Game close to death. What can be done?
Gorgelove
Join Date: 2013-07-03 Member: 185873Members, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver
Join Date: 2013-07-03 Member: 185873Members, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver
I'll get straight to the point here. This game probably isn't going to last very much longer. For the past 6 months I've been playing on Australian servers with a very dedicated group of players. Slowly they are disappearing and it has now reached a point where we are struggling to get games going of a night during prime time. We definitely get more players during the weekend as expected but weekdays are quickly becoming impossible.
Our only other option as players is to go to US servers and about half of them kick you out for high ping, There's also been some severe racism. I don't really want to play on US servers for those reasons and they're the only ones really staying strong at the moment with player numbers. In a couple of months I fear even US servers will whittle away to just a couple of servers each night. Is something going to be done about this? Can the game's price be lowered or perhaps even made free to play with DLC and Reinforcement program benefits still requiring payments?
I really don't want to see this game dwindle away. I had to experience that pain with Natural Selection 1 and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. I don't want to see that happen again after the game has only been out 2.5 years.
Our only other option as players is to go to US servers and about half of them kick you out for high ping, There's also been some severe racism. I don't really want to play on US servers for those reasons and they're the only ones really staying strong at the moment with player numbers. In a couple of months I fear even US servers will whittle away to just a couple of servers each night. Is something going to be done about this? Can the game's price be lowered or perhaps even made free to play with DLC and Reinforcement program benefits still requiring payments?
I really don't want to see this game dwindle away. I had to experience that pain with Natural Selection 1 and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. I don't want to see that happen again after the game has only been out 2.5 years.
Comments
Are we there yet?
The game managed to retain about 1-2000 players despite all this because apparently out of the tens of millions of gamers on Steam, a few hundred "unique" (shall we say) people were willing to tolerate the dire lack of optimization and absence of basic features -- essentially receiving an incomplete game on release date -- that marred the launch, and only this small number were patient enough to put time and effort into learning the game. I think most of the NS2 population actually frequent these forums, unlike any other game that is actually popular.
The game is now dying off because of those one to two thousand, only 1-2 hundred are able to continue enjoying the game. Eventually, if you weren't luck enough to join a strong community with whom you could have fun in this still hitreg deficient hobby, you will find yourself shifting out of NS2 due to the repetitiveness.
Making the game free to play will serve only one purpose. It will attract a steady stream of perma-noobs who will never put any effort in to develop those elements which are essential to have fun in this game: teamwork and situational awareness. They will download, play a few rounds, get confused as to why they can't pay 2 win like other F2P games, get stomped, and then uninstall. This will ruin the game for the remaining one to two hundred regulars, and might even cause their exit too. You will probably get an initial surge of new players intrigued by this latest free game, but you won't enjoy the games because the skill differential now between regulars and newbies is just too great.
This game's time has passed. In some ways, it never even had a chance to succeed due to various mistakes from the dev team.
Instead of looking backwards, it's time to move forwards. Let's let the CDT do their work, and enjoy the game as much as possible. Better to focus on the next big thing. NS3 perhaps?
getting there
I think you mean that you think these things, not that they "will" be. Because I think you're wrong, but don't know you will be.
I think this is a tad dramatic.
I was part of the first green wave back in 2012 and I stayed.
Once I was here, wave after wave of steam green crashed against our shores, battering and exhausting our regulars, devaluing our once-dear community servers.
2 years of steam sales and pressure to help the rookies climb the savage skill cliff so that they might one day bask in the sunlight at the summit... It weathered and wore us down.
Dealing with constant shit games full of noobs caused a lot of people to lose faith in the game, if you ask me. But what do I know.
If the game went free to play, I'd no longer feel any kind of responsibility to help those noobs.
Rookie stomping would become a way of life, with rookies being tossed around like pawns, desperately trying to land a single killing blow, as the comp players that would remain duke it out in the post apocalyptic wasteland of F2P.
Only the most determined would stay; they would have to be more determined than any stayer that stayed before them, to survive the climb of the mighty skill cliff alone.
The best way to combat this inevitable crisis in my opinion, is to stop making incessant threads about how to 'save' the 'dying' game. Stop being a fucking whiny bitch; start rine comming more and support the community as a good person.
Nobody wants to freaking comm any more. Its not the lack of players that's killing this game, its the lack of something to do when there's no commander around to take the reins. Servers fill and empty with the ebb of the shores, waiting for a man to fill a cold steel box. Learn to comm without getting stressed out by your shitty team. Keep calm and drop meds. Only intervene to give your team direction when you feel it is necessary; chances are by now they know generally how to play. Pub games aren't ENSL and if you work WITH your team, regardless of how shit they are, you've achieved something not many people can say they have.
Seriously stop making these stupid threads, we KNOW the player count is low, we all have our ideas of how to save the game. Just read one of those other ones instead of turning these forums into a broken record.
-Better walkthrough tutorial at the start
-Ability for server owners to set limits on min/max hours played based on your hive profile.
f2p ns2 would put uwe firmly back in the spot light and with the cdt continually caring for your morbidly overweight love child, skin pack revenue can keep tricking in and everyone can freak the fuck out and play ns2 happily ever after until we all die of old age.
It's not 2002 when there were 3 online games and mods worth playing. NS2's player numbers are very high, relatively.
