Player retention and the future of NS2
Idleray
Join Date: 2012-10-04 Member: 161464Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2012-10-04 Member: 161464Members, Reinforced - Shadow
This is a topic which I've been pretty vocal about, and since it's a new year, I'd thought I'd bring it up again especially with the recent announcement of Subnautica and what I fear to be the diminished importance of continuing support for NS2 from the devs.
Fundamentally, apart from performance issues (that are overcome with time via performance fixes and players improving hardware), the number one problem that ails any chance of NS2 becoming more popular, with its own sustainable E-sports to keep the interest of vets is: Player Retention
A lot of us who follow the games popularity levels on steamcharts.com/app/4920 will be familiar with the phenomenon whereby following a sale the game experiences a surge of popularity only to die down to normal levels again within a few months, which is against the expectation that the game grow steadily in popularity over time. What appears to be happening then is that the majority of players who try out the game ditch it shortly after.
Now alot of things contribute to retention which I'm not going to go into here. For me though the biggest contributing factor has always been a consistently enjoyable gameplay experience. If your system is good enough to overcome the performance hurdles, the next thing that will keep you playing is a game that is fun, and for new players especially the game needs to make a good first impression.
At its best , a match of NS2 is an intense, action-packed, thrilling tug-of-war between two sides in which both skill and strategy are indispensable.
At its worst, and I fear this is what many rookies actually experience much of the time: it's a frustrating slog against hopeless odds as you are repeatedly killed(sometimes right after spawning) without you able to do anything to put a dent on the other team. Sometimes the outcome of the match can be foreseen in the first 60 seconds and all that is left is a slow miserable slog through F4s, repeated concede votes that fail, spawn-camping and a general sense of frustration. This is worse for rookies because of the relatively long spawn times and how unfun it feels to spend your res on a lifeform once during a game and then losing it in seconds because you never learnt how to play it properly and there are few opportunities to learn.
Right now the ratio of the latter compared to the former is unacceptably high, and UWE could be doing more.
The community has done its fair share through friendly helpful commanding and advice, how-to-play videos and guides, but I feel that the promised Big Unannounced System/Organised Play System/Sabot is long over-due. I hope that UWE at least releases some news concerning its ideas so it can bounce them off the community, because there is a lot of potential here to make the experience from game to game more welcoming, more balanced and more fun.
Fundamentally, apart from performance issues (that are overcome with time via performance fixes and players improving hardware), the number one problem that ails any chance of NS2 becoming more popular, with its own sustainable E-sports to keep the interest of vets is: Player Retention
A lot of us who follow the games popularity levels on steamcharts.com/app/4920 will be familiar with the phenomenon whereby following a sale the game experiences a surge of popularity only to die down to normal levels again within a few months, which is against the expectation that the game grow steadily in popularity over time. What appears to be happening then is that the majority of players who try out the game ditch it shortly after.
Now alot of things contribute to retention which I'm not going to go into here. For me though the biggest contributing factor has always been a consistently enjoyable gameplay experience. If your system is good enough to overcome the performance hurdles, the next thing that will keep you playing is a game that is fun, and for new players especially the game needs to make a good first impression.
At its best , a match of NS2 is an intense, action-packed, thrilling tug-of-war between two sides in which both skill and strategy are indispensable.
At its worst, and I fear this is what many rookies actually experience much of the time: it's a frustrating slog against hopeless odds as you are repeatedly killed(sometimes right after spawning) without you able to do anything to put a dent on the other team. Sometimes the outcome of the match can be foreseen in the first 60 seconds and all that is left is a slow miserable slog through F4s, repeated concede votes that fail, spawn-camping and a general sense of frustration. This is worse for rookies because of the relatively long spawn times and how unfun it feels to spend your res on a lifeform once during a game and then losing it in seconds because you never learnt how to play it properly and there are few opportunities to learn.
Right now the ratio of the latter compared to the former is unacceptably high, and UWE could be doing more.
The community has done its fair share through friendly helpful commanding and advice, how-to-play videos and guides, but I feel that the promised Big Unannounced System/Organised Play System/Sabot is long over-due. I hope that UWE at least releases some news concerning its ideas so it can bounce them off the community, because there is a lot of potential here to make the experience from game to game more welcoming, more balanced and more fun.
