Hello i was woundering what you all think about cloaking, imho i really dont like the cloak atm i think it's to overpowered i dont see why you changed it the old one was really good now you get sc every game and it really unbalances it. It leads to having to get motion tracking for first upgrade which wastes so much res. I dont see why you guys changed it???

only reason i dont like the newer cloak is because it's to overpowered and i was woundering what you guys think i would also like some feedback from some active devs that play the game, i spend around 17 hours a day playing ns and this is one of the issues i've picked up and noticed and i would like to see some change or even make the percentage of cloaking changed.

There have been many changes to cloaking over the last ~2 years, but I presume you are referring to the change where we made cloaking 100%. This change was to level the advantages gained from graphics cards, driver settings and game settings. Even changing a monitor could greatly improve your chance of spotting cloaked aliens. We have debated this several times and will not be reverting the change. I play NS every day I play computer games and I don't see this SC first trend you talk about. SC first is still by far the most difficult chamber to win with, if the commander knows how to counter it.

I'm with puzl on this one. 100% cloaking was the only way to make the game fair, partially because of people that would tweek their graphics settings to get an unfair advantage.

I also don't see any SC first trend. Maybe 1/5 of the games I play I see SC first. And of them, much less than half aliens win. A good comm will set up Observatories in the field and scan enough that cloaking is useless.

Since release, I've never seen games with SC first... The only times I played a game like that, we chose SC only for fun. But the fun was to be completly owned by marines

SC first everygame... I don't see that, unless aliens are stacked.

You need celerity on the fades, silence on the skulks to have a good start. Then you need DCs to give fades and onos carapace to survive those level 3 hmgs. Cloaking becomes weakened with field obs, scans, hand grenades. Sure you can see them with scent, but that doesn't mean you'll kill them. Focus... can be great, but you need to survive as a fade, more than kill.

Not my fault australia and nz has so many ######s that love to shack and join a team and get sc first :<

Im seeing sc first in about 50% of the pub games I play in which makes me groan no matter which side im on. I don't find it fun bitten by something invisible; I find it equally unfun on aliens because i consider the only beneficial upgrade to be SOF.

I find that the largest reason for people SC first is after a short string of marine wins(usually due to early spawncamping.)

Can a calculation be made where being in darkness toggles the last 10% of cloak on?

hahahahahaha . . . yeah, fades aren't supposed to kill things

listen, a dead marine can't shoot . . . .

SC first is a huge gamble . . . if you do it right (sc network + focus) you can decide the game before the 2nd hive goes live, but even then its largely dependent on the commander's cool. if cloak were broken you would see sc first every scrim/match . . . which is hardly the case.

What about nerfing cloak time? that would change it alot more seeing a stupid skulk leap away and then 3 seconds later geting your head bitten of by the same skulk >.<

We did that for 3.2 already. We also linked the speed to the number of active chambers. In 3.1, a single SC gave the entire alien team the full potential of Cloaking. Now, it is very slow to recloak without 3 active sensories.

I can appreciate that you don't enjoy playing against cloaking, but I can't understand why you think this is unbalanced. In my experience SC first is a gamble with a low payout rate.

Also I see a reason why you are losing so much.. so take a huge breath, swallow ya pride and read the following line:
MT does NOT counter SC ever, SC counters MT.

There... you are right.. You ARE wasting res with MT there simply because you are using the opposite of the counter. 'But it works' only applies if the aliens are to stupid to realise your huge mistake and can't use SC correct. Lets make a list shall we...

* MT is useless versus SC. INrange of a SC MT does not work.
* MT is 35 res delaying Armor (which DOES work, armor2 even when combined with meds)
* MT is making you not use your obs for a few times disabling scan AND phasetech.
* SC has no defensive qualities when you can making it hard for kharaa to counter. PUSH. PGs help alot in this situation. They lack DC to retake a position and they lack MC to rush towards one. Scan nullifies the benifits of cloak, armor and welders help versus focus.
* drop welders. armor + welders is far better spend then 35 res on MT.
* the LONGER the game takes the more time they can place SC, the less MT is affective. Already set you down at the beginning, not it drags the game even more down.
* if they place OCs under cloak MT aint gona help, armor makes all the difference.
* TEAMS.. go in groups. teams even with less armor then prefered are a good counter since the kharaa decloak when attacked. if ya teammates helps shooting...

The ONLY reason why MT works is not because its a counter, its because you can play DESPITE of it. Kharaa are simply crap. Why?

* they probably do not SC important presure points and probably do not bother to place SCs correct at all. Or expand the network when possible.
* they do not focus own you to hell since you got MT instead armor
* they do not secure hives even though you lack the ups to take them.
* they don't use SOF well, since it does not matter if you have MT if they see the rine movements aswell.

A good gorge can lay a SC network if he is gona place 3 SCs anyway which totally covers the kharaa starters territory. The one corridor not under cloak aint gona help you if the chokepoints are all cloacked way before you reach it.


really... armor, speed, scan, PUSH.. those are all counters and help alot more then MT. Even a TF works better then MT when they got cloak.. Be glad if they got SC, its mistake one.. now try to force them to make more and tech up HA fast and they'll never get over it.

NS is a game.

The purpose of a game is fun.

Cloaking is not fun.

Cloaking counters the purpose of a game.

Cloaking counters the purpose of NS.

Cloaking should be changed.

I still think that if you changed it to where being in a certain magnitude of darkness toggles the last 10% of cloak on, it would create atmosphere and solve the aforementioned problem.

My opinion only.

Fun is subjective.

I enjoy cloaking.

As do many many others.

Many people don't enjoy getting owned by fades either. Are you proposing we remove fades from the game?

