This struggle is the result of larger servers being easier to seed and are more likely to maintain its player level.
It is being easier to seed, because there are more regulars who are willing to seed, because the larger slot count are more likely to attract more regulars.
You are then forced to either seed or not play at all! I HAVE WASTED SO MUCH **** TIME SEEDING (and waiting for players in comp matches for that matter), but I'm sick of seeding.
I've been saying this for years, and EVERYTIME it ends up with me being intollerant or toxic, but you people just don't understand the **** issue.
Sounds like you think all the >24 player servers are "stealing" players from other servers and as a result it's harder to get games going on other servers. I don't really think so, I think your "struggle" comes more from the fact that this is not a very popular game and there's simply not enough players due to bad retention.
One might argue that NS2Large servers is one of the causes for bad player retention, but I don't really think so, if you look at Steam forums etc. you'll see that there's not many people complaining about performance anymore. It's people complaining about the toxic community and not being able to compete on most servers after they lose rookie status (both of which I'd say are a much bigger problem on smaller servers), so even when these newer players end up joining the smaller servers they end up quitting anyway because apparently the community there does not want them. The more competitive side of this community is killing itself due to it's own actions, it's not the NS2Large servers.
And yeah, NS2+ servers were hidden too in some cases but that got fixed quickly.
It may have been fixed by now, but for the first day it wasn't and NS2+ was in the exact same boat as NS2large... Did you see any NS2+ servers die during that day? Did you see any NS2+ server operators threatening the developers with miseleading negative reviews?
Did any NS2+ player have any trouble whatsoever clicking on the NS2+ tab and finding their server? No
So why is it that the NS2large community had such a gigantic problem on that first day? Because it seems to me like this whole fiasco started when Wooza threw a fit about his servers being "hidden" behind ONE CLICK!!
@MoFo1
Can I have your NS2 ID so I can post here how many hours you have played on my servers? It seems you know more about my servers than I do. For example that I would make money and sell reserved slots.
So now you want to see my hours played in some sort of lame attempt to discredit my observations. Because someone who hates NS2large for the terrible performance and cluster**** gameplay it provides doesn't know what they're talking about unless they have hundreds of hours played on NS2large servers right?
Well news flash, I don't have many hours on your server because every time I join it (when all other servers are empty) it is such a ridiculously horrible experience (both performance and balance wise) that it makes me want to close the game altogether and play something else.
Oh and by the way, I was guessing that you make money off your server selling reserved slots because I can't fathom any other reason why you threw such a massive fit over this much needed change. A change that does nothing but remove your server from automatically showing at the top of the NS2 list. Why threaten to close your servers and bombard Steam with negative reviews simply because you aren't getting a steady influx of new unsuspecting players? Honestly the ONLY reason I can come up with is that you think it will hurt your source of income and that pissed you off.
And yeah, NS2+ servers were hidden too in some cases but that got fixed quickly.
It may have been fixed by now, but for the first day it wasn't and NS2+ was in the exact same boat as NS2large... Did you see any NS2+ servers die during that day? Did you see any NS2+ server operators threatening the developers with miseleading negative reviews?
Did any NS2+ player have any trouble whatsoever clicking on the NS2+ tab and finding their server? No
So why is it that the NS2large community had such a gigantic problem on that first day? Because it seems to me like this whole fiasco started when Wooza threw a fit about his servers being "hidden" behind ONE CLICK!!
@MoFo1
Can I have your NS2 ID so I can post here how many hours you have played on my servers? It seems you know more about my servers than I do. For example that I would make money and sell reserved slots.
So now you want to see my hours played in some sort of lame attempt to discredit my observations. Because someone who hates NS2large for the terrible performance and cluster**** gameplay it provides doesn't know what they're talking about unless they have hundreds of hours played on NS2large servers right?
Well news flash, I don't have many hours on your server because every time I join it (when all other servers are empty) it is such a ridiculously horrible experience (both performance and balance wise) that it makes me want to close the game altogether and play something else.
Oh and by the way, I was guessing that you make money off your server selling reserved slots because I can't fathom any other reason why you threw such a massive fit over this much needed change. A change that does nothing but remove your server from automatically showing at the top of the NS2 list. Why threaten to close your servers and bombard Steam with negative reviews simply because you aren't getting a steady influx of new unsuspecting players? Honestly the ONLY reason I can come up with is that you think it will hurt your source of income and that pissed you off.
It was fixed because Mendasp updated ns2+ to add ns2+ servers to the default tab, not cause UWE fixed it. Also Wooza doesn't sell reserved slots, just goes to show how much you know about this community.
