everyONE thinks that they have the solution or the best answer and that somehow that he/she can do better than a dedicated team of MANY.
*sigh*
Their team is quite small, and has relied on the contributions of their fanbase before. Sure none of these solutions may be optimal, but it is better to throw ideas out there and get a discussion going than not. One person probably won't have the perfect solution, but maybe this thread will come out with something that could improve the game. One benefit UWE provides us is being quite open with their development, so you can get a fairly good picture of how something stands in their eyes of what the game should be, based on their past opinions/design choices. So rather than implying all these ideas are bad because the creator's know better, why not try dissecting them point by point and weigh the pros and cons.
I'm so glad we have you to speak for all the people who quit, where would we be without you?
As for saying something productive, I have many close games. A significant number of them are stomps but most are not. I certainly don't agree that a lack of something that an entire generation of games did not have killed the population rather than the lacking nature of multiple core mechanics. Such as performance, balance, us ability, map variety etc. Not to mention that this game cannot be expected to do as well as cod due to a variety of reasons I don't care to ,mention but any thinking person will be able to come up with after some consideration.
A game's skill ceiling determines the gap in ability over time played. Natural Selection 2 has a high skill ceiling, this means players with more play time are very good, rather than just a bit better than players with less time. This mechanic increases the possibility for team stacking in several regards I'd rather not go into (sans an ethical playerbase which balances itself fairly). This is an issue which makes high skill games a gauntlet for new/late players to the game, who must learn against very experienced and skilled players. Many of which, for a variety of reasons, tend to stack teams. Overall this discourages enjoyment of play for everyone who isn't at the top, and plays games with expectations of winning. This decreases the likelihood of continued play, and ultimately the growth of the playerbase. The entire process compounds over time.
While it's easy to grasp the idea of a ranking system which correctly gauges player ability, such a design is generally beyond comprehension. The mistake I see in most ranking approaches, is some foundation data/mold that player information is compared to, and is used to determine ability. This is a flawed approach, as it is too subjective and reliant on the developer's understanding of the game in it's totality.
A ranking system is difficult to design, and only increases in complexity as you go. Understanding what one can do is easy, making one that actually works is a whole other can of worms. There's someone from UWE doing the "Hive" system, which is more than what we had before, so lets just be grateful we're on our way!
-I have actually fleshed out a very strong mechanic to rank players in NS2, and wouldn't mind sharing it with the right interest.
everyONE thinks that they have the solution or the best answer and that somehow that he/she can do better than a dedicated team of MANY.
*sigh*
This statement is the equivalent of saying "most people in the world are religious, so that must mean every religion is true."
Many people can be wrong, or make a massive mistake.
I certainly don't agree that a lack of something that an entire generation of games did not have killed the population rather than the lacking nature of multiple core mechanics.
Lol, a generation of gamers that was 1/8th the size of our current one, if that.
What do all the most popular competitive games (as in 100k player plus) in our current (massively larger) gamer generation have? Matchmaking. Period. They don't all have the greatest performance. They don't all have the greatest tutorials. Some of them have major problems that have never been addressed. They all have matchmaking.
WoW, LoL, DotA 2, Halo, CoD, etc.
Yes, it's true, I can't speak for everybody, but I come from a long generation of gaming mistakes. Most people have not been around since Battlezone 1 and seen the FPS/RTS genre fail time, and time, and time again.
I have played DotA 1 since the year 2004*. When League of Legends came out, it wasn't a superior game to DotA 1 by any means. Even being designed over 10 years after the Warcraft 3 engine was designed, the graphics and performance were worse in many ways. The character roster was small, generic, and unbalanced. If anyone played Season 1 of LoL, they would know it was a joke. But what major advantage did it have over DotA? Matchmaking. And that was the one thing factor it took to bring over a huge number of players from the original playerbase. People were sick and tired of the horrible pub games filled with leavers, ragers, and unbalanced games.
If you think, for a SINGLE SECOND, that DotA 2 would have made it an inch off the ground without a built-in matchmaking system, I can't tell you just how wrong you are. No, I am not denying that popular competitive games did not require it back in the '90s. This isn't the '90s.
All of other the problems people have complained about in this forums, modern popular competitive games have had and still been successful.
I never said NS2 could or should be as popular as CoD, or even insinuated that. That doesn't mean we can't learn from more successful games. What I'm saying is matchmaking *WAS* the major failure of UWE's design, and you can't deny it. I have bought 6 copies of this game. SIX. And none of them are in use. It wasn't for performance reasons. It wasn't because "the 2torial was 2 h4rd guise". It was because most players don't have the time or patience to spend looking for fair and fun games that are extremely rare when there are so many better alternatives.
People complaining about 30 FPS need to get over yourselves. People play FPS games on older machines with 30 frames per second all the time and still do extremely well, I've seen it happen. Hell, most movies ever created play at 24 fps, and we don't see people walking out of the theaters because it's "too choppy". That isn't why people left the game.
If UWE had just put NS1 onto the source engine, updated the graphics, kept the exact same gameplay, and added matchmaking, while naming the new game "NS 2", it would have been unfathomably more popular than it is now. You can't deny it. That's what happened to CS:GO vs. CS:S, it's what happened to Starcraft 2 vs. Starcraft 1, it's what happened to DotA 2 vs. DotA 1. All those competitive games had slight improvements over the originals in several areas, but none of the improvements is what brought them such massive success, it was matchmaking. Plain and simple.
I also want to point out that there's obviously a higher ratio of people in the forums who don't care about matchmaking or even games, because statistically speaking, most of the ones who did care already left.
