Perceived ("newbie") balance vs. Actual ("pro") balance

innociv

Join Date 02/2008

+34

Perceived ("newbie") balance vs. Actual ("pro") balance

A lot of times you have players that don't understand how to play that complain about imbalances, even if the game is balanced.

This was a HUGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE problem for Sins of a Solar Empire and the devs would listen to the whiners and ruin the game for people that actually knew how to play. (siege frigs lol :/) The devs didn't play at the level of the good players either.

I hate to use the word "pro", but it's easier than to keep saying "the top 5% of players".

What tends to happen is it's like, say you have chess.
One player knows how to play.
The other player, not so much, and it's like he can't understand what the other player is doing to win. It's like he only knows half the rules. He doesn't understand his Knight can jump over people. He doesn't know that his pawn and go two spaces forward if it's the pawns first move. He doesn't know his queen can not only move diagonally, but also horizontally and vertically.
The first player knows these things, and uses them to his advantage. The new player doesn't understand how he seems to have such an advantage and screams "IMBA!"

I hope if there is a problem for new players "not getting it" that instead of screwing up the game for the people that know how to play, they focus on making it so those new players can understand it so the two players are NOT playing two different games.
Ones of Sin's big probablems where the hidden armor types, damage types, and other hidden information.

demigod

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Trying to break down the difference between newb/noob is pointless. Newb, Noob, New player, whatever it doesn't matter. Its only meant as an insult to that player, to put him down, his skill, and to infuriate him. Pretty it up however you want, calling a person a newb/noob is no different than any other name-calling.

Newb/Noob - an insult used in gaming that calls in question a persons skill. Typically used to infuriate the other player. Other uses include labeling your teammates or other team as noobs/newbs as justification for why your team lost. Also used as a taunt, or to "rub in" a loss/kill.

If you want to distinguish new players, then call them "new players" or "players new to the game". Anything else is insulting.

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Since when it calling someone a newbie an insult?..

I call myself a newbie when I'm new to a game.
People use it all the time as a quick way to say someone is new.

"noob" is the one that's intended as an insult.
I'm sorry for your personal opinion. Sometimes people DO use newb as an insult, but they do for the word "gay" also.

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gay used to mean happy, don't hear that anymore (unless you watch the occasional "leave it to beaver").

Unfortunately in my experience Noob/newb has nearly always been used to insult. Course, I mostly only hear it with the DOTA community which may be why.

Honestly, don't hear newbie too much and I agree, its more suited for describing a new player descriptor of a new player (then newb/noob).

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...
Wait so you're just now saying that being homosexual is an insult?

No wonder you think newb is an insult too. :/

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I thought "Newb" was the insulting one? Mostly because i never see it used. and "Noob" was the beginner player one. And if all Tinkers are Zonkers are all Zonkers, whatsits?

ultimately it doesn't matter, Noob/newb/douchemonkey are used as descriptors by some and as insults by others and ultimately it depends on the context of the rest of the sentence.

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I thought "Newb" was the insulting one? Mostly because i never see it used. and "Noob" was the beginner player one. And if all Tinkers are Zonkers are all Zonkers, whatsits?ultimately it doesn't matter, Noob/newb/douchemonkey are used as descriptors by some and as insults by others and ultimately it depends on the context of the rest of the sentence.

Ultimately, you're a douchetastic nublet.

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I thought "Newb" was the insulting one? Mostly because i never see it used. and "Noob" was the beginner player one. And if all Tinkers are Zonkers are all Zonkers, whatsits?ultimately it doesn't matter, Noob/newb/douchemonkey are used as descriptors by some and as insults by others and ultimately it depends on the context of the rest of the sentence.Ultimately, you're a douchetastic nublet.

And you're a double douchetastic nublet with a touch of gay.

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There are a lot of opinions on the "noob"'s etymology and meaning.

The point is that we are referring to the idiots ( noob may be seen as slang for idiot in a community, where as newb may be seen as the new guy ) .

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Like i said, ultimately it doesn't matter. I don't really pay attention to the dirt that collects on the bottom of my boots, so I don't really care what we call worse players.

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...Wait so you're just now saying that being homosexual is an insult?No wonder you think newb is an insult too. :/

eh? Taking words out of my mouth that were never there...

gay used to mean happy, don't hear that anymore (unless you watch the occasional "leave it to beaver")

No where in my statement did I say that being a homosexual is an insult. I don't think this is the thread for that discussion. I was merely pointing out the evolution of the word. In any case, in the gaming community, calling someone gay is an insult.

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Oh man my gay friends must be so mad at me for calling them gay.

((

Christ Odit.
If you think saying someone is gay is an insult.. I just. Oh, yeah, not worth talking with.

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I was merely pointing out the evolution of the word. In any case, in the gaming community, calling someone gay is an insult.

Odit is right you know, and what he said doesn't mean that he himself uses the word.

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Please read the posts a little closer. I specifically typed "in the gaming community".

How many times have you heard one player call another player gay? Never ever does he mean, "hey, my gay friend here..." Or "hey, your gay, I've got someone I could hook you up with". When a gamer calls someone else gay it is an insult. I'm sorry we don't live in the politically correct world you must game in, but thats how the word is used when gaming. Fag is also interchangeably used with gay.

Geesh Innociv, you really dig getting people riled up? Seems like you post on nearly every thread and on almost every one of them, you take the role of devil's advocate. Either that or your just that much different then the rest of us.

Thanks for your contribution to discussion. You've made a number of intelligent and helpful posts. Which is why I'm a bit confused why you are pushing this lame argument..?