Wooza runs these servers out of his own pocket, which costs him around 300 bucks a month, for the servers, the internet connection, the room the servers are in, and that's not including the cost of man hours he and other people dedicated to these servers put in them. You can't even begin to fanthom how much work is being put into these servers every single day, just so people can play on them and enjoy them. Wooza has received less than 10 donations over the course that these servers have been up, he's hemmorhaging(spelling?) money by the bucket keeping these servers up, so in all honesty, it should be a relief to him that UWE wants to hide ns2large servers, as it would give him an excuse to shut down the servers for good and save a lot of money and time, but he wants to keep the servers active, because he knows well enough that's the only way a lot of the ns2 community can enjoy this game.
So please, stop your stupid accusations if you haven't even bothered to get to know the "ns2large" community. Thanks.
It may have been fixed by now, but for the first day it wasn't and NS2+ was in the exact same boat as NS2large... Did you see any NS2+ servers die during that day? Did you see any NS2+ server operators threatening the developers with miseleading negative reviews?
Did any NS2+ player have any trouble whatsoever clicking on the NS2+ tab and finding their server? No
So why is it that the NS2large community had such a gigantic problem on that first day? Because it seems to me like this whole fiasco started when Wooza threw a fit about his servers being "hidden" behind ONE CLICK!!
There's no such thing as a "NS2+ community", it runs on almost every server, Wooza's included. I bet a lot of players don't even know that some of the NS2+ features they are seeing are not a part of vanilla. A more apt comparison would be siege/faded etc. if they had more players, but they don't so in this situation there's really nothing that comes even close to being comparable to NS2Large.
And no, I did not see any misleading negative reviews from NS2+ server operators, and I haven't seen any from NS2Large server operators either. Not that it even matters if you're interested about arguing about this issue instead of just trying to name and shame certain people, it doesn't add anything to the discussion.
We're not shutting down Woozas, or any other server. We're not going out of our way to make it especially difficult to increase the player count. All we've done is change the default filter to the regular sized ns2 servers. This is done so that new players actually get to experience NS2 as it was intended.
Maybe you like the large servers. Good for you. But that is not how NS2 was intended to be played.
Wrong, sorry.
You can make the game you want to play, or the game the players want to play.
And no, I did not see any misleading negative reviews from NS2+ server operators, and I haven't seen any from NS2Large server operators either.
I said did any of them threaten to do it.. not if they actually did.
@dopy Ok then why did he throw such a massive fit as to threaten pulling his servers and bombarding steam with misleading negative reviews? His servers weren't removed, or hidden where nobody could find them. They were still right there clear as day under the NS2large tab (and still populated last time I checked) so what has all this fuss he caused been over?
Another question, how do you know exactly how many donations he's received since his server was started?
Honestly the ONLY reason I can come up with is that you think it will hurt your source of income ...
Making money hosting a game server for a community ? You are a joke or a troll sir.
Come on Mofo1, walk the walk, start your server, do it and tell us how much money you make.
With the player base shrinking up again some people looks desperate to find new players, even if that means trying depop other servers. I guess largeNS2 is the new scapegoat, "stealing" players. You could have hoped that with the community getting smaller it would have been the other way around with everyone knowing eachother but no.... it's people trying to forbid a popular game mod in a hope to recover a few more players on their servers (and off-topic ensl trying to prevent "bad" players playing with them)
And Devs, trying to evaluate the impact of large server by directly stabbing them in the back :
"There isn't a lot of active servers, and 70/400 are on only 2 servers. Let's try in our next update to kill their player base and see if these people keeps playing ns2 on smaller server or not and if large server drain all the new players. If not we will cancel this, if yes then we can take more drastic steps to kill these servers and force these changes on players, since they keep playing the game, even if they are having less fun."
So yeah, let's wait 1 week and look at the charts, since this is what all of this is for.
Honestly the ONLY reason I can come up with is that you think it will hurt your source of income ...
Making money hosting a game server for a community ? You are a joke or a troll sir.
Come on Mofo1, walk the walk, start your server, do it and tell us how much money you make.
Back when I played CoD4/WaW/BO1 the clan I was in ran several servers, and our clan leader was always talking about how much extra money he had after paying the server fees each month. (edit: and come to think about it we didn't even have reserve slots.. it was all from donations)
It's not an unheard of thing for a server to generate more money via reserve slots/donations than it costs to run. Unless NS2 servers are ridiculously expensive or something I don't know. If I was more tech savvy I'd definitely give it a try.
It's hard to not look at that latest update as anything else, but a way to stop people from playing in wooza's server (the removal of the large servers on the first tab). I know the reasons for the change, the game runs better with lower player counts in servers. Yes, that is probably the case. Not everyone cares about this though. Some people play this game to be competitive, some people play casually but want greater balance somewhere in the range of 6v6-8v8, some people like the pub servers in the range of 10v10-12v12, and others just prefer the game in its craziest state (wooza's servers).
I don't like playing in wooza's server, but I can guess why people would. It's probably fun for people, it's more crazy. You also are constantly in a battle, there's not any dead time. Sure the performance is probably worse and it's not ideal conditions for what the dev team has been producing, but people do what they want to do. It's that simple.
