Theres a lot of bad logic/facts here, and its really not worth going over it all. Overall point is NS2 is a niche game and as such always will be, no matter how much the gameplay is changed. The fact that many things were changed to make a more 'appealing' game have hurt the replayability of NS2, and without changes will result in more playerloss.
Beyond that I would be careful saying that NS1 vets are just negative and alienate themselves - many NS1 vets remember quite vivedly the mistakes made in the past, and want to prevent them from being repeated. Its a shame that advice was largely ignored/dismissed as people being nostalgic. Many points of reference to NS1 where not with regards to making mechanics work just like NS1, but more to point out changes that were made in NS1's lifetime that were similar, and WHY certain things worked better. It amazes me to see mechanics tried in NS1 that were deemed unplayable re-tried in NS2, some of which survived through release. While the tone and wording of posts may have suffered with time, many people have no idea how long some people have been contributing, nor how long they have had to deal with posting on these troll forums.
Theres a lot of bad logic/facts here, and its really not worth going over it all. Overall point is NS2 is a niche game and as such always will be, no matter how much the gameplay is changed. The fact that many things were changed to make a more 'appealing' game have hurt the replayability of NS2, and without changes will result in more playerloss.
Beyond that I would be careful saying that NS1 vets are just negative and alienate themselves - many NS1 vets remember quite vivedly the mistakes made in the past, and want to prevent them from being repeated. Its a shame that advice was largely ignored/dismissed as people being nostalgic. Many points of reference to NS1 where not with regards to making mechanics work just like NS1, but more to point out changes that were made in NS1's lifetime that were similar, and WHY certain things worked better. It amazes me to see mechanics tried in NS1 that were deemed unplayable re-tried in NS2, some of which survived through release. While the tone and wording of posts may have suffered with time, many people have no idea how long some people have been contributing, nor how long they have had to deal with posting on these troll forums.
I want to make it clear that its not every NS1 vet that has been negative/counterproductive. Quite a few have made very valuable contributions from their NS1 experience that have led to positive changes; the changes to the fade and the current pseudo turret factory setup for sentries are two such examples. However, there seems to be a regular theme of ignoring that many of the changes were made to address the very real problems that existed in NS1. The implementation may have fallen short in NS2, but reverting to the NS1 solution would have led to the same NS1-like problems. As long as UWE continues to develop NS2, many of these issues can and will likely be addressed. The regular NS1 vet harumphing that occurs on these forums has done more harm than help towards fixing these issues imo.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited May 2013
My guess is, judging from the response on my friendslist of people who tried and don't play anymore or can't play... Performance is the number one complaint, not everyone is running super optimized rigs on older hardware or souped up rigs on huge overclocks, both of which are basically need to get to 40-80+FPS and even then it's hard to maintain that (~40FPS) on older hardware (above system requirements)
Second is the teamplay aspect, I personally love teamplay, but judging from the more popular games, which tend to cater to the "one man army shows" in a deathmatch style, which tend to bore me or I see them as "jump in shoot some stuff and jump out" type of games. Teamplay is not a selling point to get a huge amount of players in, especially for complex games and large scale combat (12v12). And the fact that at that player count the NS2 gameplay starts to break down partially. Larger servers are usually more popular, due to individual skills becoming less important and as such is less intimidating to new players... I've noticed way to many players that simply do not have the patience to deal with other players on their team, which is basic 101 working together as a team. They tend to run off on their own and die, complain and either adapt or in most cases quit and never look back.
That and aliens are considered underpowered when from their perspective they die in mere instants, blaming it on the game, while they are floor Skulking and moving in straight lines. I've always played games for fun and the fun I get from games comes from learning to become better at a game. From what I've noticed this is not a mainstream mindset, which is a shame
And honestly, besides fixing the larger playercount to become viable (mostly spawn issues and lifeform explosions). I honestly have no idea how to fix a niche teamplay based game like this to get those people in here. More game modes which are easier to just step into and blast away, could potentially fracture the community (classic vs combat). And most nonclassic players tend to prefer their gametype, ergo leaving the server when classic mode comes up, because its too much of a teamplay dependent mode or too complex. It's quite a can of worms and conundrum at that...
actually i cant understand the performance cries. on my pc with a 3 year old graphics card i get 70+fps wich is more then i need and exactly what i expect. i can twist it how i want, i cant call that bad performance. and that you more or less need a 3+ghz cpu for a game that was releast late 2012 isnt realy ns2 exlusive if you think about it.
a ranking/stat tracking system might help with playerloss and should be fairly easy to implement and opens up the possibility for matchmaking based on skill.
bots allready exist, so a tutorial commander mode is absolutley doable. and combatmod takes care of the rest. now all the things listed above should preverably come with the game, because especialy a new player wont go and download 3-5 mods to learn the basics of the game.
