I thought it appropriate to chime in here just to make some things clear. First off thank you to everyone for the kind words towards myself and the other community members involved in this effort. Please realize this is NOT UWE asking for money, this is ME saying I would like to see a specific type of event that could really be enjoyable and something new for our community. However, I knew there was no way I could find enough sponsors and backers to go it alone. UWE was very generous in agreeing to cover the studio expenses should we reach our goal. You are not donating more money to UWE or changing any focus on its development. Through your support we can make this event happen and rest assured there is still great things on the horizon from the DEVs with regard to NS2 updates. If this isn't your idea of a good investment I appreciate your feelings, but please don't blame UWE or throw mud at them for it. This is and will continue to be a Community Organized Event. Thanks -WasabiOne
It's not UWE asking for money, but they made the announcement so that is what it appears (especially after they hyped this). They even have a totaliser on their website, I mean come on.
There is a large backlash to the apparent/perceived bias to competitive changes on this forum, real or otherwise and to ignore that is ridiculously naive. Especially when looking at the timing of more money drives for a game that is struggling.
Well I hopped onto the stream late, and arrived just as they made the announcement. I'm not sure how they'd gone about hyping it up on-stream for 30mins beforehand, but the reveal was disappointing even without it.
All credit to Wasabi and the others for trying to organise this thing, and i'll be sure to tune in if it succeeds but it's not something I'll be contributing too.
The only gain a majority of players have by contributing is a very slim chance of being flown to Germany to meet the teams and UWE (which would be awesome obviously), but even if everyone picked the $10 option, there would still be 3000 raffle tickets and 1 winner. I don't like those odds, and they only get worse with people contributing to the higher tiers which come with extra tickets.
At least with the reinforcement program, contributions are going towards improving the game. We all benefit from that, not just a select few players who are in the top 4 teams in the world (and the raffle winner).
It's awesome to see the community pulling together to organise something like this and have a part in securing the long term future of NS2 but the reality is that this event has no effect on a vast majority of players and, in my opinion, will bring in less sales than a free weekend would (assuming it wasn't a buggy mess like the last one) so you can't even argue about the exposure it'll give NS2.
I'm also getting a little tired of UWE's marketing. The last big 'reveal' was the female marine, which had been announced way beforehand, so didn't live up to the hype. They kicked up a big fuss about how they were financing the ENSL live event in Cologne, but never once mentioned the benefits to them such as increased sales. It was all highlighted as building the community and growing NS2 e-sports. No. Ultimately it comes down to money and if it wasn't cost effective (or close too), it wouldn't have been done. The event itself was lackluster...you can't change the teams playing the matches, so the one-sided stomp isn't on UWE, but the filler was cringe worthy.
Although I like the reinforcement program, that's not without it's issues too. Once again they hyped up as how they were doing things differently from other devs and giving us the content upfront and asking players to contribute towards the costs, but the costs are the combined costs of all post launch content if i remember correctly (or it certainly should be at $500k!)... I'm sorry, but game developers SHOULD be patching their games post launch, UWE are no exception (though they've certainly gone beyond others in terms of content updates) especially when performance has always been shakey. They also went way beyond their set dates for getting content to contributors and have still yet to fur fill all their promises (t-shirts?). And just what is happening regarding these additional tiers UWE were considering. They said they'd decide that week, like 2 months ago, and I've heard nothing (though i'm not active on twitter so i may have missed an announcement)
The championship hype was ridiculous, and someone at UWE seriously needs a lecture on false advertising. This event does not affect every NS2 player, and it won't change the game or any of the other ridiculous claims. You've managed to annoy a number of players with these claims as they've gone and taken time out of their day to watch the stream expecting something huge, which never materialised. I won't be tuning in to follow future announcements from UWE to avoid disappointment. Hopefully they learn how to hype future announcements the right way, without over-selling the importance of them... either way, I won't be giving up my free time to follow them.
All that said. I wish you guys the best of luck getting this thing going, but I wouldn't be suprised if you fail to reach your $30k target.
GhoulofGSG9Join Date: 2013-03-31Member: 184566Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Supporter, WC 2013 - Supporter, Pistachionauts
edited October 2013
@WasabiOne Man it's either Köln or Cologne (even Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium would be ok), but please not Koln. We Cologne PPL take that pretty serious.
I think their enthousiasm cought up on them a bit....a very human thing lol.
Hugh and Wasi were making a big party, but I watched RedDog on the right, as he went silent (reading the comments, no doubt).
Maybe at that moment, they realised they had to explain a bit. :P
I agree that the anouncement was misleading, but I tend to think this was also done with great enthousiasm XD
Which is why I think they should have a chance, with their project.
I thought it appropriate to chime in here just to make some things clear. First off thank you to everyone for the kind words towards myself and the other community members involved in this effort. Please realize this is NOT UWE asking for money, this is ME saying I would like to see a specific type of event that could really be enjoyable and something new for our community. [..] This is and will continue to be a Community Organized Event. Thanks -WasabiOne
It's awesome that you've decided to organise this. The work that you, RedDog, SuperEffective and some other community members have put into promoting NS2 is amazing. The main point of issue is that due to the manner in which it was hyped & announced, it's come across as a UWE initiative that's looking for community support. Not a community initiative that UWE is sponsoring.
It would have been nice to see this announced by NS2WC, on a NS2WC site. With UWE posting afterwards "Hey look at this cool thing the community is doing. We've decided to sponsor it".
huge let down today. this announcement is strictly for the competitive scene players. the way this was advertised, they're going to have a lot of upset people.
