PETITION: Develop Vanilla NS2 separate from Competative Scene
It's Super Effective!
Join Date: 2012-08-28 Member: 156625Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2012-08-28 Member: 156625Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Hello NS2 Community and UWE Dev's,
I would like to advocate the discussion of a very important topic that affects the future of NS2.
From two separate posts, I am consolidating the PRO's and CON's of Developing the Vanilla NS2 separate from the Competitive LEAGUE scene.
For reference, here are the two other posts: Topic #1 at the bottom and continues and Topic #2 Near the top half
There are compelling reasons on both sides, and I encourage that those views continue to discuss here in case I miss something, I will amend it to this post.
The goal of this post is to bring attention, and hopefully a "webbed" status so that we can find a happy middle ground for both audiences that hasn't been working out so well.
Simply sign FOR or AGAINST, and leave some thoughts, together we can make NS2 a game everyone enjoys
!
Reasons FOR separate development:
Reasons AGAINST separate development:
I would like to advocate the discussion of a very important topic that affects the future of NS2.
From two separate posts, I am consolidating the PRO's and CON's of Developing the Vanilla NS2 separate from the Competitive LEAGUE scene.
For reference, here are the two other posts: Topic #1 at the bottom and continues and Topic #2 Near the top half
There are compelling reasons on both sides, and I encourage that those views continue to discuss here in case I miss something, I will amend it to this post.
The goal of this post is to bring attention, and hopefully a "webbed" status so that we can find a happy middle ground for both audiences that hasn't been working out so well.
Simply sign FOR or AGAINST, and leave some thoughts, together we can make NS2 a game everyone enjoys
!Reasons FOR separate development:
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1 - It doesn't require UWE to remove or backtrack all that has been done as the change would be moving forward towards a better experience for pub scene.
2 - Comp scene can be developed by those evolved with it this freeing up time for Vanilla to be developed without restriction.
3 - Game play can be geared towards an average of 8 v 8 + which (according to official servers) is the intended game play and should be designed for fun, more forgiving game play.
4 - Slower game play lessens the steep learning curve for newer players, thus increasing player base.
5 - Increased player base eventually leads to more funding, and more players who may enter competitive scene on their own initiative.
6 - Development emphasis can be spent on performance to reach new players rather than using up so much time balancing the game.
7 - Pub play does not play the same as competitive play, and therefore should run with a st of rules/tweaks that makes for a fun experience.
8 - Many games including other asymmetrical game play like Left 4 Dead did this very thing, and it was successful, as most of the player base was not into competitive game play.
9 - Could free up time to make a proper interactive tutorial seen in many games (Half-Life 1 Crash Course Anyone?) that combines all the efforts made up until this point to train players.
Reasons AGAINST separate development:
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1 - The rule changes makes players have to re-learn the game
2 - Discourages people into going into competitive scene
3 - UWE or community would have to maintain the updates of a comp mod. Could lead to game breaking for complete mod.
4 - Separation of the community.
5 - It is highly dependent on actual growth of the community.
Comments
COUNTER 1 ) Rule changes have already forces people to re-learn the game, not just competitive players, but everyone, don't forget B250. Having a separate competitive scene narrows that "re-learning" to those who have the experience to adapt to it, and won't effect new players still learning the base game. The current competitive scene already plays with some different rules already, from non-close spawns to differently lit maps. I feel this argument doesn't hold much weight.
COUNTER 2) Competitive play discouraging new players is in the nature of competitive play itself, for it would require player interested in competitive play in the first place. Having this discouragement happen even in a new player's learning phase will stop the player from playing NS2 entirely, which in turn hurts both scenes.
Separation would mean that UWE has to update two separate versions, creating almost twice as much work (and playtesting). The alternative is if the comp scene is a community effort, but then it is unsupported by UWE and every update WILL break something as a result. Who will fix things when they break?
I think your step from 4 to 5 is more wishful thinking than an cast-iron guarantee, tbh.
Also it depends on how a stark a change the company’s mod would be from vanilla, it could be as simple as a couple of tweaks to suit 6v6 to something extreme.
Based on the current state of the game. There doesn't seem to be enough to warrent that much concern.
Enlighten the community if you have any information of the current comp changes.
Not really, Sewlek has done lots of coding for UWE - just look through the files, you'll see his name smattered through them going back a looong way!
