Ok, so maybe this wasn't clear... I am not 'threatening' to 'quit'. First off, EVERYTHING I have done has been voluntary... Second, I have never been after a job at UWE, nor would I accept if they offered me one. I have a job which I am quite happy with tyvm. I AM trying to stop the dependence on mods from a specific part of the community who proves themselves very needy and apparently very lazy.
Stupidity aside, I think it may be best to just STOP trying to demonize everything here, you are only making problems worse at this point, despite your apparent insight into something you are not involved in.
One thing I don't like about these discussions is that most of you don't even know half the story and are just trying to fill in the gap. A simple example dePARA post makes it sound that Dragon actually always wanted to work full time with this sentence:
I cant understand this drama that Mendasp and xDragon are not in the new Dev-team and i dont know the reason behind it.
I think its disrespectful to create a story that is assumed to be correct without any evidence to back it up. Don't create unnecessary rumors and stick with the facts. These discussions are getting ridiculous.
You assume this is about being or not in the PDT and then base the rest of your post in that. It's not about that, if you had read anything you'd know this.
Ok, so maybe this wasn't clear... I am not 'threatening' to 'quit'. First off, EVERYTHING I have done has been voluntary... Second, I have never been after a job at UWE, nor would I accept if they offered me one. I have a job which I am quite happy with tyvm. I AM trying to stop the dependence on mods from a specific part of the community who proves themselves very needy and apparently very lazy.
I still can't find any posts or threads that say what this is all actually about? All I can gather is that something (extensions?) was a problem in some way, Dragon tried to communicate with the PDT and for whatever reason couldn't, felt like he was being ignored and pulled compmod in protest... then Mendasp pulled NS2+ to support him in an effort to get better communication between modders and the PDT..
A post (or even better a thread) from one of you explaining the situation would probably do wonders. Judging from the assumptions flying around I'm not the only one who is a bit confused as to what the real issue is.
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited March 2016
My post was more directed to all the people who yelling nonstop:
"UWE are stupid, they dont put these 2 into the team".
Meanwhile both are posting here, that they are not interested anyway.
Hillarious
This plus the reason behind the descision of who is in the team.
So who is creating storys here?
Maybe the people who blame UWE of not inviting these two? Who knows.
My post was more directed to all the people who yelling nonstop:
"UWE are stupid, they dont put these 2 into the team".
Meanwhile both are posting here, that they are not interested anyway.
Hillarious
This plus the reason behind the descision of who is in the team.
So who is creating storys here?
Maybe the people who blame UWE of not inviting these two? Who knows.
You know that they can be a part of the team(community) without uwe throwing money at them, or letting them lead the whole ns2 project ?
It's about communication and listening to them, like PDT should do with the whole community.
Its easier to have spokespersons that gather information from specific target audience like mendasp+dragon and forward those concerns to the PDT. But if the information they give is denied time after time = they are not part of the team and that can lead to frustrations. You already have many other persons heavily involved with the PDT decision making that aren't in the (paid)team but their voice is heard more loudly more often, shouldn't be like that.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
The problem I have said many times is people don't like people who point out problems. If you start pointing out problems, people paint you as a negative person.
What really frustrates me is people who accuse others of being negative, when the problem is they are blinded by their own optimism/enthusiasm and are overly positive.
Any way, upshot is your voice gets ignored, until everything you predicted happens after you walked away. Everyone else is then left to pick up their own mess because they failed to listen, and life goes on..
It's about communication and listening to them, like PDT should do with the whole community.
Half of the playerbase isnt active here, and half of the people who are active here are comp players.
Comp and casual players have different views on the game of what is needed.
So if UWE would listen to the whole community you would always have people getting upset cause the dev team has the hard job to to find a way in the middle.
Some community members just forget this.
Small example?
Im trying to convince UWE since ages that the large servers are a bad idea.
They didnt listen to me cause whatever reason.
Is it frustrating?
Sure it is.
But it looks like i have to live with it.
But maybe i have not done enough for the community to deserve that UWE is listening to me.
This way of thinking is kinda strange btw.
I still can't find any posts or threads that say what this is all actually about? All I can gather is that something (extensions?) was a problem in some way, Dragon tried to communicate with the PDT and for whatever reason couldn't, felt like he was being ignored and pulled compmod in protest... then Mendasp pulled NS2+ to support him in an effort to get better communication between modders and the PDT..
A post (or even better a thread) from one of you explaining the situation would probably do wonders. Judging from the assumptions flying around I'm not the only one who is a bit confused as to what the real issue is.