Source?? Because your six friends are not a large enough sample size for me to take that claim seriously.
And.. "statistically speaking" there has been very few threads claiming the #1 mistake was MM, compared to the many many others that generally end up looking like
#1 Performance
#2 Tutorial
#3 Changes
#4 Skill gap (what your OP should've been about imo.)
You can browse the forum archives and see this for yourself easily enough, starting from october 2012.
What I'm saying is matchmaking *WAS* the major failure of UWE's design, and you can't deny it.
Lol @wingflier i give you credit for sticking to your guns... but you just keep ignoring major factors like
How NS2 never had the consistent playercount numbers to really take advantage of MM to the point of it having a notable impact over..
The huuuge skill gap that's impactful enough to the point that even 1 player can sway the battle, mitigating whatever..
Extremely difficult to implement skill ranking system is put in place, which would have to account for a mind numbing amount of factors in order to be comprehensive enough to not be a useless joke. This is not remotely as simple as K/D.
To reiterate: A skill gap cannot be bridged by matchmaking, without a large playercount.
MM does nothing to a launching playerbase of 7,000 players. Nothing. Not even close, especially when you consider the width of the skill gap you'd have to accommodate for.
You'd STILL end up with top level players entering in lower skilled pub servers even IF your MM was flawless, (which it wouldn't be.) ending up with the same exact results you experience now.
Seriously... stop focusing on the symptom, man. :-/
I know as an end user all you experience is imbalanced teams and your mind instantly goes to MM as a solution because it worked for a valve game with 500k players... but its just not that all encompassing of a fix if you consider the many other factors that go into this indie niche old school twitch FPS / RTS hybrid.
Would such a thing be welcomed? Yes.
Was the absence of it the #1 failure of NS2? Not even remotely close.
And.. "statistically speaking" there has been very few threads claiming the #1 mistake was MM, compared to the many many others that generally end up looking like
#1 Performance
#2 Tutorial
#3 Changes
#4 Skill gap (what your OP should've been about imo.)
And?
The performance issues have been fixed for the most part. The tutorial is the best of any FPS I've ever played, even showing you videos after you die about how you messed up and what to do next. Name another FPS which has this. The game's balance is very strong at the moment I think. It's not perfect, but it certainly allows for a lot more strategies/diversity than it did on launch, and arguably more than NS1 as well.
So if those really were the actual problems, they have been fixed. Still, where the hell is everybody?
Guess what? The first game had: 1) Great performance, 2)Decent Tutorials (in game and all over youtube), and 3)Decent balance as well. It was even praised by critics as being an awesome game on many popular reviewing sites. AND YET?! It was incredibly unfriendly to new players for the exact same reasons this game is. New players would join the game, get slaughtered, and leave. Only the hardcore players stayed, and thus the playerbase was like a cult following.
UWE had an amazing opportunity to fix the major problem with their first game, but instead they simply played on all the strengths of the first game, and didn't improve any of the weaknesses. Thus, here we are in the same boat as before. Really, your arguments DO NOTHING to rebut this. NS2 is just NS1 with better graphics and some gameplay tweaks but no matchmaking. It failed. CS:GO is just CS:Source with better graphics, a few gameplay tweaks, and matchmaking. It succeeded. Argument over. End of story. Go home.
How NS2 never had the consistent playercount numbers to really take advantage of MM to the point of it having a notable impact over..
At this moment, CS:GO has a concurrent 20k players. The matchmaking works great with that! NS2 has easily had over 20k purchases. Yet, as I explained before, most of them left because they hated being slaughtered within the first 5 minutes of playing. How does a tutorial or game performance help that whatsoever? Hell, even CS:GO's UNRANKED games attempt to balance teams a bit on the community servers. How does NS2 address this problem whatsoever?
Let me ask you. What would happen if, even with DotA 2's fairly lengthy tutorial, the game just threw you into a group of random people of random skill levels and said, "Here you go!". Holy crap. Let's just say League of Legends would be a whole lot more popular than it already is. This is basically NS2 in a nutshell. Even their new "server skill cap" mechanic is too little, too late.
To reiterate: A skill gap cannot be bridged by matchmaking, without a large playercount.
20k is easily large enough for CS:GO, and this game has at least that many buys. Even 10k concurrent is good enough for matchmaking. Let's be serious.
MM does nothing to a launching playerbase of 7,000 players. Nothing. Not even close, especially when you consider the width of the skill gap you'd have to accommodate for.
This isn't true. When NS2 launched you had 2 groups of people: People who had played NS1 a lot, and people who had never experienced the genre whatsoever. It would be quite easy to detect the difference between the two, and group them accordingly.
Extremely difficult to implement skill ranking system is put in place, which would have to account for a mind numbing amount of factors in order to be comprehensive enough to not be a useless joke. This is not remotely as simple as K/D.
You don't seem to understand how basic matchmaking works, which makes me wonder why you think you're even fit to comment in this thread.
DotA 2 for example has a mind-numbing amount of factors involved when deciding how skilled a player is. You think 2 sides and 6 lifeforms is complicated? Try over 100 different heroes with completely different abilities and hundreds of items to learn, different roles to play, different lanes to figure out, advanced mechanics to understand, and a whole slew of other factors which would be nearly impossible to factor into a MM equation. So how do they do that? They don't!
