleration increase and glide sound. If 1a) is the case then gliding sound is a solution. If 1b) is the problem then gliding sound is NOT the solution and increase in negative acceleration is.
- Dragon said when he tried different decel values lerk felt like tank, I believe that, because negative acceleration seems linear (plus affected by what is your slope vector, up/down.). What if the negative acceleration isn't linear, there is tons of nonlinear approaches, but seems like you could set similar to vanilla decel values at first seconds (or based on actual speed, with celerity you can glide faster further or on speed compared to max speed to keep it proportional), then slowly increase the number and then when you are approaching that default minimal speed (around 4 i think) you could decrease that number again. Might need a change in code, rather than just number, but seems worthwhile if the problem is distance not the actual silent lerk mechanic.

I am not for glide sound, if nerf on distance is needed, make decel non-linear, example:


EDIT: wrong pic

Tried a non-linear deceleration, that was how it was initially implemented. A static one would have felt extremely terrible. It also scaled up slowly after your last flap. The problem is that there a countless ways to get around the decel, and in turn the gliding noise. I am not going to explain all the tricks here, that's for players to discover but I am quite sure you can still find ways to be mostly silent as a lerk for scouting or ambushes, you just cant glide along at 12 speed silently across entire rooms.

So you are saying, that we could get around decel alone whatever it was and now we can get around glide sound as easily. I don't know what to say to that.
I guess I still need the answers to above questions and try more for myself to judge based on those.

The issue, once again, is the ability to move fast without trade off (energy and/or noise). We saw this with fades, we saw this with skulks previously when they made no noise. This allows the lifeforms to initiate combat simply by rushing full speed into the engagement without worry of being heard on the way in.

It's a similar situation with the silent lerks. Depending on your playstyle, many engagements depend on initiating by gliding behind marines and simply ganking them before they have time to react. Now this wouldn't be an issue if glide was significantly slower and had more of a trade off, but you can glide through half of a map without having to flap while going relatively fast. Which also means marines often have no audio cues that a lerk is even in the area- this causes the lerk to be artificially stronger in certain situations than it should be. I know people enjoy this playstyle, but that doesn't mean it isn't still a terrible dynamic.

So there are two ways to go about addressing the silent lerk issue:

1) Nerfing the glide deceleration... this is what we wanted to try at first, simply forcing lerks to flap more. But like dragon said and based on some discussion, this would really change the way the lerk 'feels', and not in a positive way. Which is why we chose to go with option 2:

2) Adding a sound. This is the most simple solution.

So once again to reiterate, the goal here is to provide audio cues to marines for lerks entering the area/going above 7 speed. One thing that would help, is more feedback about how to fine tune this mechanic. At the moment the sound begins playing at 6 speed and gets incrementally louder up to 11 speed.

One idea I had is perhaps adding a "sneak" key sort of similar to the skulk... where you can hold it while gliding as lerk and it will force you to move just below the audio cue threshold (which here would be just below 6 speed). The only issue with this is that the lerk doesn't really have an open key to put this on, since movementspecial is already Roost and crouch is already 'fall'.

I want to remind everyone that posts lined with negativity or lack of constructive discussion will not receive the attention or consideration the opinions behind them deserve. Getting nerfed sucks, but please remain civil. And yes, every post here is read fully, so please don't feel like your feedback is ever ignored.

and lastly I've removed the glide decel patch note from the doc, sorry for the confusion there.

That sounds like reasonable explanation, thanks. So i tried few things. Without comp mod, you can hear your own lerk glide, not loud, is lower on lower speeds, never goes away, even when you are on around that 4 min speed. With compmod on, you hear similar if not same sound and i believe it's also played to the marines around, not just you, right? It gets lower a bit with speed, but cuts of completely under around 5. Is that what marine hears? I mean, how can we check if we are completely silent without debug speed? Can we make it somehow distinguishable? And correlate to what marines hear?
Also If the threshold is 6, that means we will never catch marine running with pistol. How bad is it really to chase silently marine down with something like speed 7, still slow to initiate combat over 2 rooms lightning fast without sound, fast enough to catch the marine, so if they are not checking their backs, it's their problem and not as slow to never catch the marine. Might even bring some more skill in the game to keep the speed just right. I get that glide no penalty silent across half map is op, but taking out surprise attack on running marines entierely seems just too much.

