^ - I think the best part about comp NS2 is the importance of alien life forms. Alien Pres/team play and how that dictates the game. I don't think NS2 is at it's best when you have all alien life forms up, and they feel like they can't defeat marines because exo's or end game marine tech is so strong. Marines are already really powerful with weapon upgrades, shotguns, and machine guns in the hands of good shooters. You can push life forms out of the room. You get jp's and cat packs that make it a lot easier to kill life forms. I think we want PVP to be fun and be as important as it's been, perhaps more, but not less.

Yes, sometimes NS2 in the mid to late game becomes a game where the aliens have too much res and too many lifeforms that the chance of marines killing multiple waves of life forms is very slim. The aliens earned that though by dominating the marines earlier in the game. I don't think the best alternative to that is have game ending tech for marines that make the lifeforms feel worthless. I don't want NS2 to turn into a tech point game. I think the game is much more interesting to watch and play when marines are constantly moving and attacking (unless they have most of the res on the map). The game is less interesting when it's a sit on tech point game (pubs).

I would be more in favor of limiting the pve stuff in the game and limiting exo's if they get too strong before doing what you suggested. Your idea about delaying the onos is an idea we will look into. It is possible with the new pres change in vanilla that the onos gets on the field too quickly in an average game. We already made changes to the alien pres to try to make the buffer marines get greater before seeing another wave of alien life forms. We will be looking into Pres as it's a very important part of the game. We will see about the onos. Hopefully people/servers can play with the mod and provide feedback on how it's going.

And T Res Exos? Are you serious? Might as well add onos eggs. And making exos able to beacon (even if they beacon back without their exo suits) is horrible because it negates the tactical disadvantage of using exos. It would be like making onos fly so they can kill and/or outrun jetpackers. Not only that, but if you were going to beacon back without exos, either they would have to be really cheap, and exo spam would be THE meta, or a beacon would be such a catastrophic res loss that no sane marine commander would ever get exos. Limiting exos as you suggested would be both very hard to code and maintain with each update, as well as being completely retarded. "You now have to choose between walking and shooting your exo during a hive push, this is competitively balanced."

TL;DR No.

Based on recent discussions, we are looking to do the following:
-Increasing Pres needed to go Onos
- Changing Cysts - less hp for cysts, possibly a different maturity rate, hopefully have cysts break/die when the cyst chain breaks.
- Nutrient Mist - needs to be nerfed so people can't stop structures from taking damage off infestation.
- Rupture - moving to biomass 4.
-Gorge Bhop - will be added back to the game.
-Focus - remove 1 bite kills for skulks, but keep same for other life forms. So it will be nerf to the damage for a skulk using focus only.
- Health bars - looking into possibly removing these for field players.

Deckard says

Based on recent discussions, we are looking to do the following:
-Increasing Pres needed to go Onos
- Changing Cysts - less hp for cysts, possibly a different maturity rate, hopefully have cysts break/die when the cyst chain breaks.
- Nutrient Mist - needs to be nerfed so people can't stop structures from taking damage off infestation.
- Rupture - moving to biomass 4.
-Gorge Bhop - will be added back to the game.
-Focus - remove 1 bite kills for skulks, but keep same for other life forms. So it will be nerf to the damage for a skulk using focus only.
- Health bars - looking into possibly removing these for field players.

Would be cool to read something like this as the changelog of an NS2 update lol.

One thing to focus: I understand the change from a balance standpoint and I think it is fine there, even though I expected a nerf to fades too. I just don't think it should be the way to go making an upgrade inconsistent for different lifeforms.

My memory isn't so good. What happened the last time NSL relied on a comp mod? Can it be avoided with this mod?

Could we just change the rupture to what it was before UWE fucked with it instead of moving it to bio 4? Moving it to bio 4 doesn't make it less any cancer. Or just reducing the uptime of it's parasite similar to Gorge-Webs would also work.

After playing some gathers and watching some 6v6 play with the new mod, marines are shooting very well. This could be a combination of things: players not having practice against good shots, the health bars making it easier to focus the hurt life form, alien teams in a gather not working together, and/or the pres changes which seems to be resulting in marines getting shotguns and weapons at a very high rate.

The first thing I want to do is remove the health bars, and reduce the marine pres rate. We already changed the pres on aliens to try to increase the buffer time between life form waves. I want to make additional changes to increase the buffer between shotgun waves. This all might result in us changing the game back to the old pres numbers, but I'm trying to find a balance where the game
feels slightly crazier than before but teams are still rewarded for good plays. Look for some additional changes coming to the mod soon.

Edit: Health bars have been removed in the NSL Competitive Mod. Time to play some ns2.

i can agree here. on pub most of the games are won by marines if the marines have at least 2 or 3 very good aimer.
i think the pres change for rines is an important thing. but now we change the rine pres, before we changed alien pres.......... why not completly return to the old 0.1 tick? would solve all problems imo.

i also think that the marine domination is happening because of the missing team work from the aliens. in pubs you literally have 0 teamwork. so good aimer have it very easy to kill skulks one by one. that leads to a big incresement of marine wins. and then remi explains us that marines are overpowerd........

i would do two things. return the pres completly to 0.1 and lets test it again with GOOD alien teams with good teamwork.

With the new hitboxes we should think about the comp mod in a new way. as seen on remis win-graph aliens won nearly 70% of all games before 305. with 305 all changed. an marines won nearly 70%. So the game balance changed very often in the last time. So nobody knows how good the comp-mod really behaves in the current situation