I still think part of the main reason NS2 isn't very popular is the fact that everyone insisted on making 24+ player servers... I haven't been able to find a decent public server in north america in a long time. It's just 24-32 man servers with room fulls of whips and 90 minute stalemates.
Hardcap it back down to 16 players per server plz? I think it would honestly help a lot xD
I still think part of the main reason NS2 isn't very popular is the fact that everyone insisted on making 24+ player servers... I haven't been able to find a decent public server in north america in a long time. It's just 24-32 man servers with room fulls of whips and 90 minute stalemates.
Hardcap it back down to 16 players per server plz? I think it would honestly help a lot xD
Yes this is another major issue. Last night I was playing on a 24 player server and as usual marines utterly dominated each and every game. Server operator was present but didn't really seem to care that this was the usual progression of games on his server. Server is popular much to my lament but what is worse is that it tends to get sub 30 tick rates as you approach mid game. So not only do new players get a substandard ns2 experience in terms of game play but they also must play with poor performance which they may attribute to the game being un-optimised (which it is to a degree, but 10 - 25 ticks don't help). Recently a new server has appeared with another catchy noob drawing name, it is 20 player so in terms of player spam it is less servere, but has even worse performance than the one I mentioned above. Australia may have 100 or more players on a given night, and 68 (20 terrible ticks + 24 low ticks + 24 perfect ticks) of them are occupied in low tickrate and/or unbalanced marine stomp games. Not a good way to market the game and UWE has a duty to ensure that the average server (ie rental servers) can run the game up to standard. If not then you might as well unlock it to 64 and wipe your hands of responsibility.
I suggest lowering the max player count that server operators can set to 18/20. This will reduce the rate of 24 player servers appearing that are hosted by rental companies on non-overclocked hardware. Other operators that run overclocked servers and have access to the files will be able to set 24 players if they choose by modding it themselves.
I'm sure many people wonder why their favourite independent bands aren't more popular when idiots like one direction are selling out stadia all over the world. Why is Glee more popular then Breaking Bad?
To me, these are the same phenomena - depth and complexity do not capture a mass market
Along with the obvious performance issues some people get, I have to say a big contributer is likely some of the toxic players you meet in-game. Now, I have the game pretty much down in theory, although not in practice, and I find myself completely turned off by these players. I can just imagine how much worse this would be for someone who is still struggling with the game mechanics to have a team-mate chew you out over every and any mistake.
Last night the majority of the rounds I played erupted into arguments a few minutes in (not with me. I just shut up and didn't get involved). Between Commanders bitching and people back-seat driving I felt almost ready to hang up the game myself.
Along with the obvious performance issues some people get, I have to say a big contributer is likely some of the toxic players you meet in-game. Now, I have the game pretty much down in theory, although not in practice, and I find myself completely turned off by these players. I can just imagine how much worse this would be for someone who is still struggling with the game mechanics to have a team-mate chew you out over every and any mistake.
Last night the majority of the rounds I played erupted into arguments a few minutes in (not with me. I just shut up and didn't get involved). Between Commanders bitching and people back-seat driving I felt almost ready to hang up the game myself.
This would be more easily fixed by hardcapping the player count to 16 and spreading people across more servers. I mean FFS, in NA there are often only ~150 people online at night, and 64 of them will be on the two 32 player servers, while the rest will be on 24 player servers. This means that if a server is being trolled, or is full of dbags, you often don't have any option to play somewhere else.