From an outsider perspective of someone who only ever played the game casually for fun, this whole topic feels like I've entered some weird cult. In fact, the whole board feels like it's a cult group meeting dominated by just a few voices, since there are massive topics on petty things like this mod and atmospheric extensions. I haven't played NS2 in months, but I saw all the uproar over the lighting change and I figured I'd see what all the hubbub was about. Guess what? I barely even noticed a difference. Yes, alien rooms were slightly darker, but honestly it just looked nice and barely affected gameplay at all because you could just turn your monitor's brightness up if it was super bothersome. Absolutely no-one on the servers themselves were talking about it; they were just playing the damn game. From reading this board you'd think the atmospheric extension was killing babies and cooking them though.
And now for this huge mod issue. I don't even know what NS2+ added. To my knowledge it just added some extra tallies at the end of the round and other minor adjustments. Playing without the mod hasn't destroyed my life or ruined the game at all. But once again, from reading this board you'd think Mendasp and Dagon just nuked a small Indonesian village for fun.
As cold and as n00bish as this may sound, people: Get over it. Mod creators can do what they want with their mods and owe you absolutely nothing. If you don't like it, feel free to play a different game.
Also as a sidenote: UWE keeps trying to revive the new player community for this game, but the forums certainly don't help that when every thread and post requires you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of NS2's development drama timeline.
I still can't find any posts or threads that say what this is all actually about? All I can gather is that something (extensions?) was a problem in some way, Dragon tried to communicate with the PDT and for whatever reason couldn't, felt like he was being ignored and pulled compmod in protest... then Mendasp pulled NS2+ to support him in an effort to get better communication between modders and the PDT..
A post (or even better a thread) from one of you explaining the situation would probably do wonders. Judging from the assumptions flying around I'm not the only one who is a bit confused as to what the real issue is.
From an outsider perspective of someone who only ever played the game casually for fun, this whole topic feels like I've entered some weird cult. In fact, the whole board feels like it's a cult group meeting dominated by just a few voices, since there are massive topics on petty things like this mod and atmospheric extensions. I haven't played NS2 in months, but I saw all the uproar over the lighting change and I figured I'd see what all the hubbub was about. Guess what? I barely even noticed a difference. Yes, alien rooms were slightly darker, but honestly it just looked nice and barely affected gameplay at all because you could just turn your monitor's brightness up if it was super bothersome. Absolutely no-one on the servers themselves were talking about it; they were just playing the damn game. From reading this board you'd think the atmospheric extension was killing babies and cooking them though.
And now for this huge mod issue. I don't even know what NS2+ added. To my knowledge it just added some extra tallies at the end of the round and other minor adjustments. Playing without the mod hasn't destroyed my life or ruined the game at all. But once again, from reading this board you'd think Mendasp and Dagon just nuked a small Indonesian village for fun.
As cold and as n00bish as this may sound, people: Get over it. Mod creators can do what they want with their mods and owe you absolutely nothing. If you don't like it, feel free to play a different game.
Also as a sidenote: UWE keeps trying to revive the new player community for this game, but the forums certainly don't help that when every thread and post requires you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of NS2's development drama timeline.
So you're an outsider and this seems like a cult because people are upset over things in a game? What is cult like about people voicing their disapproval of things? Unless you mean everyone who wants better communication between the modders (that have a huge effect on this game) and UWE - is this the cult you refer to or maybe its the people that disagree with the lighting? So if people protest or bring up something they want changed, that is a cult now? It's like you decided to use the word cult to connect all your thoughts about the events in a negative way, but it doesn't seem to fit.
Slightly darker depends on what settings you had. It wasn't as easy as turning up the brightness on a person's monitor, you basically have to turn up gamma outside of the game or it is really dark on low settings in game. Again you use an extreme reference like the babies line - not needed.
Yes, playing without mods doesn't destroy your life, you might even be able to enjoy the game without it. That doesn't mean the game isn't more annoying for a lot of people not having mods that have fixed bugs and made the game less frustrating to play. Another extreme reference you use there.
And then you go to the - just play a different game line. Great...why disagree on stuff and have discussion...just go play a different game. This is very constructive and makes for a great discussion. It's almost like you didn't get the part that most people in these posts aren't saying anything against Mendasp and Dragon, it's been the other way around.
I still can't find any posts or threads that say what this is all actually about? All I can gather is that something (extensions?) was a problem in some way, Dragon tried to communicate with the PDT and for whatever reason couldn't, felt like he was being ignored and pulled compmod in protest... then Mendasp pulled NS2+ to support him in an effort to get better communication between modders and the PDT..
