2 - 3 years ago, there were more 10 vs 10 servers than 12 vs 12, for some reason 12 vs 12 became more and more popular and phased out 10 vs 10 even though 10 vs 10 is more balanced... the devs are now making it so that 12 vs 12 is allowed, but not officially supported, the same as 21 vs 21. There will still be the possibility of having 12 vs 12 servers, so what is the problem?
Because 12 v 12 was the limit and was more popular*, I assume. It's not hard to imagine:
Servers often die after a long match.
They die less frequently with more players.
People congregate in active servers.
People get tired of seeding smaller servers while losing players to the active larger servers.
If you can't beat them, join them.
Well, I don't think we had spectator slots then. Lets hope that it helps prevent servers from emptying out.
*Popular as in number of players playing. Nothing to do with how much they liked it.
In regards to this, the reason why 10v10 servers were slowly phased out has already been said multiple times in this thread.
10v10 is harder to keep alive when people leave after a game.
A 12v12 server could stay alive if 10-12 people left after a game, a 10v10 server would basically "die" and be left in the seeding phase again.
Also in regards to the hiveskill part of your comment.
Why couldn't hive be separated between "ranked" (10v10 or less) and "unranked" (11v11 or more)
In a server that's "official" it shows/uses your "ranked" hiveskill, in an "unofficial" one it shows/uses your "unranked" hiveskill.
Just what do the 21v21 servers do for skill balancing anyway if hiveskill isn't active on them?
First up, the reason 12 vs 12 is more popular is imo, 100% due to seeding and that is it, nothing more, nothing less, people have more fun on lower player count servers... there are many ways to solve the seeding issue, but first you must establish the reason behind why seeding 10 vs 10 is harder... I wrote earlier my personal theory behind why that is. see that comment in this spoiler -
I think a large portion of the playerbase would agree that lower playercounts = better rounds... but seeding and getting comms is way more difficult.
Its simple math...
in 12 vs 12, 2 commanders = 8.3% of the players need to command.
in 10 vs 10, 2 commanders = 10% of the players need to command.
in 8 vs 8, 2 commanders = 12.5% of the players need to command.
in 6 vs 6, 2 commanders = 16.6% of the players need to command.
When commanding is as difficult to learn as it is now and the playerbase are so against rookie commanders, and so quick to blame commanders for the wrong tech route or not getting a second CC/not beaconing soon enough etc... getting people to command is difficult. so the less commanders you need, the more likely you are to maintain numbers on a server... it is my belief that this is one of the pulls that Wooza and the other Large servers offers.
in 21 vs 21, 2 commanders = 4.7% of the players need to command.
This results in faster round starts, which means less downtime... in todays gaming climate, people don't want to wait around to play... people want to start immediately, so when they see 23/24 on the server browser, they instantly join because its almost certain that you will get to play faster than if the server says 11/12.
So, to help seeding, it would benefit the game to make commanding easier to get into and hopefully stop (or drastically reduce) the frequency of complaints about rookies being in the chair etc.
In regards to the hive skill, ranked/unranked system you talk about, I couldn't agree more, having unranked and ranked hiveskills would solve a LOT of the issues being raised. I believe this type of system would best be implemented alongside the Darwins Thunderdome gamemode that was discussed in the livestreams, so that you have the "official" gamemode, which would be match seeded via the game menu and have its own rankings, and then anything that isn't done that way would be our current hive and any server can make use of it.
In short, I don't think we disagree with each other on the concerns, I think we only disagree on the severity of them... in that I don't worry about 10 vs 10 becoming the norm, while others do.
I can see it now. IronHorse will eventually comment that because there is no consensus there is no right answer and UWE was not too bold or too timid. Too IronHorse, consensus is the only truth.
In haiku form:
Many minds to please
Consensus is the real truth
Direction in chains
Duh doy, if quick play only puts people in 10v10 and below it will be easier to seed them instead of 12v12 and upwards. By yalls own admission 12v12+ doesn't need any help seeding so therefore quickplay should be removed from such servers
Duh doy, if quick play only puts people in 10v10 and below it will be easier to seed them instead of 12v12 and upwards. By yalls own admission 12v12+ doesn't need any help seeding so therefore quickplay should be removed from such servers
Your logic here is so horrendously backwards it's hard to reply without a wall of text...
The difficulty isn't seeding 10v10, it's keeping the server from going back to seeding when people leave.
12v12 isn't easier to seed, it's easier to keep alive.
I believe this type of system would best be implemented alongside the Darwins Thunderdome gamemode that was discussed in the livestreams, so that you have the "official" gamemode, which would then anything that isn't done that way would be our current hive and any server can make use of it.
No not our current hive (which only has one score for both teams and is broken as hell) whatever new hiveskill system we get for "ranked" needs to be the same one used for "unranked"
There needs to be zero difference between the two otherwise it's just "sabotaging" the "unranked" mode with an inferior system in order to coerce people into "ranked" mode.