I thought it appropriate to chime in here just to make some things clear. First off thank you to everyone for the kind words towards myself and the other community members involved in this effort. Please realize this is NOT UWE asking for money, this is ME saying I would like to see a specific type of event that could really be enjoyable and something new for our community. However, I knew there was no way I could find enough sponsors and backers to go it alone. UWE was very generous in agreeing to cover the studio expenses should we reach our goal. You are not donating more money to UWE or changing any focus on its development. Through your support we can make this event happen and rest assured there is still great things on the horizon from the DEVs with regard to NS2 updates. If this isn't your idea of a good investment I appreciate your feelings, but please don't blame UWE or throw mud at them for it. This is and will continue to be a Community Organized Event. Thanks -WasabiOne
if it were truly a community based event then to be fair and honest in respect to the community trust in UWE then the community would have done the website and promoted it but that is simply not what happened.
this may have been a community based idea (or to be more honest "wasabiones's idea") UWE and Hugh were the ones promoting it and developing the website and the way it appeared to us was wasabi one was helping UWE spread the word through his show.
...besides, hugh never said this was news from or by the community until the backlash began.
i like that dylan is trying to do something supportive of what HE enjoys about ns2 but UWE and Hugh shouldn't have framed this as some massive Unknown World Entertainment MAJOR Game Changing Announcement when it's simply wasabiones idea and UWE and Hugh wanted to help out.
If it's a community thing then let the community do it - don't shove it down our throats with misleading marketing or news...
i mean come on, if it were truly a community thing then someone other than developers and beta testers wouldve been involved and it wouldnt have been so hush hush.
it was only able to be so secret because only like 5 people knew about it - that's not the community.
anyhoo, i do thank dylan/wasabione for trying to do something positive even if the end result was hurting the trust we had for you guys.
no doubt wasabiones idea will end up translating into sales and a great fun time for those few directly involved. <-and for that reason i see why Hugh Jeremy put so much hype into it.
It looks like alot of people seem to think they are ..
This Championship is great in my opinion .. it's getting organised by a group of guys who cast alot of games .. primarily Reddog, WasabiOne, Zefram and Virsoul .. I would really recommend tuning into reddogs casts btw .. he's a v good commentator
It is these guys who are looking to get the 30k together to run this championship (ie get the qualifying teams together!)
All UWE will do .. is .. if the 30k can be raised, they'll hire game arena it's to be played in.. thats it!
I am dissappointed that this announcement was overhyped .. comments like 'affect every single player in every single country' and how will it 'change the face of the community throughout 2013 - 2014' were just idiotic to put against this announcement.. especially from someone from UWE .. it made it feel like it'd be an official game changing announcement from UWE
You may have got numbers into the channel with this grandstanding .. about 1100 or so .. but the bullshit just made me want to put an /ignore on Hughs comments in future .. that and his distracted casting of the LS/Titus game .. WasabiOne, I felt for you during the cast..
I am kinda suprised tho the twitch guys didn't realise the grandstanding wouldn't help anything .. unless you really do believe there's no such thing as bad advertising .. I dunno ..
Reddog, WasabiOne, Zefram, Virsoul .. I love watching your casts, I hope the championship goes ahead and you get the goahead, I'm happy UWE are supporting it if it does (regarding the venue) .. I'm really looking forward to seeing the qualifiers .. but leave Hugh in San Fran ..
Gotta say, 30,000$ (or 15,000$ if UWE donates 50%) is an extremely optimistic goal. Based on my experiences with the few community sponsored tournaments I've followed in the past, there are only two groups of people who donate to these events: the organizers and the players with a high chance of winning the tournament.
I really feel let down by the way this was announced and hyped, when it was nothing but asking for donations. Please reconsider your wording in the future.
GhoulofGSG9Join Date: 2013-03-31Member: 184566Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Supporter, WC 2013 - Supporter, Pistachionauts
edited October 2013
Problems with reinforcement bagdes belong into the Tech support section : Please go here http://hive.naturalselection2.com/redeem-badges to redeem your ingame bagde. Or check your humble bundle email again.
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited October 2013
If this is a community event, why not asking the community in the forum before making announcements like this?
" Something so big that it will change the face of the NS2 community throughout 2013 and into 2014.
Nothing like this has been done before, and you will be able to be a part of it."
A tournament change the face of the NS2 community?
Be part of it=pay for another badge?
Welcome back to planet earth.
I think he posted it on his Twitter account back then. Something along the lines of giving them some time because he met Hugh at PAX and had a great time and did some commentary with him.
Look, I don't play this game, I couldn't pin down one reason why either. Yet I still love it. Its a start-up page in my browser, and I look at it every day. That said, my concern here is trying to make something big, like a World Championship, out of nothing. You can't force this to happen. I too was disappointed in the announcement, because like others have noted, a good portion, if not very large majority, of this player base doesn't give a damn about the e-sports scene.
The community needs to grow. To do this the game needs to be better because, let's face it, the game is mediocre at best. Since pre-release to now the game hasn't gotten considerably better (This is subjective I know). Sure performance has increased, some tweaks were made, quality of life changes, etc; Yet overall the game still hasn't gotten better. That number is still woefully low in the top right of the page. I've seen the number swell on free-weekends and the content releases, a good number of people own this game, yet there is no retention. They drop like water through a colander. The game just isn't good enough to hold people's attention. It sits on my hard-drive because I can't bring myself to delete. I think "one day I will play this," but I never do (although the reincarnation of last stand might do the trick, another topic).