Every time you're going to push out changes to the completely opposite direction in a way you just did, after 2 days of the mod being out, without any sort of transparency on why the fuck. You will receive negative posts. I'm amazed how you can pretend to neglect that oversight completely.


What about, lowering the max movement speed unless fapped within an certain time, to a random speed, say 10 or 9? You will still have silent gliding, but as fast. You will get your precious sound alarm for lerks moving fast. And if you see a lerk gliding at slow pace towards you, you'll have more time to chip/kill/etc. Or chances for it at least.

And for your sound idea, i want to be able to control my lifeform and make it silent, if there indeed is a FEATURE as such, so unless there's a bind or something a like for it, no thanks.

That would be option 1 you're talking about Iots, which dragon has said he tried to make it work and it really didn't feel right. It changes the way the lerk plays movement wise too much. And yes, having a keybind to be able to control the sound of your lerk is precisely what I was talking about, the only issue is what key you'd put it on (since crouch and movementspecial are already in use for the lerk)

Can I ask what you'd like to see in terms of transparency? We've always been willing to explain anything we've ever done regarding compmod.

thx for that explanation (and thx for removing the lerk deceleration). now I can understand the problem and be a bit more constructive now. I would recommend something like a symbol on the bottom right to show how loud you are (similar to the skulk sneak symbol). give it for example 4 different stages. below a speed of 6 absolute silent, 6-8 a bit noise (maybe something like 1 bar), 8-10 medium noise (like 2 bars) and above 10 is loud noise (like 3 bars).

with bars I mean something like the curves in this symbol http://www.whatisnano.org/sites/all/themes/nano/images/audio_symbol.gif

maybe you can also reconfigure the crouch key that it will funtion like air breaks and you start to fall when you have a speed of less then 5 (press W + Ctrl + flap and it won't let you speed go higher than 6 so you can't be heard)

just some random brain storming here

Like many others in this thread I didnt see silent lerk as a problem. It was a kin to checking my corners to look for ambushing skulks. From my perspective, giving lerks a glide noise that can be heard two rooms away is like giving walking/motionless skulks a heavy breathing sound.

Lerks are fragile enough without having your location given away at every turn. Playing the current Comp Mod there wasnt an instance where I could sneak up on a marine. Instead the only marines i ran into were crouched campers waiting ri kill me. Sound wise the lerk is a flying onos.

If you insist on continuing to turn the lerk into a flying turret tethered to infested areas at least make it possible to control your speed and thus your sound output.

My suggestion is to get rid of roost and use special movement as a cruise control. Have it function like walk does and allow the max speed available without turning me into an F16.

While roost is a cool feature it is really unneeded. Any roosted lerk is a dead lerk as we see with ground lerks. Why encourage detrimental behavior with a special movement key? If you need to steady yourself to spike, then land. At least then you can stafe a little.

Also a side note: the glide sound played even with 3 veil/silence. Both client side and for marines.

Damn lerking so hard now... The lerk can't be played using old style, you need to disengage more and can't kill bad marines that have 230ms reaction time for when they are bit on their ass by silent lerks.

SAIGON, France
LOL

I agree that adding a movement modifier to control speed and sound would probably make the change a lot easier to swallow. You could try overloading the movementspecial key to be both slow flying and roost, and make it so you can't roost while holding forward to prevent people from doing it accidentally while gliding (and roost plus movement is kind of buggy, anyway). I don't play lerk and am not sure if this would cause any problems for people, but it may be a workable solution to avoid adding another key or removing roost, which is useful for spiking mines. As for whether speed control would help address the problem of the glide sound making lerks too easy to hunt, I have no idea.

rantology says

And yes, every post here is read fully, so please don't feel like your feedback is ever ignored.