I believe this type of system would best be implemented alongside the Darwins Thunderdome gamemode that was discussed in the livestreams, so that you have the "official" gamemode, which would then anything that isn't done that way would be our current hive and any server can make use of it.
No not our current hive (which only has one score for both teams and is broken as hell) whatever new hiveskill system we get for "ranked" needs to be the same one used for "unranked"
There needs to be zero difference between the two otherwise it's just "sabotaging" the "unranked" mode with an inferior system in order to coerce people into "ranked" mode.
You cannot ever expect ELO balancing to do a good job if you throw so many variables at it.
By forcing the same skill numbers onto both ranked and unranked, you skew the effectiveness of the numbers when playing ranked.
Put simply, do you think ovewatch ELO would be as effective if it had 6 vs 6, 7 vs 7, 8 vs 8, 9 vs 9, 10 vs 10 etc to balance?
The playercount differences cause problems, if you have 1 set of ELO specifically for ranked play at a set number of players per server, it WILL be more accurate... and in the end, unranked will effectively be the unofficial playercount servers anyway.
If you ever want an effective way of balancing teams in this game, you need to have way more strict circumstances for the ELO to balance by... variable playercounts vary too much to be effectively balanced.
The difficulty isn't seeding 10v10, it's keeping the server from going back to seeding when people leave.
12v12 isn't easier to seed, it's easier to keep alive.
But if quickplay puts people right back in 10v10 and people don't really have an easy option to join the inferior 12v12+ servers because it's hidden in arcade (or even unranked) then our current issue of 12v12 stealing the players should be moot.
Combine that with grabbing players from spectate slots via a popup, and soon we will have a proper railroad to drop 10v10 support and implement the godlike 8v8 support.
It's not like players just quit NS2 if they can't join a 12v12 server. They are lazy and will go to whatever games that are running. If they are forced to play 10v10 and below everything will be fixed
This is incredibly optimistic to the point of being dishonest. The reality would be barely another full server and an even greater amount of people queuing the full servers or deciding to do something else. Seeding is difficult. Nothing will change until this is solved. This is very evident from the success of the spectator slots. People would rather sit in a full server and get a chance in half an hour than seed an empty one and wait three hours for nothing. They should be able to start a new server with the amount of people queuing but should is not would and they amount of people likely to chance it on a could falls after every failure.
I don't like large servers any more than you do, but I think that this will kill servers after long games more frequently.
I'm a bit worried about the 10v10 change. I think a likely outcome is that we'll have the same number of active games, but with fewer players in them, and so a lower active player count overall.
It is optimistic, but I don't think it is unreasonable. Let me walk you through my thoughts.
1) The majority of servers are seeded by rookies being sent there because of the quick play feature. Veterans then slowly filter in after rookies have seeded the server. It is INCREDIBLY difficult to seed a server already, 12v12, or anything without quick play. To be absolutely clear, quickplay is absolutely crucial in seeding servers right now.
2) In my experience as an 8v8 fanatic, trying to seed 8v8 servers, asking people to come play with me on an 8v8 server. Most people I talk to, even those who prefer 8v8, would rather play on a full server than play in an 8v8 game. 12v12 servers have created a tragedy of the comments phenomena where people mostly play on 12v12 servers. Rookies seed where quickplay sends them, veterans only want to play on full servers, and the only servers full are 12v12. They key detail here is that the vast majority of players only want to play on full servers.
I will use a hypothetical example group of 192 players of mixed skill. These 192 players would fill 8 servers right now with 12v12 being common. Switching to 10v10 would fill a hypothetical 9.6 servers, but we would be lucky to really get that many. So in affect we are likely to still fill 8 servers with more people queuing for a server. Switching to 8v8 servers would evenly put those 192 players across a hypothetical 12 servers. We would be lucky to get all 12 servers full, but we would fill more than 8 servers in this group.
I believe quickplay will be more likely to spread rookies out across more than 8 servers. Veterans will then slowly filter into those different servers as they do now but resulting in more active servers. 8v8 servers are genuinely harder to keep seeded than 12v12 servers, so people will move around between different servers more frequently. I believe people will move around more frequently because of skill disparity in server, slowly emergently creating more skill differentiation between servers.
The following is based on old stats, but I believe current NS2 to be similar in demographics today but maybe smaller numbers. NS2 has a very small playerbase. If you pay attention to the NS2 steamcharts you will know that NS2 has about 200 average daily players, and about 450 peak players in any given month. Based on the old data I have, it was not uncommon to have 25,000 unique players in a 45 day period. Based on those same old stats, ~5000 to ~6000 of those unique players are not rookies. Those ~5000 players are our veterans. The vast majority of players are rookies. If even half of them stuck around NS2 wouldn't have the concurrent playerbase problem anymore.
Do you know what makes them leave? Most rookies stick around until they are kicked out of rookie only servers. Then they leave. They are deterred by the sheer skill difference. If NS2 could somehow group players of similar skill into separate servers, it could improve gameplay quality and dramatically improve player retention.