I wish the organizers and the competitors the best, but really, I think this is just a waste of time, effort, and money (I also realize UWE is not 'involved' in this).
Seems to me it was a good idea/bad idea kinda thing.
The main idea is inclusion of everyone across all skill levels - that whole connecting the world through play thing. But realistically this breaks down when you try and drive this through tournaments. Quite a laugh if you expect this to cause random pubbers to create their own teams with the knowledge they will eventually hit a brick wall and get stomped on by some team drastically better than them. This becomes a problem when you start asking who will actually benefit from the 30k?
World tournament sounds great on paper, but like others have said you don't have the playerbase for equally skilled teams from around the world for this to end up being any different to invite/qualify tourneys in the past. The same old teams will most likely be the ones flown out (all euro), maybe 1 korean/aus/US team if we're lucky.
The better way of driving that whole connecting the world thing would have been announcing matchmaking. Now they've pretty much wasted any 'big announcement' hype impact on something that isn't exactly what they thought it would be.
--
If funding is a concern, I have a very easy way for you to make an absolute killing. Are you ready for this UWE?
Start a fundraiser, state that all money raised will go towards improving performance and bug fixing. Then watch the money flood in. Although i guess new exosuit model variant could also produce alot of money
For me it was a bit bizarre to watch the stream.
On the left side 4 people trying to tell us how awesome this tournament going to be and on the right side the reactions.
In times with 800 players peak and top teams disbanding (duplex, archea, godar,..) this is the big event every one is waiting for?
NO
Why the hell should i pay some € to see the the usual suspects in cologne?
@UWE
In your marketing blabla you try to tell the people "Hey, be part of this. Join a team, you can be in cologne"
Cmon, dont tell me you believe in that.
First i want to thank you Wasabi, Reddog and Hugh of putting so much time and energy in supporting and building the community.
But something went wrong today with this "big" announcement. Which i would identify as three problems:
1. Meeting the expectation
If you announce something "big", something which "change the face of the NS2 community" and state "Nothing like this has been done before", you do that once or two times in your company life. And when you do it, you have to clearly give an expectation how these statements are met.
Sure a community event on a big scale can achieve that, but how sure is that? With no deeper insight into the community mechanics you can't convince the player base, that this can be a "big" thing. You clearly missed the expectation by not get into more detail how you think this can help the whole player base (more press coverage, more attention, more sales, more fixed issues, more future updates...). Its nice to talk about the fundamental goal of UWE to bring players together but you have to be clear how exactly you plan to achieve this.
2. What is a community event which is sponsored by the DEVs?
There was already a tournament where the DEVs paid the expenses. Whats the difference now from this event to the one which was revealed today? Will Charlie not be around in Cologne? The flight costs are community sponsored? Main organization will be done by Wasabi?
3. Present issues which seem to be out of scope
When you did the first thing wrong, by not meeting the expectations people will get upset and bring up issues. There are a still a lot of issues out there which are not fixed. Performance seems to be one of the biggest. And people are concerned about the priorities. They think major resources of the DEVs are used on the tournament end, when they aren't.
But one thing for sure is, that a event in Cologne with the sponsorship of UWE takes not only money from them but also time. Hugh needs to take time off, Charlie maybe and maybe some others too. So priorities will shift a bit to this event. And once again, this can be rated as a good decision from the community perspective, if you put enough reason behind it.
Final words:
Please Hugh, Wasabi and other people who were and will be involved in the process of this event, spread the word about the reasons behind this! There is still time for that, its not too late. Sure it will not stop the first wave of frustration but its too late to fix that . And it is also never too late to say "Sorry, we made a mistake in presenting it that way".
So these were my 5 Euro Cents(I'm german). And please people stop now raging in the forums and start to play again on the servers, because thats where the fun is happening and fun is i think one of the biggest community builders.
I am disappointed too. I was hoping that them saying that it would change the game for everyone was actually true. I wish they were actually giving the $30k to a couple of community mappers, a web site designer (for a ladder system which makes it easier for casual or entry level teams to play matches and make competitive play more accessible) or towards accelerating the development for the very much needed UI for in-game gathers/match making.
We all know which teams will end up in the semi finals onward and blowing $30k to put them there is just not in the interests of the community (in my opinion only). The majority of players are not competitive players and our donations thus far have mainly been towards the well being of UWE and the game, not a competitive scene that is has no impact on most the players. I donated as a constie, I bought the game pre-alpha and I donated for Re-enforced as I totally believe in this game. However, I wont be donating towards this venture so my money can be pissed up the wall.
Start a fundraiser, state that all money raised will go towards improving performance and bug fixing. Then watch the money flood in.
That's funny. That's what I thought the $150,000 just recently donated by the community for reinforced was for.
Even as a competitive player I'm pretty disappointed by this. If this reaches the goal I am simply going to be amazed. Not only does NS2 not have the playerbase to get behind this idea, how many of the generous 3,000 individuals that just donated to Reinforced are going to be donating again for this tournament? Many have clearly expressed they have no desire to.
As much as I enjoy the idea of Natural Selection (even though I think NS2 does such a lackluster job of getting it right) I'm done with the donation drives, whether it's going towards UWE or not.
It's hard to be enthusiastic when it was just announced that fulltime development of NS2 has stopped, when the game is in such need of game breaking bug fixes, another overhaul on how alien evolutions are researched / unlocked and a lot of small balance changes for a large scale tournament to even be taken seriously. Oh, and the performance drop at the end of a long round is ridiculously high. Still. And the interp. Wooooow.
