Following the Terrain - Natural Selection 2
System
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Following the Terrain - Natural Selection 2
Some aircraft spend lots of time flying at low altitude and great speed. They often employ ‘terrain following’ radar: Systems that bounce electromagnetic radiation off the surrounding environment. The return...
Comments
When someone has already done the hard work for you, it's OK to take an already proven system and implement it. Other games have made mistakes for us so that we don't have to make them all over again. I know you're across this more than most people on here but do your research, listen to your peers and I'm sure you already have some great logical progressions in store for the next life-cycle of the game.
Wishing you and the team all the best for NS2's continued development and welcome back to Australia.
This is a perfect opportunity to engage the community directly and take polls, do surveys, and start forum discussion on what the current playerbase feels the first specific project should be.
No new features in the game is a very good limiter, so that people wont suggest excessive things like "A NEW RACE", but what about new features outside a live round?
Personally, I feel the most impactful thing that can be done to grow the community and retain players is to reduce the time a player has to wait for a server to get going.
To this end, I would say a global/regional chat system at the main menu that can let players in the same region talk to each other and join the same servers would not only lower the time it takes to seed a server dramatically, but also grow a sense of community for those people who don't exclusively play with people from their steam-friends list.
I'm no programmer, but this should be a relatively simply addition that could pay out huge dividens as far as play retention.
(p.s. i know I sound like a broken record by this point :P)
http://steamcharts.com/app/4920
Awesome work man! I've tried several times to get my friends to play this game... I've given away free copies, and the most any of them gave it was 1 hour... one guy even played it for 20 minutes. "You're welcome... I guess..."
But hey, working on player retention is our #1 goal here now.
Retention problem is obvious.
How long do they try before giving up ?
This is the #1 issue right now. Greens come into a community where players with over a thousand hours is normal. These players have to be able to enjoy the games they play even with the current skill set.
Getting "rekt" over and over will serve to only push new players away, back to some other game they're "good" at.
New features and the likes are all well and good but without a consistent player base what's the point.
On a game today i Joinded at the late close to the ending. It Went realy bad i had 1 kill and 6 deaths..
Then one dude called me out and made fun of me and Said i had hax.......
Next game i came second with 6 deaths and 17 KILLS! Also destroyed 2 hives and the game lasted about 10 min.... Unfortenly he had left that game so i didn't get my pride.....
That's got to be the world's worst hack if it gives you a 1-6 kdr.
He was obviusly joking....
No need for this
Prevent experienced players, and smurf accounts (assholes) from playing with this portion of the community.
You have a game with a high skill ceiling, and you've done nothing effective to address this disparity of ability within the player base.
This is why NS2 burns off new players. This is why there has been essentially no growth or player retention.
If you want to fix the game, implement a way to record all match data, and develop heuristics to interpret the data to evaluate player ability.
If you do not know how to do this, I have no problem explaining to you some very effective models that can be implemented. I've been considering and shaping them now for literally years.
Speaking personally, I don't think a simple return to the level of feature development it was getting in the early days would do it for me. What would bring me back is NS3. Clearly making a whole new game is out of the question, so I think the next best thing is to reinvent NS2 down to its core game design as if you were making a sequel. Maybe leave the old game in place as a classic mod or something for preservation purposes, and just go nuts with the main game (maybe rebrand it on Steam?). The worst thing to do is to be too conservative for fear of alienating the remaining fans, and as a result not excite people enough to keep the game alive.
http://www.hirezstudios.com/tribesascend/home/latest-news/view/tribes-ascend-blog/2015/09/11/patch-notes-out-of-the-blue
http://www.hirezstudios.com/tribesascend/home/latest-news/view/tribes-ascend-blog/2015/10/23/tribes-ascend-pts-2.1
http://www.hirezstudios.com/tribesascend/home/latest-news/view/tribes-ascend-blog/2015/09/24/out-of-the-blue-tribes-ascend-version-1.1-pts-2-september-2015
Speaking as a player who similarly got bored of that game and stopped playing, I'm really interested in this and will go back to it again when the changes hit the live build.
Tribes was a very fun game but lacked some key features that stopped me from playing it for a long time.
First it is really hard to find decent servers. I wanted to run servers for this game back when it was popular and even when it died out to address this issue but your not allowed to. Instead you got to pay them money to run your server on their crappy server. The servers they had were a joke I want to run a server that is not a POS but I am not allowed to unless I shell out money to the DEVs wtf!?
Second the biggest issue I constantly had with the game once in an actual server was that there was no ingame voice communication. I liked how tribes was a team based game like NS2 but unfortunately it never could be in a pub environment due to the lack of ingame mic support. This is also related again to the devs keeping an iron grip on servers. Logically the cost to them would not just be implementing a voice system but also the bandwidth costs to their servers as they do not have or allow 3rd party community hosted servers.
Third is lack of custom servers and mods and general content. Due once again to the iron grip they keep on their servers they likewise effect the ability for people to easily run custom servers with their own custom maps. While the game does have a lot of built in options for various game modes if people can not easily setup their own servers to actually offer these game modes to players without just changing the name of an existing dev server to theirs.
Forth is the lack of community, due to the lack of community servers an ingame voice there is nothing that ever tied me to that game. I payed with random people I never knew and that was it. The ability to actually communicate with people via a mic and to do so on a server hosted by a community where those players play at is huge. In ns2 and other games I always have more fun playing with people I know and have spoken to on previous games. There is a connection you get with players when you actually talk to them. This connection causes players to have more fun and interest in the game. If I knew a group of players in tribes and some servers they were regulars on I would play on those servers with them but due to the lack of mic support I can not really make that connection to begin with.
Fifth was their level restriction system. For a time the only servers with players that had <150 ping were all <level50 only, it was at this point I gave up playing the game.
You will notice that I did not list anything about the class system or gameplay. I never have had a big problem with those well at least until a year or so ago when the added content killed a bunch of stuff and then also none of the servers have fixed guns or anymore making the mec class feel left out in the cold. Honestly the gameplay was a lot more fun a few years back, it is hard to point out every change they have made to gameplay since then but I defiantly recall having more fun back then with the different classes than I do in a game today.
Well by the same token I would argue there isn't really anything wrong with NS2's core gameplay, it's just gotten stale. Many of the biggest changes NS2 made from NS1 (alien comm, infestation, marine PRes) weren't objectively better either, just different. But you need to do something different to revive the interest of players who have moved on.
Change the game just for changing may not be the best option either.