A post (or even better a thread) from one of you explaining the situation would probably do wonders. Judging from the assumptions flying around I'm not the only one who is a bit confused as to what the real issue is.
From an outsider perspective of someone who only ever played the game casually for fun, this whole topic feels like I've entered some weird cult. In fact, the whole board feels like it's a cult group meeting dominated by just a few voices, since there are massive topics on petty things like this mod and atmospheric extensions. I haven't played NS2 in months, but I saw all the uproar over the lighting change and I figured I'd see what all the hubbub was about. Guess what? I barely even noticed a difference. Yes, alien rooms were slightly darker, but honestly it just looked nice and barely affected gameplay at all because you could just turn your monitor's brightness up if it was super bothersome. Absolutely no-one on the servers themselves were talking about it; they were just playing the damn game. From reading this board you'd think the atmospheric extension was killing babies and cooking them though.
And now for this huge mod issue. I don't even know what NS2+ added. To my knowledge it just added some extra tallies at the end of the round and other minor adjustments. Playing without the mod hasn't destroyed my life or ruined the game at all. But once again, from reading this board you'd think Mendasp and Dagon just nuked a small Indonesian village for fun.
As cold and as n00bish as this may sound, people: Get over it. Mod creators can do what they want with their mods and owe you absolutely nothing. If you don't like it, feel free to play a different game.
Also as a sidenote: UWE keeps trying to revive the new player community for this game, but the forums certainly don't help that when every thread and post requires you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of NS2's development drama timeline.
So you're an outsider and this seems like a cult because people are upset over things in a game? What is cult like about people voicing their disapproval of things? Unless you mean everyone who wants better communication between the modders (that have a huge effect on this game) and UWE - is this the cult you refer to or maybe its the people that disagree with the lighting? So if people protest or bring up something they want changed, that is a cult now? It's like you decided to use the word cult to connect all your thoughts about the events in a negative way, but it doesn't seem to fit.
Slightly darker depends on what settings you had. It wasn't as easy as turning up the brightness on a person's monitor, you basically have to turn up gamma outside of the game or it is really dark on low settings in game. Again you use an extreme reference like the babies line - not needed.
Yes, playing without mods doesn't destroy your life, you might even be able to enjoy the game without it. That doesn't mean the game isn't more annoying for a lot of people not having mods that have fixed bugs and made the game less frustrating to play. Another extreme reference you use there.
And then you go to the - just play a different game line. Great...why disagree on stuff and have discussion...just go play a different game. This is very constructive and makes for a great discussion. It's almost like you didn't get the part that most people in these posts aren't saying anything against Mendasp and Dragon, it's been the other way around.
Deck I think I speak for everyone when I say: stfu, no one wants your rational and level-headed commentary here.
It's about communication and listening to them, like PDT should do with the whole community.
Half of the playerbase isnt active here, and half of the people who are active here are comp players.
Comp and casual players have different views on the game of what is needed.
So if UWE would listen to the whole community you would always have people getting upset cause the dev team has the hard job to to find a way in the middle.
Some community members just forget this.
Small example?
Im trying to convince UWE since ages that the large servers are a bad idea.
They didnt listen to me cause whatever reason.
Is it frustrating?
Sure it is.
But it looks like i have to live with it.
But maybe i have not done enough for the community to deserve that UWE is listening to me.
This way of thinking is kinda strange btw.
Well I share the same thought about larger servers, but its different to take something away from players instead of making things optional for players, you still have the option not to play on on those servers like everyone else. But when you start adding features or making modding harder to upkeep you are taking the option to choose away from players. Its like devs would now decide that 42servers are the standard and it would be hard to maintain 6vs6 comp mod because of that.
Its true that you cant have everything in vanilla, and devs cant listen to everyone that's not the point, im happy to play on pubservers with vanilla settings and with pub meta its my choice to do so. But this shouldn't come with the cost of community mods breaking or people not able to play with comp mods/ns2+ because the maintenance is too hard, and UWE wont implement them in game and therefore only the modders can upkeep them. Overall its even weird that community members are in charge of any kind of tournament mode or QOL features, they should be added to vanilla as an option by devs already.
If I would decide I would just have one larger team to brainstorm the ideas together so we could get both worlds in the game without the drama, this isn't happening at the moment. That's why we should have people that represent both parties of the game, now we have this constant complaining about features that are coming out and fingers pointing in every direction, the features should be talked before hand and have the community support. Is the (paid)dev team too small, or are they too oriented in their own blurred vision that they ignore many aspects that could be beneficial, dunno that's just how I feel.