Comments
I got to give props to Charlie for really trying to grow his business by creating NS2 from scratch (as opposed to doing a Source mod years ago) and the potential to leverage licensing options in Spark by creating their own engine. In the end, I think they bit off more than they could chew but learned a lot about the game development process that will hopefully make their next title a bigger success. The fact that constant engine optimizations were such a resource sink to NS2 really pulled away from time spent on other parts of NS2 (mainly refining the gameplay), and the fact that they are using the Unity engine for their next game will hopefully help keep the project manageable.
In the end for me personally, I just wish this learning experience for UWE didn't have to come at the expense of the sequel to my favorite game of all time. I don't know what the final numbers ended up for NS2, but I think they will definitely consider it a success for their company, despite it not becoming something that could change the face of their company (i.e. triple in size, multiple projects, amazing publicity, etc.). Honestly, FPS games in general are a bit dead (unless you already have a call of duty franchise to sell on) when compared to the dotas, league of legends, hearthstones, etc out there. NS2 never had a chance to be for UWE what LoL was to Riot Games in 2008. But I digress.
I also think it's absolutely silly to keep pushing the e-sport thing. I love competitive play, but the casual player has gotten the raw end of the deal on this game. You can't have a competitive scene without focusing first oh having and maintaining a much much much larger casual fun scene.
I only played NS1 for so long because of the amazing gameplay (not the graphics, not the features). NS1 v3.2 will always be my favorite game of all time. Some of the guys at UWE are immensely talented (Cory's Art comes to mind). In the end, the result wasn't what I was looking for in NS2. They had a different agenda. And I'm OK with that. Onward to the next project!
Unfortunately, I've never seen any kind of oversight on the plentiful Official Servers out there
In fact, I got so fed up one night that I decided to fix the problem by working through the dedicated server wiki and opening my own server last weekend.
Of course playing on my own server is not perfect, but I actively try to counter-act toxic behaviour like pro stack vs. green stack or send everyone back to RR when it's hopeless because one team has biomass 12 , is swimming in money and just drags out the inevitable victory to humiliate the rookies or rack up more kills for the oh-so-important score etc.
Microphones are mandatory on my server, though.
And what shall I say? Being able to force-eject a totally unresponsive comm is a godsend. Playing with cooperative teammates great fun.
If I see that one team has all the greens and the other not, I try to balance it out BEFORE the snorefest happens.
And if there is a superpro player that racks up more kills than the whole rest of the server combined I ask him to go comm and teach. I remind them that the server's microphone rule also applies to silent solo artists.
Bottom line
Being able to play on a server with an admin or mod present makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE.
+ Shine administration mod (guess what took me a whole week to figure out and tweak to my liking?
Wanted to correct this, playing on a server with good admin / moderators + a usefull admin mod makes the difference.
When one is driven by ambition, one is determined to be the best. But rather than starting with the culmination of your craft (i.e. NS2), one must practice first (i.e. build up to it with smaller projects) in order to gain the necessary experience for that ultimate project. Understandably, UWE were eager to create their own engine and develop NS2 from the ground up but--even by their own admission--they weren't nearly experienced enough to tackle this at the time they did. In the process, however, they learned a lot about game development, and I would be very surprised if Subnautica was a sub-par game to NS2, relatively speaking.
I hate to be a pessimist, but a vast majority of the problems NS2 faced (i.e., problems leading directly to its low retention rate) were avoidable, but it's likely too far gone now to attempt a fix. It's also just a victim of the evolution of gaming... so many cheap/indie games are available at everyone's fingertips. PC 'gaming' is worlds more popular than it was before, especially with a platform like Steam giving all these developers the opportunity to market their games to the masses. NS2 might have been successful in 2005 when niche games (let alone niche shooter games) were able to thrive, but--as the OP points out--the game is quite unforgiving for new players, and they simply don't want to continue playing.
Hypothetically, however, if UWE were to make an NS3 (on Spark or any other Engine, for that matter), it should be vastly superior to NS2 in nearly every aspect on launch day. Maybe some day
We could see some major changes that are widely accepted by the competitive and public community or even just small changes but it is kind of up to the community now to keep things running.
The upside is that small hardcore communities are mostly awesome compared to the cesspool forums of megapopular titles.
