Merry Gorgemas! Update 336 Released on Steam - Natural Selection 2
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Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Merry Gorgemas! Update 336 Released on Steam - Natural Selection 2
It’s hard to believe that another year is coming to a close. Sneaky Saint Gorgie is up to their old tricks and while some Marines have been getting some nasty...
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When will the scan bug be fixed where as a Alien you cant see if you're being scanned or not by an Obs when using Low HUD Detail?
I have issues with some of those rifle skins, though. They show up in game, but I can't equip them.
Which rifle skin belongs to which skin pack?
Merry christmas xoxo
PLEASE PLEASE do this, the background noise on the forced 20% gives me a headache, also PLEASE bring back the quake hitsounds. I am also missing high performance lights. Let the players choose the settings and don't force changes with an update after one got used to his specific settings for years...
I already tried to reproduce the old quake hitsounds with the available mods - unsuccesfully.
High performance lights are already in... they are in the "light quality" setting and they are called "minimal"
It would be nice to get the hitsounds options back, I agree with that... but ambient sounds being completely removable was always dumb.
I strongly disagree about the ambient sound though, now the game is polluted with background noises I was able to play without for years. This is must-have-option for me and I know I am by far not the only being very unhappy about this change.
Apparently it was no problem for the devs & community to have an option to disable background noise, now out of the blue 20% minimum volume is enforced.
Please let the players decide on their own if they want to play with ambient sound or without, as they could for the past years.
The decision was made that ambient sounds shouldn't be something that can be completely turned off, the reason being that it gives a huge advantage, it was non-optional at that point... if you want to be competitive, you absolutely MUST disable those sounds, which lead to a lesser experience for a large portion of players that don't want to HAVE to turn them off... I understand that people aren't happy about the decision to put a minimum limit on ambient volume... but, as someone that used the ns2+ option, I welcome this change... and I know many that feel the same.
And forcing ambient sounds is definitly the wrong direction. Being able to turn it on and off was a great QoL feature, now you've forced the remaining 200 concurrent playerbase with it.
And for the love of god.. fix HUD Details. Having to toggle between Minimal as Marines, and Low as Aliens is just not looking good when you're developing a game.
Minimal clutter, but still vital information such as being scanned, amount of rts, health, is pretty much the only thing you need. None of these things are currently in the Minimal option.
Rather have 3 options which makes more sense.
Disabled = None
Low = scann, rts, health
High = all the mumbo jumbo you want.
How was quantified how many players play with activated or deactivated ambient sounds? Do the devs realize that this is change has a massive impact on the game?
I really love this game, but for me it became unplayable with this change. I doubt this change will bring in new players, but it surely will make (some) current players (like me) stop playing the game.
The choice before was Sounds at a disadvantage, or no sounds with an advantage... I'm not a fan of it being 20%, I think 5% would be enough... but being able to turn off ambient sounds should never have been an option imo, and many other people feel the same about them... There was no choice, not really, you either had them off or you had a disadvantage.
@Ryssk totally agree with the UI issue. Will highlight this and try to push for change.
Removing options that have been available in the game for many years is a poor decision. Why would you all of a sudden remove customization options that people who have played the game for hundreds or thousands of hours are used to having?
If your argument is that it puts some players at more of an advantage or disadvantage then all customization options/mods would need to be removed so everyone is on the same level. Turning on minimal creep and turning off view models gives you an advantage and those options are in the game, so are different skins.
Some players want to play competitively and will select options/mods that will allow them to be more competitive. Other players are more casual and don't care and will turn on options that make the game look better and sound more immersive.
There is average player count 170 for last year ( https://steamcharts.com/app/4920 ) .. and half of them play competitive -> disabled ambient sound.
Casual players are long gone ... only hardcore players stays.
I'd rather dislike HudDetail High as too much clutter, and for marines it's so much clutter I'd rather not play the game. Unfortunately for aliens the radar icon is broken so using High is a requirement.
2) Ambient Sound. Make it much lower or reset all users to 0% default. Players who want it can raise it later. I think stuff like waterfall & machines nearby is ok for ambience, but the extremely annoying ambient music during spawn does not inform anything, and serves no purpose except to cause headache. MonkaG mentioned this too. Players can't move during spawn wait so disadvantage argument is inapplicable.
Alternatively it means the recent versions make aliens lose ambush ability, and just turn off all audio completely to avoid headache. I've seen some old players go with 0 sound for awhile and seem to play well.
@desuwa you can disable the spawn music completely. This is done via the music sound slider afaik.
For the hitsounds, they are not consistency checked and youcan make custom ones like with crosshairs or alien visions. I don't know if a quake hitsound is on the workshop but I can't imagine it being too hard to make one on your own (I think...)
As meph said, music itself is under a different option... you have music as a slider that can be reduced to 0/100, and ambient sounds (fans, waterfalls etc) that can be reduced to 20/100.
The hud detail issue is known and is being discussed internally, hopefully a solution will be found that suits everyone.
2: Comm skill is broken. Badly. If the comm skills are 1500 off on each side the game shouldn't even start, you end up with one comm that doesn't drop res towers or will mid-game bank 80 res not knowing what to do, and another comm that makes everyone else play better. Furthermore, something was done on the backend with how team balanace was calculated for this patch and it is badly broken. I keep getting put on the team with a commander who has a low comm skill, I never play with a decent comm when randomized; I've got ~2000 comm skill on both marines and aliens. For some reason you are using this as a tiebreaker and I've dropped 2 ranks due to this as all I really do in this game is comm. Furthermore, if you have a higher rank comm, the game will tend to give you a team with a mix of high and low tier players while the other team gets players that are all near the same rank. That reliably opens up defensive holes and creates a team that can't push together and forces you to play several RT's down the whole match. Half of the problem here is comm skill is based on win\loss ratio and doesn't take into account hours. The other half of the issue is the 2500+ comm skill players all sit outside of the chair the majority of the match; why do we even have commanders if you're letting pro players sit outside of the chair and carry the game? The concept of a fade-comm or a lerk-comm shouldn't exist. Cooldown their p-res for as long as they were in the chair for after they get out and put in a minimum hold down timer to get back in of 15 seconds. Prevent commanders from getting into lerk\fade eggs. Same goes for marines. I cannot count the number of games I've had in the past 4 months just yelling over and over and over at the comm to do the same basic things because they either cannot keep pace or they miss things and everyone just gets angry at me. After 10 years, I'm ready to throw in the towel just on this one issue.
3: Servers need to default to random hive skill teams at the game start. Plop everyone in the ready room, give them 30 seconds, randomize them. Give em' a vote to re-random, give em' a vote to turn random off for a few matches. If your game requires several votes to get a game going, it's broken. I know there's a lot of angst about wanting to play marines\aliens or play with friends. Fact is there's always an impact to that, give people an option to switch teams but if and only if it rebalances properly.