And your claimed numbers about half of the active players here are ''comp'' players, of course in this matter ''comp'' players are the majority because we are now lacking any kind of comp mod, the ones that don't use these mods don't care. If you look at the achievement or dlc topics how many ''comp'' players you see writing in those topics, the majority complaining in those are the more casual/pub oriented, do you see comp players whining about that ?
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited March 2016
So this what this drama is about?
The compmod, nsl-mod and NS2+ are not an opional part of NS2?
Thats why UWE give a fuck about the comp scene, cause there not implementing this stuff?
And cause there not implementing this, they dont respect the modders who made this?
The problem right now is:
If they would implement this we would hear stuff like
"Typical UWE, after other people doing the work for free they steal it"
If they dont implement this:
"UWE give a fuck and break all mods with every update"
People made a mod for a subcommunity of the game (comp scene), everyone respect there work there but on the other hand they complain that they dont get the respect from the devs?
How about telling everyone here what UWE should do in your opinion?
Should they implement this?
Yes, no, maybe?
So many questions cause no clear information, only drama.
The problem right now is:
If they would implement this we would hear stuff like
"Typical UWE, after other people doing the work for free they steal it"
I don't know about you but usually you can use others' work without stealing it from the original authors. Just saying.
KasharicHull, EnglandJoin Date: 2013-03-27Member: 184473Members, Forum Admins, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
@dePARA you really don't understand the situation at all do you?
the modders aren't complaining that what they have built isn't being incorporated... i'll explain it for you...
There are a plethora of bugs in NS2 at the moment, most of which are being fixed by mods... UWE "should" fix them, but don't because the mods do it "for now" so they focus energy elsewhere... while focussing on other things they end up creating more bugs... which due to complacency and laziness, people turn to the modders and say "can you make a mod that does X or fixes Y" instead of turning to UWE and telling them to fix it... now, add on the fact that UWE are making it more and more difficult for modders to keep their mods actually working, people are now saying "FIX THE MODS THAT FIX THE BUGS UWE ARE TOO LAZY TO FIX SO I CAN PLAY!!!"
Do you understand why the modders are getting a touch upset yet?
Do you grasp the concept that the modders are actually thinking of whats best for the WHOLE of NS2 and not just the comp scene?
Considering that 95% of servers use NS2+... and most use Dragons NS2 Tweaks mod (which is literally just a mod of bug fixes btw) you should begin to see that its not just the comp scene these guys are benefiting.
why is it the comp scene that end up making the complaints???
Well, its simple really... after you put in thousands upon thousands of hours into a game, you tend to be more passionate and vocal than the people that maybe put a few hundred hours in... you're more heavily invested emotionally as well as because of time spent playing than a casual player.
Don't mistake the passion of a player that cares about making a game great with the whining of an elitist not getting his way... they are far from being the same thing.
I still can't find any posts or threads that say what this is all actually about? All I can gather is that something (extensions?) was a problem in some way, Dragon tried to communicate with the PDT and for whatever reason couldn't, felt like he was being ignored and pulled compmod in protest... then Mendasp pulled NS2+ to support him in an effort to get better communication between modders and the PDT..
A post (or even better a thread) from one of you explaining the situation would probably do wonders. Judging from the assumptions flying around I'm not the only one who is a bit confused as to what the real issue is.
From an outsider perspective of someone who only ever played the game casually for fun, this whole topic feels like I've entered some weird cult. In fact, the whole board feels like it's a cult group meeting dominated by just a few voices, since there are massive topics on petty things like this mod and atmospheric extensions. I haven't played NS2 in months, but I saw all the uproar over the lighting change and I figured I'd see what all the hubbub was about. Guess what? I barely even noticed a difference. Yes, alien rooms were slightly darker, but honestly it just looked nice and barely affected gameplay at all because you could just turn your monitor's brightness up if it was super bothersome. Absolutely no-one on the servers themselves were talking about it; they were just playing the damn game. From reading this board you'd think the atmospheric extension was killing babies and cooking them though.
And now for this huge mod issue. I don't even know what NS2+ added. To my knowledge it just added some extra tallies at the end of the round and other minor adjustments. Playing without the mod hasn't destroyed my life or ruined the game at all. But once again, from reading this board you'd think Mendasp and Dagon just nuked a small Indonesian village for fun.
As cold and as n00bish as this may sound, people: Get over it. Mod creators can do what they want with their mods and owe you absolutely nothing. If you don't like it, feel free to play a different game.
Also as a sidenote: UWE keeps trying to revive the new player community for this game, but the forums certainly don't help that when every thread and post requires you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of NS2's development drama timeline.