During the NS1 days, there may have been others, but I know I didn't like that people were playing combat so much. I didn't want the normal ns1 game to die, and combat wasn't the ideal ns1 game. It didn't have all the strategy that ns1 normal game had. People still played it though, and some people seemed to only play combat. Why? It was fun. That is the biggest problem with the updates lately and this game for people...not enough focus on fun, and why would you want to take away people's fun even if it wasn't ideal to you? You already have the disclaimer when joining those servers, you can always make the disclaimers more clear if you want. Pushing the wooza servers off the main page seems to be trying to take away something a lot of players like, and seems to be reaching too far in a low player count game.
You are the best example of a toxic community. Keep on going, your hate is boosting my servers.
You aren't helping your case by antagonizing others. If people are supposedly being toxic towards you, then you are simply making it worse by reciprocating that.
And no, I did not see any misleading negative reviews from NS2+ server operators, and I haven't seen any from NS2Large server operators either.
I said did any of them threaten to do it.. not if they actually did.
@dopy Ok then why did he throw such a massive fit as to threaten pulling his servers and bombarding steam with misleading negative reviews? His servers weren't removed, or hidden where nobody could find them. They were still right there clear as day under the NS2large tab (and still populated last time I checked) so what has all this fuss he caused been over?
Another question, how do you know exactly how many donations he's received since his server was started?
His servers were pretty much removed, after the update hit nobody knew his servers were still up simply because people don't bother reading patchnotes, espescially new people. I sat in the server together with my wife for hours on end, we didn't even manage to hit 20 players. The only reason we had activity last night is because people had to resort to spamming everyone on steam friends to make them aware the servers were still up. The way that the server list is designed makes it really not obvious that there's other tabs, and there's absolutely no reason for the "all" tab not to be the default one.
And I know how many donations he's received because i'm a big part of wooza's. Wooza's isn't just Wooza and ATF anymore like it used to be.
You are the best example of a toxic community. Keep on going, your hate is boosting my servers.
You aren't helping your case by antagonizing others. If people are supposedly being toxic towards you, then you are simply making it worse by reciprocating that.
It's quite ironic that you react to that and not when some people implied that wooza players were "retard", "too stupid" and "suck at this game". But sure...
We're not shutting down Woozas, or any other server. We're not going out of our way to make it especially difficult to increase the player count. All we've done is change the default filter to the regular sized ns2 servers. This is done so that new players actually get to experience NS2 as it was intended.
Maybe you like the large servers. Good for you. But that is not how NS2 was intended to be played.
Wrong, sorry.
You can make the game you want to play, or the game the players want to play.
Take a guess at which is a viable business model.
Really? Sonic The Hedgehog begs to differ. Community input is important for some things, but the developer should decide the direction to take their games.
play on woozas regularly and i have yet to see a single rookie start moaning about the gameplay or performance or balance of the server when they join. Its only salty vets that moan about the server.
^^ This. A zillion times this. With a fucking cherry on top.
THE ONLY design error was the hackable server binaries. This shouldn't even have been possible in the first place and when the possibilty was discovered, UWE should have intervened and fixed this immediately!
Yes! Shutdown modding! What is it good for anyway? I mean look at Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim! Why do people STILL play these games?!!!!! Oh, wait...
Some modding in games is officially supported. Some is not. All is modding. Always, all-fucking-ways-indisputably modding extends a game's life. Now... do you want NS2 to be around, or not?
Fuck you for making me waste my personal time pointing out common sense.
@MoFo1 so you're saying what Wooza did is outlaw. UWE never prevented it for about 2 years although they knew the issue. A whole community emerged and got used to it. People have fun on these servers. UWE still doing nothing about it. Larger servers community got bigger, reflects now what NS2 is, a community that adapts to any evolution. UWE slowly adds changes to make sure people are moving to <24 slot servers. Wooza's community complaining because UWE has done nothing to prevent their server to grow and now a whole community gathers around those servers, UWE act against larger servers which is Wooza's community basically. Did I sum up it well?
Nailed it. Also, notice the bold. NOTICE THE BOLD.
Why do we keep having this absurd discussion? Lets break it down easy style:
Support Large servers, make it easy to find and join them = Win! NS2 Lives
! the above, gg
Can we PLEASE have someone on the PDT board who represents Large+? How else, otherwise, do you make decisions if you don't represent the community you're making decisions for?
Honestly, any barrier to entry is absurd. Adding extra clicks to find the game style players want to play makes no logical or business sense what so ever.
Also this is kind of scary because it kind of sets up a precedent in the future where they might just get rid of ns2large in its entirety. That would lose you a lot of players judging from how many people play on wooza servers alone.
Mouth of babes v2.
For the love of assholes, stop this bullshit coming around again and again and again. So tiring. Old vets -- we get it, 6v6 is sacred. However, that's not NS2 now. Deny it all you want, it's fact. Most players play on larger than 6v6 servers. NS2 will never be, ever again, 6v6. You're living in the past. Move on. The future lies in 12v12+. Welcome to Natural Selection. You know, the basis of evolution.
