List of improvements needed before NS2 World Champs
Roobubba
Who you gonna call? Join Date: 2003-01-06 Member: 11930Members, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
Who you gonna call? Join Date: 2003-01-06 Member: 11930Members, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
Dear community,
The purpose of this thread is to come up with a list of changes/fixes/additions to NS2 that we, the casting and competitive NS2 communities, feel UWE needs to work on before Wasabi's NS World Championship tournament in the early part of 2014. What makes other games successful as competitive games, and how does NS2 differ?
With specific focus on the most important fixes to the game, UWE should be able to attain the following goals:
Why not just let UWE get on with it?
Ultimately, this is an opportunity for us to highlight what we as comp players feel is the most important set of issues. This is a means for us to communicate those ideas back to UWE in one place, and also provides a single platform for discussion between UWE and their gaming community regarding these issues.
So here is the list.
It is a work in progress and I need your help to populate, curate and prioritise it. I will update this through discussion in this thread, or alternatively feel free to PM me.
Any suggestions about the contents, viability, format etc welcome, just please keep this civil and constructive.
Edit reordered and updated.
Edit2 to reflect update b251
The purpose of this thread is to come up with a list of changes/fixes/additions to NS2 that we, the casting and competitive NS2 communities, feel UWE needs to work on before Wasabi's NS World Championship tournament in the early part of 2014. What makes other games successful as competitive games, and how does NS2 differ?
With specific focus on the most important fixes to the game, UWE should be able to attain the following goals:
- stronger competitive community worldwide - more clans, better retention of comp players
- more prominent casting of games - through better interface, and with more games happening as a result of a stronger community
- better public play experience (perhaps through matchmaking and skill-matching teams)
- higher concurrent player counts
- better player retention
Why not just let UWE get on with it?
Ultimately, this is an opportunity for us to highlight what we as comp players feel is the most important set of issues. This is a means for us to communicate those ideas back to UWE in one place, and also provides a single platform for discussion between UWE and their gaming community regarding these issues.
So here is the list.
- Client performance. Progress already has been made, and I'm sure this is a running feature of UWE discussions. Still need to run _nsl_ map versions so more progress welcome.
- Server performance. Took a blow recently compared to some older builds. Probably higher priority than client performance right now.
- Matchmaking. Hive is sort of running, and this is obviously being worked on...
- Net Code.
- Net performance in low ping environments can already be boosted significantly by tweaking the rates. Can more be done here for the wider public too?
- Client updaterate fixed at 20: flexibility to allow server admins to optimise values would be helpful
- Anti Cheat features. This has been raised by eg Gliss and others. More details needed from those better informed than me.
- Support for replays. Big task but would be extremely beneficial
- First Person spectate performance. Switching is still fairly slow; we could really use an HLTV-type client but I realise this is a very big ask to implement.
- ----Fixed below here----
- Collision code. - UPDATED, thank you!
- UI clutter. - UPDATED, thank you!
- Key configuration support. For commanders and players with different keyboard and language layouts. - UPDATED, thank you!
It is a work in progress and I need your help to populate, curate and prioritise it. I will update this through discussion in this thread, or alternatively feel free to PM me.
Any suggestions about the contents, viability, format etc welcome, just please keep this civil and constructive.
Edit reordered and updated.
Edit2 to reflect update b251
Comments
I think UWE already tried it once? But maybe the people need it one more time? And after the free weekend the game could be on sale for 1 week with 50% off?
Just a thought
There have been a few free weekends. It's a great way of attracting lots of new players. However, it's really important that the next time this is done, the game is stable and has a suitable matchmaking/side balancing system that reduces the prevalence of stacks on public servers - this is one of the areas most complained about by new and not-so-new players alike.
It so happens that that ties in nicely with what we heard 6-months ago about sabot. Being able to pick up more-competitive-than-pub games from within the menu will help both comp and pub communities in several ways: more comp-minded gamers able to get better games more frequently, fewer roaming comp players inadvertantly destroying pubs, better accessibility for pub players to enter the comp scene - the list goes on.
I don't class this as a feature/fix of the game, though. It's a marketing activity, and falls outside the scope of what I'm trying to do here.
Thanks for chiming in big D.
Anti-cheat features for this game are unfortunately very bare bones. From my own personal research NS2 is just lucky that most cheating "companies" or "projects/sites" straight up aren't wasting their time on creating cheats for NS2. And our community is so small (in the NSL) that anyone cheating would likely be found out.
Were the game to get bigger however, a better system would need to arise.
If we don't ask, we definitely won't get, so this is about putting us in the best possible position to get UWE to do what we think are the most important changes ASAP.
@Locklear I know you've posted on this before, forgive me for not having found the details. Obviously getting more sophisticated anti-cheat measures in is necessary as a preparation for increasing player numbers (both comp and pub), so it's important to get the details of what is needed down. Would you elaborate (or link me, perhaps?) on what specific features we should be asking for?
only takes an hour or two to write a file filter kmd to circumvent any non-kernel level consistency checking that anyone could implement.
of course no one needs to do any of that when things are cached and not consistency checked in the first place, fyi
I can't remember if this thread was the 4th or 5th attempt at the same thing. Well I'm sure Hugh's newsletter and 1on1 assurance that your feedback will be considered will work out fo' sure this time.
Carrot on a stick feature
Reworking of the learning curve
That and client performance are the 3 biggest things that can be done in order to RETAIN players and thus keep a healthier comp scene.
Everything else on your list is with the current support of ns2 not achiveable in the next years.
We asked for changing commander hotkeys since beta or support for a replay system. And many more bugs which are in the game since beta ...
