The Best Match This Week So Far...
RedDog
Las Vegas Join Date: 2013-02-22 Member: 183267Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, WC 2013 - Shadow
Las Vegas Join Date: 2013-02-22 Member: 183267Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, WC 2013 - Shadow
Hellllllooooo Fellow NS2'ers!
So far, the casting this week has been a lot of fun. But I wanted to bring attention to a particular matchup - Damage Networks vs. Breakfast Klub; specifically round 2.
I want to share this round with anyone that's interested as it was very exciting and BK was coming off a round 1 loss. All I have to say is under-fire armory placement and triple (yes, TRIPLE) welder kill in a row...
Enjoy! Their other rounds, 3 and 4, were quite exciting too.
To access the playlist for the rest of the season 2 matches thus far, go here: http://goo.gl/sGwDn
Cheers!
So far, the casting this week has been a lot of fun. But I wanted to bring attention to a particular matchup - Damage Networks vs. Breakfast Klub; specifically round 2.
I want to share this round with anyone that's interested as it was very exciting and BK was coming off a round 1 loss. All I have to say is under-fire armory placement and triple (yes, TRIPLE) welder kill in a row...
Enjoy! Their other rounds, 3 and 4, were quite exciting too.
To access the playlist for the rest of the season 2 matches thus far, go here: http://goo.gl/sGwDn
Cheers!
Comments
All the NS2 casters seem to forget first person spectate completely. I know the top view is great and all, but plz let us be in the fights and get movement ideas from good players. You switched to first person 2 times for 5 seconds in awesome fights. First person should make 60 percent of a NS2 cast imo. In all the other shooters it's 100 percent ^^ don't forget that one is half shooter.
I'll have to watch the rest a little later. . .
Robotics probably should of been dropped earlier. . . 13:30 was a bit late, but then they only had 1 ARC online shooting 3 and a half minutes later
That's probably the only mistake I saw though. . . both teams running some very smooth strats
-so Khammander had a drifter in crevice, and dropped a harvester right in front of a marine why?!
-nice job on taking out extractors
-risky hive drop in Data, could have worked if the armory didn't go up in time
-good job trying to get flight asap after losing data
BK:
-they aren't taking the path of least resistance (most notably reactor harvester with hydras), why not earlier XR?
-nice work in data core and armory drop on that hive
-lol welder killz
Disagree completely. The first person spectator can't keep up with the players' aiming most of the time, and is sometimes too laggy and buggy to follow completely. And even if it did work, the upper view gives you so much better awareness in combat situations: you can see all the participants, their health and possible coming reinforcements, all this while not losing the overall view of the game through the minimap. First person is purely for the bling, and should IMO be used very rarely and very briefly.
No, it's not for the bling. I agree on the RTS overview part of your post, but there's much more to a FPS game than seeing people walking back and forth and eventually dropping. I'd love to see how pro Lerks and Fades behave. Casters think "oh, he's not attacking, that's boring", but every movement belongs to the excitement of playing FPS games. When do they attack, how do they use shadow step/blink, how do they choose when to use use Spikes or rather bites, when do they retreat, how do they fly to dodge bullets, how do marines cover each other, how is their aiming, how do they dodge attacks etc..
From the top view I see that 3 Skulks and a Fade prevent a 4 marine hive rush, but I don't see why and what the marines could have done better.
I really want to see some archea matches shown in first person, I mean, think of what you could learn from them.
Yes the first person view is a bit laggy, but in the parts where they used it, it didn't lag at all. No reason to switch back.
The commander and his strategy have their roles, but in the end the players decide the match. Show us how they do it.
People may disagree here, but then I gotta say NS2 casts are going to bore me very soon.
Learn positioning, learn timing, learn how they react to situations, and this all is something you learn from the overview. It's not their aiming or movement skills that make them stand above all the rest (although that certainly helps), and even if it was, the first person spectating isn't a 100% representative of what they're actually doing.
I dont agree it should be 60% though,20% of the time is more than enought,the thing is he can specate from top view most of the time and when ever there is about to be a big engagment he can just switch to first person for a few seconds.
I guess this generation watches someone playing minecraft in let's plays for hours and is satisfied with that. NS2 from the overview with comments is just the same as only hearing the comments. 'Two marines in ventilation', '3 skulks pushing data', the map doesn't show me anything that's not said.
Sry RedDog, didn't want this thread to go off-topic. Nice cast still and an interesting match.
Maybe if there was a nice sized minimap in the fps view spec that would help.
