Listen, the game must be made into F2P or the decline will continue no matter what, it is just a matter of statistics:
1. The number of players keep declining: http://steamcharts.com/app/4920
2. Sales and free to play weekends only bump the numbers very temporarily and they become less useful over time.
3. The game needs a large player base to keep functioning, since the majority of people want to play on servers that are 18+ players and they want several servers of this size available for every region. Some regions are already long since dead.
What you do:
1. So you re-release the game as F2P in a way where all of the new players will mostly play against eachother on rookie only server, the only exception being experienced NS2 commanders, or something.
2. You sell more cosmetics to make some money.
This way you maybe have a shot of keeping the game alive for a while longer. NS2 will die, but this way it will die more slowly.
But you neglect to demonstrate that F2P actually helps with any of those 3 premises. Not all F2P games magically gain more players - look at gotham city imposters.
So really, what we should focus on is NOT getting F2P ready, but develop said infrastructure. Enabling F2P is secondary to that.
In addition, it might even turn out that with the proper infrastructure in place, that F2P isn't even necessary anymore. That remains to be seen of course.
Do UWE get anything from an F2P model? very much doubt any monetization they could make would account for the cost of development. Also can't see why they would want to take dev time away from Subnautica.
For us yes it would help a dwindling playerbase but to be blunt at this point why should UWE give 2 shits.
But you neglect to demonstrate that F2P actually helps with any of those 3 premises. Not all F2P games magically gain more players - look at gotham city imposters.
So really, what we should focus on is NOT getting F2P ready, but develop said infrastructure. Enabling F2P is secondary to that.
In addition, it might even turn out that with the proper infrastructure in place, that F2P isn't even necessary anymore. That remains to be seen of course.
I think that we are actually in agreement about what we think should be done, I didn't elaborate what I meant with "in a way where all of the new players will mostly play against eachother on rookie only server" but what I mean is pretty much along the same lines as the two posts that you linked.
Yes, the game needs a proper hands-on tutorial in the game as well, but that is tricky to do.
At any rate I think that a decision about it needs to be taken swiftly as the population is dwindling and at some point this year there won't be enough players to run but a few dedicated servers in NA and Europe.
It is worth remembering that Natural Selection 1 was a free to play game, which is part of the reason why it lived for so long. Yes, you had to own Half-Life 1 but everyone and their mother had a copy of that game, making it practically F2P.
For us yes it would help a dwindling playerbase but to be blunt at this point why should UWE give 2 shits.
Again: Because better company reputation. For them almost effort-free advertising of their new product (e.g. Subnautica). Also: I hate those capitalistic view-points - "just throw away something good and beautiful because it gives me no quick money".
Reputation with a very very small percentage of people, also their next game is targeting a completely different market. As for the whole capitalistic view point, it isn't viewpoint it's what they need to do to exist. some people don't live on mattresses made of money rubbing their hand together thinking up plans to make a fast buck.
Edit: can you imagine the shit show of comments if this did go F2P? Can't see that helping sub that much either.
No risk, no gain. They won't make any extra money by not doing anything. The game is already there. It sorts of works. It was bit of a marketing failure at launch. Only thing that remains is to actively find the audience for it (people who try it mostly find it enjoyable), and the money might come at minimal investment (it has some precedents). They already made smart move by pulling CDT into this, why not exploit the potential.
Percentage depends on how many swallow the F2P bait . There is only one market - it's called people. Coincidentally, I like adventure games and probably I wouldn't even know this company and their new game exists, if I coincidentally haven't bought NS2 on one of those sales. I mean, you put it like the UWE would have to relocate under a bridge to make this happen.
There is "**** show" of comments now for not going F2P. It is a lose-lose situation :P
Once again, you assume they have the manpower to do this and support it in the long run. It's not a switch they can flip and all of a sudden all the backend to support it is there.
I do not support free to play, I have not see it benefit games culturally yet. I'm slightly biased as I've sunk $70 US into this game buying it before it was even available on steam... twice. The gameplay itself is what will sell the game, it's that simple.