I appreciate the sentiment and that you do read all the posts, but saying feedback isn't ignored and leaving it at that pretty much sums up the whole problem. It seems like you tend to only engage with us when there's a large outcry over a particular change. You say you want people to provide constructive comments, but I'd love to know why you think it's worth it for them to do that if they're not given visibility into why those comments may go unresolved. If you agree with the comments, consider saying so because saying nothing makes it look like you don't. If you disagree, people usually aren't given the opportunity to hear your reasoning and possibly argue against it. Because of that, it doesn't seem like the community has much say in what makes it into this mod that the league requires we use. The Teamspeak meeting I attended felt completely different and far more effective because there was actual discussion about each point. I think everyone would benefit if the communication were more often both ways.

I would like to remind you good folks that we are playing melee vs. range game. You could generalize that the main skill of playing aliens is to get as close to marines as possible while taking as little damage as possible. That’s the skill. Ideal would be that you can do that in three different way, witch you can mix. Those are good teamwork, good movement and good ambushing. Silent lerk can get close to marine without good teamwork, without good ambush and without good movement. It’s fundamentally broken mechanic that violates melee vs. range gameplay.

This also why good lerks like Nade have been against silent lerks because it’s a cheap mechanic. You know in NS1 where Nade was one the best lerks, he actually had to know when marines are reloading, or attack when marines are building, or in normal cases wait backup. You know, you had to outwit your opponent back then.

Fiskbit says

rantology says

And yes, every post here is read fully, so please don't feel like your feedback is ever ignored.

I appreciate the sentiment and that you do read all the posts, but saying feedback isn't ignored and leaving it at that pretty much sums up the whole problem. It seems like you tend to only engage with us when there's a large outcry over a particular change. You say you want people to provide constructive comments, but I'd love to know why you think it's worth it for them to do that if they're not given visibility into why those comments may go unresolved. If you agree with the comments, consider saying so because saying nothing makes it look like you don't. If you disagree, people usually aren't given the opportunity to hear your reasoning and possibly argue against it. Because of that, it doesn't seem like the community has much say in what makes it into this mod that the league requires we use. The Teamspeak meeting I attended felt completely different and far more effective because there was actual discussion about each point. I think everyone would benefit if the communication were more often both ways.

Gotta say although my feedback here may not have been replied too much. Lots of the things I have theory crafted have changed the way things have been implemented in compmod. Maybe it helps I have rant + golden on steam now so I can talk directly with them about issues.

But if people only come here when one change makes a massive gameplay impact (in this case lerk glide lol) then that highlights the only problem. It's not that they are failing to engage everyone else, it's that everyone else is giving shit lackluster, or worse, no feedback for them to engage on.

No one comes here to complain about 90% of the changes in compmod which is why so much of it could still do with balance changes. I think more revisions of the mod with less changes would be a better method so people can respond more directly to individual changes.

But if the only time people have opinions is when something they play gets nerfed and they don't appear care otherwise it's silly. You cant craft a mod like this without everyone giving constant feedback and that doesn't occur anywhere near as much as it should.

Tane says

I would like to remind you good folks that we are playing melee vs. range game. You could generalize that the main skill of playing aliens is to get as close to marines as possible while taking as little damage as possible. That’s the skill. Ideal would be that you can do that in three different way, witch you can mix. Those are good teamwork, good movement and good ambushing. Silent lerk can get close to marine without good teamwork, without good ambush and without good movement. It’s fundamentally broken mechanic that violates melee vs. range gameplay.

I completely disagree with that statement. As a marine you have to be aware of your surroundings, check your back occasionally and don't allow such ambush to happen. Adding some WOOOSHHHH sound which you can hear from 4 rooms away is the biggest annoyance I can think of. A flying onos, let's make that next.