Good luck getting the cash and interest for this one.
A huge announcement that is advertised to effect everyone should do just that. It was a straight up lie to hype people up and get on that gofund link.
Start a fundraiser, state that all money raised will go towards improving performance and bug fixing. Then watch the money flood in.
It's getting really annoying that people think UWE is sitting here watching the grass grow during office hours instead of bug fixing. Money will not "give them a reason to fix bugs". They are working on it every single day, during office hours, and overtime, trying to improve the state of the game.
never thought i would ever find again to this forums but after i saw this "BIG ANNOUNCEMENT" some minutes ago as a replay .. it was just kinda boring.
im not really interested into any competitive scene inside a game that is already dying - the next player loss will happen up to 2014 and the nextgen games, some of them will offer competitive scene from ground on, have better graphics, smoother gameplay and MORE athmosperic designs/sounds!
i just was observing the game the last few months joined several times for some minutes a server and quit very fast with the thoughts "my god this is no fun... still the same"
I like the thought of beeing a united competitive scene and i really Pull the hat in front of UWE but in fact this wont last forever and the game could may already end after this event and if not its just THE question of time.
There are so many changes wich have to be done in NS2 and best before 2014... otherwise i dont see any hope in this game anymore - i already told that over a year ago there are high needs for big changes and others did aswell but if UWE does not listen they need to learn how it feels to give up something they created.
just in example and same questions
are the weaponsounds and is the atmosphere in natural selection 2 awesome? No?`Why is that?
Does the Design of the game currently fit into a game of today? No ? Why is that?
are the Trailers made by UWE special? is the sound chosen awesome? No ?...
is the content something special and something big? since ive started in 228 i remember 240 and the weaponsupgrade (dunno wich build cuz i stopped playing), the maps ive seen are boring me to hell cuz they are not awesome enough - this may be the part of a bad engine.
that are just my thoughts why this game is dying - i got a better option coming end of this month i guess every1 knows wich game - i get good gunsounds wich make BOOM if i hit the button, extremly most atmospherics seen so far in any game and so on.
2014 there will be a lot more of those amazing incoming titles - so how could NS2 survive with bad sounds, no atmosphere, bad graphics and optimizations? actually loading a map in NS2 takes twice the time of BF3 for me (just as example).
if the UWE does not want to hear any community driven feedback they die - if they want their LAST competitive event and begin to exit their path wich has been chosen like this - they can do i dont care anymore.
so many people have tried to reach any of UWE people with their thoughts and feelings, if they dont wanna try and create "their own" game like DICE did in BF3 they will get hurt hard in every single forumspost troughout the entire developement.
Its time to think about changing the current stage of NS2 before its too late.
if UWE cannot reach the $ they need for the event the game dies earlier as expected and even if they do this will be just a sign for UWE to think about their financial state. if you dont have the bucks to pay such event, how is the developement currently running... bad? oh thats what i thought ages ago.
anyways im leaving with this last comment up on this again for the next months ... i will check back the game and if i dont find any improvements on the listed above i would not even care cause new and better games will arrive soon.
btw. changed to an AMD FX 8350 - game still runs like shit.
just one more thing - i would spent money if UWE change the engine into something like Unreal Engine 3.5 or 4.0 but no penny for anything else. cant even recommend the game for any of my friends.
First:
I love and support this game, and I really enjoy watching Reddog, Wasabi, etc. cast matches. Their enthusiasm is really engaging.
HOWEVER:
The announcement is not only a huge letdown, it also makes it alarmingly clear where UWE's focus for NS2 lies.
Yes I know it's a "community driven" event and not an official UWE event, you wrote that a couple of times now. But Hugh, representing UWE, didn't act like that. Not in the hype before, nor in the actual announcement. There you COULD have just said "Hey guys, there is this cool community driven project to get a world championchip going. We at UWE really like this and so we decided to match your donations." Seeing how you took Wasabi with out to Germany for the last finals, to PAX as member of your booth staff, etc. you can't tell me that - although he might not be on your payroll - Wasabi is perceived by many as a defacto-member of UWE's PR staff. You should have anticipated that people would perceive the whole thing as "UWE is asking for even more money" - though that may not be true - and make it abundandly clear from the start.
Now the thing that makes me really sad and a little bit angry, is Hugh's "teaser" for the announcement. All that drama, all that hype. Let me quote from Hugh's video:
What happens tomorrow on twitch.tv/naturalselection2 is going to define the NS2 community throughout the end of 2013 and into 2014. It's going to affect every player. In every country. All over the world. Be there.
This is -to be blunt - a load of BS. That tournament is not defining the community. It's not even going to define large parts of the competetive part of the NS2 community. It is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to your average pub player. How is it going to "affect every player"? Will their games run better? Will they be able to easily play against players with similar skill?
There may be a positive effect later, I'll admit that, if people watching the stream might become interested in this game and for a short time pump some new blood into the community, but that's a long stretch and not at all how you presented the "big" announcement.
Hugh went out of his way to make us understand how important this thing is:
This should tell you just how important this video is
UWE has bascially just told their players again what they think is most important: the competitive players.
But of course they know about there is some resentment against the comp scene (or rather against the perceived favouritism fro UWE), so how do we get people to not feel excluded again? By telling them they are all part of this! You, yes YOU, can win the finals! Isn't that great? Go support this now, because we do this for YOU!
