Something needs to be done
sju
Join Date: 2013-03-17 Member: 184042Members
Join Date: 2013-03-17 Member: 184042Members
We need something else other than this "balance mod" in NS2. Something needs to be done as I went to play a game and heh, not really much was happening, not many players around or choice for a server with players. Lots of servers, lots of empty servers.
It made me wonder why so many empty servers, the gameplay in the game has never remained consistent. The goal posts keep changing and even with a slightly better performing patch the players playing has not increased like I hoped and it seems that people aren't coming back. I just took this off of Steam-graph to show how seriously low the NS2 community really is, further evidenced by the low amount of consistent posters on the forums and lack of 'new posters' too.
So what can we do? What can the devs do? Ideas anyone? Let's go go go get thinking hats on!
It made me wonder why so many empty servers, the gameplay in the game has never remained consistent. The goal posts keep changing and even with a slightly better performing patch the players playing has not increased like I hoped and it seems that people aren't coming back. I just took this off of Steam-graph to show how seriously low the NS2 community really is, further evidenced by the low amount of consistent posters on the forums and lack of 'new posters' too.
So what can we do? What can the devs do? Ideas anyone? Let's go go go get thinking hats on!
Comments
- Balance Mod
- European Open
- Biodome content update
- Probable inclusion in the Steam summer sale
- Possible free weekend with new content update
UWE is doing quite a bit to increase the community as it is, it remains to be seen what lasting effects any of these things will have.
http://steamcharts.com/app/4920
I think it's something called "BT"
Dunno.
Let me channel Miss Cleo for a bit here without the fake Jamaican accent.
NS2 sale <$10 combined with the content patch will at the very least double the player population for a few days. Then these players will disappear as they bang their heads against the wall and get reamed by more experienced players. I'd give an optimistic estimate of 3 weeks before everything is back to the status quo.
The game is just too 'hardcore' so to speak and has little to no appeal to the mainstream audience. I'd think the current player count is actually pretty good considering the niche gameplay NS2 has to offer as well as how it's more or less still a 'beta' in my book. Also doesn't help how you still need a rather decent rig just so your fps doesn't take a nosedive later in the game regardless of the massive improvements since release.
Actually this pretty much renders everything I wrote pointless as a picture is worth a thousand words...or something like that.
Not sure if serious...
Please name a successful game atm e.g. SC2, DotA2 etc. that doesn't have competitive in mind with their design?
Agreed, and I know it's difficult given their constraints. I think something that helps tap into a wider, less hard core element is an emotional connection to a game universe. Take some of the more recent and popular indie games and the successful ones have really tried established a connection for the user base.
Ns2 has an amazing potential for a rich world, but isn't fleshed out enough. Every map created has the potential for a story to be embedded but the core focus is on gameplay. This makes allot of sense but loses some of its immersion for players. Even the recent changes to docking have forgotten to include some sense of being lived in.
Also it would be good if ns2 could adopt some of the mods (like combat) as part of the official game. This may increase the accessibility of the game to different player types.
The advantage of those games is that most pub players play the exact same game as competitive, 1v1 or 5v5. The majority of populated NS2 pub servers are more than 6v6.
Why? Playing on a modded server like Combat is as easy as joining it already. By supporting the mod it would just increase the number of things UWE has to support while effectively adding nothing to the mods. The mod creators already handle content and troubleshooting for those aspects of the game.
Yeah, the only real difference would be that reviewers would count it as additional gametype, but given that the game has been reviewed already I'd say "scru dat".
It's hypocritical anyway to simply discard a perfectly playable part of the game that can be played without any additional hurdle for the player and without him actually noticing it, just because it is not "official". Nobody took offense in such things back in Trackmania either.
Possibly the trick here is to do what Blizzard do. SC2 supports 1v1 and team games (2v2, 3v3, 4v4 and FFA), but Blizzard say that they do not balance around anything but 1v1. If you want to ignore that and play 4v4 fine go ahead, but don't complain about balance.
team fortress 2
Original team fortress 2 is designed around competition, 9 classes each with their own viable role; symmetric maps, and a battle over mid. The meta is the medic, he's your primary target, once the other teams medic goes down there's a high chance you can get the next cap or control the hill or whatever other crap they've added
Everything added in.. 2010+? Is literally garbage, in fact it's why some competitive players LEFT the game. The game was dying down and having lower player counts than what it use to; so they set it free to play and it came back.