What can we do to improve the gameplay options for players? Modding would help, trouble is there isn't much useful documentation on the subject, that literally put me off implementing one of my ideas for FOUR YEARS (Go search for the idea thread from 2011, it's not too hard to find).
Other than that, we need better tools for organising matches that aren't awkward to use. Steam groups aren't up to par, there's a cool thing called evolve which you can get at www.evolvehq.com which has match making (find a match for a game before launching the game, supports basically every game out there), group chat and whatnot.
Really I don't care much about whether there's 500 or 5000 players, as long as I can find 11 other people to have a good match with I'll be happy. Of course I'm not happy with vanilla mechanics, that's a subject for another couple million threads.
I got more to say, but probably best to avoid a wall of text when there's more than enough to talk about where we're at right now.
@Ironsoul you can join games outside the game. Just use your steam serverbrowser and filter for NS2. If you want to join a 6v6 only, from outside the game, that's what gathers are.
So I actually DO think the tools are there for that in particular. I do think ensl can improve their gather system however, but that's not on uwe or cdt.
What can we do to improve the gameplay options for players? Modding would help, trouble is there isn't much useful documentation on the subject, that literally put me off implementing one of my ideas for FOUR YEARS (Go search for the idea thread from 2011, it's not too hard to find).
Other than that, we need better tools for organising matches that aren't awkward to use.
You need the source code.
You don't need to think about the things to do in 'why is the game is dying?' threads. You just need more people who will actually do things. These people are called 'developers'.
They can't be hired, because there is no money. But there is the code, which is enough for them.
So I actually DO think the tools are there for that in particular. I do think ensl can improve their gather system however, but that's not on uwe or cdt.
There is "having tools". And there is "comprehensive experience". I mean for example, this is the first time I hear of "steam serverbrowser". How is a casual player to know of such things...
Everything but the engine and steam is readable/modable lua scripts or shaders. Source code would not help him much... Having API reference and documentation would.
More people rarely equals more work done. If they open-sourced it, they would pretty much needed equal number of people to double-check changes from submisions, test them and merge them.
So I actually DO think the tools are there for that in particular. I do think ensl can improve their gather system however, but that's not on uwe or cdt.
There is "having tools". And there is "comprehensive experience". I mean for example, this is the first time I hear of "steam serverbrowser". How is a casual player to know of such things...
The steam serverbrowser has always been an integrated part of steam. I, for example, know of it because I used it while playing Counter-Strike 1.6. Now you know of it because you read this comment. What is your point exactly? Are you saying that uwe/cdt needs to advertise this ancient feature, because some people are ignorant about it?
Everything but the engine and steam is readable/modable lua scripts or shaders. Source code would not help him much... Having API reference and documentation would.
More people rarely equals more work done. If they open-sourced it, they would pretty much needed equal number of people to double-check changes from submisions, test them and merge them.
When you have more, the probability that someone would write an API reference is higher. The probability that there is someone who creates quality content is higher.
Merge is no problem. It is a solved thing.
'Need more people to do testing' means more content per build. Because what tester does is, basically, he takes his checklist of features and checks if they work.
But more content per build is what we are actually trying to achieve to get bigger playerbase.
So I actually DO think the tools are there for that in particular. I do think ensl can improve their gather system however, but that's not on uwe or cdt.
There is "having tools". And there is "comprehensive experience". I mean for example, this is the first time I hear of "steam serverbrowser". How is a casual player to know of such things...
The steam serverbrowser has always been an integrated part of steam. I, for example, know of it because I used it while playing Counter-Strike 1.6. Now you know of it because you read this comment. What is your point exactly? Are you saying that uwe/cdt needs to advertise this ancient feature, because some people are ignorant about it?
My point was, that anything that is not part of the product, will be less frequently used, than if it would be. By ignorance or by lack of convenience. But Ironsoul specifically asked you for out-of-the-game software, so NVM.