My guess is, judging from the response on my friendslist of people who tried and don't play anymore or can't play... Performance is the number one complaint, not everyone is running super optimized rigs on older hardware or souped up rigs on huge overclocks, both of which are basically need to get to 40-80+FPS and even then it's hard to maintain that (~40FPS) on older hardware (above system requirements)
Second is the teamplay aspect, I personally love teamplay, but judging from the more popular games, which tend to cater to the "one man army shows" in a deathmatch style, which tend to bore me or I see them as "jump in shoot some stuff and jump out" type of games. Teamplay is not a selling point to get a huge amount of players in, especially for complex games and large scale combat (12v12). And the fact that at that player count the NS2 gameplay starts to break down partially. Larger servers are usually more popular, due to individual skills becoming less important and as such is less intimidating to new players... I've noticed way to many players that simply do not have the patience to deal with other players on their team, which is basic 101 working together as a team. They tend to run off on their own and die, complain and either adapt or in most cases quit and never look back.
That and aliens are considered underpowered when from their perspective they die in mere instants, blaming it on the game, while they are floor Skulking and moving in straight lines. I've always played games for fun and the fun I get from games comes from learning to become better at a game. From what I've noticed this is not a mainstream mindset, which is a shame
And honestly, besides fixing the larger playercount to become viable (mostly spawn issues and lifeform explosions). I honestly have no idea how to fix a niche teamplay based game like this to get those people in here. More game modes which are easier to just step into and blast away, could potentially fracture the community (classic vs combat). And most nonclassic players tend to prefer their gametype, ergo leaving the server when classic mode comes up, because its too much of a teamplay dependent mode or too complex. It's quite a can of worms and conundrum at that...
Performance, yeah thats a factor.
Dota is super popular atm, and that game requires a huge amount of teamwork. Just getting a couple players to go support is a miracle in gaming. The difference is, in dota 2, you all start the round together, and you all end it together. pubs dont feel like pubs in tf2 or ns2. People are more willing to make sacrifices, or control themselves from going for risky/stupid plays in order to win. And overall, the game is more enjoyable. Same basic principle applies to CS:GO when you play matchmaking or pubs. Apparently UWE is working on this type of system, but i feel like it will be hard to get enough players to make it actually work.
Dota is super popular atm, and that game requires a huge amount of teamwork. Just getting a couple players to go support is a miracle in gaming. The difference is, in dota 2, you all start the round together, and you all end it together. pubs dont feel like pubs in tf2 or ns2. People are more willing to make sacrifices, or control themselves from going for risky/stupid plays in order to win. And overall, the game is more enjoyable. Same basic principle applies to CS:GO when you play matchmaking or pubs. Apparently UWE is working on this type of system, but i feel like it will be hard to get enough players to make it actually work.
In my opinion, DotA 2 is a complete lie.
The game is inherently imbalanced at almost every level. They even went so far as to specifically name overpowered heroes as "carry", and the players actually accept this. The game is entirely balanced around the competitive scene, in which, I must admit, it is very well balanced (thanks to the players, not the developers). However, at the average skill level which 99% of all players play at, the game balance is absolutely atrocious. The outcome of basically every single game is determined by hero selection, not player skill, which is the definition of badly balanced game.
Valve remedy this by creating a celebrity player base, mainly through the massive tournament prizes they invest in (who knew the name of any DotA player before that first huge prize sum was won?). Its much like proffesional football or the like. 90% of die hard fans have never kicked a ball in their life, but they know all the top players by name, and exactly how much they get paid.
- Getting too few servers (I never got more than 20 servers with "72 performance" and "94 max ping" and "no-rookie" filter; while I see "500..." on the upper-right corner when looking for server). I feel they didn't strengthen far enough their server protocol (something's wrong; I get a shitload of servers on other games, as my friends do; but not for NS2). Today I never saw more than 4-6 I believe. And I played more than 7 hours easily. And I switched servers. I used few months ago to see UnknownWorlds (or UnknownEntertainment or something like that; there was like 20) official servers. I only saw one like a few day ago...
- Performance. Low fps; [s][and the fact that they put a distance max when having alien's vision is kinda raging; i.e. being a lerk in Crevice when marines get out of Flight Control and not seeing them... I feel like their engine limit the calculated polygones by distance, rather than like HL1 does (dunno about HL2; VisBlock if I'm right ? ; i.e. you look at a visblock; since you see that block everything contained will be loaded) ).][/s]me bitching
I do believe the fact to have a new engine for infestation is a good plus; but I'm unsure of that when you get less than half/the third of the FPS of other "normal" games.
- Mouth-2-ears game; not a game for noob-faggot; they need to communicate.
