Game suddenly dying?
Metal Handkerchief
Join Date: 2012-11-09 Member: 168697Members
Join Date: 2012-11-09 Member: 168697Members
Rarely have I seen so few servers... No... Never... Have I seen so few active servers. I guess no one can be blamed for not playing when the balance is worse than it ever was. I mean, I'm pretty sure I saw a betting company giving 9:1 odds on aliens winning a match. By the way, is there an internal testing group? I don't know how a patch that summarily nerfed all alien lifeforms in one go (especially the now bricked Lerk) slipped through the system.
Anyway, I will be watching for an update to this game and do other things for a while. All I have is 6 servers to play on and 5 are French speaking and one is German speaking. I would rather endure physical torture than play on those. Maybe the community will recover once there's more than a 2.5/10 chance for an alien victory.
By the way, just to put some constructive feedback in here:
-You nerfed Skulks. Great. I can deal with that. Skulks used to make the early game too unbalanced in favour of the aliens, rushing too fast and whatnot, so I'm actually a fan of this. Aliens are now often on the back heel at beginning of mid-game.
-Nerfing Lerks... Way uncool. They were never strong to begin with. And now that aliens are on the back heel after early game, there is nothing to catch up with until the entire team goes Onos/ gorge. And by that time it's either too late, or there are too many players like me, who, would rather floss their bowels out with diamond cutting wire than play Onos. Every single thing you did to the Lerk this patch needs un-doing. Except maybe tracers. But the tracers need to be on every 6th shot or even less often than that. And AFTER you un-break the Lerk, buff it some more compared to what it was in the previous patch. A slight speed increase is borderline necessary at this point with so many players swapping textures for fluorescent green for aiming.
Marine upgrades: I don't know what you did, but the marine weapon research is now waaaaay too powerful. Even before endgame it's not uncommon for a marine to two-shot a carapace lerk. I'm sure this must be a bug, but just mentioning it anyway.
Well, that was my goodwill for this patch, I honestly feel like the entire 50 hours of in-game time this patch would have been better spent on a different game. I want my times back :P
Anyway, I will be watching for an update to this game and do other things for a while. All I have is 6 servers to play on and 5 are French speaking and one is German speaking. I would rather endure physical torture than play on those. Maybe the community will recover once there's more than a 2.5/10 chance for an alien victory.
By the way, just to put some constructive feedback in here:
-You nerfed Skulks. Great. I can deal with that. Skulks used to make the early game too unbalanced in favour of the aliens, rushing too fast and whatnot, so I'm actually a fan of this. Aliens are now often on the back heel at beginning of mid-game.
-Nerfing Lerks... Way uncool. They were never strong to begin with. And now that aliens are on the back heel after early game, there is nothing to catch up with until the entire team goes Onos/ gorge. And by that time it's either too late, or there are too many players like me, who, would rather floss their bowels out with diamond cutting wire than play Onos. Every single thing you did to the Lerk this patch needs un-doing. Except maybe tracers. But the tracers need to be on every 6th shot or even less often than that. And AFTER you un-break the Lerk, buff it some more compared to what it was in the previous patch. A slight speed increase is borderline necessary at this point with so many players swapping textures for fluorescent green for aiming.
Marine upgrades: I don't know what you did, but the marine weapon research is now waaaaay too powerful. Even before endgame it's not uncommon for a marine to two-shot a carapace lerk. I'm sure this must be a bug, but just mentioning it anyway.
Well, that was my goodwill for this patch, I honestly feel like the entire 50 hours of in-game time this patch would have been better spent on a different game. I want my times back :P
Comments
i took that 9:1 bet, and now i'm a millionaire.
Let's be honest here, no one and I mean NO ONE in the game industry gets 100% retention. That's the holy grail and I've been in this business long enough to tell you that there is dropoff the day AFTER most new releases hit the shelves. Good luck keeping even half of your players after a couple months. NS2 has delivered over 300K copies of the game, but I feel that the learning curve and lack of a trainer has really put a damper on retention.
There is no way anyone can 'blame' a single patch or change in the game for a change in the player base, since there are too many players for any one change to really make that kind of impact. If, as a silly example, Lerks could carry around an Onos as they were flying, some people might leave since that seems stupid, while others might play more for the LOL factor.
So no, the game is not 'suddenly dying'. This is just normal fluctuation.
No, the Lerk is also slower. Both in acceleration and top speed. It does seem to have lost a bit of hard drift to compensate though, for overall more maneuverability, but really, it's just making celerity even more of a necessity than it already was. You might as not give the option of adrenaline anymore.
As for the current amount of servers available to me, there were ten times as many BEFORE the gorgeous patch went up. So it's no "natural end of patch cycle" phenomenon, as the end of last patch was vibrant in comparison. And we've had this patch for what? A week?
check your filters
Same filters as before.
-No mods
-Hide empty
-200 ping max
-60% performance or better
And that's basically it.
Small thing here, why do people still claim PC gaming is dead? Yes, most AAA publishers kinda stink but to say we're a dead industry is just plain absurd.
If you are from Asia (and may AUS), that could be why you don't see many servers..... There are certainly plenty of US and EU servers with lots of player.
Didn't make it past birth.
._.
Seems to be nothing out of the ordinary. Playercounts rise whenever there's a sale going on, and they drop back slowly after. I still see a relatively small but healthy playerbase.
btw, you could two shot a lerk before b240 as well. Marines just have it easier to hit things now, because of improved hitreg and performance.
Yeah. That's why PS4 is going to be a PC with PlayStation written on the side.
That's why Microsoft cancelled connecting Xbox players with PC players when Xbox players were embarrassingly bad against players with mice and keyboard.
Dust off your Gameboy Color link-cables guys, it's the new internet.
Hm seems to be going down from the balance patch last week that peaked at 3.8k
With the big boom gone we are going back to normal levels of players so maybe servers that were full in your area are no longer full because of it. I wonder why it did not retain as many players though. 2.2k after a week seems a bit too fast.
I'm just going to point out what I said before since you can't read: they are the SAME filters as the point of comparison, with way less servers. Unless you can somehow account for 75% of the community that didn't use mods before suddenly beginning to use it now, you're not really saying anything meaningful.
Though I would certainly understand it if someone's balance mod suddenly shot up in popularity this patch seeing as how borked everything is.
just kidding. it's probably "a pr stunt to win back the progressive youth after the whole gay thing..." ~thebest
funny how you just ignore the fact that the amount of concurrent players has remained stable, not counting spikes from the game being on sale. ya..... the game certainly is dying...... even though it has remained stable....... funny.
Next up you'll say how the fact that the concurrent players hasn't risen means it is dying..... lol. Not to mention that you haven't even unchecked the "no mod" to see what servers there are. Also, you didn't say what region you are from.
It dropped from 70,000 to about 4000-5000. Its also a widely successful game.
All the commanders are off invading Korhal
ns2stats.org
Game is as balanced as I've ever seen it, though long term effects of the patch remain to be seen. OP is clearly HEAVILY biased alien player and just can't stand that they aren't dominating as easily now.