Well, you see, the great thing about NS2+ is that its basically an advanced options menu, so if you don't fiddle with it, most(?) of its settings default to vanilla and of course won't notice a change. Also, some of its features have been incorporated into vanilla, resulting in even fewer differences.
However, for those of us that do fiddle with NS2+ settings, the difference is enough to make some of us decide that we would rather not play without it and would rather play something else.
I still can't find any posts or threads that say what this is all actually about? All I can gather is that something (extensions?) was a problem in some way, Dragon tried to communicate with the PDT and for whatever reason couldn't, felt like he was being ignored and pulled compmod in protest... then Mendasp pulled NS2+ to support him in an effort to get better communication between modders and the PDT..
A post (or even better a thread) from one of you explaining the situation would probably do wonders. Judging from the assumptions flying around I'm not the only one who is a bit confused as to what the real issue is.
From an outsider perspective of someone who only ever played the game casually for fun, this whole topic feels like I've entered some weird cult. In fact, the whole board feels like it's a cult group meeting dominated by just a few voices, since there are massive topics on petty things like this mod and atmospheric extensions. I haven't played NS2 in months, but I saw all the uproar over the lighting change and I figured I'd see what all the hubbub was about. Guess what? I barely even noticed a difference. Yes, alien rooms were slightly darker, but honestly it just looked nice and barely affected gameplay at all because you could just turn your monitor's brightness up if it was super bothersome. Absolutely no-one on the servers themselves were talking about it; they were just playing the damn game. From reading this board you'd think the atmospheric extension was killing babies and cooking them though.
And now for this huge mod issue. I don't even know what NS2+ added. To my knowledge it just added some extra tallies at the end of the round and other minor adjustments. Playing without the mod hasn't destroyed my life or ruined the game at all. But once again, from reading this board you'd think Mendasp and Dagon just nuked a small Indonesian village for fun.
As cold and as n00bish as this may sound, people: Get over it. Mod creators can do what they want with their mods and owe you absolutely nothing. If you don't like it, feel free to play a different game.
Also as a sidenote: UWE keeps trying to revive the new player community for this game, but the forums certainly don't help that when every thread and post requires you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of NS2's development drama timeline.
Well, you see, the great thing about NS2+ is that its basically an advanced options menu, so if you don't fiddle with it, most(?) of its settings default to vanilla and of course won't notice a change. Also, some of its features have been incorporated into vanilla, resulting in even fewer differences.
However, for those of us that do fiddle with NS2+ settings, the difference is enough to make some of us decide that we would rather not play without it and would rather play something else.
There are a plethora of extra fixes as well IIRC that no one really notices. Combined with the extra stuff like accuracies and suchforth that I'm reasonably sure people take for granted on pub servers.
hey ive been aplying a lot of ns2 latelyl and like my sound gets really messed up lately, my headPHONEs are kinda old but they shouldtn be broken yet. it sounds liek everything is getting really muffled.... ? anyone expereicne this too?
The saddest part of all this? competitive games (AFAIK) and gathers have completely stopped since the comp mods were removed, and it has no effect on the player graph.
If this has no visible effect on UWEs performence metrics, why would they have a sudden impetus to shifting their resources to try and fix this? Quite frankly I don't think they will, and you can't really blame them. (i understand the atmospherics mod was disabled, but that's not the real issue)
As a dev team, if 5% of your playerbase stops playing, you can't immediately drop what you're working on to try and appease them. No. I think that the competitive community will always have to cater for itself as far as mods go.
The saddest part of all this? competitive games (AFAIK) and gathers have completely stopped since the comp mods were removed, and it has no effect on the player graph.
If this has no visible effect on UWEs performence metrics, why would they have a sudden impetus to shifting their resources to try and fix this? Quite frankly I don't think they will, and you can't really blame them. (i understand the atmospherics mod was disabled, but that's not the real issue)
As a dev team, if 5% of your playerbase stops playing, you can't immediately drop what you're working on to try and appease them. No. I think that the competitive community will always have to cater for itself as far as mods go.
You had to look at numbers this sunday - appeared that +/- 120 players were 'missing' compared to last sunday. Due to less PCWs, gathers, anything comp related. Players have not stopped playing yet.
Regarding playercounts, our most active days are saturday/sunday.
Saturday Feb 27th: 718 peak
Sunday Feb 28th: 732 peak
Now to Saturday and Sunday night from last weekend.
Saturday, March 5: 582 peak (With the tournament on that night)
Sunday, March 6th: 599 peak
I'd say its a pretty big decrease in players.