@devel I wouldn't mind having the source, but I think it has none of the benefits you claim. Well, you said it. Now it is UWE property, so let them decide, what to do with it. It concerns average person only marginally and indirectly.
Other than that, we need better tools for organising matches that aren't awkward to use.
the steam server browser is
a) buried (it wasn't always buried, I used to use it when it worked properly) under the view menu dropdown,
b) partly broken (since steam buried it they stopped properly supporting it so I gave up checking whether a game worked with it properly or not) and
c) doesn't help in organising a match (how can I know if someone else is looking for a match if they haven't joined the server).
I don't know about you, but running ns2 in a window idling on a server is not a very good way of trying to get a good (repeat, good) game going.
This will take a while (it's done when i'ts done) but I belive this will change alot.
Menwhile i try to help update and translate the wiki (we are still looking for help!)
What else can we do as a community? I realy liked the TAW Newcomer Turnament, it was great! We need more things like that! Also keep telling to friends, even if only one starts to play and stays, it's one player more.
@Perman12 I don't understand how matchmaking would solve your problem with no players in your region and only full servers with 400+ ping...
The answer is "Its up to developers to make Match making "
It's not like it would be impossible to do as a mod/external tool. In fact I am pretty confident some that qualify exist. But that's the thing - they are much less likely to be used, just because they are not integrated into the vanilla game, making them useless.
@Perman12 I don't understand how matchmaking would solve your problem with no players in your region and only full servers with 400+ ping...
It would help him, by aggregating/rallying players by locality into one server. Now he pretty much has to go to every server and go : "you! you! you!, lets go and go with me to this server, where we can play with decent ping." Also it is a bit chicken-egg problem. Matchmaking might not help that much if there are less than 10 relevant players and more players won't play the game there because it has no matchmaking system.
So you don't mean matchmaking, you think of something like the old battlenet where you could enter a regional lobby and chat, create games etc.? That would only help to coordinate the remaining few south-east-asia-players. But I doubt that would increase the number at all. If you would have a server that would run for example combat (something that makes sense to play with a few players) until you have more players together for a round of ns2, ok. That might help. I understand that seeding ns2 isn't popular. The game is boring 2vs1 etc. But even combat:sa servers took a long time to fill up...
Maybe new players or a new game might be the only solution here.
No, I mean matchmaking: "In multiplayer video games, matchmaking is the process of connecting players together for online play sessions." - wikipedia
Success of the system depends only on what need it is made for and how good/badly it is thought out. Technically server browser is matchmaking system too, but I specifically mean such matchmaking system, that helps with his problem (and ideally other problems too).
@Perman12 I don't understand how matchmaking would solve your problem with no players in your region and only full servers with 400+ ping...
It wouldn't... The only way matchmaking could help him is by forcing US/EU players to play on servers in his region, thus giving him low ping and forcing them to play with 400ms.
Even if you have a slider to set your preferred ping it wouldn't really help. There isn't any way to tell how many people from your region are online either... So he could set the ping low and potentially be waiting forever (it can't gather 12+ players together for a game if there are only 2-5 people in his region online) If he set the ping high he'd be joining the same high ping servers he is now.
It certainly won't magically create more players in his region, and if those playing from his region now don't want to wait to seed a low ping server, then why on Earth would they want to spend MORE time waiting for a matchmaking system to find a game? (if it even could!) Hell at least you can play pgp while seeding, whereas with matchmaking all you can do is stare at the screen and wait.
It may work for CS:GO, but that's ONLY because that game has 400,000+ players daily. That's also why crap like CoD matchmaking works on console but not on PC... consoles have hundreds of thousands of people playing. NS2 simply does not have enough players for matchmaking to even remotely work effectively.
And if matchmaking ever does get added to NS2, then it MUST be something that all US/EU players can completely and totally ignore.