It's as if the NFL has a big annoucement telling everyone who owns what the Americans insist on calling a "football" that the next superbowl will be open for all teams! Sign up for the preseason now! Oh and don't forget to donate, because this is YOUR event now, and why wouldn't you spent some money to support yourself, eh? Anyone wanna guess if the semi finals will have any team that's not already in the NFL?
(But at least there's the hope we will have commentators that get their faces painted by a elementry school child during the half time show...)
Start a fundraiser, state that all money raised will go towards improving performance and bug fixing. Then watch the money flood in.
It's getting really annoying that people think UWE is sitting here watching the grass grow during office hours instead of bug fixing. Money will not "give them a reason to fix bugs". They are working on it every single day, during office hours, and overtime, trying to improve the state of the game.
rofl, i'm not saying anything about whether or not they are bug fixing currently. Only that if they want to make money, doing something like that is better than holding a 'world tournament' for 'publicity'.
Although let's be honest, 1 year after release and we still have a host of gameplay bugs and wild performance. That to me suggests that either UWE is lazy, or strapped for resources (human capital mostly), and i am pretty sure it's the latter not the former.
That's funny. That's what I thought the $150,000 just recently donated by the community for reinforced was for.
Pretty sure that was for recouping the costs of introducing all the new features in that build. Female marine, biodome etc. Alot of it being art assets, voiceovers and the like. Again, pretty sure it was used to gauge interest for future big content patches and not for bug fixing/performance
Ever notice that the majority of big esports games pretty much occurred by accident or the developers not designing or promoting their game around esports? I digress though.
I do hope that this tournament airs around a time with a steam sale, performance is improved as much as possible by then and matchmaking or rookie friendly servers are integrated into the game because I guarantee those two aspects dominate why player retention is so low. After the piss poor presentation of reinforced to the steam playerbase, you can't afford to have a repeat of that if you want to grow esports and the community.
Leaderboards or level up system even if it's levels only and no cosmetics would also help keep players playing and coming back.
Combat and Xenoswarm as part of tutorial vids and in-game promotion also being given highlights because the general public don't even know about them yet they are fun and different.
Dare I ask for a 'source' on this?
TB has praised NS2 plenty of times over the past year but I imagine he's not impressed with the performance barrier since that is one of his gripes with game developers in every WTF he does. Hell, while we're on the subject, get him interested in casting some NS2 even if you have to pay him lol. He's one of the biggest figures in PC gaming and esports, he would be hugely influential and already likes Hugh
This announcement is a big deal because if the right conditions are met by UWE and the experienced community works together to avoid stacking and griefing as much as possible at sales and tournament coverage, we could see a significant spike and addition to the NS playerbase.
LoL and MOBAs in general were quite low relatively in player count just a few years ago but have skyrocketed because of the matchmaking system, easy system specs and stream coverage in addition to the fun and balanced gameplay. The same could happen to NS2 on a smaller scale but only if UWE and the community wants it.
Comments
gofundme.com/ns2worldchampionship
There is a large backlash to the apparent/perceived bias to competitive changes on this forum, real or otherwise and to ignore that is ridiculously naive. Especially when looking at the timing of more money drives for a game that is struggling.
It's just getting silly now.
All credit to Wasabi and the others for trying to organise this thing, and i'll be sure to tune in if it succeeds but it's not something I'll be contributing too.
The only gain a majority of players have by contributing is a very slim chance of being flown to Germany to meet the teams and UWE (which would be awesome obviously), but even if everyone picked the $10 option, there would still be 3000 raffle tickets and 1 winner. I don't like those odds, and they only get worse with people contributing to the higher tiers which come with extra tickets.
At least with the reinforcement program, contributions are going towards improving the game. We all benefit from that, not just a select few players who are in the top 4 teams in the world (and the raffle winner).
It's awesome to see the community pulling together to organise something like this and have a part in securing the long term future of NS2 but the reality is that this event has no effect on a vast majority of players and, in my opinion, will bring in less sales than a free weekend would (assuming it wasn't a buggy mess like the last one) so you can't even argue about the exposure it'll give NS2.
I'm also getting a little tired of UWE's marketing. The last big 'reveal' was the female marine, which had been announced way beforehand, so didn't live up to the hype. They kicked up a big fuss about how they were financing the ENSL live event in Cologne, but never once mentioned the benefits to them such as increased sales. It was all highlighted as building the community and growing NS2 e-sports. No. Ultimately it comes down to money and if it wasn't cost effective (or close too), it wouldn't have been done. The event itself was lackluster...you can't change the teams playing the matches, so the one-sided stomp isn't on UWE, but the filler was cringe worthy.
Although I like the reinforcement program, that's not without it's issues too. Once again they hyped up as how they were doing things differently from other devs and giving us the content upfront and asking players to contribute towards the costs, but the costs are the combined costs of all post launch content if i remember correctly (or it certainly should be at $500k!)... I'm sorry, but game developers SHOULD be patching their games post launch, UWE are no exception (though they've certainly gone beyond others in terms of content updates) especially when performance has always been shakey. They also went way beyond their set dates for getting content to contributors and have still yet to fur fill all their promises (t-shirts?). And just what is happening regarding these additional tiers UWE were considering. They said they'd decide that week, like 2 months ago, and I've heard nothing (though i'm not active on twitter so i may have missed an announcement)
The championship hype was ridiculous, and someone at UWE seriously needs a lecture on false advertising. This event does not affect every NS2 player, and it won't change the game or any of the other ridiculous claims. You've managed to annoy a number of players with these claims as they've gone and taken time out of their day to watch the stream expecting something huge, which never materialised. I won't be tuning in to follow future announcements from UWE to avoid disappointment. Hopefully they learn how to hype future announcements the right way, without over-selling the importance of them... either way, I won't be giving up my free time to follow them.