Really? Sonic The Hedgehog begs to differ. Community input is important for some things, but the developer should decide the direction to take their games.
You better inform Blizzard then, because Overwatch is being modeled from community input and is destined to be a huge success going by the Beta. Or maybe they should just release their vision without considering what the players want and see what happens? ...
I enjoy playing from say 8v8 to 20v20 (6v6 is too demanding for me) and I'm just testifying what I've witnessed on WOoZa's
Careful. Facts might get in the way of making a decision that benefits the community.
In conclusion:
Wooz took down his servers tonight. I joined some smaller ones (8v8 and 12v12) and played for about 1.5 hrs. Bored as batshit. It's just not as fun. I guess I'll play another game until Woozas comes back.
In conclusion:
Wooz took down his servers tonight. I joined some smaller ones (8v8 and 12v12) and played for about 1.5 hrs. Bored as batshit. It's just not as fun. I guess I'll play another game until Woozas comes back.
@MoFo1
Can I have your NS2 ID so I can post here how many hours you have played on my servers? It seems you know more about my servers than I do. For example that I would make money and sell reserved slots.
Who said anything like that?
This change just gives priority to non-modded servers.
Now there is more choice because less players are being siphoned into large servers.
Great.
Anything over 8v8 shoud be considered NS2large imo.
People play games to have fun. Everyone has an opinion on the ideal ns2 game and what leads to fun for them. It's different for people, there's a lot of variations in preferences. This game doesn't have huge player numbers, but a lot of the same people keep the player numbers high enough to keep this game alive. People do what they want to do. It makes perfect sense why some players would prefer Wooza's servers. Trying to take away someone's favorite way to play this game doesn't seem right.
@MoFo1
Can I have your NS2 ID so I can post here how many hours you have played on my servers? It seems you know more about my servers than I do. For example that I would make money and sell reserved slots.
Who said anything like that?
This change just gives priority to non-modded servers.
Now there is more choice because less players are being siphoned into large servers.
Great.
Anything over 8v8 shoud be considered NS2large imo.
Oh dear... you think this gives more choice? Showing nothing but "normal" servers by default? This does nothing but take choice away from people.
It bears repeating once more, that the servers are behind one button. You could be like the Nostalrius WoW server that Blizzard forced to shut down by taking it to court because it didn't play the game as it was intended, be thankful UWE have only made a minor tweak.
I'll try and TL;DR this as much as possible though.
Firstly - I've played a lot of hours on Wooza's. I used to play in the internal 'team' we put together for in-house tournaments. I'm also one of the apparent 'less than 10' people to have donated toward his servers. I guess I own shares in them then or something? - Long story short, I've played a lot of enjoyable games on Wooza's. I've never taken a stance against his servers, although I have commented in the past that I don't believe it's the way NS2 should be played. (A view confirmed by several UWE members)
Before this issue arose I was a vocal defender of Wooza servers, because of the fun I'd had there and when this issue reared up on Discord I tried to the best of my ability to show the logic behind the change, much to the dislike of the Wooza community. I was then shown several personal attacks against me by various members of said community and because of these, I'm not willing to support them any longer.
*SNIP* Removed for naming and shaming. Take these PRIVATE issues to PRIVATE messages. -Decoy
I firmly believe that if this person would finally 'retire' as he has promised over and over again, that both the Wooza community could work closely with UWE the way the NSL community does now. Barriers are being broken down all the time. Don't let *snip* put any new ones up to feed his desire for conflict.
It bears repeating once more, that the servers are behind one button. You could be like the Nostalrius WoW server that Blizzard forced to shut down by taking it to court because it didn't play the game as it was intended, be thankful UWE have only made a minor tweak.
Ahahahaa, legal action because a modded server? Are you being serious right now? Wooza's didn't break any ToS nor any laws, if they had things in place to allow cracked clients to play, that would be a whole different thing. But this is all legit, and the players are all legit players that have bought the game, it's not a loss of sales for UWE, if anything it's a gain of sales as most of these people have bought at least 1 DLC or more. You can not seriously believe that UWE trying to sue wooza for his server would even hold up in court in the slightest. That's hilarious.
I'll try and TL;DR this as much as possible though.
Firstly - I've played a lot of hours on Wooza's. I used to play in the internal 'team' we put together for in-house tournaments. I'm also one of the apparent 'less than 10' people to have donated toward his servers. I guess I own shares in them then or something? - Long story short, I've played a lot of enjoyable games on Wooza's. I've never taken a stance against his servers, although I have commented in the past that I don't believe it's the way NS2 should be played. (A view confirmed by several UWE members)
Before this issue arose I was a vocal defender of Wooza servers, because of the fun I'd had there and when this issue reared up on Discord I tried to the best of my ability to show the logic behind the change, much to the dislike of the Wooza community. I was then shown several personal attacks against me by various members of said community and because of these, I'm not willing to support them any longer.