- Separation of the community
- Having to relearn the game, when players are interested in going from pub to comp
- Patches will break it, if it isn't officially supported
- It is highly dependent on actual growth of the community, otherwise it's just creating a split with ~1000 concurrent players
- Most competitive games have the same pub and pro gameplay, NS2 has issues with pubstomping mostly and the fact that a new player has a VERY slim chance of doing anything against a good/pro player. To them it feels like they aren't contributing anything to the outcome of the game. That is the bit that leads to frustration/leaving...
Perhaps a "for point:
- It redirects the pro pubstompers (the unintentional ones) from the pub servers (if the player count allows for this)
In terms of where community feedback came in, I think you have it wrong way around. BT/250 was not 'community made', but made for, and in consideration of the community.
AGAINST
- The interests of competitive and public gameplay do not diverge materially enough to warrant separate development. It's a common misconception that they do.
No. The balance test was entirely made by Sewlek, who is employed by UWE as a game systems designer. The community provided input and suggestions, but the end result is Sewlek's work.
You're assuming though that splitting up development would somehow free up significantly more time for UWE. But I don't see how it would enable them to polish the game any faster than they can at the moment. It's not like they are all spending time on balance issues there. The balance mod was basically entirely Sewlek's work, no?
Anyway, not saying I'm completely against it, not as long as the actual differences between comp and vanilla aren't too big, but it seems a lot of your "reasons for" are based on this presumption it would help NS2 progress faster in general, which is not that convincing to me.
Overall, I'm leaning towards AGAINST.
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/127737/why-public-play-and-competitive-play-needs-two-rulesets/
having a easy thing like friendly fire is one thing, but even that can cause inbalance.
I can not fathom how we want to balance and support to games on both community and uwe.
Well I cant speak for uwe, but I cant imagine them doing it.
I retract my comment about Swelek's work on Balance Test, it certainty seemed that way and I apologize.
I have added some of Kouji-san's points that were not duplicates of those already posted
Just to clarify, my view of what the "competative mod" would be targeting would be for players seeking to get into high level competitive for things like NSL.
We will always have players ranging from rookie to non-rookie. But non-rookie pool also separates in a gradient naturally to those who play to have fun with the skills that they have competitive league level.
@elodea, can you elaborate on your point.
@DC_Darkling, I don't think anyone mentioned friendly fire, even I agree that would be super unbalanced, but whatever changes to the comp scene need to be made to make comp play as fair as possible without having so much of it affect pub play.
With a community hovering around 1000 players it makes absolutely no sense to divide the community with two different rule sets. We saw this problem emerge a little bit already when the BT hadn't yet been released, there was a drastic divide between those who were playing the BT to get ready for its release and those who had no idea it was coming.
it's not comp vs pub balance. It's good players stomping bad players.
please stop saying that rulesets and balance somehow will fix the stomping.
Seriously, I can't remember any other game where there are so many poorly conceived "improvement" suggestions. UWE should definately create a "suggestions"-board where only people can post that have over 200h of gameplay or something. But please... make it stop!
I feel this is something that we can work on, making rookie only servers that only allow players with <50-100 hours played making mostly everyone on the same sort of level.
A) the separation of skill levels in players (i.e. I don't want high skill level players playing in the same server as low skill level players)
or
Suggestion in OP may have been made with good intentions, but the solution is questionable ...I personally am very against split rulesets/development. There are far too many cons than pros (and I think it would make a huge amount of work for UWE to design/balance two separate game modes). I do think there are some issues with player skill difference that can be highlighted though. For instance the game could really benefit from sabot (ingame scrim finder/ matchmaker) which would help funnel bored competitive players out of low skill pubs and into games or servers with other players of roughly similar (or at least higher than avg pub) skill. Currently it's a massive headache to find higher skill servers unless you have every single comp player on your steam friends (and even so you often still have to run the gauntlet of the absurd reserved slot system a lot of servers have adopted).
thats ridiculous
I'll withhold my vote (NS2 is a democracy, right
Also, to pull a quick Devil's Advocate, although this was billed as to be designed as the most moddable game ever almost any mod that has been or will be created has the potential to break the game with patches (front page news: bouncing nades being the latest thing from everyones favorite stat tracking mod) as well as splitting the community (combat, NS1 remake, etc).
And where was the outrage with other gameplay changing mods such as last stand?
So you're saying if you had the final say on how the competitive game should be designed you would quietly bow out and play what we have?