Nah, that's more to do with the patch for achievements bumping numbers up that weekend. The numbers are pretty much in line with the two weeks before that. Maybe you could make the case for the numbers falling earlier/faster than expected for a rather significant patch, but we don't have the statistics to make prove or disprove such a claim. I'm not making the effort to do so at any rate.
Regarding playercounts, our most active days are saturday/sunday.
Saturday Feb 27th: 718 peak
Sunday Feb 28th: 732 peak
Now to Saturday and Sunday night from last weekend.
Saturday, March 5: 582 peak (With the tournament on that night)
Sunday, March 6th: 599 peak
I'd say its a pretty big decrease in players.
Our numbers were unexpectedly high on the weekend of 27/28th Feb due to 2 things that weekend:
1) We implemented Steam achievements
2) We sent out a NS2 email newsletter to over 100,000 people about our latest patch.
This is why your analysis of lowering player numbers is invalid due to lack of info. A better look would be during the previous week before where nothing happened:
20th Feb - 562 Peak
21st Feb - 614 Peak
Well within regular player base fluctuations. No real decrease.
Well competitive scene is 12 slots gathers from 17h CET to 5h am and 1 or 2 pcw (12 slots 19h-23h)
Roughly 10 players/h out of the 310 average players purely for competitive games (if average is in player/h). You can argue that comp player play on vanilla too, but then they shouldn't be that hurt by this "moddening" since they don't rely on compmod or nslmod (and kept playing the game this sunday and yesterday)
3.3% (plus vanilla-comp players rage quiting the game completely) won't change a lot in peak players, but you are losing a part of the most regular players ie a decreasing number of active players at mid and long term (low quantity high quality)
And with a number that low you can question the excessive impact of comp scene in game change discussion (or over-representation of themselves), given there is very active non comp players too who may contribute as much if not more to maintaining this game alive.
Comments
Stupidity aside, I think it may be best to just STOP trying to demonize everything here, you are only making problems worse at this point, despite your apparent insight into something you are not involved in.
I think its disrespectful to create a story that is assumed to be correct without any evidence to back it up. Don't create unnecessary rumors and stick with the facts. These discussions are getting ridiculous.
I still can't find any posts or threads that say what this is all actually about? All I can gather is that something (extensions?) was a problem in some way, Dragon tried to communicate with the PDT and for whatever reason couldn't, felt like he was being ignored and pulled compmod in protest... then Mendasp pulled NS2+ to support him in an effort to get better communication between modders and the PDT..
A post (or even better a thread) from one of you explaining the situation would probably do wonders. Judging from the assumptions flying around I'm not the only one who is a bit confused as to what the real issue is.
"UWE are stupid, they dont put these 2 into the team".
Meanwhile both are posting here, that they are not interested anyway.
Hillarious
This plus the reason behind the descision of who is in the team.
So who is creating storys here?
Maybe the people who blame UWE of not inviting these two? Who knows.
You know that they can be a part of the team(community) without uwe throwing money at them, or letting them lead the whole ns2 project ?
It's about communication and listening to them, like PDT should do with the whole community.
Its easier to have spokespersons that gather information from specific target audience like mendasp+dragon and forward those concerns to the PDT. But if the information they give is denied time after time = they are not part of the team and that can lead to frustrations. You already have many other persons heavily involved with the PDT decision making that aren't in the (paid)team but their voice is heard more loudly more often, shouldn't be like that.
What really frustrates me is people who accuse others of being negative, when the problem is they are blinded by their own optimism/enthusiasm and are overly positive.
Any way, upshot is your voice gets ignored, until everything you predicted happens after you walked away. Everyone else is then left to pick up their own mess because they failed to listen, and life goes on..
Half of the playerbase isnt active here, and half of the people who are active here are comp players.
Comp and casual players have different views on the game of what is needed.
So if UWE would listen to the whole community you would always have people getting upset cause the dev team has the hard job to to find a way in the middle.
Some community members just forget this.
Small example?
Im trying to convince UWE since ages that the large servers are a bad idea.
They didnt listen to me cause whatever reason.
Is it frustrating?
Sure it is.
But it looks like i have to live with it.
But maybe i have not done enough for the community to deserve that UWE is listening to me.
This way of thinking is kinda strange btw.
From an outsider perspective of someone who only ever played the game casually for fun, this whole topic feels like I've entered some weird cult. In fact, the whole board feels like it's a cult group meeting dominated by just a few voices, since there are massive topics on petty things like this mod and atmospheric extensions. I haven't played NS2 in months, but I saw all the uproar over the lighting change and I figured I'd see what all the hubbub was about. Guess what? I barely even noticed a difference. Yes, alien rooms were slightly darker, but honestly it just looked nice and barely affected gameplay at all because you could just turn your monitor's brightness up if it was super bothersome. Absolutely no-one on the servers themselves were talking about it; they were just playing the damn game. From reading this board you'd think the atmospheric extension was killing babies and cooking them though.