However, all of this said - and this being the point of my post - I need to address the elephant in the room. 'ATF' as he is known. This is to all of the members of the Wooza community. I've been involved in internet games and communities for longer than I care to admit and I have never encountered someone as paranoid, manipulative and angry as him. He may make a valuable contribution to the running of your servers @wooza, but I implore you to either handle it yourself or find someone else to do it. He is the driving force behind the conspiracy theories, the negative steam reviews and the majority of the comments on these boards. He's banned from here on at least 3 accounts, but he watches these threads more than ANYONE - obsession isn't healthy.
I firmly believe that if this person would finally 'retire' as he has promised over and over again, that both the Wooza community could work closely with UWE the way the NSL community does now. Barriers are being broken down all the time. Don't let ATF put any new ones up to feed his desire for conflict.
You've already told me this on discord as well, I'm well aware of ATF's stance on UWE and UWE's stance on ATF, and I care about neither of that, this whole issue is not about ATF, it's about wooza's servers being tucked away, wether or not ATF is part of Wooza's does not make a single difference in the fact that UWE did what they did. IF what you say is true, then UWE can still talk to us wether or not ATF is part of Wooza's, they can simply not include him in the discussions. ATF had left wooza's for several months and only came back about 2 weeks ago, I didn't see UWE trying to reach out to us. The only small thing i've seen so far is Obraxis saying he'd be discussing this with the UWE staff, and so far I haven't seen any result of that.
And no, this thread clearly hasn't served it's point. Because there's still people that seem to think ns2large doesn't deserve to be part of ns2.
It makes perfect sense why some players would prefer Wooza's servers. Trying to take away someone's favorite way to play this game doesn't seem right.
Complete nonsense the server has not been taken down, nobody tried to "take away your favorite way to play this game".
Chill out with the conspiracy theory omg! lol this thread
You seem to be dealing in literals and absolutes when I was making a broad comparison. Also, you don't know the half of ATF and his history. Also you've just completely confirmed my opinion that all you're capable of is cherry-picking the statements, opinions and facts that you can skew toward your argument. Which indicates either a completely flawed argument or a poor grasp of what I'm actually communicating.
However, all of this said - and this being the point of my post - I need to address the elephant in the room. 'ATF' as he is known. This is to all of the members of the Wooza community. I've been involved in internet games and communities for longer than I care to admit and I have never encountered someone as paranoid, manipulative and angry as him. He may make a valuable contribution to the running of your servers @wooza, but I implore you to either handle it yourself or find someone else to do it. He is the driving force behind the conspiracy theories, the negative steam reviews and the majority of the comments on these boards. He's banned from here on at least 3 accounts, but he watches these threads more than ANYONE - obsession isn't healthy.
I firmly believe that if this person would finally 'retire' as he has promised over and over again, that both the Wooza community could work closely with UWE the way the NSL community does now. Barriers are being broken down all the time. Don't let ATF put any new ones up to feed his desire for conflict.
I have many things to say, but don't really have time to write them up right now so I'll just bring up a few points. Firstly, Isn't naming and shaming against the rules on this forum? Either way, I don't even know who the dude you're talking about is and I think it's obvious this has nothing to do with the topic of this forum post.
Also, just because the question was answered, doesn't mean it justifies what has been done to the ns2large servers, that is what is being discussed in the thread right now.
It's also pretty ironic that you bring up the new relationship between UWE and NSL considering one of the biggest changes of this patch (medpack change) has been met with much critique within the competitive community on how it was implemented, probably not the best example...
Sorry to nitpick your post, just really wanted to bring up these factors before people make start making false assumptions.
It makes perfect sense why some players would prefer Wooza's servers. Trying to take away someone's favorite way to play this game doesn't seem right.
Complete nonsense the server has not been taken down, nobody tried to "take away your favorite way to play this game".
Chill out with the conspiracy theory omg! lol this thread
It was moved to a different tab, off the main page. I wouldn't be suprised if a lot of people never even check out the other tabs. They never needed to, they may just assume the server is down. Also, you might just click on the server you see in front of you. Sure, people could still go to the other tab, but it also makes perfect sense that it wouldn't fill nearly as easily as before and that server in particular would rely on tons of people seeing the server and joining to make it what it is (a crazy experience). I'm just discussing the obvious reality of the situation. Unless you can tell me that Wooza's server should in reality fill just as easily now as it did before. So yes, the results of this change end up hurting Wooza's server and also end up hurting people's fun that prefer that server. I would think it would be hard to argue against that.
@Foxy
"I was then shown several personal attacks against me by various members of said community and because of these, I'm not willing to support them any longer"
"I have never encountered someone as paranoid, manipulative and angry as him"
I think your opinion is biased, and not toward the subject but toward actual people...