It certainly won't magically create more players in his region
Weeeeell, it just might... Read some of the "the game is dead" reviews or "my ping is bad". Those are people that one-by-one buy the game, find that there is no one in their region and leave the game 4ever. If the game allowed them to play half-decently untill their numbers grow to sustainable levels, we wouldn't even have this discussion now.
So he could set the ping low and potentially be waiting forever (it can't gather 12+ players together for a game if there are only 2-5 people in his region online) If he set the ping high he'd be joining the same high ping servers he is now.
Consider two separate regions e.g. Asia and Oceania, both having not enough players, both having to play in EUSA, but they should have like 30 min players online and better ping between themselves than on the opposite side of Earth. Lets put them all on one server (ideally in the middle). Whats more, distribute them equally to both teams, so high ping enemy interaction probability is kept to minimum.
Generaly speaking, whatever people can do manually, computerized system can do it and more, better and faster... IMHO the only debate should be if it's worth the time of developers and how exactly could it be done best - and that depends on wheter we are planing for end-of-life of the game or for growth. I mean, I am the lucky one in EU, but either way it's not helthy to keep telling these people "suck it up or leave", if there is a hope.
And if matchmaking ever does get added to NS2, then it MUST be something that all US/EU players can completely and totally ignore.
Or, you know, MUST be something that is usefull tool for them too. (BTW server browser is form of matchmaking. Without MM we would be connecting to games by IP, like in the good ol' days)
@krOoze I have an idea for a mod relating to that and I plan on implementing it myself, but it's going to be a bit of a slow process, so I need help. I guess this is a general call for help to anyone with software development experience. Inexperienced people are welcome to join in if they're motivated enough, but their lack of experience will not improve the speed this task will take to develop.
So you don't mean matchmaking, you think of something like the old battlenet where you could enter a regional lobby and chat, create games etc.? That would only help to coordinate the remaining few south-east-asia-players. But I doubt that would increase the number at all. If you would have a server that would run for example combat (something that makes sense to play with a few players) until you have more players together for a round of ns2, ok. That might help. I understand that seeding ns2 isn't popular. The game is boring 2vs1 etc. But even combat:sa servers took a long time to fill up...
Maybe new players or a new game might be the only solution here.
Like Lobby of Starcraft 2 Free Edition ? ( with Global chat channel)
I dont know but take other Steam games with match making 5v5 like DOTA2 , DeadIsland Epidemic ....vv i have been played
or Pay2Play games like CSGO ( they have Valve dedicated server and Match making >> which is awesome)
Developers really want more player come to NS2 ? Then creat something that make players dont have to wait 2-3 hours play 1v1 2v2 to seed an empty server =='
P/s : i can seed it if i want , but my times and schedule not allow it
We need a casual mode where new players can just jump into and enjoy the game. (I am looking at you Skulks with SG!)
Expecting people to learn the game for 100 of hours to perform decently will not attract a big player base. Especially if new players face veterans with 1000 + hours more game time experience.
My initiative was to teach players on our HBZ server but ppl did not stay for long even after explaining them the basics.
Comments
1. The number of players keep declining: http://steamcharts.com/app/4920
2. Sales and free to play weekends only bump the numbers very temporarily and they become less useful over time.
3. The game needs a large player base to keep functioning, since the majority of people want to play on servers that are 18+ players and they want several servers of this size available for every region. Some regions are already long since dead.
What you do:
1. So you re-release the game as F2P in a way where all of the new players will mostly play against eachother on rookie only server, the only exception being experienced NS2 commanders, or something.
2. You sell more cosmetics to make some money.
This way you maybe have a shot of keeping the game alive for a while longer. NS2 will die, but this way it will die more slowly.
Leave the price as is and give the money to the CDT.
Open complete source code.
That way you'll have faster development. (and don't fear that suddenly huge amount of people will play illegally outside of Steam, it won't)
But you neglect to demonstrate that F2P actually helps with any of those 3 premises. Not all F2P games magically gain more players - look at gotham city imposters.
I might get out of my depth here, but my impression is that most people actually agree with the F2P model - provided that you have the right infrastructure in place.