The 'division of the community' everyone points out is a good thing in this case, because comp players should not be stomping around in the kiddie pools. Pubstomping has a severely negative effect on new player retention, and it turns off non-rookie casuals as well. I've seen many a server emptied by a single tier 1 player.
Having to 'relearn' the game when ascending from pub to comp play is a non-issue as I see it, since this is already the case. Comp tactics and gameplay are very different from pub play, and the type of people who are interested in playing at the competitive level are by nature the sort that enjoy the extra challenge and already put more effort into research / theorycrafting / skill development / etc.
Current balance / development is skewed in favor of competitive and high level play, as that's where most of the community feedback comes from. The most dedicated and proactive players are typically the ones involved in the competitive scene, and are also the most likely to be playtesters and forum posters. It is not in the nature of casual players to get involved at the higher level and argue about game mechanics and balance, they just want to jump on a server and play some enjoyable matches. If it's not fun, they just stop playing. It's rare for a casual player to come to the forums to try and give feedback to the developers about game balance, and their arguments are typically emotional, misinformed, anecdotal, and not very technically inclined or accurate. This makes it difficult to filter any kind of genuinely useful information from them, and they usually just get crapped on by the elitists and trolls anyway. I don't have a solution for getting more usable feedback from casual players, but I think having two versions of the game would allow for some more dialogue options than 'It's fine, learn to play'.
Getting a bit tired of this comparison.
Originally developed by Philogl, an NS2 player in my team who sometimes posts on these forums. Actually I'm pretty sure he's posted on this topic if you're interested. There's more to it than saying it simply went well. It made the game (L4D2) playable. It didn't progress balance development as you seem to be claiming this will for NS2. Nor did it help grow the competitive community in any sizable way. Any players interested in pugging or scrimming the game were required to learn all of the changes, and everything was changed. Both L4D games were required to be changed and it needed to be done by the competitive community as Valve designed versus mode as a casual game mode. L4D2 didn't even have a versus scoring system.
Now why this won't work for NS2.
For a few reasons. L4D had a lot of players. Right? Get it? Understand? A competitive community could survive even though they were playing what was essentially a different game. Interested public players trickled in, a lot not bothering to learn the changes or understand why they were made. When Confogl was initially released, I would hazard a guess of at least 20,000 more concurrent players than NS2. And that's NS2 on release day. That's very generous I think. The player population was enough that even with the increased entry barrier that a competitive version of the game brings a scene could be sustained. For about a year anyway. That's also being generous.
Lets get another thing clear. For the total number of concurrent players L4D had, the competitive scene has always been tiny. The only time L4D2 had a large competitive scene was when game launch tournaments (Newegg, Alienware cups) with prizes were ran using the vanilla game.
NS2 is actively developed by a group of pretty awesome people. Minus Hugh. It is developed with the goal of being a skill based team strategy game. Player choices matter. Player skill matters. Why should this not be the case in public games? And unlike Valve, UnknownWorlds has been committed to patching and improving NS2 to meet this while considering implications on public and more organised play. Yeah it's difficult, but developing them as two seperate entities isn't simpler.
Next problem with this. Getting the community to develop a competitive config. This will blow your mind. L4D went through problems with this too! There have been around a couple dozen different configs that people have played. Varying from classic confogl, promod, l4d1 spawns, fresh, fresh no HR, equilibrium, vanilla, cevo. The list goes on. All different configs developed by different community members. Some teams willing to play one config, others only willing to play other. Zero standardization and total confusion to the intrigued public player. The same thing happened during the NS2 beta when the game wasn't particularly playable or enjoyable in a competitive or public setting. The same thing happened before the BT cup. Some teams wanted to play it. Others didn't. Some pubs wanted to, others didn't.
I'm going to stop writing.
This comparison makes no sense. You just can't compare Confogl / Rotoblin to whatever it is you're proposing. Despite both being asymmetrical games, they are developed with different goals in mind and a wildly differing player base.
TLDR: Competitive configs aren't a win-win when the game developer encourages organised play and improves the game for this to be the case. A game can be both appropriate for competitive and public play without segregating the two groups when carefully designed and implemented. This includes tutorial systems (see L4D for some great ideas on how to implement in game tutorials). Competitive players are public players that want to play the game in an organised way, a separate set of gameplay additions, changes or removals to learn is an unnecessary barrier.
Oh shit I forgot.
I'm against.
Somebodies got the case of the rages!
I am against it. Too much work, imo. But the competetive scene can do it like in BF3, for example: Just add some rules (forbid some weapons, for example).