Dear UWE, what are you doing.
Cr4zyb4st4rd
United Kingdom Join Date: 2012-08-09 Member: 155200Members, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
United Kingdom Join Date: 2012-08-09 Member: 155200Members, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
Hello, it's a new year, you're a month and then some late on doing anything worthwhile to fix the problems you're paying to fix.
Don't tell me the hitreg fix was worth it, nothing happened other than you made servers perform worse with no real noticeable gain in hitreg detection.
I've mentioned things to @Wasabi in other threads and there are no responses other than those by @IronHorse which in all honestly just sound like someone covering the asses of the PDT leads but he is replying to people who want to know what the hell is happening.
Are you even working on anything to do with the game? http://dev.naturalselection2.com/ says that you've done nothing for nearly a month...
The trello is a very similar story, there is a list of crap you should be doing but most of that is honestly not going to fix the player count in the way you wanted to when you announced you were coming back. Let us not forget the claim of
You're a step closer to the revenue at least, because the only person who has work that seems to be constantly updated on trello is @rantology along with getting feedback for skins on the forum. However rantology is one member of a team of 8 hired to do art work and not code.
The "SIMPLIFYING NS2" thread has reached 20 pages, @Golden (who isn't a paid member of the team) has put most of those pages worth of suggestions into the google doc that was created. It's 6 pages of ideas for your stupid "rapid iteration" (really quick work so far btw)
So where exactly is this actively improved communication?
You as a company have always failed with the transparent development you claim and keep saying you aim to improve upon. Why in that case has there been no word on implementing anything in the simplifying NS2 thread, there are a ton of great ideas and some not so great ones that should be tested with your rapid development. However you're somewhere else ignoring it or so it seems.
Why does the trello not have these ideas you plan to revive the game and increase player retention with? Literally nothing in the trello will improve your player retention.
Where are these fast agile builds so you can test new features? When do we finally get to see the improved NS2.
Let's remember that with the hiring of this team so far, less work has been accomplished by the entire team than @xDragon has done in the past week to fix this game (or if you have done more you told no one about it). He has solved more issues that you have even acknowledged or probably even knew how to fix, he has found fixes for some causes of riflejam, something UWE threw out any hope of fixing long ago. But don't go and steal his code this time if you actually want to fix your game officially.
So can someone tell this community what is going on. A real answer too please, none of this "people are working on it in the background" because that doesn't tell the community a bloody thing with no proof of any progress on trello or elsewhere. You promised a hell of a lot and failed to deliver and are being made look like fools by just one single modder in a considerably smaller amount of time.
TL;DR No fixes for anything important, no work on improving player retention like you claimed and the lack of transparency like good old UWE. Communicate with your community.
Don't tell me the hitreg fix was worth it, nothing happened other than you made servers perform worse with no real noticeable gain in hitreg detection.
I've mentioned things to @Wasabi in other threads and there are no responses other than those by @IronHorse which in all honestly just sound like someone covering the asses of the PDT leads but he is replying to people who want to know what the hell is happening.
Are you even working on anything to do with the game? http://dev.naturalselection2.com/ says that you've done nothing for nearly a month...
The trello is a very similar story, there is a list of crap you should be doing but most of that is honestly not going to fix the player count in the way you wanted to when you announced you were coming back. Let us not forget the claim of
Hugh wrote:“Thousands of concurrent players, tens of thousands of people engaging with NS2 every week, and millions of dollars of yearly revenue.”
You're a step closer to the revenue at least, because the only person who has work that seems to be constantly updated on trello is @rantology along with getting feedback for skins on the forum. However rantology is one member of a team of 8 hired to do art work and not code.
The "SIMPLIFYING NS2" thread has reached 20 pages, @Golden (who isn't a paid member of the team) has put most of those pages worth of suggestions into the google doc that was created. It's 6 pages of ideas for your stupid "rapid iteration" (really quick work so far btw)
So how about you start doing this? But oh wait, how can you have rapid iteration without your aim for transparency.Hugh wrote:Theoretically, under a ‘rapid iteration’ system, we could push changes as often as our build infrastructure can compile the game. Imagine if we could get that time down to 25 minutes – That would mean, theoretically, NS2 could be changed twice per hour.