No, just keep the silence glide. It's not broken at all, never was, never will be. Nerf lerk all you want but the gliding needs to stay silent. :f

@Rant, exactly the points and explanations you wrote AFTER this 'outrage', it really doesn't take more than that.

And i don't know if its the medication, sleep deprivation or just being stupid but i didn't really understand what dragon wrote, but since that's out of the question..

If the choices are to to use binds currently in game with this "sound", i vote for removing crouch, it brings nothing to lerk gameplay, at least roost is beneficial in random situations with mine clearing/skulkroleplayambushes.

edit: is it possible to add sound alert every 4-5 seconds(example) when you're gliding? It's really tough to know what's possible for Dragon to implement at this case -.-

-----

@Tane

Silent skulks can get close to a marine without good teamwork, without good ambush, without good movement, sure the likelyhood is lower but hey, that's the argument right? The difference is skulks get to control this behaviour and are penalized for it(-movementspeed), as most people here are okey with, but we are not okey with a hoover sound alerting yourself 100% of the time you're moving.

What's wrong with the current vanilla lerk? As a bunch of people already said, during all my playtime, I don't remember people whining about silent lerks, I heard so many people complaining about some abilities that made for some people the lerks OP, but i'm pretty sure it wasn't about silence.

I admit, i'm not a lerk but a fade, that's why I wonder if in the CompMod team, there are some lerks around? Sometimes, because we don't really need fades or just don't have enough time to get resources for fades, I went lerk, that's kinda funny on public servers to kill people who are not checking their corners or whatever. It seems to be exactly the same for competitive. For instance, with my team, we played against onFire last sunday for a scrim, we're lucky to play our first map without these changes and guess what, I died once by Zero as a lerk because I forgot to check my corners & take a look behind me. (I call this a good reasoning). Of course, I only died once like this, people are not supposed to be stupid. When they are killed with a particular action, they won't do the same mistake twice (in general).

Then, we saw some updates that added that sound. it was louder that's right but I can't imagine anymore a lerk that can suprise me, even if I do not check my corners. Is this not a shame?

Silent lerk (is that really silent by the way?) is a part of the game. You can change things when people yell or complain about them (like the uselessness of regeneration on vanilla) but there are things that cannot be changed 'cause they don't need to be modified. For a mod made by the competitive community, it doesn't make any sense for me now. Community, those who are currently giving feedbacks & explanations here & those that think the same but do not really want to give more "similar" opinions without more arguments that seem to be ignored do not care about silent lerks because they are not an issue. If players are too bad to be killed by a silent lerk, that's their own problem. It doesn't mean this needs to be modified.

You always try to change things, sometimes, it can work out, sometimes, it can't. In that case, this is unwanted by the players so remove it. (or keep it like in vanilla to be exact). That's greatly appreciate to see changes and ideas from people who want to have a better competitive mod. But it doesn't mean, make more & more changes for the future. A mod & a game can easily work out without huge or short changes when it's already okay like that. At least, ask to the competitive community before release a new patch, all these criticisms were readily foreseeable.

Don't do changes just to do changes. Why the AUS scene are currently using v2 of the mod? There's a reason. You're supposed to listen the biggest part of the competitive community & sometimes, it seems this is not the case. Unwanted things need to be removed, not to be changed.

Last thing that a ton of people agrees. This is not NS1. Stop to the people that keep thinking it's good to make the game closer than its predecessor. If you want to play NS1.5. Just change graphics. Ideas you can find out in NS1 aren't always fine in NS2. (HMG is the best example).

Don’t really understand this being aware of surrounding ”argument”. Sounds are big part of ”surrounding”. If fact, sound data is by far more important than visual data when it comes spotting opponent almost in every competitive FPS ever made. Being aware of surrounding is as much about sounds than it’s about your visual data. That is exactly the reason why silent lerks are so annoying. Silence as game mechanic is problematic because it takes away skill. They are both in same category with cloak, they kill skill ambushing with artificial help. This is the same reason why we don’t see cloak or silence mechanics in competitive games.