- It's non-noob friendly. You start. You're lost. You quit.
- Not started by a big title (Ubisoft, Valve, etc ==> no big announcement; Unknown Worlds is not really famous...).
- It evolves a lot. Big changes from a change to another. Kinda if it was an alpha. However I get that Unknown Worlds is making his product evolve, rather than throwing one garbage game out in the wild, asking $60, then repeating the same thing. I think this might discourage casual gamers .
- Depth. Depth ==> casual gamers are going "D:" .
- On the scripting side, something coded for NS2 isn't HL2 compatible, while something coded for HL1 would be compatible for NS1. So there is a lot of scripts to redo; a big part of the "past" community code is to redo. But it's part of being a new engine.
Along with the obvious performance issues some people get, I have to say a big contributer is likely some of the toxic players you meet in-game. Now, I have the game pretty much down in theory, although not in practice, and I find myself completely turned off by these players. I can just imagine how much worse this would be for someone who is still struggling with the game mechanics to have a team-mate chew you out over every and any mistake.
Last night the majority of the rounds I played erupted into arguments a few minutes in (not with me. I just shut up and didn't get involved). Between Commanders bitching and people back-seat driving I felt almost ready to hang up the game myself.
From my experience, in comparison to more casual games that cater to larger audiences, NS2 has a dreamlike community.
Jesus your a moron, I CBF even explaining how incorrect your opinion of DOTA is because its obvious your experience of the game is at the most basic level. This is further reinforced by your views on NS2.
Yes.. there is a conspiracy by Valve to trick people into thinking Dota is balanced by creating dota celebrities at the pro level. Believe it or not, but the famous people in dota 2 WERE famous in Dota 1 as well.
Carries being overpowered? LOL, carries only become useful if the team members who are not playing carries do their job. Without support / initators / every other role in the game the carry is simply stun locked / locked out of farm / ganked to death.
fyi: The most skilled players play support / ganking roles
Jesus your a moron, I CBF even explaining how incorrect your opinion of DOTA is because its obvious your experience of the game is at the most basic level. This is further reinforced by your views on NS2.
Yes.. there is a conspiracy by Valve to trick people into thinking Dota is balanced by creating dota celebrities at the pro level. Believe it or not, but the famous people in dota 2 WERE famous in Dota 1 as well.
Carries being overpowered? LOL, carries only become useful if the team members who are not playing carries do their job. Without support / initators / every other role in the game the carry is simply stun locked / locked out of farm / ganked to death.
fyi: The most skilled players play support / ganking roles
**/Loosing brain cells responding to you**
You just supported your entire premise of the game being balanced by referencing players of the highest level. This, after I clearly stated that the game is balanced only for players of the highest level, in which case it is balanced extremely well (which I said).
Yes, I am clearly the stupid one here.
I can only assume that you enjoy playing Dota 2, and enjoy playing with your friends and pubstomping. You no doubt think that there is a great deal of skill involved, and who am I to tell you otherwise.
However, please do not be ignorant to your bias. I have never played DotA at a high skill level, but I have played it for about 8 years, and have called it on its bullshit every step of the way. Yes, it is very fun, and top tier players exploit the meta game to an amazing degree to make for very entertaining and complex games, but it is most certainly not anywhere close to balanced for the vast majority of players.
Performance sucks, people are arguing over DOTA, "fixing" NS1 things doesn't make a good game, player count dropping, team play is a detriment and not a positive, individual skill is not rewarded, the game is too complex, the main mode of play is poor for new comers.
Dota is super popular atm, and that game requires a huge amount of teamwork. Just getting a couple players to go support is a miracle in gaming. The difference is, in dota 2, you all start the round together, and you all end it together. pubs dont feel like pubs in tf2 or ns2. People are more willing to make sacrifices, or control themselves from going for risky/stupid plays in order to win. And overall, the game is more enjoyable. Same basic principle applies to CS:GO when you play matchmaking or pubs. Apparently UWE is working on this type of system, but i feel like it will be hard to get enough players to make it actually work.
In my opinion, DotA 2 is a complete lie.
The game is inherently imbalanced at almost every level. They even went so far as to specifically name overpowered heroes as "carry", and the players actually accept this. The game is entirely balanced around the competitive scene, in which, I must admit, it is very well balanced (thanks to the players, not the developers). However, at the average skill level which 99% of all players play at, the game balance is absolutely atrocious. The outcome of basically every single game is determined by hero selection, not player skill, which is the definition of badly balanced game.