Imagine the same circumstances NS2 has in basketball (or any sport). Imagine there are 192 basketball players. That is enough for 8 courts, each with large 12 versus 12 games of basketball. 12 players are professional NBA players. 72 players are high school varsity players. 108 players young children. How NS2 currently works is that each of the 8 courts is going to have a random set of players. Any given court might have 2 NBA players, 8 high school varsity players, and 14 young children. How the hell are you supposed to balance games with players like these? NS2 uses the hive skill system to try and make the teams even. NS2 would make two teams of 1 NBA players, 4 high school varsity players, and 7 young children. Sure, teams are "balanced" but the game won't play well, and nobody is really going to enjoy themselves as much as they could.
This is exactly what NS2 is like. Hive can not make games with 2 NBA players, 8 high school varsity players, and 14 young children work out much better than it already does. That is not the purpose of hive. Hive is not meant to group similar skilled players into different servers. It only tries to make the best teams out of the players it is given. Hive does pretty well at it's purpose, that is making even skilled teams. Hive does not make near skilled teams.
Imagine if instead the players were put into servers with near skill players. That would be servers with:
12 high skill players and 12 high skill veterans, split evenly among the teams.
24 veterans.
24 veterans.
12 veterans and 12 low skill veterans, split evenly among the teams.
24 rookies.
24 rookies.
24 rookies.
24 rookies.
8v8 could create more skill differentiation between getting us closer to more near skilled games. We are never going to have such an ideal split of players for near skilled games. I am not that optimistic. 8v8 servers could allow for greater skill differentiation to occur because of people leaving servers for other servers more often across a greater number of active servers than we have now. Lowering playercounts improves both server and client performance. Lower player counts creates a more consistent balance experience.
No, 8v8 is not going to fix every problem. It is not the magic pill we need. 8v8 will improve a number of things that synergize together to create a far greater experience overall.
I will use a hypothetical example group of 192 players of mixed skill. These 192 players would fill 8 servers right now with 12v12 being common. Switching to 10v10 would fill a hypothetical 9.6 servers, but we would be lucky to really get that many. So in affect we are likely to still fill 8 servers with more people queuing for a server. Switching to 8v8 servers would evenly put those 192 players across a hypothetical 12 servers. We would be lucky to get all 12 servers full, but we would fill more than 8 servers in this group.
In addition, going the players from six 24p servers would evenly fill nine 16p servers. That is 50% more active servers, which would increase skill differentiation among servers increasing gameplay quality.
Nordic, its kind of clear that you don't even believe in it yourself.
Regarding the rest of your post, you are basically saying that it is better to attempt to grow the active playerbase from having a better experience. Well, maybe, but I think it is clear that you agree what the immediate effect will be and the rest is just obfuscation.
Edit - When is the patch supposed to happen again?
I don't see how I am saying I don't believe in it myself when my entire post was explaining why I believe in it. I don't know where I failed in communication here. It looks like you are trying to show that since I don't show blind optimism then I don't truly believe what I am saying?
I am saying that I think UWE was not bold enough and should have went full 8v8. 10v10 is a step in the right direction, but is not enough to get us there. 8v8 will. But 10 or 11 active servers compared to 8 as per my example is a big win. You need 8v8 to do that. I have called UWE too timid and chicken for doing 10v10. I think 10v10 will improve the gameplay experience but it isn't enough to do what needs done. I am criticizing UWE for doing 10v10 rather than 8v8. In my previous post I explained why I think 8v8 would be such a good thing.
I will try an analogy. John Doe wants to lose weight. He has an eating problem. He never works out. John decides he is going to start walking 10 minutes a day rather but change nothing else.
That is great John, good job. That is a step in the right direction. You are never going to lose the weight that way though. UWE needs to commit to 8v8 because 10v10 just won't do it.
21v21 cancer. 12v12 bad. 10v10 not good. 8v8 good. 8v8 real good.
I'm saying that we won't get a 1:1 conversion and that you agree with that. Lets put it another way, assuming 8 is minimum and 12 is maximum, how many servers do you think would be likely to get filled? You were stating 12 (well, actually 6 to 9 instead of 8 to 12) as fact in your first post. You are now backing down to "10 or 11" as a "big win". That just shows that you aren't even confident in what you are saying. What I'm getting from you is that 8-9 would be the more reasonable expectation, which is a far cry from the 50% more active servers you were claiming definitively and the rest of your post is just a distraction.
To put it simply, you made an absurd claim and you aren't backing it up. That's all I'm saying.
to put it simply, you made an absurd claim and you aren't backing it up. That's all I'm saying.
I see our problem now. My original statement was trying to say what could be possible and the way I wrote it was not what was trying to say. I did not realize that I had made such a definitive claim.
I also switched from 144 players in the first example to 192 players in the second. I chose 144 because it seemed simple. Then I switched to 192 because it was closer to the steam charts number.
how many servers do you think would be likely to get filled?
...