See :
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2236050/#Comment_2236050
and
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2236141/#Comment_2236141
So really, what we should focus on is NOT getting F2P ready, but develop said infrastructure. Enabling F2P is secondary to that.
In addition, it might even turn out that with the proper infrastructure in place, that F2P isn't even necessary anymore. That remains to be seen of course.
For us yes it would help a dwindling playerbase but to be blunt at this point why should UWE give 2 shits.
I think that we are actually in agreement about what we think should be done, I didn't elaborate what I meant with "in a way where all of the new players will mostly play against eachother on rookie only server" but what I mean is pretty much along the same lines as the two posts that you linked.
Yes, the game needs a proper hands-on tutorial in the game as well, but that is tricky to do.
At any rate I think that a decision about it needs to be taken swiftly as the population is dwindling and at some point this year there won't be enough players to run but a few dedicated servers in NA and Europe.
It is worth remembering that Natural Selection 1 was a free to play game, which is part of the reason why it lived for so long. Yes, you had to own Half-Life 1 but everyone and their mother had a copy of that game, making it practically F2P.
Edit: can you imagine the shit show of comments if this did go F2P? Can't see that helping sub that much either.
Percentage depends on how many swallow the F2P bait
There is "**** show" of comments now for not going F2P. It is a lose-lose situation :P
Ha haaaa, holy sh*t that was awesome
What can we do to improve the gameplay options for players? Modding would help, trouble is there isn't much useful documentation on the subject, that literally put me off implementing one of my ideas for FOUR YEARS (Go search for the idea thread from 2011, it's not too hard to find).
Nudge nudge, here's a sneak preview of a little project I've been working on for the past 2 weeks: https://trello.com/b/hdWPnL93/natural-selection-2-modding-documentation-version-0
Other than that, we need better tools for organising matches that aren't awkward to use. Steam groups aren't up to par, there's a cool thing called evolve which you can get at www.evolvehq.com which has match making (find a match for a game before launching the game, supports basically every game out there), group chat and whatnot.
Really I don't care much about whether there's 500 or 5000 players, as long as I can find 11 other people to have a good match with I'll be happy. Of course I'm not happy with vanilla mechanics, that's a subject for another couple million threads.
I got more to say, but probably best to avoid a wall of text when there's more than enough to talk about where we're at right now.
So I actually DO think the tools are there for that in particular. I do think ensl can improve their gather system however, but that's not on uwe or cdt.
You need the source code.
You need the source code.
You don't need to think about the things to do in 'why is the game is dying?' threads. You just need more people who will actually do things. These people are called 'developers'.
They can't be hired, because there is no money. But there is the code, which is enough for them.
What is so hard to understand here?
Everything but the engine and steam is readable/modable lua scripts or shaders. Source code would not help him much... Having API reference and documentation would.
More people rarely equals more work done. If they open-sourced it, they would pretty much needed equal number of people to double-check changes from submisions, test them and merge them.
When you have more, the probability that someone would write an API reference is higher. The probability that there is someone who creates quality content is higher.
Merge is no problem. It is a solved thing.
'Need more people to do testing' means more content per build. Because what tester does is, basically, he takes his checklist of features and checks if they work.
But more content per build is what we are actually trying to achieve to get bigger playerbase.
@devel I wouldn't mind having the source, but I think it has none of the benefits you claim. Well, you said it. Now it is UWE property, so let them decide, what to do with it. It concerns average person only marginally and indirectly.
The steam server browser is not acceptable as I mentioned:
the steam server browser is
a) buried (it wasn't always buried, I used to use it when it worked properly) under the view menu dropdown,
b) partly broken (since steam buried it they stopped properly supporting it so I gave up checking whether a game worked with it properly or not) and
c) doesn't help in organising a match (how can I know if someone else is looking for a match if they haven't joined the server).
I don't know about you, but running ns2 in a window idling on a server is not a very good way of trying to get a good (repeat, good) game going.
