NS2 as an esport
meb3
Join Date: 2011-06-23 Member: 106078Members
Join Date: 2011-06-23 Member: 106078Members
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NS2 runs pretty crap all around, but it is looking to be the only FPS-game with at least some competitive-potential for quite some time. Anyway, +1 for the first-person spectating naturally. The SourceTV thing shan't be a problem for that much longer either, *wink wink*...
Hi meb.
- Massive FPS improvements
- Improved hitreg and no more input lag
- Overall fluid feel and less chopiness
- Large server improvements so they can actually handle the game
Once that is done, you don't have to play like a deaf, blinded man half beaten to death with both his arms died to the back, so individual skill actually has a decent envrionment. Then tuneing and finetuning of the game mechanics and generally overall balance of the game.
Oh yeah, and something SourceTV like would be very useful.
In addition matchmaking might help aswell.
Pre-release talk means nothing. Anyone who has actually played ns2 for more than a little while knows it has a long way to go before it is really a viable competitive game. Of course the performance needs to be improved, but there are also many problems with the gameplay. Many of the mechanics lack depth and are more about luck than skill. The game also has many balance problems which I doubt will all be addressed by 1.0
I don't really understand the direction the devs are going in either. It certainly doesn't seem like they are focused on building a competitive game. I guess we will see a pro mod that the competitive community adopts while the rest play vanilla. I'd rather it didn't go that route though as it tends to isolate the community and make it less accessible to new players.
yes and I'm hoping to see them play a bigger role some time in the future :/
One is already going in with NS2 (and will continue to after release), and the other requires immense media exposure and sponsorship interest (which you simply can't consider until this game is in a much better state).
Do you want NS2 to be featured at an MLG event with thousands of people paying to watch it, or do you want bracketed tournaments with clans? Or both?
Yeah, I enjoy playing NS2 and I really want it to be successful, but the way it's going at the moment, I severely doubt it's chances as a successful competitive game not including any mods that may stem from it.
But the spectator interface needs to be excellent so that the casters can keep an eye on the broad game state easily while play-by-playing the action.
You bet your arse it is. Not touching on how video-recorders have a tendency to kill your FPS, you're stuck viewing a single perspective, on a pre-determined resolution\graphics-setting, with prebaked commentary. It just sucks (unless early-morning Blind is doing the commentary).
This is the model that is currently working for esports. sc2, dota2, lol, d3 etc.. even games *with* sourcetv don't really use it now.
If you want to get 4K+ viewers then you need a fairly large network of sourcetv proxies and the infrastructure to go with them? Even in the days of ns1 when esports was in its infancy and ns was comparatively small, it was a nightmare getting good quality hltv proxies.
This is the model that is currently working for esports. sc2, dota2, lol, d3 etc.. even games *with* sourcetv don't really use it now.
If you want to get 4K+ viewers then you need a fairly large network of sourcetv proxies and the infrastructure to go with them? Even in the days of ns1 when esports was in its infancy and ns was comparatively small, it was a nightmare getting good quality hltv proxies.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
(A)RTS games are inherently different from FPS games when it comes to casting. ARTS generally lend themselves towards watching a caster/commentator's stream, because they know more about the game than you do and they know the best perspectives and where all the action is. In FPS games, it's typically player preference who they want to watch or how they want to watch it. I'm not sure exactly what the right model is for NS2 due to its genre-hopping, but I can certainly see situations where SourceTV for NS2 is useful.
Both the halo series of games and cod:mw have been successful as tournaments with a caster perspective.
Even putting that aside, lets look at the logistics.
SourceTV currently has a maximum client limit of 255. The default value is 128.
So say you want to host an event for 1000 people. How do you do it? Do you advertise 4 sourcetv ips and let people work it out for themselves? How do you manage people constantly jumping between sourcetvs because of the slow queue fallacy? Say you want to go higher to 10,000 spectators for a single event ( not overly ambitious IMO ).. how do you organise this? You would basically have to re-invent the wheel and provide a very scalable and robust solution just to give a few hardcore fans the ability to provide a better perspective than the casters. And I for one always hated having to chase around what the casters were talking about. You'd be in triad watching a fade delay a push while the casters were giving details on a skulk rush on ms.
Thanks to the bad performance and hitreg / lag compensation problems theres a lot more luck and randomness involved, than skill.
Unless everyone is playing on a heavily overclocked, recent intel CPU. And even then its bad, since the serverside performance is horrible.
Why does Onos have to be removed for NS2 to become an e-sport?