What I'm getting from you is that 8-9 would be the more reasonable expectation
Assuming we have 8 active servers now, I think 9 or 10 is entirely reasonable to expect. I don't think it is entirely unreasonable, although unlikely, to get all 12 in the short run. I think it is even possible to see modest growth and get more than 12 in the long run.
What people want is full servers and they don't want to do the seeding. Rookies already do most of the seeding because of quick play, and will regardless of server count. Servers will get seeded regardless of server size because of quick play. I even think the higher turn over of people leaving servers would be a net positive in an 8v8 environment.
This implies that I am arguing in bad faith and I most certainly am not. I did make a mistake in that unintended definitive claim, but I am making efforts to explain myself better. Communication is a process.
I see our problem now. My original statement was trying to say what could be possible and the way I wrote it was not what was trying to say. I did not realize that I had made such a definitive claim.
There is a vast difference between would and could.
This implies that I am arguing in bad faith and I most certainly am not. I did make a mistake in that unintended definitive claim, but I am making efforts to explain myself better. Communication is a process.
Well, from my point of view, it has no relation to what I'm contesting. I didn't mean for it to be so harsh, sorry.
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Assuming we have 8 active servers now, I think 9 or 10 is entirely reasonable to expect. I don't think it is entirely unreasonable, although unlikely, to get all 12 in the short run. I think it is even possible to see modest growth and get more than 12 in the long run.
What people want is full servers and they don't want to do the seeding. Rookies already do most of the seeding because of quick play, and will regardless of server count. Servers will get seeded regardless of server size because of quick play. I even think the higher turn over of people leaving servers would be a net positive in an 8v8 environment.
Shrug, from my first reply I have already said that seeding is the problem. You seem to think that quick play is the solution. Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think so anyway. I can get into greater detail if you want me to, but its not a discussion I'm particularly interested in. The only reason I commented was to contest that first assertion.
I must be missing something, I've never seen or heard of quick play sending players to empty servers to seed. (As nordic is clearly implying)
From everything I've seen and been told by admins it takes 5 players in a server before quick play starts sending people there.
Which means the majority of servers are not seeded by rookies, they are seeded by veterans who join servers with 0-5 people to get them going.
There also seems to be this mentality that the people worried about 10v10 are upset that they won't be able to play 12v12. Like it's the same thing as ns2large or something.
12v12 became the norm because they don't die as easy, it's as simple as that. It is extremely unlikely that we will have unranked 12v12 servers the way the large community has their 21v21...
Also you all completely misunderstood what I was trying to say about hiveskill needing to be the same...
Current hiveskill is one score for both teams and is glitchy as hell (not updating etc)
The new hiveskill is supposed to have separate scores for each team and (hopefully) won't be glitchy
All I wad trying to say is that both "ranked" and "unranked" need to use the same new working hiveskill system.
It would be blatant sabotage to leave "unranked" with an outdated broken inferior inaccurate hiveskill system that had problems updating while "ranked" has a shiny new far superior hiveskill system that updates properly.
First up, the reason 12 vs 12 is more popular is imo, 100% due to seeding and that is it, nothing more, nothing less, people have more fun on lower player count servers...
Please dont generalize by your subjective taste.
I for one prefer 12v12 over 6v6 or even 8v8. And i know alot of other players too.
High-skilled players MAY prefer 6on6, due to balancing reasons, but I see many purple and sanji players on 12v12 pub.
They have an option, and they also choose 12v12.
As @MoFo1 said, it would be perfectly reasonable to rank 6v6-8v8 (or whatever player count seems balanced to UWE), and unrank the rest.
The caveat is that i would play on unranked servers 100% of the times, and my skill changes (if any after all these years) would not be reflected in hive.
I just want to point out that the idea of reducing payer count to somehow improve performance is insane. This is because you can easily look at all the various servers running ns2 here: https://ns2servers.pw/
You can see a graph of their tick rates and easily see if those servers are dropping ticks. You can also see their performance scores which are also given in the form of little icons in the server list. How often do you see sub par servers that just can not run at there tick rate.
While we server operators often and almost always call for increased server performance going back to the limits of when the game came out is a joke. It is true that back when NS2 came out there was virtually no computers that could actually run servers with more than 18 players without a lag fest. This is not true with today's hardware.
On player slots:Let the server owner decide:it really is that simple. If you get players and people enjoy everyting is fine. Some arguments sound more morally induced (you get a better game i f u play it like i like it) than experience-based or based on the fact that people have different taste. Let players and server owners decide:what works works.
Its funny, the 12 vs 12 servers won't be impossible to achieve any more than the 21 vs 21 servers are now... the only difference is that these servers won't be able to be seeded via the play now button.
Officially supporting any playercount at all would result in literally nothing being balanced in any way shape or form... its already an insane task to balance player skill and variable player counts from 6 vs 6 to 12 vs 12... if UWE were to put their foot down and say "X vs X is the OFFICIAL playercount" I would 100% back them regardless of what playercount it is... what they are doing now is bringing it 1 step closer to that.