Valve remedy this by creating a celebrity player base, mainly through the massive tournament prizes they invest in (who knew the name of any DotA player before that first huge prize sum was won?). Its much like proffesional football or the like. 90% of die hard fans have never kicked a ball in their life, but they know all the top players by name, and exactly how much they get paid.
Spin2Win?
Having never played or had aspirations to play a moba I've quite wondered why they seem to be so popular. It always seemed like hybrid between a MMORPG and fighter game, which are notorious for having op/up characters/classes and yet still seem to maintain their popularity. I suppose getting good at the 'weaker' characters/classes feels like more of an accomplishment.
no one wants to play in 30fps.. a singleplayer game can be played in 30fps but not a multiplayer one. worst thing is even a high end machine can't cut it. and only few can afford an insane rig.
Dota is super popular atm, and that game requires a huge amount of teamwork. Just getting a couple players to go support is a miracle in gaming. The difference is, in dota 2, you all start the round together, and you all end it together. pubs dont feel like pubs in tf2 or ns2. People are more willing to make sacrifices, or control themselves from going for risky/stupid plays in order to win. And overall, the game is more enjoyable. Same basic principle applies to CS:GO when you play matchmaking or pubs. Apparently UWE is working on this type of system, but i feel like it will be hard to get enough players to make it actually work.
In my opinion, DotA 2 is a complete lie.
The game is inherently imbalanced at almost every level. They even went so far as to specifically name overpowered heroes as "carry", and the players actually accept this. The game is entirely balanced around the competitive scene, in which, I must admit, it is very well balanced (thanks to the players, not the developers). However, at the average skill level which 99% of all players play at, the game balance is absolutely atrocious. The outcome of basically every single game is determined by hero selection, not player skill, which is the definition of badly balanced game.
Valve remedy this by creating a celebrity player base, mainly through the massive tournament prizes they invest in (who knew the name of any DotA player before that first huge prize sum was won?). Its much like proffesional football or the like. 90% of die hard fans have never kicked a ball in their life, but they know all the top players by name, and exactly how much they get paid.
Spin2Win?
Having never played or had aspirations to play a moba I've quite wondered why they seem to be so popular. It always seemed like hybrid between a MMORPG and fighter game, which are notorious for having op/up characters/classes and yet still seem to maintain their popularity. I suppose getting good at the 'weaker' characters/classes feels like more of an accomplishment.
I think you're just out of the target audience. I remember you talking about the conflict in gorge role in NS1 (correct me if I remember wrong) how it had spit, healspray and bbomb and you didn't like the conflict of them doing such different things and making the gorge role kind of a mess.
For me the gorge role was enjoyable exactly because I had to balance my adren and actions between 3 completely different things, constantly reading the game and trying to pick the right action from a vast variety of possibilities. I enjoy the situational mess and chaos and I feel really good when I think I made the right decisions during 20 second rush where I ended up blowing mines, doing structural damage, picking up one marine with spit and doing some healing.
A lot of the time the same goes for something like Dota 2. It's a really chaotic situational game. A lot of the fun is in learning to read the situation, to recognize the important factors, to control them and so on. In many ways it's a really frustrating and fragile game, but by ignoring all those vulnerable parts of the game, it is able also provide very satisfying, deep and complex interactions when things are running nicely. All in all it's a high investment, high return game.
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As for the carry-support stuff and role frustration and such, I think it's comparable to something like Euro Football. Someone has to play defence and someone has to be the goalie. You can't have 11 forwards on the field and everyone can't be the top goal scorer. It can be frustrating to play defence if your forwards suck and so on. Meanwhile you can still be an amazing defenceman, have people who appreciate your play, you can have amazing interactions with midfielders and forwards and sometimes you can even score a goal or two even if it's not your main duty. The game expects that you've got some 'sacrificial lambs' on your team who don't get to do the flashier stuff, but it uses those sacrifices to make the whole game a lot more meaningful and diverse.
Meanwhile most modern games try create a setup where everyone gets to make those big goal scoring plays all the time. When you got everyone doing that all the time, the game just ends up being flat and even scoring goals loses its significance.