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Boy, I hope this thread is not a sign of how this community is going to be..

Probably the only post worth reading in this whole thread came from TBO. Whether you're a 'noob' or a 'pro' you'd do well to heed his advice.

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actually this is still much tamer than many other forums I've visited. I've never seen the need for a moderator on here as most of the posters keep their posts in check.

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Aside from discussion of those Newb/n00b/noob or whatever. I agree with innociv that the game should not have any hidden stats or hidden features without stating them in game. It really take me sometime to know there's a minor stunning effect in many DotA skills which is suck and we cannot know until we try it out. Taking it like Guildwars is great, showing every details on the skills and giving player every information of what happening. Showing what skills has done damage to you is really a good thing, so you know how you die, like in TF2 zoom you to what just killed you.

But still talking about balance should have at least some standard to gauge the balanceness. How do you know it's balanced? How do you know it's not? Since games these day is so complex and involved strategies (whole main idea of how to play), tactics (minor method to achive certain goal) and team synchronization (how each player setup support one another). It's so hard to say something is balance or not. Sure, you can easily say it's not balance when you see 2 items with same price and have different damage without no additional abilities.

How about if we got 2 items with the same price which 1) +25% damage . 2) +25% attack speed We surely start to argue that they MAYBE IMBA (note that in theory those 2 give out same DPS). But if you consider it carefully, they may have their suitable usage right? It gonna be too long to write about those so i'll skip. But if certain player know just some of their usage but not all, that player might saying the other one is useless and the one he knew is IMBA.

There was an issue in the early DotA about whether we should be able to ambush the towers(like left 1 hero sneaking on them without pushing the creeps while the other 9 are engaging in combat else where). Imo it's just one tactic we can use, if we can't use tactic cuz it's imba, then we have to ban ganking or ambushing too? Of course not, it's not the the weapons that kills people, it's the people who use it that kills them. Items and skills are just tools, how you use it determine the outcome. Professional knife user can kills new Gunner, that's not mean knife is IMBA.

So that said, that's why we need community to support with every aspect of the situation. We need to provide accurate infos so all of us know what's going on and the dev team can ultimately decide how to handle that. In this case i think newb player comments are needed too as long as we can consider it is from newb player. Maybe we should have some info on the level of the poster so we can manage this out correctly.

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Thank you Zeneroth for breaking the monotony of immature posts, and actually having read the various posts of the discussion in teh thread and understanding them..

You're right it's hard to know what's balanced, but one thing is when you consider +attack speed items, you have to consider %chance to trigger skills. +damage skills don't increase your chance to trigger these, + attack speed does. Faster attack speed also makes it easier to dance around in micro. So I always think +attack speeds should be lower.

Also if you do the math of, say, +50% damage vs. +25% attack speed and +25% damage..

Say damage is 1, attack speed is 1second, for simplicity sake.

With 50% damage that's 15 damage over 10 seconds. With +25% damage and +25% attack speed it's 16.66___ damage. So using a +25% damage item with a +25% attack speed item would be better than 2 +50% damage items in various ways.

These are things I don't think DotA really considers..

As far as towers, I think a gold bonus for towers like DotA is a good thing.

However, I think towers should have armor that reduces damage, and the armor should drop exponentially based on the number of people that are by it. This makes towers Solo'able, but harder too. (IE, 50% damage reduction with just one Demigod there. -5% damage reductoin on the armor per creep attacking it, -25% damage reduction on it's armor per ADDITIONAL Demigod attacking it. Capped at 0)

So if you push creeps with you, you'll kill it faster. If you have another demigod attacking it with you, even more. 3 people pushing down a single lane would drop towers fast.

This is a game mechanic in Savage2 that works really really well. IT is possible to backdoor, but it's slow enough wheere someone who is paying attention can get there to try and stop you. If you have 3+ people on a cooridnated attack then things drop pretty fast, like as fast as if 6 people where attacking it. It does exactly what it's supposed to

But also in savage that's a hidden game mechnic. The game doesn't really tell you this happens, people just know it does from the devs.

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As of the +25% damage vs Speed, yeah if you consider it to some extent it'll be different as i said just it's gonna be too long to explain (that's a long post already). Then if you think about it, maybe it's not IMBA, but it's just "DIFFERENT" and if that different is used right, it'll determine the outcome of the match.

As of i'm not that sleepy yet, more thought about balance. I think the concept of balancing is coming from "How to make a FAIR game for every players" like in many game of cards. We seek to have a game that is "fair" enough for everyone and everyone don't get any disadvantage for playing normally. For fairness, i think we should come up with statistic data, not just some claim saying "something is IMBA cuz if you use it you'll win for sure". Present the community with data and statistic and calculation and you can be sure every decent readers will agree with you and give a logical feedback back for you.

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Well 25% attack speed WOULD be better if there are % chance to trigger skills. So if you have two items that cost 500gold, for arguments sake, one is damage bonus and one is attack speed bonus, the damage bonus one imo should be like +25% and the IAS one +15% to +20%.

That's how you make it fair.

Also consider +damage and +attack speed. +damage is better on low damage, fast attack speed units. +% damage is what you'd want to use on something that already does high damage. It's stuff to think about..

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^ Absolutely right!

It seem you sure are hardcore DotA player haha

Still i hope we can stop assuming and have wild fantasies for Demigod balances soon. Things would be more sensible and logical after the Beta is out. Looking forward to discuss about the beta with you all soon.

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