Yes, ots. That is exactly my point. Order to skulk to get close to marine with current silent walk is already good ambushing , because it’s so slow you already have to be in good position. Lerk in other hand, didn’t even have to think positioning in order get close to marine. If melee vs. range game really have to use silence mechanic, it has to have drawpacks. Lerk didn’t have any drawpacks, that’s why it was fixed. I would have changed speed as well but I’m not the one who makes these changes.

And in almost all games that sound is important, it's being either manipulated for your needs for negated by not making any. Just like NS2, what a shock. Silence is annoying, yes we know, everyone knows that, but we're fine with it, just like we are fine (to some extent) with cloaking. We have counters, to some extent for these things, it's only when those counters are not enough should compmod step in and try to fix things up.

Not removing something because you don't "like it".

And fyi, this is not to say the option for a slowed down silent gliding should not be implement, i welcome to try it out how it pans out, but if it's not possible, i'd rather keep the gliding as it is and wait until it is possible, or find other ways to correct this issue(that is not this version of the hoover sound).

It's funny how my oppinion on this changed during my last 3 posts (including this one). Meaning I actually want to get rid of that silent lerk now, but not completely. I f they are slow enough they should still be silent (like it is right now IIRC). Just give lerks the ability to control their speed better (no real idea on how to accomplish that atm) and give them feedback on their sound range. I am curious to see how the lerk players (including me) would adapt to this and how it would change the meta game.

Btw. Tane I think lerk speed is fine as it is (or was last week... not sure if they rly changed lerk speed now or not). Dodging as lerk is a skill to survive that shouldn't get nerfed. Also I think you know that fades are faster than lerks

I think its ok that the Lerk-glide has some sound, so marines have the chance to react.

But:
It doesnt make sense that you still hear the sound if the Lerk use silence
and its too loud

I can hear Lerks in repair while im in hub.
Just reduce the sound a bit and we are fine.

Btw, its interisting that an Lerkplayer introducing this change, isnt it?

Although obviously regen needed to be nerfed somehow, I'm not a fan of the combat timer. There was a reason it was removed in the first place.

So, wild idea about regen: make the heal rate scale to your current HP%. The lower your HP gets, the lower regen heal rate becomes (capped at a certain minimum rate).

This way regen is still useful in combat initially, for hit and run attacks, but the moment marines do a substantial amount of damage to you, it'll take significantly more time to heal up again compared to before.

Maybe a good midway between OP regen and combat timer regen?

To those arguing that no one wanted this change and that lerks were fine, I can tell you there are many that did & agreed with it. It should have been done a long time ago because it makes early game lerks artificially stronger than they should be. Every single lerk player in premier I've spoken to approves of the change and many have wanted it for a while for reasons Tane has kindly written.

@Friskbit and others with concerns over transparency and responses here:

Speaking for myself personally, I try not to debate here on the forums. Which leads to a relatively minimal response count, mostly being updates, explanations and questions for feedback. I try to read every post and relay that to everyone in the cmod team and gather their feedback about issues & ideas posted here. From there it's a matter of rounding people up and directing the discussions to produce a result. It's also very draining for me personally to reply & debate every single idea brought up here, I'm not really keen on forum debates. But like I said I do read every single post and I try to relay everything brought up here to the compmod team.

I can say that if anyone has concerns about how their idea is being looked at or if you have any questions about transparency, you can message myself or any other compmod team member on steam or PM. We'd be happy to talk about it or answer any questions. Additionally, as always, the door to the internal compmod chatroom is also always open, but I'd ask that anyone requesting to join needs to be able to bring enthusiasm about theorycraft & game knowledge to contribute to the discussions there.