NS2 is losing players now that the steam sale is over
Samdaman
USA Join Date: 2015-12-07 Member: 209802Members
USA Join Date: 2015-12-07 Member: 209802Members
steamcharts.com/app/4920#7d
ATM we are sitting at an average of 330 players. That is only enough people to fill 16 and a half, 20 slot servers.
What is taking UWE so long? What are they waiting for?
ATM we are sitting at an average of 330 players. That is only enough people to fill 16 and a half, 20 slot servers.
What is taking UWE so long? What are they waiting for?
Comments
What do you want us to do?
As a community member I am thinking they are not waiting at all, and that it takes time to code things.
I want your boss to make the game free to play.
That's right, I said it, the dreaded F2P.
That is amazing lol. I can't believe it just opened 2 hours ago. Hopefully we will get a new batch of players with the extra sale.
As free as SMNC? Perhaps instead like Tactical Intervention?
Or maybe you were thinking as free as DOTA2? Or maybe instead as TF2?
We can think of some ways to mitigate this problem:
1) Help people over the wall
2) Paint the wall nicely so that it's not that frustrating to sit in front of the wall
3) Lower the wall
Most bits in the dev trello suggests either work on option 1) or 2), but imo for option 1) current plans are only giving a marginally small help. It will still take frustratingly long to overcome the hurdles and players mostly do no invest that much time these days. Option 2) is just a paint job.
Many in the community that made it over the wall will vehemently disagree with anything that remotely has to do with option 3).
There's an exception in form of mods and alternative gamemodes. Though that train has halfway departed with NS2:Combat.
Edit: F2P or sales has more people running at the wall and there's hope that those people might stack upon each other but it also attracts a lot of zombies and in the end only a few will make it over with that method anyway.
Like Dota 2 or Planetside 2. Obviously people can act like I am saying this is the fix to fix all issues, but it's not. However, an extremely small amount of people who play PC actually know NS2 exists. This game is unheard of in the majority PC gaming market.
This game is old as well, people tend to stay away from BUYING old, dying games(Small Community). Someone is more likely to install and try a game that is F2P than they are to buy the game and panic thinking about if they like it or not, or if they will get a refund. Remember, steam only lets you play for 2 hours before refunds are invalidated. In a game like NS2, 2 hours is not even enough time to learn how to heal with the gorge for newbies.
I am not saying suddenly going F2P will solve all the issues, but it makes it a hell of alot easier on US, the community, to get our friends to play with us and try and get them to stay.
Seen this thread before
This thread before
Thread before
Before
But seriously.
But people sill struggle to play these games.
You have players there with laughable aim, kids crying about cheaters everywhere @ every death and overall really dumb players who cant learn these simple maps and gamemechanics.
You dont believe me?
This is me after 1 week in Warface (F2P Shooter from crytek. Horrible game btw)
hitbox.tv/video/680738
From there people called me "Hacker" in every fuckin round.
The average skill from clanscene there is laughable.
Believe me, you dont want these players in NS2.
Who cares about a low playerbase.
Better low than every server filled with trolls and whining kids.
No thanks, nope, nada , no senor!
Compare to another fps game, released on steam during the same year as ns2, and actually is f2p.
http://steamcharts.com/app/17080
I think we're doing okay for now. And clearly f2p is not going to bring hordes of new players in.
Making ns2 free to play would not fix the bounce. It would only make it worse because you would have more going through at a time. Before ns2 could go free to play it would need to fix the bounce.
From what I am seeing on the trello I think the devs may already be heading in the F2P direction with all this development of steam trading and whatnot. The devs above got awfully quiet when i mentioned Free to play as well.
You all resent F2P but can anyone explain a way to really sell this game, given it's age and current player count, to the majority pc gaming market? Also when I say majority I am not saying DOTA levels of players but rather at least 2000+ players on average.
You could try and change a bunch of things in the game and then do a relaunch saying "Look at the shiny new game!" but I doubt that will work, given how little time the devs have.
I am both a server owner and apart of a very large community and I have been trying for months now to get people to play. One of the problems I keep running into in inviting friends is they freak out over having to buy an expired game, like I said above people only have 2 hours to decide if they like this game.
Switching to F2P would solve this issue by letting people come and go as they please, if they enjoy the game, then they can buy cosmetic items to help fund the game.
I suppose I need to stress this again, going Free to Play does not fix all the issues. What it does fix though is the difficulty of entry. The easier it is for you and I to invite friends, the greater chance we have of getting them to play. Again, this doesn't fix the bounce issue, however if you couple this with a fix for players bouncing then you will see a large increase in player count, and, down the line, player quality.