All non-AAA games have this issue - http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=103763, so please activate the old grey matter before making threads like this.
This isn't the usual "herp derp the game is dying we only have 600 players at peak times" type thread. It hasn't been until recently where an entire community is on the brink of dying. I guess it doesn't effect you Americans, but it effects us.
It's not that we want to sit around repeating the same ideas and the same arguments over F2P. It's that we need to communicate just how dire the situation is and at least get some sort of assurance that something will be done.
Frankly "we are working on things" is not enough assurance.
Without some kind of assurance, the regulars that are left over might as well jump ship to something else, and they already are. I'm beginning to think that I should just quit too. After all, there's nowhere to play anymore. Apart from *shudder* on American servers.
Hilariously I nnoticed last night half the ns2 population was on Woozas which I am sure will be irking many a person.
I will command these greens and tell them tales of past glory.
This game is unique and amazing and I love it.
It would indeed be a shame to lose an entire continent like Australia. We already lost Asia for similar reasons.
But some players are, justifiably, frustrated with playing against high ping players. Rubberbanding and ridiculously long ranged bites can be very annoying. Those players deserve a place where they can play against low pingers. Even if it means Australia is left out.
The last thing you want to do is alienate everyone who enjoys playing against low ping players.
I know Australia already have their own league and community. So really, I don't see how anyone but the australien community themselves can possibly solve this problem.
Make regular events, host gathers, draft tournaments and invite the Europeans and Americans. I know a lot of people will probably refuse just because of the latency, so it won't be easy, but that's the only solution I can think of.
Because forcing the rest of the community to settle for less quality is not the answer imo -whether it's just perceived lesser quality or if it's objectively lesser quality is irrelevant.
Simple like CSGO >> Match making put players below 250 ping to one vanilla server ( Valve server for example )
And we still can Browse Server List to join , how about that ?
I think developers should try a simple match making menu like CSGO , when 10 player join full a lobby >. Put 10 player in a server with average ping ~ 250
There's not enough players. The queue times would be generally unbearable, it's too late to simply include matchmaking without adding players
It's a combination of lightspeed threshold and server hops.
check this one out... I used to connect, when testing on the Onos PT server, from the Netherlands to San Francisco UWE office with had a latency of ~250ms, while some of the East coast Americans had 200-300ms. So Europe has a better connection to the USA's West coast than internally in the USA? What kind of weird connections and cable company bullshittery is going on there
Technically we can lower the latency, I mean lightspeed is more than capable of getting this done. What is it, about every millisecond (0.001s) light travels about 300Km in a perfect environment (vacuum, no bends in the trajectory, no server hops). But here's the catch, our data isn't traveling at light speed, it's mostly 30% slower in our cable networks across the worlds, so that would be 210Km/ms, still bloody fast though :P, but ignoring bandwidth. (this is sexy though, but experimental cabling)
However we simply do not have the proper switch/server hub connection architecture and bandwidth in place ("yet"). Every hop (biggest offender of adding latency) and bend in the fibers adds tiny amounts to the latency. And there is the in engine latency as well to consider and cable bandwidth and so on, we need better cables/servers/cookies
Yeah, Quantum Entanglement Comm (Mass Effect anyone?). But with 400 ms ping you certainly have room for improvement (by light speed two most distant places on Earth can be connected in 70 ms by shortest path on surface). The latency with which one gets to the backbone network is about 15 ms, so there is no need for anyone on earth to have > 100 ms latency (= 200 ms ping).
I don't know what kind of presuppositions you have against match-making/quick-join systems. Generally speaking they should be faster, than people manually assigning themselves to servers on their own. I don't see why the queue would be longer than 1s. The bottleneck is usually lack of free servers, than lack of people. Of course, they can be implemented in sorts of different weird ways, to annoy players...
If there's one thing that NS2 isn't lacking, it's free servers.
The idea of match-making is not to balance out 20 players of mixed skill that already are on a server, but instead, have players queue up, until the system can possibly pick 20 of same skill and fill a server with it from scratch (or stick you onto an already running server with a free slot with players of your skill range on it).
We don't populate that many servers with the current player base, really, and the servers are already heavily mixed, meaning the average difference in player skill there ranges from "greenling" to "competitive player". Match-making implies that those server populations would have to be cut in slices (defined by their skill level) and each slice/range would be assigned to their server. There's just not enough players for that.
Of course one could make some system who would consider just ping instead of skill. I don't know how would you call that - match-making too, something else?
But if the need ever dose comes were we need f2p model, can er at least grt a working match making? Or even build the nsl gather system into the main game ?
I agree with you that it's the team that needs balancing, and not everyone on the server needs to be on the same skill level.
But that's not match-making, is it? It's just a "Force even teams" vote with some magic fairy dust added to make it work better(tm) than it - from a percieved point of view - currently does.
My personal perception is that I don't see that many 50/5 KD stompers on rookie friendly servers, and when I do, they seem to be smurf accounts anyway.
Oh, and for the original thread topic: The best thing we can do is to get people to play the game, and retain them. And I personally believe it's more important to find the right people to recruit (this game is not for everoyne), instead of trying to retain the wrong ones. I started with a small contribution today and just wrote a review on Steam - maybe it'll encourage someone to join our community.