Me too we still got wooza on ark survival evolved maybe we can make a real time strategy game out of it with extensions from modders that can fix the frames and add skins to pretend some people are aliens *trollface*
You seem to be dealing in literals and absolutes when I was making a broad comparison. Also, you don't know the half of ATF and his history. Also you've just completely confirmed my opinion that all you're capable of is cherry-picking the statements, opinions and facts that you can skew toward your argument. Which indicates either a completely flawed argument or a poor grasp of what I'm actually communicating.
What are you on about cherry picking the statements, what other statements have you made that I should be replying to? The fact that you played on Wooza's?
Ok? What difference does that make, i'm not saying you never did. You playing on the server makes no difference in this case.
Or the fact that you brought up ATF? I think I explained well enough that ATF has nothing to do with me or anyone else here replying to this thread.
Or the fact that you stopped supporting the wooza's servers? I mean again, what difference does this make to this topic? Shit is being flung around from both sides, we can all see that, it's your choice to stop supporting wooza's, but there's plenty of people that support wooza's as it's their home, and said home is now being tucked away for new people to join us.
Comments
Sounds like you think all the >24 player servers are "stealing" players from other servers and as a result it's harder to get games going on other servers. I don't really think so, I think your "struggle" comes more from the fact that this is not a very popular game and there's simply not enough players due to bad retention.
One might argue that NS2Large servers is one of the causes for bad player retention, but I don't really think so, if you look at Steam forums etc. you'll see that there's not many people complaining about performance anymore. It's people complaining about the toxic community and not being able to compete on most servers after they lose rookie status (both of which I'd say are a much bigger problem on smaller servers), so even when these newer players end up joining the smaller servers they end up quitting anyway because apparently the community there does not want them. The more competitive side of this community is killing itself due to it's own actions, it's not the NS2Large servers.
It may have been fixed by now, but for the first day it wasn't and NS2+ was in the exact same boat as NS2large... Did you see any NS2+ servers die during that day? Did you see any NS2+ server operators threatening the developers with miseleading negative reviews?
Did any NS2+ player have any trouble whatsoever clicking on the NS2+ tab and finding their server? No
So why is it that the NS2large community had such a gigantic problem on that first day? Because it seems to me like this whole fiasco started when Wooza threw a fit about his servers being "hidden" behind ONE CLICK!!
So now you want to see my hours played in some sort of lame attempt to discredit my observations. Because someone who hates NS2large for the terrible performance and cluster**** gameplay it provides doesn't know what they're talking about unless they have hundreds of hours played on NS2large servers right?
Well news flash, I don't have many hours on your server because every time I join it (when all other servers are empty) it is such a ridiculously horrible experience (both performance and balance wise) that it makes me want to close the game altogether and play something else.
Oh and by the way, I was guessing that you make money off your server selling reserved slots because I can't fathom any other reason why you threw such a massive fit over this much needed change. A change that does nothing but remove your server from automatically showing at the top of the NS2 list. Why threaten to close your servers and bombard Steam with negative reviews simply because you aren't getting a steady influx of new unsuspecting players? Honestly the ONLY reason I can come up with is that you think it will hurt your source of income and that pissed you off.
It was fixed because Mendasp updated ns2+ to add ns2+ servers to the default tab, not cause UWE fixed it. Also Wooza doesn't sell reserved slots, just goes to show how much you know about this community.
Wooza runs these servers out of his own pocket, which costs him around 300 bucks a month, for the servers, the internet connection, the room the servers are in, and that's not including the cost of man hours he and other people dedicated to these servers put in them. You can't even begin to fanthom how much work is being put into these servers every single day, just so people can play on them and enjoy them. Wooza has received less than 10 donations over the course that these servers have been up, he's hemmorhaging(spelling?) money by the bucket keeping these servers up, so in all honesty, it should be a relief to him that UWE wants to hide ns2large servers, as it would give him an excuse to shut down the servers for good and save a lot of money and time, but he wants to keep the servers active, because he knows well enough that's the only way a lot of the ns2 community can enjoy this game.
So please, stop your stupid accusations if you haven't even bothered to get to know the "ns2large" community. Thanks.
There's no such thing as a "NS2+ community", it runs on almost every server, Wooza's included. I bet a lot of players don't even know that some of the NS2+ features they are seeing are not a part of vanilla. A more apt comparison would be siege/faded etc. if they had more players, but they don't so in this situation there's really nothing that comes even close to being comparable to NS2Large.
And no, I did not see any misleading negative reviews from NS2+ server operators, and I haven't seen any from NS2Large server operators either. Not that it even matters if you're interested about arguing about this issue instead of just trying to name and shame certain people, it doesn't add anything to the discussion.
You can make the game you want to play, or the game the players want to play.
Take a guess at which is a viable business model.
I said did any of them threaten to do it.. not if they actually did.