In the first koln event the sc2 caster (not sure about his name), told hugh that UWE should work on a replay system and even an ingame system to watch games (like hltv) to improve the competitive community, because you only get sponsors and players with a game which you can watch. But Companys dont focus on the specator system, there was a video on this forum about that topic.
We had many ideas about how to do it with the feature which we are currently having e.g. direct highlight of twitch streams while starting ns2 and being in the start menu. NS2 is using a browser system so you would be able to watch the games with twitch ingame. (even if its not possible, should take much work compared to other stuff). There are more people watching Starcraft 2 then playing it. Still this game is one of the top highlights of competitive gaming.
To sum it up, as a company UWE achived the money to cover their cost and to work on a new project. The features you highlight would cost to much money and work for a game which has a smaller community everyday. If we had half the points on the list done till end of the year, i would say NS2 had a chance to keep it up as good as it is now or even improve.
But you can not blame UWE. The cash/bow turns into a poor dog so they have too.
Replays: due to the number of people who stream the game these days, someone is bound to record that moment you want replayed. And it wouldn't really be possible to implement into the game/would require a LOT of work.
Better public play: No matter how much matchmaking you implement, no matter how much skill balancing, nothing will stop people from being mean, discouraging, negative, and other censored words to describe people, which will likely make people stop playing because they think the community sucks.
Key configuration support: my bindings mod, works perfectly fine.
UI clutter: the UI is really not that bad is it? I don't think anyone would object by saying its much better than it was before. Yeah some things could be smaller/customizable, but it's nothing game breaking I don't think.
Everything else is at least pretty reasonable, and wouldn't be completely impossible to do.
Replay support would be massive, do you not see what kind of interest Dota2 games can pull? Being able to join up to any inprogress game and just watch, either from a directed POV or just free looking around is amazing.. OFC that does require significant infrastructure to support I imagine, but even some basic HLTV recording would be an improvement.
If you really believe that you don't realize the difference between the quality possible in a good demo system compared to 3500kb/s live stream.
There are so many moments where I have gotten some decent frags and unable to have them recorded because recording live -> low performance and it's in poor quality compared to what could be achieved with HL demo system.
Plus the points Dragon made, and also check out www.gamereplays.org.
The quality in this video: http://www.twitch.tv/l2pns2/c/2111922 (pub frags and some comp fade at the end in combat mod - nothing worth noting as a frag video)
Is very terrible encoding and resolution wise to what could be done with the HL1 demo system..
http://www.ensl.org/files/videos/AtomicNS.mp4
^ much better
basic config support / keybinding system has been promised since day 1 and it still hasn't been delivered - I thought it was grimly hilarious that Bitey had to use autohotkey at LAN just to have basic rebind functionality.
And we are still here shooting some whips, crags and drifters...
Collisions have been horrible since the model was changed to pill.. but that may finally be changing again.. There was some changes being tested in the BT mod which do hold some promise.. I personally hadn't played with them yet however but I do believe it changes player collisions to use a box or cylinder.
I realise that it's not probable that ALL this stuff can be worked on by such a small company, but at this stage I want to narrow the list of 'must-haves' down by getting feedback from people here. We can then present this to UWE with a cover letter along the lines of 'if you're serious about supporting the NS2WC, then here is a list of things we feel most strongly about in priority order - can we discuss these with you?'
The primary idea behind this is to maximise the exposure and response that UWE gets from a live WC tourney (or not live if it's not funded, but the potential is for it to be huge on twitch either way). It will do that by addressing the major concerns regarding comp level play and by providing a solid start for new players such that they're less likely to get repeatedly stomped than they currently are.
Everytime they made such an event, there was no responds to this kind of topic in the forums.
I even wrote an Email to Flayra and Hugh back then, with the answer "we will look into this".
If they change that and would do some of this stuff before an event which will probly not happen, i would be glad to say "I am wrong".
But history has shown, nothing will be done.
And like gliss said Keybindings.
For UWE as a company, i can only hope that they will improve their focus and the priority to some aspects of their games in the future.
Otherwhise the next title which isnt supported from such a community like Natural selection will fail instantly.
Is it just apathy that no one even bothers to ask for better movement mechanics anymore knowing UWE can't do it?
As long as we have the alien commander, it's either going to be this PvE garbage, where the alien comm does have stuff to do - but it makes for a bad experience as marine.
Or go back to the alien comm being a part time job of getting into the hive every now and then to drop something, where 1 player is chained to the hive and is forced to pull themselves away from contributing to the team ilike everyone else to click a couple buttons for a few seconds.
As we've seen. Both are awful. And a solution isn't coming.
damn
You should make a table instead of bullets.
One column to guess how difficult it can be.
One column to guess how much time is needed to develop each item.
Net code / Client updaterate : It has to be done automatically (meaning negotiation between client and server) to prevent any form of abuse, exploit, cheat. I don't wanna see the same sh!t as NS1.
Anti Cheat features: Always welcomed not because we have many. But because a product that can be trusted is simply better. One note about it. Dev should talk about what kind of cheat it protects from.
Key configuration support: Even if SamusDroid did create a mod, it stays unofficial (sorry).
I would add :
-Testing demo. A simple demo that configure automatically the best settings (graphics) for NS2.
-Ingame netgraph (not the actual) and GFX stats. Cool for mapper and moders but also to check if everything is ok on the network side.
-Spectate option like lock on player (next time he respawn you stay on him)
-Referee option. Any match making will be enhanced by referee and player option.
Option for referee to call team for a ready, heads or tail coin
Option for player to edit a status on competition. Like "ready" / "not ready" and more