And now for this huge mod issue. I don't even know what NS2+ added. To my knowledge it just added some extra tallies at the end of the round and other minor adjustments. Playing without the mod hasn't destroyed my life or ruined the game at all. But once again, from reading this board you'd think Mendasp and Dagon just nuked a small Indonesian village for fun.
As cold and as n00bish as this may sound, people: Get over it. Mod creators can do what they want with their mods and owe you absolutely nothing. If you don't like it, feel free to play a different game.
Also as a sidenote: UWE keeps trying to revive the new player community for this game, but the forums certainly don't help that when every thread and post requires you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of NS2's development drama timeline.
So you're an outsider and this seems like a cult because people are upset over things in a game? What is cult like about people voicing their disapproval of things? Unless you mean everyone who wants better communication between the modders (that have a huge effect on this game) and UWE - is this the cult you refer to or maybe its the people that disagree with the lighting? So if people protest or bring up something they want changed, that is a cult now? It's like you decided to use the word cult to connect all your thoughts about the events in a negative way, but it doesn't seem to fit.
Slightly darker depends on what settings you had. It wasn't as easy as turning up the brightness on a person's monitor, you basically have to turn up gamma outside of the game or it is really dark on low settings in game. Again you use an extreme reference like the babies line - not needed.
Yes, playing without mods doesn't destroy your life, you might even be able to enjoy the game without it. That doesn't mean the game isn't more annoying for a lot of people not having mods that have fixed bugs and made the game less frustrating to play. Another extreme reference you use there.
And then you go to the - just play a different game line. Great...why disagree on stuff and have discussion...just go play a different game. This is very constructive and makes for a great discussion. It's almost like you didn't get the part that most people in these posts aren't saying anything against Mendasp and Dragon, it's been the other way around.
Deck I think I speak for everyone when I say: stfu, no one wants your rational and level-headed commentary here.
Well I share the same thought about larger servers, but its different to take something away from players instead of making things optional for players, you still have the option not to play on on those servers like everyone else. But when you start adding features or making modding harder to upkeep you are taking the option to choose away from players. Its like devs would now decide that 42servers are the standard and it would be hard to maintain 6vs6 comp mod because of that.
Its true that you cant have everything in vanilla, and devs cant listen to everyone that's not the point, im happy to play on pubservers with vanilla settings and with pub meta its my choice to do so. But this shouldn't come with the cost of community mods breaking or people not able to play with comp mods/ns2+ because the maintenance is too hard, and UWE wont implement them in game and therefore only the modders can upkeep them. Overall its even weird that community members are in charge of any kind of tournament mode or QOL features, they should be added to vanilla as an option by devs already.
If I would decide I would just have one larger team to brainstorm the ideas together so we could get both worlds in the game without the drama, this isn't happening at the moment. That's why we should have people that represent both parties of the game, now we have this constant complaining about features that are coming out and fingers pointing in every direction, the features should be talked before hand and have the community support. Is the (paid)dev team too small, or are they too oriented in their own blurred vision that they ignore many aspects that could be beneficial, dunno that's just how I feel.
And your claimed numbers about half of the active players here are ''comp'' players, of course in this matter ''comp'' players are the majority because we are now lacking any kind of comp mod, the ones that don't use these mods don't care. If you look at the achievement or dlc topics how many ''comp'' players you see writing in those topics, the majority complaining in those are the more casual/pub oriented, do you see comp players whining about that ?
The compmod, nsl-mod and NS2+ are not an opional part of NS2?
Thats why UWE give a fuck about the comp scene, cause there not implementing this stuff?
And cause there not implementing this, they dont respect the modders who made this?
The problem right now is:
If they would implement this we would hear stuff like
"Typical UWE, after other people doing the work for free they steal it"
If they dont implement this:
"UWE give a fuck and break all mods with every update"
People made a mod for a subcommunity of the game (comp scene), everyone respect there work there but on the other hand they complain that they dont get the respect from the devs?
How about telling everyone here what UWE should do in your opinion?
Should they implement this?
Yes, no, maybe?
So many questions cause no clear information, only drama.
I don't know about you but usually you can use others' work without stealing it from the original authors. Just saying.
the modders aren't complaining that what they have built isn't being incorporated... i'll explain it for you...