No but his friends can so smood is actually right.

Anyway i dont see a problem with sc in a competative game because its not overpowered and you can easily counter it with teamwork and a good comm, public on the other hand is a pain because you have neither and its just too frustrating to die and not be able to do anything about it.

I dont think anyone think that its fun to die like that and its just not possible to get teamwork on public because people play for different goals.

Im not saying you should remove it, the solution for me actually would be to only play on co servers with good players and some sort of balancing plugin that removes the stupid upgrades but yeah...

I don't know where you guys are playing, but I regularly see SC fist being countered by a good public comm and reasonably teamwork. Remember, that your less than efficient marine team is playing against a less than efficient alien team. The quality of the teams and the teamwork should be roughly equal on a public server. Aliens need to coordinate to make SC first work too, they need to use their chambers to pressure marines and keep their res down, because if the marines end up with PG and OBS near a growing hive, then the aliens are at a disadvantage.

What I see as the problem with SC first, is that the people who are used to running off half-cocked *without* teamwork suffer badly in their early pressure and then usually quit or just start goofing around. I've seen guys just start knifing the IP at base, and these are very high skilled players. SC first requires more teamwork for marines, but often the level required to beat a typical public alien team is easily achievable.

SC requires that you're playing against a bad comm to succeed. A good comm will drop that second obs and keep all your important ambush area's scanned, and then marines easily take second hive and it's GG.

No, SC is balanced. Public however, isn't. Which is precisely where your argument is failing.

Certain elements of fun can be obfuscated by suggesting that it's wholly subjective. On a more realistic path, fun is, infact, mostly objective, which is a primary reason why some games sell and other games do not.

:Taste For Makers by Paul Graham is an excellent essay on the objectivity of art:

All gameplay elements interact synergistically with the whole of the game. Cloaking has certain attributes that many people consider to be "not fun". For example, people play competitive games for challenge, for a battle of wits with the opponent, for comradery, and obviously, for many other reasons as well. Cloaking is not challenging on the first-person level as it is an automatic "skulk is on top of you" effect without any counterability outside of a roll of the dice on your commander. This leaves players feeling powerless as the comm either does a good or bad job dealing with the ability. On aliens' side, players lose the fun factor of "challenge", since cloaking requires no skill to use, they do not gain the enjoyment of having done well at a task. Additionally, it promotes rambo'ing because of the aforementioned facts. Because of these elements, many people refer to full cloaking as "lame" and I would be inclined to agree with them.


On the above arguments, fading consists of a challenge which is counterable by a good team, meaning that even if the team isn't good, psychologically the sense of being able to deal with the threat is still there. This segways into a sense of teamwork and comradery since a single fade is stronger than a single marine. To counter the fade is a heavy battle of wits and "reading" the opponent to correctly block the fade or position oneself to swipe a marine and get out safely. In layman's terms, "It is fun."

The fact that some people get owned is an unfortunate effect of the inherent skill mismatch of public play. Despite that, the fade - unlike cloaking - falls into the categories of balance and good gameplay, so no, I do not propose that you remove fades from Natural-Selection.

:1: Handgrenades provide a reasonably effective counter to cloaking, accessible by the marine on the ground with no reliance on the comm aside from the initial 10 res investment. This allows an intelligent marine to engage in the battle of wits against the cloaking skulk.

The marine may still be at a disadvantage, but fun is not removed because one player is at a disadvantage, it only disappears when one player is no longer even a threat. Before the skulk evolved cloaking, the marine had the advantage. Now the skulk has the advantage. The marine can regain the advantage again with more upgrades. Someone has an advantage nearly all the time.

:2: Teamwork counters cloaking skulks at least as well as it counters fades. Three marines moving together and covering each other can save each other from ambushing skulks, even if they could not save themselves. Of course, having an armor upgrade or two helps a lot for this.

Ergo, cloaking is still fun.

:3: "Segue". I know it's pronounced "segway", but its spelled "segue". I think its French or something.

:4: Personally, I found it more fun when cloaking was 95%, and if I looked closely enough I could sometimes catch a shimmer of movement and fight it. However, I found it much less fun when cloaking that you thought was 95% was actually only 50% because of some other player's absurd gamma ramp. Having an upgrade be powerful and difficult to counter solo is arguably un-fun. Having an entire upgrade be rendered useless by someone else's video settings is definately un-fun.

sc makes ns a 1-dimensional numbers game- for the com at least. there's not a whole lot you can do and as soon as a squad falls to < 3 marines then you have to ignore them or waste res.

total respect for past and present devs who have better hindsight than me in every aspect of ns except for sc. this is only an opinion- but im immovable on it: moving invisibly, and silently is totally nuts. (and boring... and low-skilled...)

Personal attacks don't belong here
--Ahnteis

There you go.

If aliens are dominating round after round and it's stacked, have you thought it was the STACKED part that is the problem? Tell me some of your games where teams were fairly equal, or where marines were stacked and aliens went SC.

SC does what it does. It's a short-term gamble that becomes weaker as more and more field obs are placed, armor upgrades roll, bigger weapons come out. It has a lot of counters, but the counters take time. That's why it becomes increasingly weaker as the game goes on.

OP, when you have stacked games, look at the stack, than what is used.

However, you have another group of people here who complain about SC just because they don't like it. This thread has nothing to do with these people.

And my example I said was to say that the fade should play it safe with SC. Fighting an marine with less than 300 hp can be risky without celerity. So it's better to play it safe and stay alive than to risk death.

SC is fine. Have one obs at home, and another obs in the field at a tactical location (preferably with a phase gate nearby), and you'll have no problem against cloaking. And hey, field obs means limited MT in that area.