I thought becoming an e-sport simply meant that ....
a) an existing competitive scene has evolved.
b) someone (NVidia? Dell? Intel?) was willing to pony up for a purse and/or other awards (PC, Video Card).
Starcraft
MOBA's have entirely different heroes on each team.
<!--quoteo(post=1935405:date=May 11 2012, 10:36 PM:name=player)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (player @ May 11 2012, 10:36 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1935405"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->You bet your arse it is. Not touching on how video-recorders have a tendency to kill your FPS.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
We should be talking about casts in NS2 in terms of when performance has improved and first person spectating is available.
<!--quoteo(post=1935405:date=May 11 2012, 10:36 PM:name=player)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (player @ May 11 2012, 10:36 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1935405"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->you're stuck viewing a single perspective, on a pre-determined resolution\graphics-setting, with prebaked commentary. It just sucks (unless early-morning Blind is doing the commentary).<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well I think the vast majority of the audience, if NS2 were to become a legitimate E-Sport with spectators ranging into the thousands, would rather all these things being handled for them, and consider commentators a positive feature.
So say you want to host an event for 1000 people. How do you do it? Do you advertise 4 sourcetv ips and let people work it out for themselves? How do you manage people constantly jumping between sourcetvs because of the slow queue fallacy? Say you want to go higher to 10,000 spectators for a single event ( not overly ambitious IMO ).. how do you organise this? You would basically have to re-invent the wheel and provide a very scalable and robust solution just to give a few hardcore fans the ability to provide a better perspective than the casters. And I for one always hated having to chase around what the casters were talking about. You'd be in triad watching a fade delay a push while the casters were giving details on a skulk rush on ms.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You're talking about SourceTV as if it somehow excludes commentated video-broadcasts, but it really doesn't. Instead of taking up a slot in the live-server, he'll just do his thing from one of the TV-proxys (or a recorded demo). The lack of SourceTV however does mean the casting-market is monopolised heavily by the more prominent community-members, which really won't benefit the quality of offerings. As well as just outright missing matches if a caster doesn't happen to be around.
Also, I think we're talking about 2 different things at the same time, namely whole-game demos, and servers that recieve live-streamed demos. The former is absolutely essential, as without it we get that monopoly I mentioned. The latter isn't strictly required, but I feel would really add value to the scene (eg. being able to spectate a match live for yourself, on your client, with maximum resolution etcetc).
Those whole-game demos I'll put out very soon indeed. The SourceTV shouldn't be very difficult to build on top of that, as it is essentially a whole-game demo, only streamed to another server in realtime. There are of course some questions regarding the logitistics, eg. how NS2 is able to handle large volumes of clients (passed what was originally intended), but I feel something like 64 should at least be possible, from there I can use tricks to build a very large relay-network (by that I mean clients on a dozen proxies are able to chat with each other while being on seperate proxies).
Why does Onos have to be removed for NS2 to become an e-sport?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
no skill needed to onos so big joke competitively
also puzl in several of those games you listed as examples have sourcetv equivalents. like in dota 2 you can easily spectate matches going on and have control over who or what you watch
the last thing i want to watch is poor camera work by some amateur that thinks 3rd person spectating views are more fun to watch than a FIRST PERSON PERSPECTIVE in a FIRST PERSON GAME
it's sort of like thinking about starcraft if it had no replay system. how would you improve if you can't analyze matches in a controlled way?
This is the model that is currently working for esports. sc2, dota2, lol, d3 etc.. even games *with* sourcetv don't really use it now.
If you want to get 4K+ viewers then you need a fairly large network of sourcetv proxies and the infrastructure to go with them? Even in the days of ns1 when esports was in its infancy and ns was comparatively small, it was a nightmare getting good quality hltv proxies.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't see why you can't have both a twitch.tv-style cast AND ingame mass-spectating like sourcetv. That way you can appeal to both the casual viewer and the "niche" group of experienced viewers. I personally get nothing out of watching ns2 casts (no offense to the casters, I appreciate the effort they put in) because my knowledge of the game far exceeds theirs and it's a constant frustration to have to follow their point of view, which is often not centered on the most important parts of the gameplay.
NS1 never had a large enough spectator base to make lack of proxies a problem (not to mention that CS 1.6 regularly had 10000+ spectator games HLTVed without problems) and it doesn't look like NS2 will be any bigger in that regard.
Some way to record games is an absolute minimum. First person recordings are also required. No first person spectating makes it impossible to detect many kinds of cheats.