Encouragement comes from the most curious of places
Soul_Rider
Mod Bean Join Date: 2004-06-19 Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Mod Bean Join Date: 2004-06-19 Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
I loaded up NS2 today for a game, and much to my delight found this server in the browser:
<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v260/Soulrefuge/2012-02-09_00001.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Now this got me really excited and really boosted up my belief in NS2 as a successful retail product. For those of you unaware, Multiplay is the largest server provider in UK for games servers and also hosts the i## series of LANS, the biggest in the UK hosting 2000 people.
To see such a community getting involved with NS2, really made happy. Of course the server performance dissapears with 27 or 28 players, but under that number the server is really stable.
This is a big deal in my mind and really positive for the future outlook of NS2 :)
<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v260/Soulrefuge/2012-02-09_00001.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Now this got me really excited and really boosted up my belief in NS2 as a successful retail product. For those of you unaware, Multiplay is the largest server provider in UK for games servers and also hosts the i## series of LANS, the biggest in the UK hosting 2000 people.
To see such a community getting involved with NS2, really made happy. Of course the server performance dissapears with 27 or 28 players, but under that number the server is really stable.
This is a big deal in my mind and really positive for the future outlook of NS2 :)
Comments
It's been my experience in every FPS I've played that 32 person servers are unplayable for many reasons:
- poor performance (TF2 for instance scales terribly past 24 players, the developers have admitted it)
- lack of coordination, overemphasis on random loner play (which is especially annoying when you have things like infantry portals and eggs that shouldn't be going to waste over and over)
- map design (TF2 is the only game I've played that *really* has maps made to be played with lots of people, and they're the trashiest most one-sided maps in the game)
Seeing this game grow is great, but I never EVER want to join an NS2 server and watch as it downloads haha.wav to my computer. I don't want to see a bunch of ugly text flying all over my screen from serverside mods that let me roll dice or whatever.
Was it playable? No!
Was it fun? Hell yeah!
The map we played was Tram and it was big enough for atleast 29 players. Around 30% of the players are dead all the time and each side has a com so only 10 alive players were on the map.
Most fight were loading/repair and tram tunnel.
So atleast Tram plays well on big games and mineshaft should also and the new map comming out is even bigger than mineshaft.
Also some costum maps and reworks are playable on 16vs16 as we saw on NS1.
But something I don't want to read anymore is:
<b>10</b> Aliens hatch before you...dang. Almost waited 2min to hatch.
The reason for this is simple: it's too difficult to get 2 groups of 16 people to meet regularly and play a game, because different people have different lives (and you need backup players too).
When games start gearing themselves more toward gigantic public games, competitive play suffers. TF2 is the absolute perfect example of this - in almost the entire life of the game, the developers have not added a map that is suitable for 6v6 competitive play. The majority of the competitive map pool has been custom maps for quite a while now, with Valve occasionally buying them up (like freight, gullywash, fastlane..) and stuffing them in the game, before going back to promoting game modes like Payload.
Starcraft 2 has a similar problem going on - the ladder map pool has never been 'perfect' for competitive (or even semi-competitive) players since release, since they deliberately make sure to always include a small rush map. The stated reasoning is that they want to make the game fun for all types of players, but the end result is that pro players have one less practice venue. They start developing their own map pool when they see that the developers can't do it. Which is exactly what has happened - the majority of the maps being played in the GSL this season were custom made and do not appear on the 1v1 ladder.
So basically what I'm saying is it's a good idea to identify a target audience for this game, and make sure it isn't the one that makes playing in pubs unbearable :)
We really want server operators to be able to run the game: the number of available servers has definitely been nearing capacity over the last week (we will be porting the server to linux but that's still a little ways off).
But yeah we're not expecting many 16v16 servers, it's just too nuts for our game.
Fantastic job on Gorilla update, the game is coming along brilliant.
Really? Not played many FPS games then? lol :) A gentle rib, please don't take offence :)
I spent years playing Battlefield 2, fighting it out on 64 player maps. You know what, they worked great.
I used to host game servers too, our biggest being a 42-man Zombie Mod server. It ran fine at 42, but just would not go up to 50.
Just saying there are lots of games out there able to easily handle 32 players and more, but I appreciate NS2 is not designed to handle that many and more, but as with any game, when you have 32 players in the same server it is an amazing experience.
The server issues were no different to a normal server, when there's too much DI it goes to pants, other than that its playable, if not perfect :)
My point was not about the size of the server, although it really is an amazing game playing NS with 32 people, I highly recommend it! Just purely that one of the largest GSP's in the world (I read their website) is actively looking into supporting NS2. For me that is the biggest boost, but you've got to try 32man NS2, once you do, you'll never go back :)
----EDIT-----
One 'general' thing I have noticed is that your average pub gamer likes playing with as many people as possible. This is so they increase their chances of action and doing what most of them play games for, to kill things. This is your joe average gamer, the people NS2 will need to attract to really make it a financial success. Organised players have a much higher skill level and ability, so consequently on the same size map that would be say 16vs 16 on a general pub, in organised play, that same map could probably be covered by an 8v8 team. The number of players a map supports can generally be halved, maybe need just over half, and still be played well with skilled, organised players.
On the actual "Multiplay :: 24p test" server is only running tram as standard map which seems a bit to small for 24 players.
They should change it to mineshaft.
And btw 32 player games in ns1 were the most fun and enjoying for me in public.And also quiet balanced cause the players knew how to play this game after so many years.