It's a simple win/loss ratio. If you win, your MM score goes up. If you lose, your MM score goes down. Yes, initially this doesn't account for player skill very well, but over a period of hundreds of games, your own personal skill will begin to shine through, and your will be given the "Elo" score that you deserve. Combine this with an algorithm for "time played" (obviously people who have played longer get a slightly higher score), and you've got a very decent matchmaking system which has worked well for over 5 years in games just like this. If you knew ANYTHING about it, you would understand that.
Now what I'm expecting you to do at this point, is go into a deep explanation about how NS2 is more complicated than those games, or how 1 person can affect the game more than this or that, or blah blah blah (shoot myself). There would be two matchmaking scores, one for your ability to command, and another for your ability to play as a soldier/alien. Over time, you would get where you need to be. This nonsense about 1 player carrying the game is just a red herring. If there's 1 amazing player on one team, then statistically speaking there will be one amazing player on the other team, and it will balance itself out.
i guess global rankings (not just uwe servers) and decent auto team balance would be a good start, but admins should decide if they want to have ATB or not on their servers.
Don't want to be a UWE fanboi or anything, but people here talk like NS2 is dead already and like 10 years in development - let's just look forward to the "big" October patch and see what's coming up, so much drama..
Even 10k concurrent is good enough for matchmaking. Let's be serious.
Well, even though they had 7k at launch, I don't see the point in lecturing about it now. Atm there are 232 playing, and if I remember correctly it peaks at about 1k, sure you can talk that "it WAS the biggest mistake", but what good is there complaining about the past? The past is the past, because it is gone. It's nowhere to be seen but screenshots, videos and statistics. Hanging on to old mistakes is useless, that's why you have to concentrate on preventing possible new problems.
For example: let's say MM would have been a good thing on launch (I have no idea about these things, so I don't know could it have been, but in theory), well, it wasn't introduced and would have been a mistake. You decide to rant about it after it would do nothing to introduce it, which is useless and unproductive.
If that was the case, I believe UWE has enough brains to know that there's no reason to start thinking "what if we did something at launch to improve the game?" since it would give no help to the problems at hand: performance, crashes etc.
You do have a lot of good points, but they all mean nothing considering the time it took for you to give them. If you had done it at/soon after launch, it could have made good discussions if UWE should introduce MM to NS2. However, nobody did, or at least didn't do it good enough for UWE to think about it.
The last thing I have to say: Either you're just sticking to your opinions close minded, ignoring facts over your beliefs, or you keep at it just to piss people off. I really hope the first one.
People complaining about 30 FPS need to get over yourselves. People play FPS games on older machines with 30 frames per second all the time and still do extremely well, I've seen it happen. Hell, most movies ever created play at 24 fps, and we don't see people walking out of the theaters because it's "too choppy".
http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html
i get angry when i'm forced to play this game with 80 FPS, I would probably cut my wrists at 30. (of course, 80 FPS in this game feels like 40 in a decent one)
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
@nazo
Yea i realize I'm being baited / trolled now after the 3rd time he ignores and cherry picks which rebuttals to respond to and keeps reiterating the same thing, regardless. (people who purchased ns2 =/= concurrent player base.. *facepalm* )
That and the 30 fps and k/d comments really highlight what's going on here ..
Ugh so on a serious not being a troll note. Despite the fact that MM threads always seem to devolve into mess I do think something needs to be done about skill levels in this game. There are real players who just want to be able to play NS2 every now and then without having to invest so much time just to find a decent game. Anything that would reduce the number of stompy games would really attract me to play NS2 more often.
@nazo
Yea i realize I'm being baited / trolled now after the 3rd time he ignores and cherry picks which rebuttals to respond to and keeps reiterating the same thing, regardless. (people who purchased ns2 =/= concurrent player base.. *facepalm* )
That and the 30 fps and k/d comments really highlight what's going on here ..
/steps out of thread
As far as I know, I responded to your whole argument. Please let me know which part I've missed.
"1 player is good enough to sway the entire game."
-This applies to DotA as well, and is very often the case. All you're doing is making an argument *FOR* matchmaking, not against. If the game really has this large of a skill-depth, certain factors need to be in place to make the games fair for the people participating.
"30 FPS is not playable."
-It most certainly is playable, even if it's not the most enjoyable. If nothing else, a person with that FPS can play exclusively Commander, who does not need 60+ FPS to be effective. Besides, most the performance issues have been fixed, so where is the playerbase? Talk about dodging the question. You have never answered this.
"NS2 never had a consistent number of players for MM to even be effective."
-This is simply a logical fallacy based on the current state of the game. My claim is that if MM had been there from the beginning, the population would have grown in size as more people stayed. More people staying equals more people telling their friends. More people telling their friends equals the game growing to a point that MM works much better. As has been said before in this thread, even bad MM is better than no MM at all, and it could have been tweaked over time. Your claim that "the playerbase never approached levels where MM would have mattered" is fallacious. It assumes that the same number of players would have left, which is completely missing the point of my argument.
Even a simplistic form of skill balancing that worked in community servers would have made a huge difference.
Anyway, I think I've laid out my argument pretty well, so I'll stop beating a dead horse. Obviously there is no way to prove this without polling all the people who have left, but I believe fully that the vast majority of the absent playerbase left because of the poor quality of the games themselves, not the game design or mechanics, performance reasons, or anything else. Why do I think this? Because most the performance and balancing flaws have been addressed, as they were in the first game; the *ONLY* thing that has not changed in TEN+ years of development is that the games are still 1-sided stomps the majority of the time, and here we are.