I am incapable of "proving" to you that FTP is a bad idea. I am capable of typing out a freakishly long post describing why I think it would be a bad idea.
Here's the TL;DR: "ERMAHGAWD the players will be spamming us and we will all DIEEE"
Reasons FTP are a bad idea given the state of the game at the moment. If nothing else this is why just flipping a switch and making NS2 FTP is not as easy as that.
- No matchmaking.
Assuming the game went free to play tomorrow (or next month, or w/e) and somehow this magically created a massive influx of players (which was my point previously, namely that "FTP" doesn't mean "Massive Playerbase"), all of these players would be thrown into the mix together. Why is this bad? Because the high-skill capacity of NS2 means that players really really need to play against people of approximately their level. Elseways you're going to have a massive sh*tefest of squirming bodies everywhere. This will promptly inspire old-standing community members to uninstall. If the communities that have been building over the past years immediately became >50% people who give no shits, I'd not even bother playing.
- No training.
People download TF2, go through a tiny tutorial that basically says "go shoot stuff" and you're good. That's all that matters. you can have a perfectly good game of TF2 if all you did was go around and shoot stuff. DOTA's got a tutorial that covers more of the basics and maybe even a bit of strategy, and then you're fine. Yeah obviously there's a high skill potential in DOTA that can't be taught, but guess what DOTA's got that NS2 doesn't... If you guessed Matchmaking, you'd be right. Newbies aren't expected to know any of that extra stuff right off the bat. Warframe's pretty simple, Planetside's pretty simple, Tribes is pretty simple. Go shoot stuff. Have fun.
If one treated NS2 like this, it would end, again, in a squirming pile of fecal matter and bodies everywhere wandering around perfectly content to just walk into that room over there and -oh wait, how'd i die?
- No infrastructure
There are a lot of servers out there, but not many that are played on, and as for the ones that aren't played on... well who knows who admins those, if they're on good enough hardware, etc. UWE would need to foot the bill for some pretty solid server space on several continents to make FTP a thing. These servers will need to be maintained, updated, moderated, etc. Plus, knowing UWE, they'll not have some of the best things server-side that this game has to offer (mods).
- Holy ballsack the support team we'll need.
Give up any hope of new content or updates. Odds are with a large influx of FTP gamers, the number of reports of people being unable to start the game, play the game, find servers, etc will increase. I think at the moment it's basically Ironhorse and anyone else who haunts the Tech support forum. Ultimately UWE can't put those resources towards fixing/finding/consoling those issues, which means those people will leave with a bad taste in their mouth.
- What business model?
Again assuming the game goes FTP tomorrow, how does this financially help UWE to continue developing the game? At the moment there are all of 3 skin packs available for purchase (+1 soon). You think that the average FTPer who picks this game up for a few hours is going to want to invest in it by buying a >$5 pack of a few skins? I'm really not sure here but I doubt it personally. TF2's cosmetic system is based on modularity and "cool factor" that's been reinforced throughout constant marketing (it really is all about the hats). Seeing as how it's probably the singlemost successful FTP + cosmetics game out there this is what you have to emulate, Warframe is a close second. And I think it's safe for me to say, NS2 doesn't have anywhere near that level of infrastructure there to make that even possible yet.
- Cheaters
I've played just over 2000 hours of NS2, I've encountered and confirmed one player as a cheater (a pair, but still). I've known of maybe 3 total. Undoubtely they're out there. But guess who comes in with the crowds, it's the hackers and cheaters itching to ply their trade. In a game as highly skilled as this one, i bet it'll have its popularity. FTP, what's to stop them from just hopping on an alt?
- Community
NS2's best part at the moment is it's community. NS2's worst part at the moment is it's community. Lots of us are awesome, lots of us are toxic, lots of us just don't get along. FTP won't help the toxic. Odds are the toxicity will only increase with veterans getting mad at semi-veterans and semi-veterans getting mad at rookies. Rookies getting mad at everyone cause they don't know what the frack to do with themselves.
NS2 is, has been, and forever will be a Niche Game. It's got more strategic depth than a Moba, less control than an RTS, and a hellofalot more complexity than your normal FPS. Unless we can slowly but surely break new players into these concepts, keeping them playing along their skill levels, they'll just get super frustrated super fast. OR they'll think "this game's too hard" and leave, never realizing all of the hidden mechanics that underly everything because they were thrown in among a few veterans.