Don't demean NS2 players because they're not interested in the same things as you (i.e. you want to see how people shoot and move, while a great deal of us want to see how people position themselves and what's going on in the bigger picture)
This is completely wrong even for the best of casters. There are so many simultaneous things going on in a match that it's impossible for a caster to mention all of them or move his camera to every spot where something is happening. The only way for the spectators to see everything that's happening is to look at the minimap. I, for one, look at the minimap for approximately 80-90% of the time while watching a cast, and I get annoyed when the camera jumps into a first-person spectate mode. Your Quake-comparison is pretty hilarious, since if you don't realise the fundamental difference between an old-school rocketjump-shooter and NS2, then the fault lies in you. If you don't understand everything that's happening on the map, bear in mind that many of us do.
Yeah I'm just being a little polemic there. I've been playing NS since 8 years, I'd say I know what I see on the map. And I know what Quake is, and I know that NS2 still deserves to be seen as a shooter where movement is important and intense PvP situations can happen.
And I know that people may have different interests, I just wanted to remind the casters of what some people may want to see. It's up to you if you see it the same way, well you, Therius, obviously don't.
Each side has their pros and cons, so I think it'll be easier to just list them as bullet points:
Pros of FPS Mode:
- Helps immerse the viewers right into the action
- Viewers can follow/see how their favorite or clutch player handles his/her weapons
- More intense feeling of combat
- First-person view of what a team is facing in terms of defense, offense, etc.
- Ability to select a unit and instantly zoom into FPS (@statikg this was added to spectate mode last patch)
- *Viewers can critique a player's skill, aim, dodge, etc. (*kinda due to lag issues w/ the system)
Cons of FPS Mode:
- Loss of battlefield/situational awareness
- Loss of the mini-map (which kinda links to above)
- Hard to notice if reinforcements are/are not coming
- Information such as forward armory drops (behind the FPS player) + other tech, etc is difficult to be tracked
- Knowledge of counter-pushes / counter-activity by the other team is lost
- This is more a performance thing, but it can get dang laggy
- If you're in FPS mode too long, it's easy to miss all the other action going on in the map (some of that action missed *could* be game-changing too)
That being said, I can see (and agree) that this all comes down to one dreaded word: balance. Personally, I believe in an RTS+Shooter game such as this, more time should be spent on the overview as you can then be more aware of what is going on in the map. However, I do ALSO agree that some viewers want to see engagements from an FPS view - which is fine as well. The trick is ensuring that you enter FPS mode on 1) Someone that won't die right when you enter the mode, thus lagging you and forcing you to miss more action as you get back into overhead, and 2) You're sure this is basically a *main* engagement so you don't miss a crucial counter-push to a main base or foothold loss on the map.
I know that viewers differ in what they want to see/hear, etc during a cast. I can tell you that I will do my best to work on this balance and hopefully come up with a method that is okay for everyone.
Good discussion, folks! Thanks!
I hope this means a bit more 1st person view from now on. Pretty please.
Could you have a picture in picture affair one corner always being what is NOT being shown on large. So if you move to marine view, the spectator map overview minimizes to a corner PIP and if you are in map overview you still have a marine PIP in the corner. Given that you have two commentators (I guess you guys are not sat in the same room sadly) it's quite possible for you to each control one of these views and embed them both into a stream?
Am I just dreaming?
My personal experience with streaming has given me much more appreciation of the level of multi-tasking and awareness necessary to ensure a smooth, interesting, and informative cast. That's an interesting thought, but it would likely require some type of mod. Unfortunately, xsplit/obs/ffsplit/etc only allow you to stream what's on your screen, so to do a 'picture-in-picture' would require the smaller pictured action to be displayed on some part of your screen (likely a 2nd monitor). You could (sort of) do it with two people streaming (e.g. the main streamer puts the second streamers stream in the corner picture), but it would have an ugly delay (e.g. the least delay you can get in something like twitch is like 10-15s).
However, if there was a mod that allowed you to display the minimap on a second monitor, you could easily just do a screen region stream of the minimap overlayed on your main stream. Any aspiring modders interested in the challenge?
Also, while we are discussing the spectate mod, if you guys read this, please add back in the total res stat to the top of the page, its really important to see how the overall match is going in terms of who is winning which isn't always immediately clear. RTs destroyed stat was also good, altho not as integral if you are going for that really clean look.
Having said that, it's not impossible to catch some great action in FPS mode. Just that for it to happen; the caster needs to be in the right place at the right time; so to speak.
Oh holy hell - I completely agree! The graph blows!