Official NS2 Gathers?
Kasharic
Hull, England Join Date: 2013-03-27 Member: 184473Members, Forum Admins, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
Hull, England Join Date: 2013-03-27 Member: 184473Members, Forum Admins, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
Competitive players will be familiar with the NSL gather system found here - http://gathers.ensl.org/
Many games have a queue system where you can join a more "serious" game. (Other games have shown huge success in this, e.g Rocket League, CS:GO etc)
I'm sure with a little time and effort an official ranked/unranked gather system could be put in place into NS2 via the main menu... which would also encourage more people to use it, because only a small number of people use NSL, or the UWE forums at all... this would appeal to the people that don't use forums etc.
Thoughts?
*** EDIT ***
It is kind of what I meant... just something in the main menu that advertizes and allows people to join gathers
Many games have a queue system where you can join a more "serious" game. (Other games have shown huge success in this, e.g Rocket League, CS:GO etc)
I'm sure with a little time and effort an official ranked/unranked gather system could be put in place into NS2 via the main menu... which would also encourage more people to use it, because only a small number of people use NSL, or the UWE forums at all... this would appeal to the people that don't use forums etc.
Thoughts?
*** EDIT ***
SantaClaws wrote: »A link to the gather page in the main menu would be great if that's all you meant.
It is kind of what I meant... just something in the main menu that advertizes and allows people to join gathers
Comments
What you're describing, is no different from all the other matchmaking suggestions. They all share the same fatal flaw: Not enough players, will lead to endless seeding.
ENSL Gathers work, because you seed the gather from your browser, not in-game. So you can sit and seed for hours - and the average quality of the games, are generally higher than in pubs.
There's no way you get rookies to seed for hours, only to get in to a game that has NO guarantee to be particularly high quality.
In fact, this would likely have negative effects on player retention.
the idea I was thinking is one where you click on the matchmaking system in the menu and you begin seeding... while you seed you would still be able to join servers manually and play on them... when there are enough players to play a matchmaking game, a popup appears. you either join or don't (you should have around 20 seconds to respond... maybe less)... if you don't respond you are removed from the queue and it continues to search for more players.
How would that negatively effect player retention?
Official matchmaking/gather system is indeed pointless when you don't have at least couple of thousands of players.
Either add link to ENSL in main menu so you can join the gathers that way, or implement with the new menu and steam friendlist somekind of slot based friend gather. That would encourage players to add people from NS2 to their friendlist and get those community/friend based quick games going from the game/steam.
For example to start a gather you qlick ''Create game'' and then start sending invites to fill the slots.
It would be less frustrating than to ask people from different places, or texting them individually instead of just sending ''invite to gather'', and when you have filled the slots you get a game going.
Or something like @kasharic mentioned, when you open NS2 you have the option to ''add me to gather'' and you can keep playing pubs or whatever and when the gather is filled you are ready to ''join gather''. You could have the gather system running on the background, and if you quit NS2 it would remove you from the waiting list.
You could also add rewards to players that keep playing gathers, achievements/unlock/badges whatever. But the problem is that if you think ''it ain't gonna work'' then its even pointless to have this revive ns2 thing going on. If its too much to do coding/timewise then its pointless to add it.
Easiest way is to add ensl menu to the game.
1.Have a link to ENSL page or,
straight to gather.
Problem with the straight gather joining would be that
a.How it would affect the quality of ENSL gathers when there are rookies joining up, but if the community wants to have more players then they need to loosen up a little.
b.Joining the gathers from outside the game via ENSL
c.The first step to join to play with strange experienced players in a tiny community and joining teamspeak etc.
Solution could be to have a hive rank requirement/tutorial before you can join gathers, or only have link to ENSL main page so they can read about gathers etc themselves.
2.Friend based gather from within the game. You could send gather invite to your steam friends and fill the slots, this way people could mess around with a friendly environment without any pressure. It would also encourage players to add friends from community and play together, maybe even form some teams.
3.Official gather where you join a gather wait list from the NS2 main menu, it would run on the background when you are in the game, and when its filled up you join it. The problem here would be the low player amount, and if people would want to join random gathers.
It is kind of what I meant... just something in the main menu that advertizes and allows people to join gathers
Déjà vu.
RIP.