This is my biggest issue with the gameplay of NS2.
In NS1 both teams had to balance their res for structures/upgrades with weapons/lifeforms.
In NS2, you can afford both, due to PRes and alien commander being introduced and these are things the developers will not remove. So I thought up an idea a long time ago to adress the issues in a way that does not change/remove the developers gamedesign decisions. Yet they do want to adress the tech explosion issue in some way.
In simplicity, add an upkeep cost to weapons/lifeforms depending on how many percent of the team having the specific weapon/lifeform. Dropped weapons would obviously still add to the percentage so you can't bypass the upkeep cost by dropping your shotgun for example. Commander dropped weapons/lifeforms would also not be affected by the upkeep cost.
To explain further how this system would work, I will make a few examples:
First marine buys a shotgun for 20 PRes. In a 6v6 this means 16,66% of the team has a shotgun.
Then you would multiply the 16,66% with the 20 PRes to get the cost for the second marine, that gives you 23,33 PRes for the second shotgun. 33,33% with 20 PRes for the third marine, 26,66 PRes for third shotgun. And so on.
First alien gets a fade for 50 PRes. Second alien gets fade for 58 PRes in a 6v6.
This means you won't be able to get a full team of shotguns without TRes drops in the first minute of the game. It means you won't have 4-5 fades popping the the exact same time, they would pop into the game one by one as the game goes on and more res is collected or as fades die. Essentially adressing the tech explosions we currently have in NS2. And since it is percentage based, it will work both for 6v6 competetive play 16v16 public play, while being less punishing on the prizes and free choice in the larger public games, since one player would be less percentage of a larger team.
The upkeep percentage, additional upkeep cost and total cost should obviously be shown at the buymenus for ease of understanding the system.
I talked with Laama from Mercury about this and he believes that it shouldn't be too hard to mod and try it out. I believe it would make the NS2 gameplay more balanced and add an additional layer of res management/strategy in NS2 and make NS2 a better balanced game than NS1 for BOTH competetive AND public play, which is something the developers desire. NS1 had it's problems for higher player numbers since it was balanced around competetive play in the end. I hope this mod can become a reality and can be tested out if it works as well in practice as I think it does and then hopefully made part of the official game. I'm not saying this would make NS2 a more balanced game than NS1 in competetive 6v6, but I do believe it would help get closer to the experience NS1 gave with having to pick who is the first fade(s) or first shotgun(s) and so on.
And on top of this I would also remove "no res when dead" and add 1 PRes per kill(NOT 1-3! It is too much!) to help adress the higher costs and reward good play and furthermore space out the timings of which weapons/lifeforms appear.
I see one potential problem, but might not be a problem in practice. You would not be able to get a full team of onos just from PRes since the max PRes is 100 and the default cost for onos is 75. But with TRes drops, I don't see this as a big issue.
Certainly worth a try. My one concern would be that it might lead to more 1-sided games since this system would appear to punish the team with fewer res collectors proportionately more than the richer team, so that would make killing extractors and harvesters even more of a big deal than it is now. I don't know if that would have a positive, negative or neutral impact on match outcomes/enjoyability.
I suggested a variation of this idea a while ago in which before you could go a certain class, you had to purchase access to that class for something like 50% of its PRes cost. For example, your first fade would cost 75 PRes (25 for access to the class + 50 to purchase the class), but only 50 PRes for each additional fade. It doesn't so much prevent mass lifeforming, but it does increase the cost to do so significantly.
I do like (and have seen) your idea suggested before, but I have doubts that UWE would change its policy of fixed weapon/lifeform costs, as it adds to the already punishing NS2 skill curve.
I know, they completely rejected the suggestion when I made it on the official forums way back in the beta.
But the thing is, they have to realize that this HAS to be restricted somehow. This issue is even worse with higher player numbers (ie. public servers). And this suggestion allows to adress it without removing what is causing the issue(ie. alien commander and PRes). There is no other way to fix this, you can't make every lifeform/weapon equally viable, ever. Rock/scissor/paper method for balancing does simply not work with NS, you will have to force someone to play as the basic units while others play as the higher tier lifeforms/equipment. Some weapons/lifeforms will always be better at killing than others.