Some think its a weak move to "only" reduce to 10 vs 10, but until UWE have their own servers being ran instead of relying on community servers, it will be very difficult to convince everyone that one route is the best route forward for ns2... because everyone has different opinions on what is best for ns2.
That is not the only difference, if users to do not gain rank on these larger servers you can not operate said larger servers of you will be overrun by smurfs. Logically one could play on an unranked server and pubstopm all day. Your talking about not haivng the ability for hive balance shuffle working on those servers. Currently no one really worries much about this as most unranked servers are mod servers or are so large that there is no real need for shuffle or worry about a pub stop.
Question, is it possible for the hive to be made opensource/publicly available so anyone with a web server could run their own hive stats system? Then we can still run our "unranked" servers but also be able to benefit the players with the ability to shuffle teams and other balance options.
Perhaps this would be a nice win win for everyone...
Question, is it possible for the hive to be made opensource/publicly available so anyone with a web server could run their own hive stats system? Then we can still run our "unranked" servers but also be able to benefit the players with the ability to shuffle teams and other balance options.
Perhaps this would be a nice win win for everyone...
I have asked and commented on this before for over a year. I would love to see it open sourced.
First up, the reason 12 vs 12 is more popular is imo, 100% due to seeding and that is it, nothing more, nothing less, people have more fun on lower player count servers...
Please dont generalize by your subjective taste.
I for one prefer 12v12 over 6v6 or even 8v8. And i know alot of other players too.
High-skilled players MAY prefer 6on6, due to balancing reasons, but I see many purple and sanji players on 12v12 pub.
They have an option, and they also choose 12v12.
As @MoFo1 said, it would be perfectly reasonable to rank 6v6-8v8 (or whatever player count seems balanced to UWE), and unrank the rest.
The caveat is that i would play on unranked servers 100% of the times, and my skill changes (if any after all these years) would not be reflected in hive.
Feel free to take a look at where I wrote "imo" and tell me again how i'm generalizing.
Question, is it possible for the hive to be made opensource/publicly available so anyone with a web server could run their own hive stats system? Then we can still run our "unranked" servers but also be able to benefit the players with the ability to shuffle teams and other balance options.
Perhaps this would be a nice win win for everyone...
I would like to see hive count all games in all servers, and have the player count limits only affect quick play.
From everything I've seen and been told by admins it takes 5 players in a server before quick play starts sending people there.
Which means the majority of servers are not seeded by rookies, they are seeded by veterans who join servers with 0-5 people to get them going.
Server admins do seed servers, which is what often gets quickplay to target their server. I have spent so much time trying to seed with and without quick play. Without quickplay I can sometimes get a server seeded in 3 hours or more, but not always, while also begging people to join on steam and discord. With quickplay at worst I have had it take an hour to seed.
High-skilled players MAY prefer 6on6, due to balancing reasons, but I see many purple and sanji players on 12v12 pub.
As I stated earlier, people want to play on full servers. I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to seed 8v8 servers. People tell me they prefer 8v8 but they still won't join because they don't want to seed. Most people I talk to, even those who prefer 8v8, would rather play on a full server than play in an 8v8 game. 12v12 servers have created a tragedy of the comments phenomena where people mostly play on 12v12 servers.
Edit: @ZEROibis where were you when UWE had shared this months ago with the server ops? Where were your complaints then?
Having only skimmed the discussion about servers here - I think you're all willfully ignoring spectator slots here. It seems that for some ungodly reason, having six spectator slots has become the norm. On the one hand, these will help keep a server alive, as spectators can jump in when people leave, which is a good thing. On the other hand, If there's three servers with six spectators each, those could fill a whole 9v9 server just by themselves. (Yes, I know, many of those are afk and stuff, but still).
What we need is a mentality shift away from hanging around in spec slots and towards using the quickplay button. But unfortunately it is almost impossible to actually guide changes in mindset.
So, in the meantime... does your server really need 6 spec slots?
Having only skimmed the discussion about servers here - I think you're all willfully ignoring spectator slots here. It seems that for some ungodly reason, having six spectator slots has become the norm. On the one hand, these will help keep a server alive, as spectators can jump in when people leave, which is a good thing. On the other hand, If there's three servers with six spectators each, those could fill a whole 9v9 server just by themselves. (Yes, I know, many of those are afk and stuff, but still).
What we need is a mentality shift away from hanging around in spec slots and towards using the quickplay button. But unfortunately it is almost impossible to actually guide changes in mindset.
So, in the meantime... does your server really need 6 spec slots?
Seeding is difficult. Nothing will change until this is solved. This is very evident from the success of the spectator slots. People would rather sit in a full server and get a chance in half an hour than seed an empty one and wait three hours for nothing. They should be able to start a new server with the amount of people queuing but should is not would and they amount of people likely to chance it on a could falls after every failure.