Guess what? The first game had: 1) Great performance, 2)Decent Tutorials (in game and all over youtube), and 3)Decent balance as well. It was even praised by critics as being an awesome game on many popular reviewing sites. AND YET?! It was incredibly unfriendly to new players for the exact same reasons this game is. New players would join the game, get slaughtered, and leave. Only the hardcore players stayed, and thus the playerbase was like a cult following.
Uh, you must not have played NS1 during the stage of its life that NS2 is currently in. 1) At launch, NS1 ran worse than NS2 did at launch with comparable hardware, and NS1 was basically using a (at its core) 7 year old engine. 2) NS1 had been out about 3 years when youtube even launched... 3) NS1 was balanced to be played 6v6 yet by far the majority of servers had more than 12 slots.
Also, by the end of the first month after release, NS2 had literally less than 1/3 the daily players, so I don't think that
It's a simple win/loss ratio. If you win, your MM score goes up. If you lose, your MM score goes down. Yes, initially this doesn't account for player skill very well, but over a period of hundreds of games, your own personal skill will begin to shine through, and your will be given the "Elo" score that you deserve.
would have benefited anyone but the hardcore players that stayed, just like if matchmaking had been in NS1. NS1 did have the distinction of being the second most played mod of HL1, behind the obvious CS, so according to your logic NS1 would have beaten CS in playerbase had NS1 only used matchmaking...
Although a certain portion of players in NS2 could (and no doubt would!) benefit from matchmaking, I think I'll trust the anecdotal evidence of hundreds of posts I've read in the last 11 months about folks who had (often hardcore) gamer friends stop playing because of reasons @IronHorse mentioned rather than the lack of matchmaking at launch...
Matchmaking on PC I would say is a terrible experience all around, and right now matchmaking may be a bit too late? I doubt it would so much in this case anyways with such a low player count aside from annoy people, or just toss them into an already stacked game.
Work on presentation, improve the training mechanics. Right now the game is more or less hop in, presented with a menu screen, server list, video settings and a variety of servers to join in. The bot training doesn't work, that's the easy way to put it, bots get stuck, it performs badly, I've mentioned that in my previous post. Once you get into the game, you have random video notifications that pop up to teach you how to play. I doubt half the people have the attention span to watch them, I'm thinking a tutorial mode would be amazing (again mentioned in my last post.) I'm willing to stand boldly that this would improve the game for new players, aside from optimization and bug fixes, but that's a different discussion.
Another thing to randomly toss in that is a bit off topic, adding things like wall hopping and marine strafing really isn't something new players pick up very well, how simple they may seem for experienced players, it's a major advantage experienced users have over new players in a 1v1, or even 3v3 situation. Rookie weekends (free weekends) are a pub stomper paradise along with a shot in the foot for casual players who have to teach each user how to play, as a pub player who's seen this over time with free weekends.
Marines running into a base and laying out sentries around the hive/eggs (or just pinning in locations with early game sentries, is another common thing I see amongst experienced commanders in pub games lately that has players running side to side in the marine selection.
The game doesn't present itself well to people unless they're willing to take the time to learn how to play, instead of adding more complicated elements things should be dumbed down a little, I doubt match making will help at all, considering it must find out of the 1000 people playing at a time (low player count) that are in similar geographical locations, 24 open players, compare their "skill/rank," then find a server in the same geographical area that is at 100% performance that will fit all players into the server. I for one will be skipping over to the server list option, I'd hope to not see time wasted into writing match making for what is a small community and "poorly" (using it loosely) optimized game.
More focus into presentation, bug fixing, minor balances, marketing, tutorials, and reducing the very contrast skill ceiling. This isn't DOTA/LoL, match making wouldn't work for a game like this, or at least this late in its life.
I am a player with 922 hours of NS2 on the record. Been playing since NS2 official launch. Several issues listed by posters here are very valid (such as lack of matchmaking, performance issues etc) which were the reasons why the game died. But I officially had enough when they added the strafe jumping for the marine.. I waited for 2 week for UWE to remove it, after couple of patches it was still there, so I felt like my patience got burnt out. I haven't touched NS2 in at least a month. Wonderful game with a lot of potential, unfortunately did not make it.
UWE has two choices...
1) Regroup, fix the game + invest in marketing and bring NS2 back to life. If they play their cards right they could squeeze a lot of $$$ from NS2 is they go in the right direction.
2) Move on to something else.
I can understand UWE are being discouraged to work on NS2 from seeing that the game is losing its popularity. Whatever it is they decide to do, I wish them the best.
The game doesn't present itself well to people unless they're willing to take the time to learn how to play, instead of adding more complicated elements things should be dumbed down a little, I doubt match making will help at all, considering it must find out of the 1000 people playing at a time (low player count) that are in similar geographical locations, 24 open players, compare their "skill/rank," then find a server in the same geographical area that is at 100% performance that will fit all players into the server. I for one will be skipping over to the server list option, I'd hope to not see time wasted into writing match making for what is a small community and "poorly" (using it loosely) optimized game.
You're a little over complicating something that should be very simple.
Imagine 4 players on the server. player 1 (4:1 KD ratio), Player 2 (5:1 KD ratio), player 3 (1:1 KD Ratio), player 4 (1:1 KD ratio)
The match making system will arrange the teams in this way:
Team1: Player 1, Player 4
Team2: Player 2, Player 3
This is actually already possible with Shine Administration mod. Not all admins are aware of it or are willing to use the matchmaking though.
Unfortunately many admins don't realize how essential matchmaking is to NS2.
What will happen if the teams end up being like this?