My hopes for this is that if modded, tested and feedback given from enough competetive players it might change their minds. It will definitely make the game more balanced, both for competetive play, but especially for public play where this issue is extreme.
from a game design perspective, this approach would be hard to accept, even if the end result achieves your goals. I'm not saying whether it's good or bad for the game - just that any implementation with mathematical formulas is often rejected because every game must be as dumbed down as possible in today's market
basically look for a way to avoid math - especially multiplication. if that's impossible, make it so that only the commander has to worry about math. mystifying a team of rookies is probably what UWE wants to avoid, but they might be okay with giving the complexity to the commander, who is probably a more experienced player
hard limits are easier to digest than cost modifiers. if it's too restrictive, let the commander increase the limit for some cost (RTS games do this with hero units. FPS servers do this sometimes if there are too many people who pick the "noob tube")
respawning pickups are probably even simpler than that (think Quake. not all players can get the same item/armor/rune right away... so they go disperse and pick up different things)
obviously encouraging variety through the game design instead of through arbitrary restrictions would be better (like RTS with counters or FPS with classes/abilities that don't stack), but that requires actual game design talent & significant changes
Ironically, lifeform/weapon explosion isn't as big an issue on 24 player servers than it is on lower pop ones. The high frequency of egg-locking on 24p servers combined with no res while dead usually do a good job of separating out lifeforms. On the marine side, the frequency of marines dying in forward locations typically limits weapon explosion.
Also, I think RPS can be made to work in a game like NS2, but would require a serious rework of the classes/weapons. You really need to build the core combat mechanics around the RPS format to make it not become an ugly mess.
Thats not what I see at all on those servers. Due to the higher playercounts, egg-locks and such are much less frequent because of higher player numbers(more people to defend). And suddenly you are fighting 10 fades or 10 onos.
I wonder if this were to be made part of the game by the devs, what kind of backlash (if any) there would be from the more causal players of the game. For the competitive scene I can see how this could work, since everyone starts at the same time, but in the public games you have people coming in and out during the round. Where would the player who joined in the middle be in this equation? Will he/she get to pay the 20 res for the shotgun because they just got in or will he have to pay more because other players have already bought them in the round?
Ultimately this kind of change won't matter to me as much as the players in the league since I cast, but I at the same time I wanna understand so I can relay it in the cast. :) Of course, I could be misunderstanding completely. Wouldn't be the first time. ^_^
To awnser your question, the new player joining the server would also get the upkeep cost if other players on the team currently have the specific weapon or lifeform. But if no one else on the team currently have a shotgun, the new player would buy it for the standard price (20 PRes), since 0% of the team would have a shotgun at that current moment. The upkeep cost and percentage would go up and down as more shotguns are bought or disappear from the field, completely dynamic.
It is a really nice idea the more I think about it, just a little complex perhaps to fit with Charlie's 'no hidden numbers' rule. If there were a way to implement this without it being confusing for new players I'm sure it would greatly improve the game, hopefully someone can make and tweak a mod to get it into that sort of shape.
I also think it might require making the first purchase slightly cheaper than current prices, if you can't get shotguns or fades all at the same time, maybe the first one should be available a little earlier than it is now. Seems like the main problem with fades atm is "oh shit we're at 8 minutes here come 3 fades", I think 1 fade at 6 minutes wouldn't be so bad, if you knew the second and third were still a while off, would also mean that fade had to be even more careful than currently.
But I do still think you have to consider the problem of causing even greater disparity between teams with different numbers of res nodes. The rate of res accumulation is inversely proportional to number of res nodes so making things more expensive to buy more of them really emphasises the economy game, it would probably be even harder to come back from an early game deficiency than it is currently, maybe that would be good, but maybe it would be boring.