Hugh wrote:It’s the whole teams’ responsibility to be communicative and responsive to what customers are telling us.
sebastian wrote:One of the things we’re actively trying to improve is the way we communicate with the community.
So where exactly is this actively improved communication?
You as a company have always failed with the transparent development you claim and keep saying you aim to improve upon. Why in that case has there been no word on implementing anything in the simplifying NS2 thread, there are a ton of great ideas and some not so great ones that should be tested with your rapid development. However you're somewhere else ignoring it or so it seems.
Why does the trello not have these ideas you plan to revive the game and increase player retention with? Literally nothing in the trello will improve your player retention.
Where are these fast agile builds so you can test new features? When do we finally get to see the improved NS2.
Let's remember that with the hiring of this team so far, less work has been accomplished by the entire team than @xDragon has done in the past week to fix this game (or if you have done more you told no one about it). He has solved more issues that you have even acknowledged or probably even knew how to fix, he has found fixes for some causes of riflejam, something UWE threw out any hope of fixing long ago. But don't go and steal his code this time if you actually want to fix your game officially.
So can someone tell this community what is going on. A real answer too please, none of this "people are working on it in the background" because that doesn't tell the community a bloody thing with no proof of any progress on trello or elsewhere. You promised a hell of a lot and failed to deliver and are being made look like fools by just one single modder in a considerably smaller amount of time.
TL;DR No fixes for anything important, no work on improving player retention like you claimed and the lack of transparency like good old UWE. Communicate with your community.
Comments
It's what people do around xmas and new year, after all.
Also I have had a whole taw division of over 40 people being extatic over the improved hitreg as they did notice.
I can see in server logs that non taw folk playing on the NSL server are equally noticing positive change.
The only downside is that server performance took a small dive with the improved hitreg. But we admins should just make sure that the servers work within limits.
If admins did not then their servers may not be able to hold required rates which would be a problem on that specific server, but thats not ns2's fault.
I think if you look at the Polaris Civil War videos, you'll see that the game plays pretty fine for only rookies vs rookies. The problems really occur when you get rookies in servers that are for the seasoned public player and they just get slaughtered. No one enjoys getting slaughtered.
If the goal is truly to bring players back to the game, you'll need to look deeper into making the gameplay experience better for new players so that they stick around. I feel like a broken record at this point.
When you load up NS2 for the first time, what is your experience for the first 10-20 hours of play? Is it consistent? Is it random? Making it more consistently friendly to new players is something I would look into with some serious effort.
I have found hitreg to be improved. If anything I have found so far that I get more false postives, than I ever have gotten actual no regs. This is testing in live public games of ns2.
How to test hitreg objectively:
The hitreg command will spit out debugging information into the console and the log. You can use this to objectively see if you did have a genuine hitreg issue.
Here is an example of the hitreg output with both a no reg and then a false positive against a fade.
This is a no reg on a fade. The server (srv.hit) says it was a miss, and my client (cli.hit) says it was a hit.
This is a false positive on a fade. The server (srv.hit says it was a hit, and my client (cli.hit) says it was a miss.
Your log is found in your "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Natural Selection 2" folder. It is the file named log.txt. You can find the hitreg issues in the log by typing pressing Control -> F and typing "srv.hit" to find them. You may see a lot of "diffs found" but those are unimportant. They is not a hitreg issue unless it there is a discrepancy between "srv.hit" and "cli.hit" such that one is true and the other is false.
If you want to be so generous as to help the developers get rid of these hitreg bugs, it is best to make a video. Using shadowplay, fraps, or a game recording software of your choice play the game with the hitreg command on as described above. Then after each time you think you had a hitreg issue, open up the console so it is visible in the video. It would be ideal if you recorded your gameplay and uploaded the video in 60fps, because youtube now supports 60fps content.