Team1: Player 1, Player 2
Team2: Player 3, Player 4.
You guessed it right. Team 2 will get frustrated and quit. 10 more games like that, and guess what?? They'll think twice before playing NS2 again. Hence the low player count. Way too many frustrated players who had enough of having their team stomped by the other team, or simply by being on the overpowered team which makes the game boring and unchallenging.
Haven't you had a great commander once but a team full of people who get very easily snipped and killed? So even if you have a great commander, and your team understands the game well, you will not win if your opponent kills you before you can do anything.
I am sorry to say but people who think that matchmaking is not important to NS2 are being illogical.
When I started TF2, I was constantly stomped by better players. Teams were often stacked, because it just feels good when everyone knows what to do. Now I have played TF2 around 1300h. Teams still get more often than not stacked. I dislike stacking, but I just choose random and let the fate decide if I'm stomped or stomping. Stacked teams won't drive me away from TF2, but if TF2's performance was as bad as in NS2, I doubt that it would attract so many players. I stopped playing NS2 for weeks and waited until the performance issues were ironed out. Free players didn't have that 'luxury' and bad rep spreads fast.
Performance is the number one issue with NS2.
Match making would have been something that should have been in since launch, right now, or at least initially if it were added in, I would just see it not being used much at all, clans want to stomp in their own server.
Match making would have been something that should have been in since launch, right now, or at least initially if it were added in, I would just see it not being used much at all, clans want to stomp in their own server.
That's so wrong. When matchmaking makes it into the game, I'd expect to see a lot less veteran players on the average pub server.
I agree w/ the OP, but I'm not sure there's an easy solution esp since this is an RTS/FPS hybrid. I've seen games where a newb comm jumps in and I realize a few minutes in that this game is likely to suck. Other games, I realize 10-15 minutes in that an alien is an amazing fade and is going 30-2. I will agree with the OP that UW should've thought more about catering to casual/new gamers. Riot definitely makes sure newbies have an enjoyable first couple hours. Hell, even SC2 now has really invested in the tutorial system.
UW needs to keep its wiki up-to-date and not push so many balance changes out along with new content. I haven't played this game since the gorgeous update came out since I've been playing SC2. I simply feel over-whelmed by how many changes have come out in the last 3 months alone. Since the wiki is not current, I'm really not sure what to expect when I first go into a game again.
Back in March, I posted that the game needs a much easier mechanic for conceding. If the comm+25% of the team wants to forfeit early into the game, that should be made easy. I actually don't think a roflstomp game that ends in 5 minutes is bad, as long as the newb players understand why they lost. As an SC2 analogy, if I go 15 hatch in ZVZ and I lose to an early pool/zergling rush, it's a fast game but I feel that I've learned the downside to playing a greedy strategy.
Performance has never been a big deal to me. I played a year ago on a 6850 (core i5 750 on win7 64-bit) and am now using 660.
While I disagree with the OP's suggestion of MM, I strongly agree with his attitude of finding ways to cater to new players. Frankly, I'm surprised they're still adding in new content when this should've been priority #1 for most of the past year.
Match making would have been something that should have been in since launch, right now, or at least initially if it were added in, I would just see it not being used much at all, clans want to stomp in their own server.
That's so wrong. When matchmaking makes it into the game, I'd expect to see a lot less veteran players on the average pub server.
I'm still optimistic about it being a ground breaking feature that will fix major pub stomps, I'm sure most will just skip over to the server list just to avoid that matchmaking option all together. It's not a generic FPS, people pick and choose which servers they play in for their own reason, IE mods, the people who play there, easy to stomp, their own clans server, etc.
Comments
*sigh*
:-@
As for saying something productive, I have many close games. A significant number of them are stomps but most are not. I certainly don't agree that a lack of something that an entire generation of games did not have killed the population rather than the lacking nature of multiple core mechanics. Such as performance, balance, us ability, map variety etc. Not to mention that this game cannot be expected to do as well as cod due to a variety of reasons I don't care to ,mention but any thinking person will be able to come up with after some consideration.
While it's easy to grasp the idea of a ranking system which correctly gauges player ability, such a design is generally beyond comprehension. The mistake I see in most ranking approaches, is some foundation data/mold that player information is compared to, and is used to determine ability. This is a flawed approach, as it is too subjective and reliant on the developer's understanding of the game in it's totality.
A ranking system is difficult to design, and only increases in complexity as you go. Understanding what one can do is easy, making one that actually works is a whole other can of worms. There's someone from UWE doing the "Hive" system, which is more than what we had before, so lets just be grateful we're on our way!
-I have actually fleshed out a very strong mechanic to rank players in NS2, and wouldn't mind sharing it with the right interest.
Many people can be wrong, or make a massive mistake.
Lol, a generation of gamers that was 1/8th the size of our current one, if that.
What do all the most popular competitive games (as in 100k player plus) in our current (massively larger) gamer generation have? Matchmaking. Period. They don't all have the greatest performance. They don't all have the greatest tutorials. Some of them have major problems that have never been addressed. They all have matchmaking.
WoW, LoL, DotA 2, Halo, CoD, etc.
Yes, it's true, I can't speak for everybody, but I come from a long generation of gaming mistakes. Most people have not been around since Battlezone 1 and seen the FPS/RTS genre fail time, and time, and time again.