There are a plethora of bugs in NS2 at the moment, most of which are being fixed by mods... UWE "should" fix them, but don't because the mods do it "for now" so they focus energy elsewhere... while focussing on other things they end up creating more bugs... which due to complacency and laziness, people turn to the modders and say "can you make a mod that does X or fixes Y" instead of turning to UWE and telling them to fix it... now, add on the fact that UWE are making it more and more difficult for modders to keep their mods actually working, people are now saying "FIX THE MODS THAT FIX THE BUGS UWE ARE TOO LAZY TO FIX SO I CAN PLAY!!!"
Do you understand why the modders are getting a touch upset yet?
Do you grasp the concept that the modders are actually thinking of whats best for the WHOLE of NS2 and not just the comp scene?
Considering that 95% of servers use NS2+... and most use Dragons NS2 Tweaks mod (which is literally just a mod of bug fixes btw) you should begin to see that its not just the comp scene these guys are benefiting.
why is it the comp scene that end up making the complaints???
Well, its simple really... after you put in thousands upon thousands of hours into a game, you tend to be more passionate and vocal than the people that maybe put a few hundred hours in... you're more heavily invested emotionally as well as because of time spent playing than a casual player.
Don't mistake the passion of a player that cares about making a game great with the whining of an elitist not getting his way... they are far from being the same thing.
Well, you see, the great thing about NS2+ is that its basically an advanced options menu, so if you don't fiddle with it, most(?) of its settings default to vanilla and of course won't notice a change. Also, some of its features have been incorporated into vanilla, resulting in even fewer differences.
However, for those of us that do fiddle with NS2+ settings, the difference is enough to make some of us decide that we would rather not play without it and would rather play something else.
There are a plethora of extra fixes as well IIRC that no one really notices. Combined with the extra stuff like accuracies and suchforth that I'm reasonably sure people take for granted on pub servers.
If this has no visible effect on UWEs performence metrics, why would they have a sudden impetus to shifting their resources to try and fix this? Quite frankly I don't think they will, and you can't really blame them. (i understand the atmospherics mod was disabled, but that's not the real issue)
As a dev team, if 5% of your playerbase stops playing, you can't immediately drop what you're working on to try and appease them. No. I think that the competitive community will always have to cater for itself as far as mods go.
You had to look at numbers this sunday - appeared that +/- 120 players were 'missing' compared to last sunday. Due to less PCWs, gathers, anything comp related. Players have not stopped playing yet.
But gameplay wise I didn't really notice a difference.
*edit*
wasn't there supposed to be some kind of meeting yesterday? Thought I read something like that on ns2news.
ah, seems like 18 to 19 o'clock CET is a kind of low player count in general. Thank you for linking that.
Saturday Feb 27th: 718 peak
Sunday Feb 28th: 732 peak
Now to Saturday and Sunday night from last weekend.
Saturday, March 5: 582 peak (With the tournament on that night)
Sunday, March 6th: 599 peak
I'd say its a pretty big decrease in players.
Nah, that's more to do with the patch for achievements bumping numbers up that weekend. The numbers are pretty much in line with the two weeks before that. Maybe you could make the case for the numbers falling earlier/faster than expected for a rather significant patch, but we don't have the statistics to make prove or disprove such a claim. I'm not making the effort to do so at any rate.
Derelict came out and clearly I alone killed 109 players.......
Thursday july 30th - 446 players
Thursday Aug 6th - 337 players
also
NS2 now has more players than evolve!... so much for this dead game of ours
http://steamcharts.com/cmp/273350,4920#7d
Our numbers were unexpectedly high on the weekend of 27/28th Feb due to 2 things that weekend:
1) We implemented Steam achievements
2) We sent out a NS2 email newsletter to over 100,000 people about our latest patch.
This is why your analysis of lowering player numbers is invalid due to lack of info. A better look would be during the previous week before where nothing happened:
20th Feb - 562 Peak
21st Feb - 614 Peak
Well within regular player base fluctuations. No real decrease.
Roughly 10 players/h out of the 310 average players purely for competitive games (if average is in player/h). You can argue that comp player play on vanilla too, but then they shouldn't be that hurt by this "moddening" since they don't rely on compmod or nslmod (and kept playing the game this sunday and yesterday)
3.3% (plus vanilla-comp players rage quiting the game completely) won't change a lot in peak players, but you are losing a part of the most regular players ie a decreasing number of active players at mid and long term (low quantity high quality)
And with a number that low you can question the excessive impact of comp scene in game change discussion (or over-representation of themselves), given there is very active non comp players too who may contribute as much if not more to maintaining this game alive.