Accidental Beacon - Natural Selection 2
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Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Accidental Beacon - Natural Selection 2
We’ve all been that commander, or the marine on the ground when it happens. The misclick, the wrong hotkey, the shame as all marines are beaconed back to base by accident. Today, the forces of darkness assembled against poor WasabiOne, and the Natural Selection 2 World Championship (NS2WC) suffered a distress beacon that no one intended. All donations made over the past twenty four hours (Almost 10% of the goal, or 3,000) have been refunded and ticker reset to $0. Here is an explanation from WasabiOne about what happened: “An error occurred on the GoFundMe site that was forwarding contributions for the NS2 World Championship directly to our PayPal account rather than holding them for the All or Nothing …
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EDIT: Reposting here because I find it amusing,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_nVk25ZvTkU
That's incorrect; people outside the US and Canada can't start Kickstarter campaigns, but they can (and do) donate to them. The Mighty No. 9 kickstarter should be a pretty visible example to the contrary, with the Japanese campaign site providing instructions in Japanese on how to make a donation on the English-only site.
The whole tournament is doomed, anyway. A shame, actually.
Its great that the community organizes those events, naturally UWE will support such a big event. I'm for one look forward to it. As a pub player we can count on UWE trying to improve the game to give players the best experience possible during that event, including performance and bugfixes, something that will affect all of us.
Well, I guess you can order people to be quiet, but you cannot change their feelings (even military commanders and dictators cannot).
Many people contributed to the Reinforcement program because they love the game, and they care about its final polish, features and balance. So they probably thought - yeah, if it just takes more funds to see my favorite game to be finally finished, then so be it, I will be happy to contribute. And some people contributed ridiculously high sums, I must say.
And what signals they get in return?
- 258 patch is late (again)
- Public statement that the 150k $ or so was nice, thank you all, there will definitely be some patches, but now UWE is moving to another project. I think for many people this was like a slap in the face, but I calmed myself down, and thought okay, the money was given no strings attached, true, but until I see NS2 in reasonably finished state, I am not buying/donating anything anymore.
- People are asked YET AGAIN in a short period of time for funds, this time for a tournament that players may or may not care about. This could be okay, if it did not give so clear impression that finishing NS2 is really not the highest priority. And that, my brother, is sad.
From PR perspective, it would be much better for UWE to show a period of honest effort, trying to finish the game and address the most painful issues, and then, when the game is finished, you can fly it around the world and people will actually care.
From the design decisions during the development process, it's quite clear that there is a big ego in UWE not really in touch with reality - I don't know who, because I don't know the team, but even from the outside, it's quite clear. It may not be a bad thing all the time, because such people posses great energy, courage and often drive things forward, but when they get out of control...
-258 is late for a good reason, it has to be stable first. Imho it will be the most stable and best performing patch that we had in a long time, so its really worth it. The changes to the engine where pretty big to make 32bit work again, leading to some bugs that had to be fixed first. that is normal and not a conspirancy, uwe is working fulltime + overtime to get this out.
-They never said that UWE is moving to a new project and abandoning ns2. Most of UWE is still working on ns2, specially the people that are really needed on it right now like max, dushan, andi etc. If cory does concept art and stuff for a new game (i honestly dont know if he does that, but i would assume so), then that does in no way impact the fixes we all want for ns2, which are performance, balance and bugfixes.
-Yes, the timing is not ideal for another fundraising. That said, that fundraising is not done by the same people. Wasabi and the others launched the idea, and UWE supports them. The two fundraisers are not connected.
I couldn't care less about a world wide tournament.
At the moment, the game urgently needs more efficiency and smarter coding (since reinforcement, dedicated servers currently check to see if players actually owns reinforcement skins, like wtf)...
That being said, i'm looking forward to tomorrows patch.
Is this still happening?
The most important thing a game needs to keep afloat is people who want to play it, and I think this is a good way to do it. I for one will be forcing a few of my friends to watch this event if it does happen, they may turn around and show a couple of their friends. So on
Lots of people who have never heard of Natural Selection might wonder what this game is all about and have a look into a game they would otherwise have never heard of. That's good publicity.
Just make sure your commentators adapt so even a total newcomer can enjoy the broadcast. And please leave that famous (?) StarCraft commentator guy who likened the Fade to the Mutalisk out of it.
Same thing.
Before the "accidental beacon" it accepted Paypal, now it doesn't. Any idea about this?