I think the issue has more to do with the way the game is being played than the content of the game. I don't think any amount of new maps/balance changes/toys are going to help with the fundamentally uneven nature of the game experience for newcomers, as well as the lack of a persistent system whether it be achievements, skill level (which is still basically not functional right now) or something else.
However I think a well thought-out and implemented organised play system will help with both keeping the game fresh for vets and making it more accessible/less punishing for rookies. Please entertain the following idea for a few moments:
I floated the idea awhile back for one way in which such a system could do both ranked match-making and persistence well: in the form of Campaign "Seasons" where players participate by picking a side (marine/alien) and joining a marine "squadron" or alien "swarm": something that is like a looser form of the clan structure but is supported in game. Players would then have a "club" to which they feel a sense of belonging or commitment, and different squads might be paired up against different swarms each week in official "campaign games" which might pick a balanced roster of players based on skill from both clubs and the results from these games would be recorded for a final tally at the end of each season. Then the very end of the season would be a marine or alien victory with the top contributing squads/swarms(as well as the top players of each) displayed in all their glory.
It would be a great way to have both rookies and vets intermingle and would essentially supplant the bother for PUGs when you have officially scheduled games every week wherein you're guaranteed to both have a balanced, fun game and also have that game count towards something.
UWE could even monetise this in a fair way by selling tickets to campaign games like TF2...
oops I went off on a tangent. In any case I just want to re-emphasise that the core game is great already, with alot of the new features redundant even(exos and babblers to name 2 off my head). The reason why the game is not recognised as great is in my opinion a lack of vision to make it feel truly big and epic, and imho too much focus on promoting the competitive scene without making the player base fully invested.
1. They can not be bothered to learn the mechanics of the game and thus get dominated on public servers.
2. Performance is a problem for them to fully enjoy the game.
3. Players get bored of the same game mode after a while
4. Hardcore players want something more (not realising this game has a competitve scene or don't like the competitive scene)
Modders can atleast add some game modes or variations to the game for people that are looking for something new and refreshing. They can also change the way the mechanics work and help balance competitive play with certain variable changes. As far as performance goes, I am not too sure much can be done about that from modding.
These are probably the only things I can see that will keep the game alive and increase player retention but perhaps I have missed something.
It has exchanged this deliberate pace for a much more bombastic approach, favored by the 'hardcore FPS' crowd, where twitch-shooting/reflexes are all that are required to dominate, and clothed under the blanket description of 'skill'. It results in short, EXTREMELY lethal rounds filled with sprinting from place to place, where games are (effectively) won and lost within the first ten minutes much of the time, and a single 'pro' player can dominate and carry an entire team, with no recourse or hope of recovery.
I have the strong feeling that a need to return to the roots of NS is needed, if the game is to have any chance to flourish... and if it has not missed that opportunity by alienating a majority, if not nearly the entirety of new players who do step into a rookie server, only to be met by a stacked stomp round after round, every 15 minutes.
I feel that we need to discard the CounterStrike rounds that have replaced the 2-hour campaigns of classic NS. To ignore the whingeing about keeping the skill cap high from a certain segment when changes are made, in order to maintain a healthy standard player base, rather than a small pool of the extremely dedicated/'competitive'.
That NS needs to remember itself, and return to the days when it was more than yet another mindless twitch-shooter also-ran with basic objectives tacked on.
Who gets to decide what changes happen when the developers are no longer the end authority on that? Do we want to end up with 10 different balance mods with slight variations between them, with teams only playing a certain one ?
There are a lot of interesting mods in this game but to be honest none of them will get much attention or bring much new. Combat is the only real variation on the main game that could be considered another game mode that is successful, but a very shallow one that quickly becomes tiring.
A single pro person could do so in ns1 also. Part of the issue of the constant action is the map design being such that maps are small and wheel shaped.
People hate change, can you imagine the outcry of the people who claim they paid 20 dollars for the game and now they have to relearn everything bla bla.
The ns1 skillcap was higher so the good old days may shock you.
Then the problem is server you are playing in, not the mod. I get twice the fps in combat compared to normal ns2 and the game feels a loooooooooot more responsive/faster
Most games have a population graph which follows an exponential decay curve. That's the norm.
Should the game be simplified to cater for more casual gamers? No. I've been pretty satisfied with the state of NS2 since biodome. It balances twitch with strategy well.