Having only skimmed the discussion about servers here - I think you're all willfully ignoring spectator slots here. It seems that for some ungodly reason, having six spectator slots has become the norm. On the one hand, these will help keep a server alive, as spectators can jump in when people leave, which is a good thing. On the other hand, If there's three servers with six spectators each, those could fill a whole 9v9 server just by themselves. (Yes, I know, many of those are afk and stuff, but still).
What we need is a mentality shift away from hanging around in spec slots and towards using the quickplay button. But unfortunately it is almost impossible to actually guide changes in mindset.
So, in the meantime... does your server really need 6 spec slots?
No one is spectating, they're just holding F4 hoping to get a player slot.
Seeding is difficult. Nothing will change until this is solved. This is very evident from the success of the spectator slots. People would rather sit in a full server and get a chance in half an hour than seed an empty one and wait three hours for nothing. They should be able to start a new server with the amount of people queuing but should is not would and they amount of people likely to chance it on a could falls after every failure.
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The point is: Those players could all be having full rounds right now, if they left their spec slots and seeded together. Game theory and all that.
. They should be able to start a new server with the amount of people queuing but should is not would and they amount of people likely to chance it on a could falls after every failure.
Comments
Because 12 v 12 was the limit and was more popular*, I assume. It's not hard to imagine:
Servers often die after a long match.
They die less frequently with more players.
People congregate in active servers.
People get tired of seeding smaller servers while losing players to the active larger servers.
If you can't beat them, join them.
Well, I don't think we had spectator slots then. Lets hope that it helps prevent servers from emptying out.
*Popular as in number of players playing. Nothing to do with how much they liked it.
First up, the reason 12 vs 12 is more popular is imo, 100% due to seeding and that is it, nothing more, nothing less, people have more fun on lower player count servers... there are many ways to solve the seeding issue, but first you must establish the reason behind why seeding 10 vs 10 is harder... I wrote earlier my personal theory behind why that is. see that comment in this spoiler -
So, to help seeding, it would benefit the game to make commanding easier to get into and hopefully stop (or drastically reduce) the frequency of complaints about rookies being in the chair etc.
In regards to the hive skill, ranked/unranked system you talk about, I couldn't agree more, having unranked and ranked hiveskills would solve a LOT of the issues being raised. I believe this type of system would best be implemented alongside the Darwins Thunderdome gamemode that was discussed in the livestreams, so that you have the "official" gamemode, which would be match seeded via the game menu and have its own rankings, and then anything that isn't done that way would be our current hive and any server can make use of it.
In short, I don't think we disagree with each other on the concerns, I think we only disagree on the severity of them... in that I don't worry about 10 vs 10 becoming the norm, while others do.
Many minds to please
Consensus is the real truth
Direction in chains
Your logic here is so horrendously backwards it's hard to reply without a wall of text...
The difficulty isn't seeding 10v10, it's keeping the server from going back to seeding when people leave.
12v12 isn't easier to seed, it's easier to keep alive.
No not our current hive (which only has one score for both teams and is broken as hell) whatever new hiveskill system we get for "ranked" needs to be the same one used for "unranked"
There needs to be zero difference between the two otherwise it's just "sabotaging" the "unranked" mode with an inferior system in order to coerce people into "ranked" mode.
You cannot ever expect ELO balancing to do a good job if you throw so many variables at it.
By forcing the same skill numbers onto both ranked and unranked, you skew the effectiveness of the numbers when playing ranked.
Put simply, do you think ovewatch ELO would be as effective if it had 6 vs 6, 7 vs 7, 8 vs 8, 9 vs 9, 10 vs 10 etc to balance?
The playercount differences cause problems, if you have 1 set of ELO specifically for ranked play at a set number of players per server, it WILL be more accurate... and in the end, unranked will effectively be the unofficial playercount servers anyway.
If you ever want an effective way of balancing teams in this game, you need to have way more strict circumstances for the ELO to balance by... variable playercounts vary too much to be effectively balanced.
But if quickplay puts people right back in 10v10 and people don't really have an easy option to join the inferior 12v12+ servers because it's hidden in arcade (or even unranked) then our current issue of 12v12 stealing the players should be moot.
Combine that with grabbing players from spectate slots via a popup, and soon we will have a proper railroad to drop 10v10 support and implement the godlike 8v8 support.
It's not like players just quit NS2 if they can't join a 12v12 server. They are lazy and will go to whatever games that are running. If they are forced to play 10v10 and below everything will be fixed
It is optimistic, but I don't think it is unreasonable. Let me walk you through my thoughts.
1) The majority of servers are seeded by rookies being sent there because of the quick play feature. Veterans then slowly filter in after rookies have seeded the server. It is INCREDIBLY difficult to seed a server already, 12v12, or anything without quick play. To be absolutely clear, quickplay is absolutely crucial in seeding servers right now.
2) In my experience as an 8v8 fanatic, trying to seed 8v8 servers, asking people to come play with me on an 8v8 server. Most people I talk to, even those who prefer 8v8, would rather play on a full server than play in an 8v8 game. 12v12 servers have created a tragedy of the comments phenomena where people mostly play on 12v12 servers. Rookies seed where quickplay sends them, veterans only want to play on full servers, and the only servers full are 12v12. They key detail here is that the vast majority of players only want to play on full servers.