@dopy Ok then why did he throw such a massive fit as to threaten pulling his servers and bombarding steam with misleading negative reviews? His servers weren't removed, or hidden where nobody could find them. They were still right there clear as day under the NS2large tab (and still populated last time I checked) so what has all this fuss he caused been over?
Another question, how do you know exactly how many donations he's received since his server was started?
Making money hosting a game server for a community ? You are a joke or a troll sir.
Come on Mofo1, walk the walk, start your server, do it and tell us how much money you make.
And Devs, trying to evaluate the impact of large server by directly stabbing them in the back :
"There isn't a lot of active servers, and 70/400 are on only 2 servers. Let's try in our next update to kill their player base and see if these people keeps playing ns2 on smaller server or not and if large server drain all the new players. If not we will cancel this, if yes then we can take more drastic steps to kill these servers and force these changes on players, since they keep playing the game, even if they are having less fun."
So yeah, let's wait 1 week and look at the charts, since this is what all of this is for.
No comment.....
Back when I played CoD4/WaW/BO1 the clan I was in ran several servers, and our clan leader was always talking about how much extra money he had after paying the server fees each month. (edit: and come to think about it we didn't even have reserve slots.. it was all from donations)
It's not an unheard of thing for a server to generate more money via reserve slots/donations than it costs to run. Unless NS2 servers are ridiculously expensive or something I don't know. If I was more tech savvy I'd definitely give it a try.
I don't like playing in wooza's server, but I can guess why people would. It's probably fun for people, it's more crazy. You also are constantly in a battle, there's not any dead time. Sure the performance is probably worse and it's not ideal conditions for what the dev team has been producing, but people do what they want to do. It's that simple.
During the NS1 days, there may have been others, but I know I didn't like that people were playing combat so much. I didn't want the normal ns1 game to die, and combat wasn't the ideal ns1 game. It didn't have all the strategy that ns1 normal game had. People still played it though, and some people seemed to only play combat. Why? It was fun. That is the biggest problem with the updates lately and this game for people...not enough focus on fun, and why would you want to take away people's fun even if it wasn't ideal to you? You already have the disclaimer when joining those servers, you can always make the disclaimers more clear if you want. Pushing the wooza servers off the main page seems to be trying to take away something a lot of players like, and seems to be reaching too far in a low player count game.
You aren't helping your case by antagonizing others. If people are supposedly being toxic towards you, then you are simply making it worse by reciprocating that.
His servers were pretty much removed, after the update hit nobody knew his servers were still up simply because people don't bother reading patchnotes, espescially new people. I sat in the server together with my wife for hours on end, we didn't even manage to hit 20 players. The only reason we had activity last night is because people had to resort to spamming everyone on steam friends to make them aware the servers were still up. The way that the server list is designed makes it really not obvious that there's other tabs, and there's absolutely no reason for the "all" tab not to be the default one.
And I know how many donations he's received because i'm a big part of wooza's. Wooza's isn't just Wooza and ATF anymore like it used to be.
It's quite ironic that you react to that and not when some people implied that wooza players were "retard", "too stupid" and "suck at this game". But sure...
Really? Sonic The Hedgehog begs to differ. Community input is important for some things, but the developer should decide the direction to take their games.
The folllowing is me being nice:
^^ This. A zillion times this. With a fucking cherry on top.
Yes! Shutdown modding! What is it good for anyway? I mean look at Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim! Why do people STILL play these games?!!!!! Oh, wait...
Some modding in games is officially supported. Some is not. All is modding. Always, all-fucking-ways-indisputably modding extends a game's life. Now... do you want NS2 to be around, or not?
Fuck you for making me waste my personal time pointing out common sense.
Nailed it. Also, notice the bold. NOTICE THE BOLD.
Why do we keep having this absurd discussion? Lets break it down easy style:
- Support Large servers, make it easy to find and join them = Win! NS2 Lives
- ! the above, gg
Can we PLEASE have someone on the PDT board who represents Large+? How else, otherwise, do you make decisions if you don't represent the community you're making decisions for?Honestly, any barrier to entry is absurd. Adding extra clicks to find the game style players want to play makes no logical or business sense what so ever.
From the mouth of babes.
Mouth of babes v2.
For the love of assholes, stop this bullshit coming around again and again and again. So tiring. Old vets -- we get it, 6v6 is sacred. However, that's not NS2 now. Deny it all you want, it's fact. Most players play on larger than 6v6 servers. NS2 will never be, ever again, 6v6. You're living in the past. Move on. The future lies in 12v12+. Welcome to Natural Selection. You know, the basis of evolution.
You better inform Blizzard then, because Overwatch is being modeled from community input and is destined to be a huge success going by the Beta. Or maybe they should just release their vision without considering what the players want and see what happens? ...
Careful. Facts might get in the way of making a decision that benefits the community.
In conclusion:
Wooz took down his servers tonight. I joined some smaller ones (8v8 and 12v12) and played for about 1.5 hrs. Bored as batshit. It's just not as fun. I guess I'll play another game until Woozas comes back.
