Gather ingame.

Tinki

Integrate http://gathers.ensl.org/ in the game, either with the web explorer or directly in the main menu. Chris already did a pretty good job.
You can even add 2 rooms for those who want to play low or all/high skill rounds, letting 1-2 high skill players join the low skill room if they want to com. You could make a system where you can just join the gather and play in a public server in the mean time, with an alert when the gather is ready and a way to accept or not (if you are commander and don't want to leave your server for example). Maybe this will resolve the current situation : 2 small player base playing on different servers with a huge skill gap, competitive players playing mostly gathers on private server or pcw and the rest of the community getting sometime stomp when one comp joins them.

Ensl gather server are often up and ready. Of course this will need some coordination between the new dev team and the ensl.

A lot of people think gathers are for competitive players and on invitation only. I often saw some complaints from the dev team about large slots servers, this will be a good way to promote the game as you first intented : 6v6 ; even if you might need more players if it's with low skill players (7v7 or 8v8). Since auto matchmaking is impossible with a player base that low this might be a good in-between auto-join/server list. When you fisrt play this game the server list can be scary (like in every game) and every multiplayer games which went out in the last 2 years had some sort of matchmaking. This could be a way for ns2 to modernize itself.

Nordic

Do you remember the "Organized play" tab in the main menu? Looking at your join date it looks like you were around then. That tab was basically an in game gather. It was removed long ago for lack of use. Nobody ever used it. Afaik, this was for 2 reasons.
1. Comp players used the ensl gather system still.
2. Unlike an ensl gather, you could not play public ns2 while you waited for it to fill.

If the in game gather system was improved from what it was, I would like to see it return.

Aeglos

It was broken as far as I knew, at least I never got it to work. I think there was an announcement specifically asking us not to use it too. Hard to blame lack of use when it couldn't be used.

Pelargir

I'm not much of a coder but I doubt adding such a page: http://gathers.ensl.org/ would be that hard. Of course it would require some work but I'm sure it's worthwhile, also it doesn't have to be 6 vs. 6 gathers although just a redirection to the NSL gathers page would just do the trick. There are many things to debate about implementing a similar gather page, bigger teams for instance (7 vs. 7; 8 vs. 8) leading to some dedicated ingame servers.

The old system wasn't working properly and was of no use.

Tinki

Nordic wrote: »

Do you remember the "Organized play" tab in the main menu? Looking at your join date it looks like you were around then. That tab was basically an in game gather. It was removed long ago for lack of use. Nobody ever used it. Afaik, this was for 2 reasons.
1. Comp players used the ensl gather system still.
2. Unlike an ensl gather, you could not play public ns2 while you waited for it to fill.

If the in game gather system was improved from what it was, I would like to see it return.

Yeah i remember but as @Aeglos said is was broken .
With a web page you can even regroup people joining with their web browser and people joining the gather directly in game.
Comp players may still use the ensl gather but we can merge both, we don't need to have 2 different entity. And i'm sure some comp players would like to play gather with new players, even good one who just play public but are too scared to join ensl since they don't know anyone there and don't have a team

Although i don't know if this section of the forum has enough visibility or if we need to make suggestion on the new web site.

Lambo

Nordic wrote: »

Do you remember the "Organized play" tab in the main menu? Looking at your join date it looks like you were around then. That tab was basically an in game gather. It was removed long ago for lack of use.

no, it was just broken to shit.

Nordic

Tinki wrote: »

Nordic wrote: »

Do you remember the "Organized play" tab in the main menu? Looking at your join date it looks like you were around then. That tab was basically an in game gather. It was removed long ago for lack of use. Nobody ever used it. Afaik, this was for 2 reasons.
1. Comp players used the ensl gather system still.
2. Unlike an ensl gather, you could not play public ns2 while you waited for it to fill.

If the in game gather system was improved from what it was, I would like to see it return.

Yeah i remember but as @Aeglos said is was broken .
With a web page you can even regroup people joining with their web browser and people joining the gather directly in game.
Comp players may still use the ensl gather but we can merge both, we don't need to have 2 different entity. And i'm sure some comp players would like to play gather with new players, even good one who just play public but are too scared to join ensl since they don't know anyone there and don't have a team

Although i don't know if this section of the forum has enough visibility or if we need to make suggestion on the new web site.

It appears I don't remember it being broken. That would be a reason.

I think putting it on the new suggestion website would be good. I really like the idea of the ensl gather and in game gather being linked.