All that said. I wish you guys the best of luck getting this thing going, but I wouldn't be suprised if you fail to reach your $30k target.
Hugh and Wasi were making a big party, but I watched RedDog on the right, as he went silent (reading the comments, no doubt).
Maybe at that moment, they realised they had to explain a bit. :P
I agree that the anouncement was misleading, but I tend to think this was also done with great enthousiasm XD
Which is why I think they should have a chance, with their project.
It's awesome that you've decided to organise this. The work that you, RedDog, SuperEffective and some other community members have put into promoting NS2 is amazing. The main point of issue is that due to the manner in which it was hyped & announced, it's come across as a UWE initiative that's looking for community support. Not a community initiative that UWE is sponsoring.
As I mentioned in a post in the other thread:
Also expected some new feature or content.
if it were truly a community based event then to be fair and honest in respect to the community trust in UWE then the community would have done the website and promoted it but that is simply not what happened.
this may have been a community based idea (or to be more honest "wasabiones's idea") UWE and Hugh were the ones promoting it and developing the website and the way it appeared to us was wasabi one was helping UWE spread the word through his show.
...besides, hugh never said this was news from or by the community until the backlash began.
i like that dylan is trying to do something supportive of what HE enjoys about ns2 but UWE and Hugh shouldn't have framed this as some massive Unknown World Entertainment MAJOR Game Changing Announcement when it's simply wasabiones idea and UWE and Hugh wanted to help out.
If it's a community thing then let the community do it - don't shove it down our throats with misleading marketing or news...
i mean come on, if it were truly a community thing then someone other than developers and beta testers wouldve been involved and it wouldnt have been so hush hush.
it was only able to be so secret because only like 5 people knew about it - that's not the community.
anyhoo, i do thank dylan/wasabione for trying to do something positive even if the end result was hurting the trust we had for you guys.
no doubt wasabiones idea will end up translating into sales and a great fun time for those few directly involved. <-and for that reason i see why Hugh Jeremy put so much hype into it.
It looks like alot of people seem to think they are ..
This Championship is great in my opinion .. it's getting organised by a group of guys who cast alot of games .. primarily Reddog, WasabiOne, Zefram and Virsoul .. I would really recommend tuning into reddogs casts btw .. he's a v good commentator
It is these guys who are looking to get the 30k together to run this championship (ie get the qualifying teams together!)
All UWE will do .. is .. if the 30k can be raised, they'll hire game arena it's to be played in.. thats it!
I am dissappointed that this announcement was overhyped .. comments like 'affect every single player in every single country' and how will it 'change the face of the community throughout 2013 - 2014' were just idiotic to put against this announcement.. especially from someone from UWE .. it made it feel like it'd be an official game changing announcement from UWE
You may have got numbers into the channel with this grandstanding .. about 1100 or so .. but the bullshit just made me want to put an /ignore on Hughs comments in future .. that and his distracted casting of the LS/Titus game .. WasabiOne, I felt for you during the cast..
I am kinda suprised tho the twitch guys didn't realise the grandstanding wouldn't help anything .. unless you really do believe there's no such thing as bad advertising .. I dunno ..
Reddog, WasabiOne, Zefram, Virsoul .. I love watching your casts, I hope the championship goes ahead and you get the goahead, I'm happy UWE are supporting it if it does (regarding the venue) .. I'm really looking forward to seeing the qualifiers .. but leave Hugh in San Fran ..
" Something so big that it will change the face of the NS2 community throughout 2013 and into 2014.
Nothing like this has been done before, and you will be able to be a part of it."
A tournament change the face of the NS2 community?
Be part of it=pay for another badge?
Welcome back to planet earth.
Oh i forgot, we need hats.
I think he posted it on his Twitter account back then. Something along the lines of giving them some time because he met Hugh at PAX and had a great time and did some commentary with him.
The community needs to grow. To do this the game needs to be better because, let's face it, the game is mediocre at best. Since pre-release to now the game hasn't gotten considerably better (This is subjective I know). Sure performance has increased, some tweaks were made, quality of life changes, etc; Yet overall the game still hasn't gotten better. That number is still woefully low in the top right of the page. I've seen the number swell on free-weekends and the content releases, a good number of people own this game, yet there is no retention. They drop like water through a colander. The game just isn't good enough to hold people's attention. It sits on my hard-drive because I can't bring myself to delete. I think "one day I will play this," but I never do (although the reincarnation of last stand might do the trick, another topic).
I wish the organizers and the competitors the best, but really, I think this is just a waste of time, effort, and money (I also realize UWE is not 'involved' in this).
The main idea is inclusion of everyone across all skill levels - that whole connecting the world through play thing. But realistically this breaks down when you try and drive this through tournaments. Quite a laugh if you expect this to cause random pubbers to create their own teams with the knowledge they will eventually hit a brick wall and get stomped on by some team drastically better than them. This becomes a problem when you start asking who will actually benefit from the 30k?
World tournament sounds great on paper, but like others have said you don't have the playerbase for equally skilled teams from around the world for this to end up being any different to invite/qualify tourneys in the past. The same old teams will most likely be the ones flown out (all euro), maybe 1 korean/aus/US team if we're lucky.
