rookies RESTRICTED access to green server ONLY
RevanCorana
Join Date: 2015-08-14 Member: 207125Members
Join Date: 2015-08-14 Member: 207125Members
So we now have these rookie-only server things that arent used enough.
Instead they will often jump into normal pubs games and ruin the balance in every round
because aliens are harder to pickup for rookies.
I d like to also suggest putting a new status after rookie has ended that would be yellow and could be marked in certain servers as the current rookie friendly but with less bad rounds.
Instead they will often jump into normal pubs games and ruin the balance in every round
because aliens are harder to pickup for rookies.
I d like to also suggest putting a new status after rookie has ended that would be yellow and could be marked in certain servers as the current rookie friendly but with less bad rounds.
Comments
If you did not know rookie only servers are restricted to players below level 5. Once they get there, they can no longer play on rookie only servers. A green can not just jump into a pub game, unless they have completed the tutorial first.
Rookie friendly does not exist anymore. It was replaced with rookie only as described above. Rookie friendly was bad. One reason was because a server being rookie friendly often meant nothing.
newcomers being the next level after rookie to help differentiate between rookie with 0 knowledge that makes any round bad versus newcomers who understand basics but not much experience still.
Here, Here, and here are threads where this was discussed in the past.
Yellow is not a good choice either, because yellow is already used in the server browser to show servers with reserved slots that are not full. Red is used to show full servers. Gold is used to show whitelisted ranked servers. Blue is used to show NSL competitive servers, but that was done with ns2+. At what point do we stop adding colors before we get a rainbow server browser?
I did not see this idea in your above posts, but if you want to limit servers to below certain skill range to be rookie friendly that is already possible. With shine mod, any server operator can restrict a server to certain ranges of hive skill or hours played. This is also not really possible right now because of the small playerbase as I described in this thread.
We have a select few server operators (will not name any names), that seem to be more focused on building a 'community' with each their own brand names. It's going to be a real big challenge, I think, to convince these server operators, to risk cutting their community in half, by skill segregation. I simply don't think they care as much, if the games are objectively better, if it means their little niche playerbase is cut in half. At least, that's the vibe I get from a lot of these guys - and I can't blame them.
The HBZ pub server, seemed to be the only place that really honestly attempted this, it's a shame that it was eventually taken down - because the games on that server were generally great.
I agree that there's a significant hurdle to the idea of skill-based server/matchmaking at the moment due to the community nature of our servers atm. Asking community servers to split themselves into a specific skill level would also be a bit unsavory and unfair. After the time it's taken to build the community, establish donors and such things, asking them to suddenly restrict their server to a certain playerbase wouldn't be nice.
One of the only ways it could work would be to have two different Play Modes: Casual and Ranked (a la Rocket League). Wherein casual games occur on servers like what we have now and barely effect your hive score (if at all), while Ranked games would happen on official servers and would have a much more dramatic effect on hive score. These two playmodes would inherently create the mentality that "Ranked matches matter more" and thus might keep players who aren't really interested in playing too seriously away. As far as what playercount a ranked server would have, that would be a great big can of worms. Comp is and always will be 6s, Some of the least casual pubs are 8s, anything above that starts to break down into a strictly casual atmosphere of grenade/onos spammage.
Small playerbase does put a big damper on the ability for this work too. But if something like this happened and the games people experienced were geniunely better quality, it might just catch on. Then we'd have to worry about the server Ops of current servers losing their playerbases.
Something like a year ago we had servers restricted with minimum hours of play. These kind of servers should be easier to seed than servers with minimum hive skill, and yet they were always empty. I know because I tried to seed them several times at that moment.
In my experience, people (specially rookies) don't know how to have fun while practicing in pregame, so when a server has only a few players they leave or they start some stupid 2vs3 matches
Yes, the solution seems to be having the option "Ranked Play" instead of "Play now", and all the current servers to be labeled as "casual/community play". Some variants of this have been proposed a few times in the past, but we don't have enough people for this to work.
I think our community servers are a factor. They definitely make it harder to seed a restricted server. Right now I always choose to go to one community server above all other servers if it has games going, but that is because I can't find games of the same quality elsewhere.
I still hold that the main thing preventing skill segregation or meaningful matchmaking is playercounts as I described in that thread I linked. Also, Nosgoth when I was playing a lot had 3000 daily average players compared to NS2's ~600 right now. I know you know that game, and how bad its matchmaking was. I think they are another great example of how far we are from any sort of skill segregation.
For NS2, we obviously would never even contemplate anything remotely like that.
About the seeding of restricted servers, you are absolutely right. This is why I'd appeal to the community leaders. Put a well-known name, in the NS2 community, in those server titles. I think that goes a long way, wrt to seeding the servers.
The problem with that is, you risk compromising the quality associated with that name - which is why I think it will be a challenge to convince these guys to do it.
So it was the 1st skill restricted server.
On the other hand i was always for 3 types of servers (Rookies. med skill, High skill)
Now after its kinda to late, people realize that new, med and high skill players need a place to play.
Its just more fun and challenging to play with and against players of nearly equal skill.
This attitude change is the source of all the current changes to the game.
But playerbase is to small now for an full segregation and i think the current solution is the best we have.
But I think it is still important to recognize, how you separate the players matters.
A full-fletched out matchmaking system, does require a really large playerbase, csgo or starcraft big - I grant you that. Although I will add, that there are things that you can improve on that model - like in overwatch, you don't sit in a lobby, you play in a sandbox while it matches you. -Not unlike seeding an empty server really..
But I don't agree, that all forms of segregation require the same sized playerbase. Restricted servers, shouldn't require nearly as big numbers as ranked matchmaking does. How matters.