The developers are looking for a video similar to this. (demonstrates one of the few remaining hitreg issues)(Video by Ironhorse)
Or similar to this video I made of the example fade hitreg issues above.
Keep in mind you can only run the hitreg command with if a server admin turns on tests with "sv_tests 1" and you should limit the amount of people using the hitreg command it hogs bandwidth.
But the skulk movement seems erratic and difficult to follow even when they move in a set pattern
Ultimately while a tutorial will help new players into the game, it's something that has been "in the works" forever, maybe now the PDT is back one will be finished.
Don't expect that to fix player retention though, the game is still horrible for most rookies as @Locklear mentions. Rookies will still get screwed over on most pub servers outside of "rookie" only where they might learn something but will still get destroyed playing against even an average pub player now.
FBX compiler while nice for some doesn't address the issues mentioned.
I don't really know what to tell you tbh. As for the rapid release cycle, the PT Leads just got an email discussing that the PDT is wanting to move forward with it and it could change playtest in some ways, but that they're not sure how yet. It's a "to be continued" discussion as it's figured out how it looks in practice? I'm not sure. I think it's a Coming Soon kind of deal. Someone from the PDT might have more info that I don't.
I just brought up the other day (again) that the communication is awful internally. Or at least for the people that aren't on the PDT. It's crazy frustrating when you're technically on the internal team and you don't find things out until last minute. I've been told that it will be worked on and changed but nothing seems to have been done to change it yet. It's a big point of frustration for me.
There's nobody in charge of communicating with the public. A couple of us, myself included, pushed for Golden to be hired as community manager. Hugh was pretty convinced that we didn't need one initially? I don't know the details of that situation or if he changed his mind, but it's pretty obvious that it would be super beneficial. Golden would be great at it, for a lot of reasons, but I don't want to stroke his ego too much
I've brought up multiple times now that communication is sub-par. I really hope that this thread will do something to change that. And that someone in leadership (which I think is Wasabi/Hugh? but I'm not really sure?) jumps in to address the things that you've brought up.
More server options would be a good idea, stuff such as specific weapon/ upgrade/ lifeform locks, being able to adjust the res gain from nodes, colours for different skill levels of the players, number of starting ips for the server and any starting structures,
3 months is barely enough time to do anything major with the resources they have. Then to combine this with the initial forced idea of rapid development, and trying to apply that methodology to an already matured product with a limited development team and THEN imposing an arbitrary 3 month "well, let's see what you've done! Are we making millions yet?" deadline.
Yeah, you didn't need a magic ball to predict the start being a bit of a disaster.
I'm largely just a spectator in all this, but I suspect the PDT is still in the process of moving away from the the original plans they had (Hugh had lmao) and actually deciding on their own vision. By no fault of the members of the PDT they've effectively had a lot of potential development time wasted and had set backs immediately. Maybe they've already moved away from rapid development and I never expected and certainly am not now expecting updates to be pushed to the main build several times a week to test changes.
Regarding transparency, personally this isn't something I care about at all when it comes to game development. So I won't really comment on that. But they have a Discord channel where you can communicate directly to the people involved and they're still active on the forums. Seems pretty good to me. Yeah I guess they could update the trello more often.
game to know it intimately again or entrust it to people who do. You've got a couple [redacted] taking over an operation that was running just fine without them who seem to be again falling asleep at the wheel.
Im there, nothing regarding the patches is discussed. Most of it is just general chat, there's a helpful modding discussion, but please don't act like this is the holy grail of official information about what's happening, because it really isn't.
Maybe you could actually answer some of the real questions in this thread instead of avoid them @Obraxis
And going by @Decoy looks like even your internal communication is a joke. Thankfully someone can admit that things are not running as smoothly as they should be. Clearly you need to do something about it.
In all honesty, they had their time once years ago, this is nothing new, it's the same horrible development mess that caused the game to release with tons of badly built patches in the past, if they don't wake up then in 3 1.5 months they'll have no PDT and most the CDT has packed up and left. I don't want the game to die, but the grave is being dug at a rapidly increasing pace.