Games strive around competition, heck even a garbage game like black ops 2 (Which I've played b4, so I know the facts) still has a decent playercount because it's just SO EASY to get into a 6v6, start up the game, pick a game mode, bam you're playing a 6v6.. don't like the map? Vote against it, want to play with more people or do your own stuff, bam private matches (although blops2 fails in this aspect because there is no private dedicated servers)
Basically activision forces the cod devs to not build a community because each game only needs a 7 month lifecycle, then they want people to move to the next game; also blops2 is dead in the competitive scene because of the excessive, and i mean excessive issues around gameplay (and no mod tools and etc) compare the size of cod4 and cod4s competitive scene to any cod after it, you'll see they don't compare what so ever
Why is that? Cod4 was competitive (of course it require modding to make it playable) and had the largest playerbase of any call of duty game; it was actually a great game regardless if you hate cod or not
I could use other games for example, but w/e
Now back to ns2, ns2 is a great game, the maps are labeled, it feels competitive, it makes sense. I just love the game, what I don't love is that I open up my server browser and see 24 slot rookie friendly nobody knows what's going on junkfest
I want to open up ns2 and hop into a 6v6 or an 8v8, with people who are playing to win and having matches of equal opponents. Sure a pug offers that on occasion but those can't always be setup.. It's just frustrating to sign into your favorite game and feel like there's no where to play (even though there is plenty of full servers, none to your taste) with the recent BT though I've been finding more and more servers running BT which are pretty enjoyable (8v8/nsl maps)
Anyway whatever, BT mod I'm hoping will draw back in some players because it's the only reason I've been still playing; not that I didn't enjoy vanilla ns2, it just got so stale.. this version is much much more fun (and better)
It's not like 24 players got more advertisement or anything like that at the start, people simply decided what they liked better. People had the common sense to know what played better. I'm sorry it's not the version of NS2 YOU prefer, but it certainly is what more people preferred.
As for helping the game out now, I really don't know. I actually like the idea of an officially adopted combat mode. In NS1, I'm one of those guys who kept playing combat long after my interest in official had waned. It was fun, it was fast, and it was non-committal. That version of combat is far, far better then what I've seen from the mod the few times I've tried it. That combat mod is just NOT fun to me at all, and I imagine I'm not alone on that. I don't think the BT is going to save it, I'm not even sure new content to official is going to save it. The game gets tedious after playing a few hundred rounds when the last 10-30 minutes seem like you're just going through the motions because you know what the outcome is going to be. Even when you see crazy comebacks it gets less exciting because as players got better the odds become higher of doing something unexpected. Other games don't suffer the same hit, I don't think, because they're designed to be faster. This one isn't. People invest alot of time into rounds, and they get frustrated and leave when their efforts are undone by unskilled and unintelligent team mates. Combat mode was a nice bridge between the niche and the mainstream. Love it or hate it, that's another simple fact.
I realize I'm not offering much hope here (especially for those that considered combat blasphemy, which is ridiculous really), because this is a super-niche game. But I think what I'm pointing out is at least a large part of what you're seeing with the population.
I wish ns2 and the devs the best of luck, IronHorse, thank you for all you do, (and of course the rest of the play testers), and the community , thanks for all the games and the good times!
Counter Strike pre 1.6, DoD and DoDS.
A FPS that catered to only competitive during that same time period? Q3A, look where that took it.
I'm in the exact same situation as you really. I haven't actually played but maybe 2 rounds of NS2 in 3 months. I still log on the server and sit in spectate and watch games from an admin POV, and I keep my web admin up otherwise to keep an eye on the server. I'm getting more and more annoyed when I see it empty out overnight, but I also realize that's just what's happening with the population in general. My interest in actually playing the game has just deadened. Also like you, I'm obviously still interested in what happens with the game and have a strong desire to see it improve. It's such an odd situation for me.
Sounds like a goodbye from you. I guess this means that your horrible banlist will die as well? Or is that thing still nurturing the community?
In NS1 all the servers I played on used combat to fill them, then changed the map to NS for real games.
Until people can do simple map votes for Combat, Last Stand, Classic, Faded, or anything else, mods will continue to be an underused selling point.
This combined with LuaJIT, more maps, and the implementation of BT is the best way I can see to get an retain players.
I've actually been wondering, what does it take to get a server like yours to fill up? I imagine people don't normally join when there are zero players on it to start with, so I would guess you need some kind of seed group getting something organized for a game to actually get started on there.
Anyway, one of the main benefits of 24 man is that it stays viable even when people leave the game. You can't have the same people playing 24/7, eventually there is going to be some changeover. When that happens, when 2-6 people leave a 16 man server, it drops below the playable threshold and everyone leaves. I've seen that happen in the 24mans too, but it takes like 10 people leaving which only tends to happen after a particularly long game, ironic since it's the long games that people usually like best.
II think you have a point with the mods, tying back in to how do you fill an empty server? The current implementation though is slowly strangling the game by dividing the extremely small playerbase.
To you, although that's most likely coming from a lack of willingness to keep an open mind rather than any real facts.