I will use a hypothetical example group of 192 players of mixed skill. These 192 players would fill 8 servers right now with 12v12 being common. Switching to 10v10 would fill a hypothetical 9.6 servers, but we would be lucky to really get that many. So in affect we are likely to still fill 8 servers with more people queuing for a server. Switching to 8v8 servers would evenly put those 192 players across a hypothetical 12 servers. We would be lucky to get all 12 servers full, but we would fill more than 8 servers in this group.
I believe quickplay will be more likely to spread rookies out across more than 8 servers. Veterans will then slowly filter into those different servers as they do now but resulting in more active servers. 8v8 servers are genuinely harder to keep seeded than 12v12 servers, so people will move around between different servers more frequently. I believe people will move around more frequently because of skill disparity in server, slowly emergently creating more skill differentiation between servers.
The following is based on old stats, but I believe current NS2 to be similar in demographics today but maybe smaller numbers. NS2 has a very small playerbase. If you pay attention to the NS2 steamcharts you will know that NS2 has about 200 average daily players, and about 450 peak players in any given month. Based on the old data I have, it was not uncommon to have 25,000 unique players in a 45 day period. Based on those same old stats, ~5000 to ~6000 of those unique players are not rookies. Those ~5000 players are our veterans. The vast majority of players are rookies. If even half of them stuck around NS2 wouldn't have the concurrent playerbase problem anymore.
Do you know what makes them leave? Most rookies stick around until they are kicked out of rookie only servers. Then they leave. They are deterred by the sheer skill difference. If NS2 could somehow group players of similar skill into separate servers, it could improve gameplay quality and dramatically improve player retention.
Imagine the same circumstances NS2 has in basketball (or any sport). Imagine there are 192 basketball players. That is enough for 8 courts, each with large 12 versus 12 games of basketball. 12 players are professional NBA players. 72 players are high school varsity players. 108 players young children. How NS2 currently works is that each of the 8 courts is going to have a random set of players. Any given court might have 2 NBA players, 8 high school varsity players, and 14 young children. How the hell are you supposed to balance games with players like these? NS2 uses the hive skill system to try and make the teams even. NS2 would make two teams of 1 NBA players, 4 high school varsity players, and 7 young children. Sure, teams are "balanced" but the game won't play well, and nobody is really going to enjoy themselves as much as they could.
This is exactly what NS2 is like. Hive can not make games with 2 NBA players, 8 high school varsity players, and 14 young children work out much better than it already does. That is not the purpose of hive. Hive is not meant to group similar skilled players into different servers. It only tries to make the best teams out of the players it is given. Hive does pretty well at it's purpose, that is making even skilled teams. Hive does not make near skilled teams.
Imagine if instead the players were put into servers with near skill players. That would be servers with:
12 high skill players and 12 high skill veterans, split evenly among the teams.
24 veterans.
24 veterans.
12 veterans and 12 low skill veterans, split evenly among the teams.
24 rookies.
24 rookies.
24 rookies.
24 rookies.
UWE once had some plans to do some sort of player grouping system but I don't know the details more than the trello says.
https://trello.com/c/Zk5778Qu/28-match-seeding-system
https://trello.com/c/s7ONC9b7/21-matchmaking-system
8v8 could create more skill differentiation between getting us closer to more near skilled games. We are never going to have such an ideal split of players for near skilled games. I am not that optimistic. 8v8 servers could allow for greater skill differentiation to occur because of people leaving servers for other servers more often across a greater number of active servers than we have now. Lowering playercounts improves both server and client performance. Lower player counts creates a more consistent balance experience.
No, 8v8 is not going to fix every problem. It is not the magic pill we need. 8v8 will improve a number of things that synergize together to create a far greater experience overall.
Nordic, its kind of clear that you don't even believe in it yourself.
Regarding the rest of your post, you are basically saying that it is better to attempt to grow the active playerbase from having a better experience. Well, maybe, but I think it is clear that you agree what the immediate effect will be and the rest is just obfuscation.
Edit - When is the patch supposed to happen again?
I am saying that I think UWE was not bold enough and should have went full 8v8. 10v10 is a step in the right direction, but is not enough to get us there. 8v8 will. But 10 or 11 active servers compared to 8 as per my example is a big win. You need 8v8 to do that. I have called UWE too timid and chicken for doing 10v10. I think 10v10 will improve the gameplay experience but it isn't enough to do what needs done. I am criticizing UWE for doing 10v10 rather than 8v8. In my previous post I explained why I think 8v8 would be such a good thing.
I will try an analogy. John Doe wants to lose weight. He has an eating problem. He never works out. John decides he is going to start walking 10 minutes a day rather but change nothing else.
That is great John, good job. That is a step in the right direction. You are never going to lose the weight that way though. UWE needs to commit to 8v8 because 10v10 just won't do it.