@devel I am confused.
2/Join 24/42 player slot server >> Play with 400+ ping
And developers still making "new DLC" , "New network optimize ...vvv"
What can i do now? I have really tried to invite friends play this game
The answer is "Its up to developers to make Match making "
This will take a while (it's done when i'ts done) but I belive this will change alot.
Menwhile i try to help update and translate the wiki (we are still looking for help!)
What else can we do as a community? I realy liked the TAW Newcomer Turnament, it was great! We need more things like that! Also keep telling to friends, even if only one starts to play and stays, it's one player more.
@Perman12 I don't understand how matchmaking would solve your problem with no players in your region and only full servers with 400+ ping...
It would help him, by aggregating/rallying players by locality into one server. Now he pretty much has to go to every server and go : "you! you! you!, lets go and go with me to this server, where we can play with decent ping." Also it is a bit chicken-egg problem. Matchmaking might not help that much if there are less than 10 relevant players and more players won't play the game there because it has no matchmaking system.
Maybe new players or a new game might be the only solution here.
Success of the system depends only on what need it is made for and how good/badly it is thought out. Technically server browser is matchmaking system too, but I specifically mean such matchmaking system, that helps with his problem (and ideally other problems too).
It wouldn't... The only way matchmaking could help him is by forcing US/EU players to play on servers in his region, thus giving him low ping and forcing them to play with 400ms.
Even if you have a slider to set your preferred ping it wouldn't really help. There isn't any way to tell how many people from your region are online either... So he could set the ping low and potentially be waiting forever (it can't gather 12+ players together for a game if there are only 2-5 people in his region online) If he set the ping high he'd be joining the same high ping servers he is now.
It certainly won't magically create more players in his region, and if those playing from his region now don't want to wait to seed a low ping server, then why on Earth would they want to spend MORE time waiting for a matchmaking system to find a game? (if it even could!) Hell at least you can play pgp while seeding, whereas with matchmaking all you can do is stare at the screen and wait.
It may work for CS:GO, but that's ONLY because that game has 400,000+ players daily. That's also why crap like CoD matchmaking works on console but not on PC... consoles have hundreds of thousands of people playing. NS2 simply does not have enough players for matchmaking to even remotely work effectively.
And if matchmaking ever does get added to NS2, then it MUST be something that all US/EU players can completely and totally ignore.
There is a way. Many in fact.
Consider two separate regions e.g. Asia and Oceania, both having not enough players, both having to play in EUSA, but they should have like 30 min players online and better ping between themselves than on the opposite side of Earth. Lets put them all on one server (ideally in the middle). Whats more, distribute them equally to both teams, so high ping enemy interaction probability is kept to minimum.
Generaly speaking, whatever people can do manually, computerized system can do it and more, better and faster... IMHO the only debate should be if it's worth the time of developers and how exactly could it be done best - and that depends on wheter we are planing for end-of-life of the game or for growth. I mean, I am the lucky one in EU, but either way it's not helthy to keep telling these people "suck it up or leave", if there is a hope.
Or, you know, MUST be something that is usefull tool for them too. (BTW server browser is form of matchmaking. Without MM we would be connecting to games by IP, like in the good ol' days)
Like Lobby of Starcraft 2 Free Edition ? ( with Global chat channel)
I dont know but take other Steam games with match making 5v5 like DOTA2 , DeadIsland Epidemic ....vv i have been played
or Pay2Play games like CSGO ( they have Valve dedicated server and Match making >> which is awesome)
Developers really want more player come to NS2 ? Then creat something that make players dont have to wait 2-3 hours play 1v1 2v2 to seed an empty server =='
P/s : i can seed it if i want , but my times and schedule not allow it
Expecting people to learn the game for 100 of hours to perform decently will not attract a big player base. Especially if new players face veterans with 1000 + hours more game time experience.
My initiative was to teach players on our HBZ server but ppl did not stay for long even after explaining them the basics.