The whole 11 forwards kind of thing somewhat relates to how NS2 has shotguns and lifeforms everywhere and how that can be detrimental to the game even if everyone has more toys, but I think that has been talked about pretty extensively already.
Wow, this thread is incredibly long for a simple answer: hardly anyone can run this game smoothly. We saw the same thing with Crysis when it first came out.
Performance is the issue - I can bet on this. That is the number one reason why people quit the game. I might aswell give up if I won't be able to have a minimum of 50 fps in 6 months or less, but as I understand - that is not and will not be possible because of the language this game was programmed on?
If only UWE could tell us if we can even expect huge performance improvements... do I keep playing and tolerate the 25-30 fps I get in combat very often? Or do I quit playing this because I won't ever have 40-50 fps minimum in combat?
Performance is the issue - I can bet on this. That is the number one reason why people quit the game. I might aswell give up if I won't be able to have a minimum of 50 fps in 6 months or less, but as I understand - that is not and will not be possible because of the language this game was programmed on?
If only UWE could tell us if we can even expect huge performance improvements... do I keep playing and tolerate the 25-30 fps I get in combat very often? Or do I quit playing this because I won't ever have 40-50 fps minimum in combat?
During RedDogs interview with Brian, they were talking about an implementation of LuaJIT. However explained that it isn't as simple as just plugging it in and getting a nice speed increase. He went on to explain that they saw promising results and it was more of a side project that a single programmer was working on and estimated a completion time of ~3-5 months.
Give up, in the most recent interview they stated they will potentially make some adjustments for those poor people stuck on directx9.dll with horrible graphics, the same .dll the Enb series uses to make GTA 4 look damn near life like.
The second part was what Jekt said, they originally coded the game for LuaJit, switched back to lua, now realise there's *potential* for performance increase but it's hardly a priority, there will literally be 0 noticable improvement to performance for multiple months, if UWE could just come out and post this in a news post I'm sure a lot of people would fade away/lose interest immediately.
For the record, I give Australia 2 more months max before NS2 is dead, we're already down to 2 24p servers between 10-12pm nightly and 1-3 am has a half full server of mostly RR people, there's roughly 2-3 active scrimming clans, Team AU will bomb the ENSL international and all interest will be gone.
Performance is the issue - I can bet on this. That is the number one reason why people quit the game. I might aswell give up if I won't be able to have a minimum of 50 fps in 6 months or less, but as I understand - that is not and will not be possible because of the language this game was programmed on?
If only UWE could tell us if we can even expect huge performance improvements... do I keep playing and tolerate the 25-30 fps I get in combat very often? Or do I quit playing this because I won't ever have 40-50 fps minimum in combat?
During RedDogs interview with Brian, they were talking about an implementation of LuaJIT. However explained that it isn't as simple as just plugging it in and getting a nice speed increase. He went on to explain that they saw promising results and it was more of a side project that a single programmer was working on and estimated a completion time of ~3-5 months.
Well, if it's a work of a single programmer and it's a side project - obviously they don't give a flying duck that people can't play the game.
p.s. that's my opinion, just in case someone gets butthurt.
performance just has not improved the way it used to. they can just do more miscellaneous crap at a time, but the days of getting a 2x framerate boost every year are gone
not really an excuse, but it may be an explanation
I've been playing other games as of late, and when I jumped into a game of ns2 the poor performance really hit me.
I mean, I already knew i had bad performance in ns2 (<40fps in fights often), but after playing games with smooth gameplay and coming back to ns2 it really hits you in the face. It's easy to see how it can turn people away from the game.
Comments
Theres a lot of bad logic/facts here, and its really not worth going over it all. Overall point is NS2 is a niche game and as such always will be, no matter how much the gameplay is changed. The fact that many things were changed to make a more 'appealing' game have hurt the replayability of NS2, and without changes will result in more playerloss.