I have played DotA 1 since the year 2004*. When League of Legends came out, it wasn't a superior game to DotA 1 by any means. Even being designed over 10 years after the Warcraft 3 engine was designed, the graphics and performance were worse in many ways. The character roster was small, generic, and unbalanced. If anyone played Season 1 of LoL, they would know it was a joke. But what major advantage did it have over DotA? Matchmaking. And that was the one thing factor it took to bring over a huge number of players from the original playerbase. People were sick and tired of the horrible pub games filled with leavers, ragers, and unbalanced games.
If you think, for a SINGLE SECOND, that DotA 2 would have made it an inch off the ground without a built-in matchmaking system, I can't tell you just how wrong you are. No, I am not denying that popular competitive games did not require it back in the '90s. This isn't the '90s.
All of other the problems people have complained about in this forums, modern popular competitive games have had and still been successful.
I never said NS2 could or should be as popular as CoD, or even insinuated that. That doesn't mean we can't learn from more successful games. What I'm saying is matchmaking *WAS* the major failure of UWE's design, and you can't deny it. I have bought 6 copies of this game. SIX. And none of them are in use. It wasn't for performance reasons. It wasn't because "the 2torial was 2 h4rd guise". It was because most players don't have the time or patience to spend looking for fair and fun games that are extremely rare when there are so many better alternatives.
People complaining about 30 FPS need to get over yourselves. People play FPS games on older machines with 30 frames per second all the time and still do extremely well, I've seen it happen. Hell, most movies ever created play at 24 fps, and we don't see people walking out of the theaters because it's "too choppy". That isn't why people left the game.
If UWE had just put NS1 onto the source engine, updated the graphics, kept the exact same gameplay, and added matchmaking, while naming the new game "NS 2", it would have been unfathomably more popular than it is now. You can't deny it. That's what happened to CS:GO vs. CS:S, it's what happened to Starcraft 2 vs. Starcraft 1, it's what happened to DotA 2 vs. DotA 1. All those competitive games had slight improvements over the originals in several areas, but none of the improvements is what brought them such massive success, it was matchmaking. Plain and simple.
Source?? Because your six friends are not a large enough sample size for me to take that claim seriously.
And.. "statistically speaking" there has been very few threads claiming the #1 mistake was MM, compared to the many many others that generally end up looking like
#1 Performance
#2 Tutorial
#3 Changes
#4 Skill gap (what your OP should've been about imo.)
You can browse the forum archives and see this for yourself easily enough, starting from october 2012. Lol @wingflier i give you credit for sticking to your guns... but you just keep ignoring major factors like
To reiterate: A skill gap cannot be bridged by matchmaking, without a large playercount.
MM does nothing to a launching playerbase of 7,000 players. Nothing. Not even close, especially when you consider the width of the skill gap you'd have to accommodate for.
You'd STILL end up with top level players entering in lower skilled pub servers even IF your MM was flawless, (which it wouldn't be.) ending up with the same exact results you experience now.
Seriously... stop focusing on the symptom, man. :-/
I know as an end user all you experience is imbalanced teams and your mind instantly goes to MM as a solution because it worked for a valve game with 500k players... but its just not that all encompassing of a fix if you consider the many other factors that go into this indie niche old school twitch FPS / RTS hybrid.
Would such a thing be welcomed? Yes.
Was the absence of it the #1 failure of NS2? Not even remotely close.
By this point you should know he is deliberately disagreeing/arguing with you just to piss you off
In short: As with most threads around here, it's going nowhere slowly
The performance issues have been fixed for the most part. The tutorial is the best of any FPS I've ever played, even showing you videos after you die about how you messed up and what to do next. Name another FPS which has this. The game's balance is very strong at the moment I think. It's not perfect, but it certainly allows for a lot more strategies/diversity than it did on launch, and arguably more than NS1 as well.
So if those really were the actual problems, they have been fixed. Still, where the hell is everybody?
Guess what? The first game had: 1) Great performance, 2)Decent Tutorials (in game and all over youtube), and 3)Decent balance as well. It was even praised by critics as being an awesome game on many popular reviewing sites. AND YET?! It was incredibly unfriendly to new players for the exact same reasons this game is. New players would join the game, get slaughtered, and leave. Only the hardcore players stayed, and thus the playerbase was like a cult following.
UWE had an amazing opportunity to fix the major problem with their first game, but instead they simply played on all the strengths of the first game, and didn't improve any of the weaknesses. Thus, here we are in the same boat as before. Really, your arguments DO NOTHING to rebut this. NS2 is just NS1 with better graphics and some gameplay tweaks but no matchmaking. It failed. CS:GO is just CS:Source with better graphics, a few gameplay tweaks, and matchmaking. It succeeded. Argument over. End of story. Go home.
At this moment, CS:GO has a concurrent 20k players. The matchmaking works great with that! NS2 has easily had over 20k purchases. Yet, as I explained before, most of them left because they hated being slaughtered within the first 5 minutes of playing. How does a tutorial or game performance help that whatsoever? Hell, even CS:GO's UNRANKED games attempt to balance teams a bit on the community servers. How does NS2 address this problem whatsoever?
Let me ask you. What would happen if, even with DotA 2's fairly lengthy tutorial, the game just threw you into a group of random people of random skill levels and said, "Here you go!". Holy crap. Let's just say League of Legends would be a whole lot more popular than it already is. This is basically NS2 in a nutshell. Even their new "server skill cap" mechanic is too little, too late.
20k is easily large enough for CS:GO, and this game has at least that many buys. Even 10k concurrent is good enough for matchmaking. Let's be serious.
This isn't true. When NS2 launched you had 2 groups of people: People who had played NS1 a lot, and people who had never experienced the genre whatsoever. It would be quite easy to detect the difference between the two, and group them accordingly.