Reduced player count achieved! *ding*
You're not the only one.
Who said anything like that?
This change just gives priority to non-modded servers.
Now there is more choice because less players are being siphoned into large servers.
Great.
Anything over 8v8 shoud be considered NS2large imo.
Oh dear... you think this gives more choice? Showing nothing but "normal" servers by default? This does nothing but take choice away from people.
You got a reply on PAGE 1 of this thread as to why the change was made.
It bears repeating once more, that the servers are behind one button. You could be like the Nostalrius WoW server that Blizzard forced to shut down by taking it to court because it didn't play the game as it was intended, be thankful UWE have only made a minor tweak.
I'll try and TL;DR this as much as possible though.
Firstly - I've played a lot of hours on Wooza's. I used to play in the internal 'team' we put together for in-house tournaments. I'm also one of the apparent 'less than 10' people to have donated toward his servers. I guess I own shares in them then or something? - Long story short, I've played a lot of enjoyable games on Wooza's. I've never taken a stance against his servers, although I have commented in the past that I don't believe it's the way NS2 should be played. (A view confirmed by several UWE members)
Before this issue arose I was a vocal defender of Wooza servers, because of the fun I'd had there and when this issue reared up on Discord I tried to the best of my ability to show the logic behind the change, much to the dislike of the Wooza community. I was then shown several personal attacks against me by various members of said community and because of these, I'm not willing to support them any longer.
*SNIP* Removed for naming and shaming. Take these PRIVATE issues to PRIVATE messages. -Decoy
I firmly believe that if this person would finally 'retire' as he has promised over and over again, that both the Wooza community could work closely with UWE the way the NSL community does now. Barriers are being broken down all the time. Don't let *snip* put any new ones up to feed his desire for conflict.
You've already told me this on discord as well, I'm well aware of ATF's stance on UWE and UWE's stance on ATF, and I care about neither of that, this whole issue is not about ATF, it's about wooza's servers being tucked away, wether or not ATF is part of Wooza's does not make a single difference in the fact that UWE did what they did. IF what you say is true, then UWE can still talk to us wether or not ATF is part of Wooza's, they can simply not include him in the discussions. ATF had left wooza's for several months and only came back about 2 weeks ago, I didn't see UWE trying to reach out to us. The only small thing i've seen so far is Obraxis saying he'd be discussing this with the UWE staff, and so far I haven't seen any result of that.
And no, this thread clearly hasn't served it's point. Because there's still people that seem to think ns2large doesn't deserve to be part of ns2.
Complete nonsense the server has not been taken down, nobody tried to "take away your favorite way to play this game".
Chill out with the conspiracy theory omg! lol this thread
I have many things to say, but don't really have time to write them up right now so I'll just bring up a few points. Firstly, Isn't naming and shaming against the rules on this forum? Either way, I don't even know who the dude you're talking about is and I think it's obvious this has nothing to do with the topic of this forum post.
Also, just because the question was answered, doesn't mean it justifies what has been done to the ns2large servers, that is what is being discussed in the thread right now.
It's also pretty ironic that you bring up the new relationship between UWE and NSL considering one of the biggest changes of this patch (medpack change) has been met with much critique within the competitive community on how it was implemented, probably not the best example...
Sorry to nitpick your post, just really wanted to bring up these factors before people make start making false assumptions.
there are but, like i have been saying in previous posts. a veterans effect on a server is diluted the more players there are.
It was moved to a different tab, off the main page. I wouldn't be suprised if a lot of people never even check out the other tabs. They never needed to, they may just assume the server is down. Also, you might just click on the server you see in front of you. Sure, people could still go to the other tab, but it also makes perfect sense that it wouldn't fill nearly as easily as before and that server in particular would rely on tons of people seeing the server and joining to make it what it is (a crazy experience). I'm just discussing the obvious reality of the situation. Unless you can tell me that Wooza's server should in reality fill just as easily now as it did before. So yes, the results of this change end up hurting Wooza's server and also end up hurting people's fun that prefer that server. I would think it would be hard to argue against that.
"I was then shown several personal attacks against me by various members of said community and because of these, I'm not willing to support them any longer"
"I have never encountered someone as paranoid, manipulative and angry as him"
I think your opinion is biased, and not toward the subject but toward actual people...
What are you on about cherry picking the statements, what other statements have you made that I should be replying to? The fact that you played on Wooza's?
Ok? What difference does that make, i'm not saying you never did. You playing on the server makes no difference in this case.
Or the fact that you brought up ATF? I think I explained well enough that ATF has nothing to do with me or anyone else here replying to this thread.
Or the fact that you stopped supporting the wooza's servers? I mean again, what difference does this make to this topic? Shit is being flung around from both sides, we can all see that, it's your choice to stop supporting wooza's, but there's plenty of people that support wooza's as it's their home, and said home is now being tucked away for new people to join us.