The Veterans will have a hayday for about half an hour. We will be gods. Even the most menial of us will shoot well and bite better. Our teams will hail us as "good commanders" for dropping a few medpacks on the poor peasants struggling to carry out our frustratedly shouted orders. Those among us who have better than average skill now will be hailed as Hackers at every turn, since we'll all have our wallhacks on and be able to kill our enemies without even getting scratched.
Then, after about 1-2 games we'll realize that half of our hair is gone and in the interest of self-preservation and sanity, will stop playing.
Within a month of this churning decision being implemented, I'd wager that 75% of the veterans that still play will be gone, occasionally popping into Gathers and ENSL matches. With no way of knowing anything, most of the newbies will have come and gone and come and gone for that month or two, and after a short while of undeniably high player counts, it'll drop like a rock again.
RIP NS2.
I wanted to put a anti-most of those points at the end of my post, but I learned a long time ago not to contradict yourself within your own argument. So here's the Other side of that coin.
IF a system of matchmaking could be developed, even a rudimentary one that simply sorted people into hidden servers by default (i.e. ones that didn't show up in server browser), but kept the server browser communities alive and well, F2p becomes a lot more viable.
There are a lot of servers out there that are available. And IF UWE is willing to foot the bill on some quality servers around, with a clear way to report players on those servers (official servers are the most notoriously un-admined; read: hacker heaven), that problem disappears.
Training is being worked on. If Beige Alert's stretch goals of Lifeform-specific and advanced strategy tutorials became a thing, that's a super big step toward making rookies viable teammates.
Support team, idk cross your fingers and pray stuff doesn't break?
IF the economic pros and cons were weighed with F2p and UWE devoted time and resources toward making a "coolness factor" behind skin customization (which i'd argue would need to be more robust than simply whole skins), f2p becomes a lot more profitable. If you could convince the average player to spend say 10 bucks on customization, you're making more than if they had bought it in a sale. Tie in the steam market stuff (idk how funds there are split between Valve and Dev, but it's essentially printing money), and you're making alright earnings.
Community would need to be moderated. If not by officials on official servers then by the community itself. IIRC League has a way to report "toxic" players and if enough people report them independantly, there are repurcussions. A similar system of 'croudsourcing justice' could work in NS2. This feature would need to be made prominent.
And Ultimately, if enough revenue did come in from NS2 going f2p, there's nothing stopping UWE from devoting more talent to adding more stuff to NS2.
Altogether, if this was approached carefully and gradually (it is indeed arguable that the current direction of NS2 is moving towards a f2p+hats business model), and was done smart, I wouldn't be opposed to it. Just as long as the existing playerbase doesn't drown in a tide of green, everything would be ok. There's just a lot more that UWE would need to do to make f2p work. They've gotta judge interest accurately enough not to over-spend on servers (remember way back when there used to be like 5,000 UWE official servers?), but still have enough on call for the tide. They'll need to market the heck out of it again, or else no one will be playing and no one will be buying. And before all that, they've gotta set up all the pre-requisites.
You're an idiot if you think that I was comparing the gameplay of the 2 games.
Hope you get rekt out there
The hacker problem wouldn't even be the worst of it. Even now with people buying the game we have rookies who refuse to listen or learn. New players who go command and ruin the game for 21 other people. And the occasional smurf account...
Make the game free and the number of deaf and dumb rookies ruining games would easily quadruple. I'd wager most vets who didn't leave would end up on smurf accounts since they'd be free and would open up access to rookie servers...
It might grow the community somewhat, but the overall quality of players in the community would hit rock bottom.. Finding a decent game would be virtually impossible. (It's already hard enough now)
Then of course you have the hackers. Free games attract them like a rotting corpse attracts flies. Which would in turn cause hackusations against legit players to skyrocket.. Especially when you consider all the game mechanics that look like hacking to a rookie.. (like the "wallhack" aura, or marines minimap)
A free NS2 would be absolute hell.
As for hackusations.. Why the hell do you care? I look at it this way. If the players think I'm cheating, I shouldn't play on that server anyway. It's hardly a challenge anyway. I just leave those servers, maybe with a sarcastic remark or if I'm in a good mood a genuine advice.
These cancer are easy to spot by there positioning, accuracy and the way how they play.
If you spot these small minded players on your servers, just BAN them right away.
And all these:
"Im only smurfing for some relaxed rounds because i want to play gorge" is just BULLSHIT.
Its the same like:
"I was only using a wallhack cause i want to catch a wallhacker and want to be sure"
Great story.