You don't seem to understand how basic matchmaking works, which makes me wonder why you think you're even fit to comment in this thread.
DotA 2 for example has a mind-numbing amount of factors involved when deciding how skilled a player is. You think 2 sides and 6 lifeforms is complicated? Try over 100 different heroes with completely different abilities and hundreds of items to learn, different roles to play, different lanes to figure out, advanced mechanics to understand, and a whole slew of other factors which would be nearly impossible to factor into a MM equation. So how do they do that? They don't!
It's a simple win/loss ratio. If you win, your MM score goes up. If you lose, your MM score goes down. Yes, initially this doesn't account for player skill very well, but over a period of hundreds of games, your own personal skill will begin to shine through, and your will be given the "Elo" score that you deserve. Combine this with an algorithm for "time played" (obviously people who have played longer get a slightly higher score), and you've got a very decent matchmaking system which has worked well for over 5 years in games just like this. If you knew ANYTHING about it, you would understand that.
Now what I'm expecting you to do at this point, is go into a deep explanation about how NS2 is more complicated than those games, or how 1 person can affect the game more than this or that, or blah blah blah (shoot myself). There would be two matchmaking scores, one for your ability to command, and another for your ability to play as a soldier/alien. Over time, you would get where you need to be. This nonsense about 1 player carrying the game is just a red herring. If there's 1 amazing player on one team, then statistically speaking there will be one amazing player on the other team, and it will balance itself out.
Don't want to be a UWE fanboi or anything, but people here talk like NS2 is dead already and like 10 years in development - let's just look forward to the "big" October patch and see what's coming up, so much drama..
Well, even though they had 7k at launch, I don't see the point in lecturing about it now. Atm there are 232 playing, and if I remember correctly it peaks at about 1k, sure you can talk that "it WAS the biggest mistake", but what good is there complaining about the past? The past is the past, because it is gone. It's nowhere to be seen but screenshots, videos and statistics. Hanging on to old mistakes is useless, that's why you have to concentrate on preventing possible new problems.
For example: let's say MM would have been a good thing on launch (I have no idea about these things, so I don't know could it have been, but in theory), well, it wasn't introduced and would have been a mistake. You decide to rant about it after it would do nothing to introduce it, which is useless and unproductive.
If that was the case, I believe UWE has enough brains to know that there's no reason to start thinking "what if we did something at launch to improve the game?" since it would give no help to the problems at hand: performance, crashes etc.
You do have a lot of good points, but they all mean nothing considering the time it took for you to give them. If you had done it at/soon after launch, it could have made good discussions if UWE should introduce MM to NS2. However, nobody did, or at least didn't do it good enough for UWE to think about it.
The last thing I have to say: Either you're just sticking to your opinions close minded, ignoring facts over your beliefs, or you keep at it just to piss people off. I really hope the first one.
http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html
i get angry when i'm forced to play this game with 80 FPS, I would probably cut my wrists at 30. (of course, 80 FPS in this game feels like 40 in a decent one)
Yea i realize I'm being baited / trolled now after the 3rd time he ignores and cherry picks which rebuttals to respond to and keeps reiterating the same thing, regardless. (people who purchased ns2 =/= concurrent player base.. *facepalm* )
That and the 30 fps and k/d comments really highlight what's going on here ..
/steps out of thread
"1 player is good enough to sway the entire game."
-This applies to DotA as well, and is very often the case. All you're doing is making an argument *FOR* matchmaking, not against. If the game really has this large of a skill-depth, certain factors need to be in place to make the games fair for the people participating.
"30 FPS is not playable."
-It most certainly is playable, even if it's not the most enjoyable. If nothing else, a person with that FPS can play exclusively Commander, who does not need 60+ FPS to be effective. Besides, most the performance issues have been fixed, so where is the playerbase? Talk about dodging the question. You have never answered this.
"NS2 never had a consistent number of players for MM to even be effective."
-This is simply a logical fallacy based on the current state of the game. My claim is that if MM had been there from the beginning, the population would have grown in size as more people stayed. More people staying equals more people telling their friends. More people telling their friends equals the game growing to a point that MM works much better. As has been said before in this thread, even bad MM is better than no MM at all, and it could have been tweaked over time. Your claim that "the playerbase never approached levels where MM would have mattered" is fallacious. It assumes that the same number of players would have left, which is completely missing the point of my argument.
Even a simplistic form of skill balancing that worked in community servers would have made a huge difference.
Anyway, I think I've laid out my argument pretty well, so I'll stop beating a dead horse. Obviously there is no way to prove this without polling all the people who have left, but I believe fully that the vast majority of the absent playerbase left because of the poor quality of the games themselves, not the game design or mechanics, performance reasons, or anything else. Why do I think this? Because most the performance and balancing flaws have been addressed, as they were in the first game; the *ONLY* thing that has not changed in TEN+ years of development is that the games are still 1-sided stomps the majority of the time, and here we are.
Uh, you must not have played NS1 during the stage of its life that NS2 is currently in. 1) At launch, NS1 ran worse than NS2 did at launch with comparable hardware, and NS1 was basically using a (at its core) 7 year old engine. 2) NS1 had been out about 3 years when youtube even launched... 3) NS1 was balanced to be played 6v6 yet by far the majority of servers had more than 12 slots.
