Let's Play

Lenard

<div class="IPBDescription">How does I play NS?</div>I realize the strength of the NS community is dwindling, but isn't there some way to still play vanilla NS semi-competitively and actually have fun? I used to play on JigglyPuff's all the time but now it is uniformly empty. There are like two other popular servers with semi-decent latency and they are always full of ######bags or are modded all to hell. I want to play this game the way it was meant to be played. How/where can I do that? Thanks.

Bacillus

There used to be pick up games/gathers all the time. Now hardly anyone plays them because there aren't enough of players.

I'm not sure how the game was meant to be played, but the organized 6v6 sure does open a lot of new elements to it. At least the european competetive communtiy is still alive, although we've got only 5-10 active teams nowadays.

Leon

almost every night there is a pug going in north america

<a href="http://steamcommunity.com/groups/nspickup" target="_blank">http://steamcommunity.com/groups/nspickup</a>

ask an admin to invite you

ZiGGY

you do this:
1. get some friends
2. get some friends who want to play ns
3. get some friends who want to play semi-competitive ns
4. get some friends who want to play semi-competitive ns on an organised day, eg. a saturday afternoon.
5. either get access to a ventrilo server or make sure everyone's in-game voice works so that you aren't faffing around with typing.
6. (if you don't have IRC die in a hole) go to #ensl on quakenet (best bet) at a decent euro time (note Euro time is about East Coast + 6) or go to #nspickup on gamesurge at a decent US time (and pray).
7. whine for somewhere in the region of 10min-1hr 30min and you will get a game.
8. expect to spend an hour doing very little while people dust off their pcs and prance around like fairies irl
9. enjoy

HOWEVER, I recommend at least playing around a bit and engaging the old brain before trying this.