Organised Play Systems - Natural Selection 2
System
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Organised Play Systems - Natural Selection 2
Natural Selection 2 is best played in an organised manner. Here at Unknown Worlds, we are working on a system to make finding that play much easier.
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But if you don't also provide at least ONE solid working instance of an actual structured play scheme which a) everyone can instantly understand and b) appeals to and satisfies the needs of the majority of players, I am afraid all the tool-building will be for naught.
People want matchmaking. Or league play. Or tournaments. Or ladders. Or SOMETHING. They don't want tools that let them build their own whatever-it-is-es. I mean, sure, some of us want those tools very badly and will be quite excited when you provide them. But most of the players just want to play, not design structured play structures.
imo, the focus of this should be on making more of the games fun. I think anyone who has played the game long enough knows that NS2 has the potential to deliver amazing experiences - the problem is that they occur too infrequently
what NS2 lacks is a quick way to just play a game that has a high chance of being fun. I think just playing a game from start to finish with somewhat fair teams would meet most players' definition of fun.
making fair teams isn't an easy task, but as long as they are close and everyone wins around half the time it should be a huge improvement over status quo. Also, you'll need 1 dedicated commander role for each game, especially at lower skill levels where not having an experienced commander = autoloss.
Well, they wouldn't have to design anything. If a player (e.g. WasabiOne) wanted to create a 12 team double elimination tournament, they would simply select that and it would be created for them. If Unknown Worlds wanted to create an 'official' league with a cash prize, we could go into the system and select 'league' from the options. If someone wants to play in a 6v6 scrim they select that.
Ideally people will have a wide selection of organized play to choose from. The point I made about it being a tool, not a league in and of itself, was that Unknown Worlds is not in the business of saying 'Here is the NS2 League. You will play in it.' We're in the business of making the game work in such a way that it supports the way you want to play. And if for example a BlindNS or ENSL or WasabiOne league ended up being more popular than an 'official' one then that is fantastic.
If this system is meant to try and turn some of the casual players to more competitive ones, then you are in for a big surprise when it doesn't happen.
Sabot? A device intended to guide a round of certain caliber through a barrel of larger caliber?
Is it gonna host all the data on your servers?
What would be awesome is an easy way to add a server you're currently playing on to your favorites. Haven't found a way to do this.
1. Disorganized Play
2. Unfair Teams
Problem 1 should go away pretty simple by having an organized match, just make sure the system has something like gathers, were people can join an organized match easily.
Problem 2 requires something like k/d ratio or point tracking, so players can see how strong the teams are before the game starts. For commanders this could be won/lost games.
So if you were to include a gather style system the creator of a gather match could then set requirements, like a minimum ratio of win/lost for commanders or that teams should not have a balance difference greater than x.
This would allow players that spontaneously want to play a game with other people on their skill levels to have a few rounds of instant fun. It will still allow others to play public, it will even improve the game for them because the stronger players will probably not be there anymore and thus not stack teams
<on topic> Looks very interesting, looking forward to seeing this implemented and in action!
To me, playing games should be social. Of course one can play alone, but my experience is that when you are doing it together with freinds, it increases the fun by alot. When I used to play BF3 on PS3, playing alone was never as fun as when I had my freinds and we got a squad together and went into that helicopter or tank or whatever. It was magical! And afterwards we could take a look at stats, comparing who was the better and who was the worse and all: it just built up how much fun we had with BF3.
Another example is SC2´s ladder system compared to "pubbing", ie. playing unranked games. I just loooooved laddering, and that feeling when your rating went up and you could feel your own improvement. You could feel that you got better. And when you got promoted from a league to another? That feeling is priceless.
An inbuilt "gather" system could do both of these! First of all, just imagine if you could boot up the game, invite your freinds to create a squad or whatever they call it, and then we press like "start ranked game". We team up with some random ppl, choose com and then we go. Easy as that. Afterwards we go to ns2stats (which is fixed by then, and only shows ELO for ranked games) and talk about the games, comparing stats.
Priceless.
Kidding, fingers crossed it turns out as awesome as it sounds.
I also don't see what is so wrong about rewarding the game's most dedicated followers, which I think competitive play has a much higher proportion of than the public-only playerbase, especially when the devs have made it perfectly clear they do not intend to ever balance the game towards comp play at the expense of public play.
The game is already in good shape in terms of performance and I'm sure the devs know what they are doing in terms of maximising gains in that direction while also improving other aspects of the game, like this. If done well, this could really improve the NS2 experience and that will mean more players, more money for UWE, and more improvement.
I strongly welcome this move by UWE - and I think the timing is absolutely spot on.
Another feature could be a filter in the server list to join a match that needs a "commander", or a "support role" (gorge / welder marine), maybe some sort of lobbies instead the ready room to filter those games that have not been started yet.
Something I've seen a lot of times are servers that empty after a map change because there's no commander, the people tend to go for another server. Maybe a vote option like "Request a commander" that'll highlight this server to "commander players"*
* - This will need profiles as you stated, where you can mark what kind of roles you play (commander, alien, marine, support, attack, etc.). But it'll be better if you compute it based on the player games (how often it plays as commander, buy welders, go gorge, etc.).
Then you can have a higlighted part of the server list where you can see somthing like:
Server Name - 14/16 players (6A | 8M ) - Need an alien commander
If it doesn't do that, it should. If it can't do that, then something else needs to.
This. If Sabot can do this it would be awesome. It would go a long way to make competitive games easier to get into for new players. Hopefully this can increase the overall number of NS2 players as well!
1) It's hard(er) to find the ENSL page.
2) It feels like a bigger step than just pressing a "play ranked game" button ingame would.
3) There is no good way to gauge skill or balance teams in the ENSL gathers (although it usually turns out pretty good anyways)
About the system:
I think you should only start with one format(6v6 for example)for quick scrims and on top of that maybe add a few more option like ladder play and sheduled matches.
The problem with multiple formats for quick scrims would be that the players would be too splited and finding match would be too hard(it's exactly what happened when ESL VS tryed to introduce 8v8 and 3v3 formats in bf3).
I think you are making an excellent point that needs to be considered. Often you want to play with friends but your group size is smaller than whatever teamsize is appropriate for a game. You cannot join the same team on pub because of team balancing, which sucks because of course you want to play together with your friends. So the above diagram should be extended to incorporate another entity "party" between player and team. The system should support parties to join up to teams for games/matches.
The use case could be something like:
- 3 friends create a party to play 6v6 gather.
- the system finds either another 3 player party, or a 2 player party and a single player or 3 single players and matches them to a team.
- This team can then find another 6 player team to play against.
I also FULLY support this move, think this will be a fantastic addition to NS2 and really make this an even bigger and more competitive game. Hopefully also making it more accessible to a lot of new people as well. I know I got stomped a lot (especially as alien) when I first started this game and I think this will make it easier for players to learn when they first start.
SABOT-Seriously About Building On Teamwork