Also, by the end of the first month after release, NS2 had literally less than 1/3 the daily players, so I don't think that
would have benefited anyone but the hardcore players that stayed, just like if matchmaking had been in NS1. NS1 did have the distinction of being the second most played mod of HL1, behind the obvious CS, so according to your logic NS1 would have beaten CS in playerbase had NS1 only used matchmaking...
Although a certain portion of players in NS2 could (and no doubt would!) benefit from matchmaking, I think I'll trust the anecdotal evidence of hundreds of posts I've read in the last 11 months about folks who had (often hardcore) gamer friends stop playing because of reasons @IronHorse mentioned rather than the lack of matchmaking at launch...
Work on presentation, improve the training mechanics. Right now the game is more or less hop in, presented with a menu screen, server list, video settings and a variety of servers to join in. The bot training doesn't work, that's the easy way to put it, bots get stuck, it performs badly, I've mentioned that in my previous post. Once you get into the game, you have random video notifications that pop up to teach you how to play. I doubt half the people have the attention span to watch them, I'm thinking a tutorial mode would be amazing (again mentioned in my last post.) I'm willing to stand boldly that this would improve the game for new players, aside from optimization and bug fixes, but that's a different discussion.
Another thing to randomly toss in that is a bit off topic, adding things like wall hopping and marine strafing really isn't something new players pick up very well, how simple they may seem for experienced players, it's a major advantage experienced users have over new players in a 1v1, or even 3v3 situation. Rookie weekends (free weekends) are a pub stomper paradise along with a shot in the foot for casual players who have to teach each user how to play, as a pub player who's seen this over time with free weekends.
Marines running into a base and laying out sentries around the hive/eggs (or just pinning in locations with early game sentries, is another common thing I see amongst experienced commanders in pub games lately that has players running side to side in the marine selection.
The game doesn't present itself well to people unless they're willing to take the time to learn how to play, instead of adding more complicated elements things should be dumbed down a little, I doubt match making will help at all, considering it must find out of the 1000 people playing at a time (low player count) that are in similar geographical locations, 24 open players, compare their "skill/rank," then find a server in the same geographical area that is at 100% performance that will fit all players into the server. I for one will be skipping over to the server list option, I'd hope to not see time wasted into writing match making for what is a small community and "poorly" (using it loosely) optimized game.
More focus into presentation, bug fixing, minor balances, marketing, tutorials, and reducing the very contrast skill ceiling. This isn't DOTA/LoL, match making wouldn't work for a game like this, or at least this late in its life.
UWE has two choices...
1) Regroup, fix the game + invest in marketing and bring NS2 back to life. If they play their cards right they could squeeze a lot of $$$ from NS2 is they go in the right direction.
2) Move on to something else.
I can understand UWE are being discouraged to work on NS2 from seeing that the game is losing its popularity. Whatever it is they decide to do, I wish them the best.
You're a little over complicating something that should be very simple.
Imagine 4 players on the server. player 1 (4:1 KD ratio), Player 2 (5:1 KD ratio), player 3 (1:1 KD Ratio), player 4 (1:1 KD ratio)
The match making system will arrange the teams in this way:
Team1: Player 1, Player 4
Team2: Player 2, Player 3
This is actually already possible with Shine Administration mod. Not all admins are aware of it or are willing to use the matchmaking though.
Unfortunately many admins don't realize how essential matchmaking is to NS2.
What will happen if the teams end up being like this?
Team1: Player 1, Player 2
Team2: Player 3, Player 4.
You guessed it right. Team 2 will get frustrated and quit. 10 more games like that, and guess what?? They'll think twice before playing NS2 again. Hence the low player count. Way too many frustrated players who had enough of having their team stomped by the other team, or simply by being on the overpowered team which makes the game boring and unchallenging.
Haven't you had a great commander once but a team full of people who get very easily snipped and killed? So even if you have a great commander, and your team understands the game well, you will not win if your opponent kills you before you can do anything.
I am sorry to say but people who think that matchmaking is not important to NS2 are being illogical.
Performance is the number one issue with NS2.
That's so wrong. When matchmaking makes it into the game, I'd expect to see a lot less veteran players on the average pub server.
UW needs to keep its wiki up-to-date and not push so many balance changes out along with new content. I haven't played this game since the gorgeous update came out since I've been playing SC2. I simply feel over-whelmed by how many changes have come out in the last 3 months alone. Since the wiki is not current, I'm really not sure what to expect when I first go into a game again.
Back in March, I posted that the game needs a much easier mechanic for conceding. If the comm+25% of the team wants to forfeit early into the game, that should be made easy. I actually don't think a roflstomp game that ends in 5 minutes is bad, as long as the newb players understand why they lost. As an SC2 analogy, if I go 15 hatch in ZVZ and I lose to an early pool/zergling rush, it's a fast game but I feel that I've learned the downside to playing a greedy strategy.
The absolute worst experience for new players is to endure a 30 minute game that's clearly unbalanced.
You can read gnoarch's story here, from way back in March: http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/129026/a-suggestion-to-change-the-concede-function/p1
Performance has never been a big deal to me. I played a year ago on a 6850 (core i5 750 on win7 64-bit) and am now using 660.
While I disagree with the OP's suggestion of MM, I strongly agree with his attitude of finding ways to cater to new players. Frankly, I'm surprised they're still adding in new content when this should've been priority #1 for most of the past year.
I'm still optimistic about it being a ground breaking feature that will fix major pub stomps, I'm sure most will just skip over to the server list just to avoid that matchmaking option all together. It's not a generic FPS, people pick and choose which servers they play in for their own reason, IE mods, the people who play there, easy to stomp, their own clans server, etc.