The better way of driving that whole connecting the world thing would have been announcing matchmaking. Now they've pretty much wasted any 'big announcement' hype impact on something that isn't exactly what they thought it would be.
--
If funding is a concern, I have a very easy way for you to make an absolute killing. Are you ready for this UWE?
Start a fundraiser, state that all money raised will go towards improving performance and bug fixing. Then watch the money flood in. Although i guess new exosuit model variant could also produce alot of money
Wait, what?
First i want to thank you Wasabi, Reddog and Hugh of putting so much time and energy in supporting and building the community.
But something went wrong today with this "big" announcement. Which i would identify as three problems:
1. Meeting the expectation
If you announce something "big", something which "change the face of the NS2 community" and state "Nothing like this has been done before", you do that once or two times in your company life. And when you do it, you have to clearly give an expectation how these statements are met.
Sure a community event on a big scale can achieve that, but how sure is that? With no deeper insight into the community mechanics you can't convince the player base, that this can be a "big" thing. You clearly missed the expectation by not get into more detail how you think this can help the whole player base (more press coverage, more attention, more sales, more fixed issues, more future updates...). Its nice to talk about the fundamental goal of UWE to bring players together but you have to be clear how exactly you plan to achieve this.
2. What is a community event which is sponsored by the DEVs?
There was already a tournament where the DEVs paid the expenses. Whats the difference now from this event to the one which was revealed today? Will Charlie not be around in Cologne? The flight costs are community sponsored? Main organization will be done by Wasabi?
3. Present issues which seem to be out of scope
When you did the first thing wrong, by not meeting the expectations people will get upset and bring up issues. There are a still a lot of issues out there which are not fixed. Performance seems to be one of the biggest. And people are concerned about the priorities. They think major resources of the DEVs are used on the tournament end, when they aren't.
But one thing for sure is, that a event in Cologne with the sponsorship of UWE takes not only money from them but also time. Hugh needs to take time off, Charlie maybe and maybe some others too. So priorities will shift a bit to this event. And once again, this can be rated as a good decision from the community perspective, if you put enough reason behind it.
Final words:
Please Hugh, Wasabi and other people who were and will be involved in the process of this event, spread the word about the reasons behind this! There is still time for that, its not too late. Sure it will not stop the first wave of frustration but its too late to fix that
So these were my 5 Euro Cents(I'm german). And please people stop now raging in the forums and start to play again on the servers, because thats where the fun is happening and fun is i think one of the biggest community builders.
We all know which teams will end up in the semi finals onward and blowing $30k to put them there is just not in the interests of the community (in my opinion only). The majority of players are not competitive players and our donations thus far have mainly been towards the well being of UWE and the game, not a competitive scene that is has no impact on most the players. I donated as a constie, I bought the game pre-alpha and I donated for Re-enforced as I totally believe in this game. However, I wont be donating towards this venture so my money can be pissed up the wall.
That's funny. That's what I thought the $150,000 just recently donated by the community for reinforced was for.
Even as a competitive player I'm pretty disappointed by this. If this reaches the goal I am simply going to be amazed. Not only does NS2 not have the playerbase to get behind this idea, how many of the generous 3,000 individuals that just donated to Reinforced are going to be donating again for this tournament? Many have clearly expressed they have no desire to.
As much as I enjoy the idea of Natural Selection (even though I think NS2 does such a lackluster job of getting it right) I'm done with the donation drives, whether it's going towards UWE or not.
It's hard to be enthusiastic when it was just announced that fulltime development of NS2 has stopped, when the game is in such need of game breaking bug fixes, another overhaul on how alien evolutions are researched / unlocked and a lot of small balance changes for a large scale tournament to even be taken seriously. Oh, and the performance drop at the end of a long round is ridiculously high. Still. And the interp. Wooooow.
Good luck getting the cash and interest for this one.
A huge announcement that is advertised to effect everyone should do just that. It was a straight up lie to hype people up and get on that gofund link.
It's getting really annoying that people think UWE is sitting here watching the grass grow during office hours instead of bug fixing. Money will not "give them a reason to fix bugs". They are working on it every single day, during office hours, and overtime, trying to improve the state of the game.
im not really interested into any competitive scene inside a game that is already dying - the next player loss will happen up to 2014 and the nextgen games, some of them will offer competitive scene from ground on, have better graphics, smoother gameplay and MORE athmosperic designs/sounds!
i just was observing the game the last few months joined several times for some minutes a server and quit very fast with the thoughts "my god this is no fun... still the same"
I like the thought of beeing a united competitive scene and i really Pull the hat in front of UWE but in fact this wont last forever and the game could may already end after this event and if not its just THE question of time.
There are so many changes wich have to be done in NS2 and best before 2014... otherwise i dont see any hope in this game anymore - i already told that over a year ago there are high needs for big changes and others did aswell but if UWE does not listen they need to learn how it feels to give up something they created.
just in example and same questions
are the weaponsounds and is the atmosphere in natural selection 2 awesome? No?`Why is that?
Does the Design of the game currently fit into a game of today? No ? Why is that?
are the Trailers made by UWE special? is the sound chosen awesome? No ?...
is the content something special and something big? since ive started in 228 i remember 240 and the weaponsupgrade (dunno wich build cuz i stopped playing), the maps ive seen are boring me to hell cuz they are not awesome enough - this may be the part of a bad engine.
that are just my thoughts why this game is dying - i got a better option coming end of this month i guess every1 knows wich game - i get good gunsounds wich make BOOM if i hit the button, extremly most atmospherics seen so far in any game and so on.