I've been in it since it started roughly. It hasn't really shone any light on what he's asking for here.
Omg we gonna do stuff really quick right,good stuff for the game make it big and awesome...
Than the people who have been doing this stuff for years now said. Hmm, let's take a step back and set up some development systems to actually do this
And now 1.5 months later, we're in that development cycle
In short, as far as I can see. The plan is NOW coming together/forming and the "OMG GUY WE GON DO SUM STUFF" was released too early
like @Jekt said, let's see where this will go... (not as fast as was hyped). But UWE really needs some lessons in communication/marketing (it is known
If you were involved with the development process then your response would make more sense, as that is a frustrating position to be in.
But as just another player, I have to ask: why is the time line so important to you? Do you believe NS2 couldn't get another wave of Rookies again in the future once it was ready to receive them properly?
You mean you and the old Trello.
I've been in development, maybe not on NS2 but I've worked in the industry, honestly the amount of work seen here in this timeframe is laughable.
The timeline matters because you're losing your free hard working people that actually fixed more problems than the people that have been paid in the past. If it gets to the point where this "experiment" fails, what then? You have a team of people who are ow not being paid why do they have any incentive to work on the game now? Those who were not paid, Mendasp and Samus have left or are leaving already. There are fewer and fewer people in this community who do real work to improve the game because those who paid don't seem to understand it or hell even play it.
There seems to be not much that can be done with performance improvement anymore.
So is there any other reason for your degree of concern?
I also heard of that 2 years ago.
Back in 2009, I.......
Fine I'll stop
@WasabiOne geeez man, L2punctuate (probably with your phone/tablet posting ey)
I just wanted to say that given page only shows the master branches history. So it does not show what we are currently actively working on in other branches. And yes I know that's a bit confusing.
Basically what you see at that page is what already is ready for release.
I had guessed it was either that or some update to gitlabs broke something. Any way of showing other branches on that site (seeing as how everything's gone public now?)
We are currently upgrading our version of gitlab as well and will hopefully have better options for full viewing of more data and merge requests soon.
TL;DR : We're working on it...
(heard that somewhere but i can't remember where or when)
I sense irony there. The things people who try to stay tuned need are simple. ETA Targets. Milestones. Danger ?
Make a list easy to read that contains useful information.
We are working on "that", ETA date 1
"That" is a prerequisite for "This" so ETA for This is date 2
Imagine (just as an example) someone modify the origin point of a 3D prop, and the devs modify all the maps that include that specific prop (say a basic 90° rotation). Anyone outside the UWE/CDT who used this props cannot anticipate until the new build is out. Same goes for script/code. It is far better for a programmer to get this kind of information to check and prepare if necessary. There is one or two threads about that isn't it ?
If there was such a channel to help all kinds of internal as much as external developments; it may change the deal. I mean the Trello and other means are quite cryptic to read and never really are informative as it looks more or less like a forum. "We should do that"; "hmm yes, why not ?"; card moved, etc. And you never know WHEN it'll be available, and what impact it will have on things. Bug tracking platform anyone ?
It's not a big deal to fail to deliver before the dead line. It's a common thing in project management. What bothers people is to be blinded by "it's gonna be huge guys, you can't even start to imagine what it is"... yup precisely i have trouble picturing... emptiness...
It's better to postpone something and say "We're not ready yet", than to deliver a broken thing in time and pretend "it's alright".
So; yes this time, timeline is quite a matter as players and modders are more or less exhausted. I confident you felt the "mood" in here is quite tense lately.
Ultimately. Who cares ? UWE is a company that needs sales. Once it's done, the level of interest just goes down. I'm not saying it's bad, but at least UWE shouldn't have pretended it was supporting the community. The last 2 years were more or less quicksands for who ever tried to do something.
It would be fun to see a new transaction process. If you don't play for more than 6 months (and a number of hours) the company can't get the full sale price. It would be only paid a the end of the 6 months. That would change a loooooot of things concerning "community games" development. Maybe we would see less BS.
TL;DR : I just hope it's not another badge.