That's not a thing.
The rubberbanding has nothing to do with fps.
Our combat server also has this rubberbanding / lag problem, which means that there must be something wrong with the mod, since vanilla ns2 runs just fine.
its more that the smaller communities have a higher probability to be awesome because there's less people to average out the awesome factor vs bigger communities. Theres plenty of shit small ones.
Concerening the game modes, yes there are various different game modes/mods, most of which are unfinished or not working properly. Aside from combat (which has been rubber banding since 2 or 3 patches ago whenever someone joins or leaves a server) I have found myself playing the faded mod a few times.
This is a nice change for me for those times when I am bored of pubbing for fun or doing gathers and we are not playing pcw's as a team. It actually brings a lot of what I expected NS2 to be like when I first played the game. All of the rooms are dark and no one has a clue where the fade is until he starts killing people. It creates a pretty tense atmosphere.
Also the developers have never been the authority on Mods that were not created by them. NS1 was a mod for Half-Life and look where that ended up, there is no reason why a mod can not exist that makes the game what so many people think it should be. There needs to be an outcry or some kind of concensus from a lot of people for certain changes to happen to the base game in the form of a mod. I am speaking strictly in terms of what can be done for player retention, the logistics is a completely different matter.
Just trying to bring something to the table.
The game is quite frankly beyond brutal to new players. Pretty much any player with experience can decimate a rookie regardless of skill level.
I have a friend I bought NS2 for, but he quit after around 30 hours due to the vast skill gap between rookies and vets. I continually am trying to convince him to give it another try, but so far his memories of being so brutally stomped have kept him away. His usual response is along the lines of "I'm not really in the mood to be slaughtered today" and that's sad. I've never known him to quit a game just because it's hard...
I think if pub games were balanced more around pub play, then new players might not be so brutally stomped. (and likewise vets wouldn't have such a huge impact on the outcome of each game)
Maybe someone could make a "pub" mod for public games, leaving the core game for competitive players only. Basically the opposite of "promod" (noobmod! lol) Admins could even use the rookie tag for easy identification... Green = public mod. White = core game.
Also, if you compare how good rookies are playing on each side, you will see that they tend to be better marines when playing the game for the first time, which then shifts to being better aliens. At least that always has been my impression.
So, in which direction would you balance for new / public players?
I was talking about the devs being an authority on the game balance and changes, not 3rd party mods.
Half-life mods were a success because everyone owned half-life and a huge proportion of pc gamers played half-life derived games; ie the player base of the various mods (tfc, cs, ns1, etc) were all sourced from the greater half-life player base. NS2 has about the same number of players as ns1, maybe even less I can't remember, and the fraction of that willing to play mods will mean mods will all have a tiny regular player base.
It boils down to me not really wanting to play mods on a high interp, low fps and sluggish feeling medium that I only play on because it offers gameplay that is somewhat like ns1 despite glaring issues. If I am not playing ns2 then I am playing one of the thousands of other games off the cereal box aisle that is the steam store, usually CSGO. Combat I can tolerate because it provides value to me either through xenocide griefing or through the illusion of practicing my skills and becoming better at vanilla.
The pub mod thing was just a wild idea thrown out there... It seems to me if games balanced around pub play can have competitive promods, then why can't a game balanced around competitive play have a pub mod...
I'm not a modder or game designer though so I don't know how it would be done... It was just a thought. I love NS2 but it sucks seeing people quit due to the skill gap.
But yeah the playerbase is a problem and we have already lost a hell of a lot of potential players but surely we can come up with some solutions to offer any other potential new players a reason to keep playing the game?
What I believe is that if the games are consistently balanced, rookies will still get to win and be able to enjoy the game, and if their wins mean something they will have something to work for and be motivated to become more skilled.
So it should not be balancing the game mechanics, it should be about balanced match-making.
There are still greenies that join a game and comm then tell me they didn't play the tutorial.
Still, it's obvious they really worked hard on the game, and hey, I did manage to get hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of it. So not too many complaints to be had.
Also, NS is part of a subset of games that are sadly going out of style. Fast-moving skill-based shooters with tons of strategic depth aren't really in demand anymore. People don't want to dedicate as much time to mastering game mechanics, it's all about instant-gratification "realistic" shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield these days.