2014 there will be a lot more of those amazing incoming titles - so how could NS2 survive with bad sounds, no atmosphere, bad graphics and optimizations? actually loading a map in NS2 takes twice the time of BF3 for me (just as example).
if the UWE does not want to hear any community driven feedback they die - if they want their LAST competitive event and begin to exit their path wich has been chosen like this - they can do i dont care anymore.
so many people have tried to reach any of UWE people with their thoughts and feelings, if they dont wanna try and create "their own" game like DICE did in BF3 they will get hurt hard in every single forumspost troughout the entire developement.
Its time to think about changing the current stage of NS2 before its too late.
if UWE cannot reach the $ they need for the event the game dies earlier as expected and even if they do this will be just a sign for UWE to think about their financial state. if you dont have the bucks to pay such event, how is the developement currently running... bad? oh thats what i thought ages ago.
anyways im leaving with this last comment up on this again for the next months ... i will check back the game and if i dont find any improvements on the listed above i would not even care cause new and better games will arrive soon.
btw. changed to an AMD FX 8350 - game still runs like shit.
just one more thing - i would spent money if UWE change the engine into something like Unreal Engine 3.5 or 4.0 but no penny for anything else. cant even recommend the game for any of my friends.
I love and support this game, and I really enjoy watching Reddog, Wasabi, etc. cast matches. Their enthusiasm is really engaging.
HOWEVER:
The announcement is not only a huge letdown, it also makes it alarmingly clear where UWE's focus for NS2 lies.
Yes I know it's a "community driven" event and not an official UWE event, you wrote that a couple of times now. But Hugh, representing UWE, didn't act like that. Not in the hype before, nor in the actual announcement. There you COULD have just said "Hey guys, there is this cool community driven project to get a world championchip going. We at UWE really like this and so we decided to match your donations." Seeing how you took Wasabi with out to Germany for the last finals, to PAX as member of your booth staff, etc. you can't tell me that - although he might not be on your payroll - Wasabi is perceived by many as a defacto-member of UWE's PR staff. You should have anticipated that people would perceive the whole thing as "UWE is asking for even more money" - though that may not be true - and make it abundandly clear from the start.
Now the thing that makes me really sad and a little bit angry, is Hugh's "teaser" for the announcement. All that drama, all that hype. Let me quote from Hugh's video: This is -to be blunt - a load of BS. That tournament is not defining the community. It's not even going to define large parts of the competetive part of the NS2 community. It is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to your average pub player. How is it going to "affect every player"? Will their games run better? Will they be able to easily play against players with similar skill?
There may be a positive effect later, I'll admit that, if people watching the stream might become interested in this game and for a short time pump some new blood into the community, but that's a long stretch and not at all how you presented the "big" announcement.
Hugh went out of his way to make us understand how important this thing is:
UWE has bascially just told their players again what they think is most important: the competitive players.
But of course they know about there is some resentment against the comp scene (or rather against the perceived favouritism fro UWE), so how do we get people to not feel excluded again? By telling them they are all part of this! You, yes YOU, can win the finals! Isn't that great? Go support this now, because we do this for YOU!
It's as if the NFL has a big annoucement telling everyone who owns what the Americans insist on calling a "football" that the next superbowl will be open for all teams! Sign up for the preseason now! Oh and don't forget to donate, because this is YOUR event now, and why wouldn't you spent some money to support yourself, eh? Anyone wanna guess if the semi finals will have any team that's not already in the NFL?
(But at least there's the hope we will have commentators that get their faces painted by a elementry school child during the half time show...)
Although let's be honest, 1 year after release and we still have a host of gameplay bugs and wild performance. That to me suggests that either UWE is lazy, or strapped for resources (human capital mostly), and i am pretty sure it's the latter not the former.
Pretty sure that was for recouping the costs of introducing all the new features in that build. Female marine, biodome etc. Alot of it being art assets, voiceovers and the like. Again, pretty sure it was used to gauge interest for future big content patches and not for bug fixing/performance
I do hope that this tournament airs around a time with a steam sale, performance is improved as much as possible by then and matchmaking or rookie friendly servers are integrated into the game because I guarantee those two aspects dominate why player retention is so low. After the piss poor presentation of reinforced to the steam playerbase, you can't afford to have a repeat of that if you want to grow esports and the community.
Leaderboards or level up system even if it's levels only and no cosmetics would also help keep players playing and coming back.
Combat and Xenoswarm as part of tutorial vids and in-game promotion also being given highlights because the general public don't even know about them yet they are fun and different.
TB has praised NS2 plenty of times over the past year but I imagine he's not impressed with the performance barrier since that is one of his gripes with game developers in every WTF he does. Hell, while we're on the subject, get him interested in casting some NS2 even if you have to pay him lol. He's one of the biggest figures in PC gaming and esports, he would be hugely influential and already likes Hugh
This announcement is a big deal because if the right conditions are met by UWE and the experienced community works together to avoid stacking and griefing as much as possible at sales and tournament coverage, we could see a significant spike and addition to the NS playerbase.
LoL and MOBAs in general were quite low relatively in player count just a few years ago but have skyrocketed because of the matchmaking system, easy system specs and stream coverage in addition to the fun and balanced gameplay. The same could happen to NS2 on a smaller scale but only if UWE and the community wants it.