21v21 cancer. 12v12 bad. 10v10 not good. 8v8 good. 8v8 real good.
To put it simply, you made an absurd claim and you aren't backing it up. That's all I'm saying.
I also switched from 144 players in the first example to 192 players in the second. I chose 144 because it seemed simple. Then I switched to 192 because it was closer to the steam charts number.
I did write a wall of text trying to explain.
Assuming we have 8 active servers now, I think 9 or 10 is entirely reasonable to expect. I don't think it is entirely unreasonable, although unlikely, to get all 12 in the short run. I think it is even possible to see modest growth and get more than 12 in the long run.
What people want is full servers and they don't want to do the seeding. Rookies already do most of the seeding because of quick play, and will regardless of server count. Servers will get seeded regardless of server size because of quick play. I even think the higher turn over of people leaving servers would be a net positive in an 8v8 environment.
This implies that I am arguing in bad faith and I most certainly am not. I did make a mistake in that unintended definitive claim, but I am making efforts to explain myself better. Communication is a process.
There is a vast difference between would and could.
Well, from my point of view, it has no relation to what I'm contesting. I didn't mean for it to be so harsh, sorry.
Shrug, from my first reply I have already said that seeding is the problem. You seem to think that quick play is the solution. Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think so anyway. I can get into greater detail if you want me to, but its not a discussion I'm particularly interested in. The only reason I commented was to contest that first assertion.
From everything I've seen and been told by admins it takes 5 players in a server before quick play starts sending people there.
Which means the majority of servers are not seeded by rookies, they are seeded by veterans who join servers with 0-5 people to get them going.
There also seems to be this mentality that the people worried about 10v10 are upset that they won't be able to play 12v12. Like it's the same thing as ns2large or something.
12v12 became the norm because they don't die as easy, it's as simple as that. It is extremely unlikely that we will have unranked 12v12 servers the way the large community has their 21v21...
Also you all completely misunderstood what I was trying to say about hiveskill needing to be the same...
Current hiveskill is one score for both teams and is glitchy as hell (not updating etc)
The new hiveskill is supposed to have separate scores for each team and (hopefully) won't be glitchy
All I wad trying to say is that both "ranked" and "unranked" need to use the same new working hiveskill system.
It would be blatant sabotage to leave "unranked" with an outdated broken inferior inaccurate hiveskill system that had problems updating while "ranked" has a shiny new far superior hiveskill system that updates properly.
Please dont generalize by your subjective taste.
I for one prefer 12v12 over 6v6 or even 8v8. And i know alot of other players too.
High-skilled players MAY prefer 6on6, due to balancing reasons, but I see many purple and sanji players on 12v12 pub.
They have an option, and they also choose 12v12.
As @MoFo1 said, it would be perfectly reasonable to rank 6v6-8v8 (or whatever player count seems balanced to UWE), and unrank the rest.
The caveat is that i would play on unranked servers 100% of the times, and my skill changes (if any after all these years) would not be reflected in hive.
Quickplay sends me to empty servers about 90% of the time
You can see a graph of their tick rates and easily see if those servers are dropping ticks. You can also see their performance scores which are also given in the form of little icons in the server list. How often do you see sub par servers that just can not run at there tick rate.
While we server operators often and almost always call for increased server performance going back to the limits of when the game came out is a joke. It is true that back when NS2 came out there was virtually no computers that could actually run servers with more than 18 players without a lag fest. This is not true with today's hardware.
That is not the only difference, if users to do not gain rank on these larger servers you can not operate said larger servers of you will be overrun by smurfs. Logically one could play on an unranked server and pubstopm all day. Your talking about not haivng the ability for hive balance shuffle working on those servers. Currently no one really worries much about this as most unranked servers are mod servers or are so large that there is no real need for shuffle or worry about a pub stop.
Perhaps this would be a nice win win for everyone...
I have asked and commented on this before for over a year. I would love to see it open sourced.
Feel free to take a look at where I wrote "imo" and tell me again how i'm generalizing.
I would like to see hive count all games in all servers, and have the player count limits only affect quick play.
As I stated earlier, people want to play on full servers. I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to seed 8v8 servers. People tell me they prefer 8v8 but they still won't join because they don't want to seed. Most people I talk to, even those who prefer 8v8, would rather play on a full server than play in an 8v8 game. 12v12 servers have created a tragedy of the comments phenomena where people mostly play on 12v12 servers.
Edit: @ZEROibis where were you when UWE had shared this months ago with the server ops? Where were your complaints then?
What we need is a mentality shift away from hanging around in spec slots and towards using the quickplay button. But unfortunately it is almost impossible to actually guide changes in mindset.
So, in the meantime... does your server really need 6 spec slots?
No one is spectating, they're just holding F4 hoping to get a player slot.
The point is: Those players could all be having full rounds right now, if they left their spec slots and seeded together. Game theory and all that.
shhhhhh no one does that now nervously wipes sweat from forehead