Beyond that I would be careful saying that NS1 vets are just negative and alienate themselves - many NS1 vets remember quite vivedly the mistakes made in the past, and want to prevent them from being repeated. Its a shame that advice was largely ignored/dismissed as people being nostalgic. Many points of reference to NS1 where not with regards to making mechanics work just like NS1, but more to point out changes that were made in NS1's lifetime that were similar, and WHY certain things worked better. It amazes me to see mechanics tried in NS1 that were deemed unplayable re-tried in NS2, some of which survived through release. While the tone and wording of posts may have suffered with time, many people have no idea how long some people have been contributing, nor how long they have had to deal with posting on these troll forums.
a ranking/stat tracking system might help with playerloss and should be fairly easy to implement and opens up the possibility for matchmaking based on skill.
bots allready exist, so a tutorial commander mode is absolutley doable. and combatmod takes care of the rest.
now all the things listed above should preverably come with the game, because especialy a new player wont go and download 3-5 mods to learn the basics of the game.
Hardcap it back down to 16 players per server plz? I think it would honestly help a lot xD
Along with the obvious performance issues some people get, I have to say a big contributer is likely some of the toxic players you meet in-game. Now, I have the game pretty much down in theory, although not in practice, and I find myself completely turned off by these players. I can just imagine how much worse this would be for someone who is still struggling with the game mechanics to have a team-mate chew you out over every and any mistake.
Last night the majority of the rounds I played erupted into arguments a few minutes in (not with me. I just shut up and didn't get involved). Between Commanders bitching and people back-seat driving I felt almost ready to hang up the game myself.
This would be more easily fixed by hardcapping the player count to 16 and spreading people across more servers. I mean FFS, in NA there are often only ~150 people online at night, and 64 of them will be on the two 32 player servers, while the rest will be on 24 player servers. This means that if a server is being trolled, or is full of dbags, you often don't have any option to play somewhere else.
From my experience, in comparison to more casual games that cater to larger audiences, NS2 has a dreamlike community.
I think you're just out of the target audience. I remember you talking about the conflict in gorge role in NS1 (correct me if I remember wrong) how it had spit, healspray and bbomb and you didn't like the conflict of them doing such different things and making the gorge role kind of a mess.
For me the gorge role was enjoyable exactly because I had to balance my adren and actions between 3 completely different things, constantly reading the game and trying to pick the right action from a vast variety of possibilities. I enjoy the situational mess and chaos and I feel really good when I think I made the right decisions during 20 second rush where I ended up blowing mines, doing structural damage, picking up one marine with spit and doing some healing.
A lot of the time the same goes for something like Dota 2. It's a really chaotic situational game. A lot of the fun is in learning to read the situation, to recognize the important factors, to control them and so on. In many ways it's a really frustrating and fragile game, but by ignoring all those vulnerable parts of the game, it is able also provide very satisfying, deep and complex interactions when things are running nicely. All in all it's a high investment, high return game.
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As for the carry-support stuff and role frustration and such, I think it's comparable to something like Euro Football. Someone has to play defence and someone has to be the goalie. You can't have 11 forwards on the field and everyone can't be the top goal scorer. It can be frustrating to play defence if your forwards suck and so on. Meanwhile you can still be an amazing defenceman, have people who appreciate your play, you can have amazing interactions with midfielders and forwards and sometimes you can even score a goal or two even if it's not your main duty. The game expects that you've got some 'sacrificial lambs' on your team who don't get to do the flashier stuff, but it uses those sacrifices to make the whole game a lot more meaningful and diverse.
Meanwhile most modern games try create a setup where everyone gets to make those big goal scoring plays all the time. When you got everyone doing that all the time, the game just ends up being flat and even scoring goals loses its significance.
The whole 11 forwards kind of thing somewhat relates to how NS2 has shotguns and lifeforms everywhere and how that can be detrimental to the game even if everyone has more toys, but I think that has been talked about pretty extensively already.
/thread
The second part was what Jekt said, they originally coded the game for LuaJit, switched back to lua, now realise there's *potential* for performance increase but it's hardly a priority, there will literally be 0 noticable improvement to performance for multiple months, if UWE could just come out and post this in a news post I'm sure a lot of people would fade away/lose interest immediately.
For the record, I give Australia 2 more months max before NS2 is dead, we're already down to 2 24p servers between 10-12pm nightly and 1-3 am has a half full server of mostly RR people, there's roughly 2-3 active scrimming clans, Team AU will bomb the ENSL international and all interest will be gone.
I've been playing other games as of late, and when I jumped into a game of ns2 the poor performance really hit me.
I mean, I already knew i had bad performance in ns2 (<40fps in fights often), but after playing games with smooth gameplay and coming back to ns2 it really hits you in the face. It's easy to see how it can turn people away from the game.