f2p would not solve the problem. this game has gone through sooo many sales i think nearly everyone on steam has the game in his library. f2p would not get so many new players.
@radimax: dont forget that summer is coming. summer time was always a bad time for computer games. i think the playerbase will rise again near winter.
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
There is a reason why Evolve is in beta now again.
The Devs going to massive dumb down the game right now and removing the need to play as a team. (just read the last patchnotes)
Why are they doing this?
Cause you as an indiviual dont need a healer anymore if you spend real money into some healing perks.
Im sure the devs investing the most time right now of finding ways of how to melk the cow aka player the best. (Like in every f2p shooter)
Its just amazing that some people really believe going f2p is:
Make it free, add 10 skins as extra dlc and thats it.
You want an example of an typical f2p shooter?
Here we go.
Zero skill, crying about cheaters after every death. Nonstop. Every round. What a bright future.
Going f2p would destroy anything that's good left in NS2.. Games would become overrun with hackers, smurfs, trolls, and casual herp derp "lets dink around in this stupid free game to kill time" kids...
Matchmaking on the other hand just isn't feasible unless you have at least 100,000+ players, and even then it's still a shit system that requires you to wait while it places you in shit games you'd never willingly join. Even on console titles with 300,000+ players matchmaking is an absolute nightmare..
Matchmaking has been like cancer in the gaming industry ever since they introduced it for shooters on the xbox 360.
Matchmaking isn't strictly necessary. Skill segregation is. Matchmaking is just one of many ways to implement skill segregation, but perhaps a better way, is simply to enforce skill caps on your already existing community servers.
Right now, that's probably not very feasible, if you wish for an active server. That's what happened to HBZ basically. It had some of the best games on that server, even outshining gathers imo, but the low population simply couldn't sustain that.
But with a big influx of players? I think it's very reasonable to have high level servers, like the old HBZ.
Because while a lot of veterans might enjoy the first few hours of rookie influx massacres, many will probably retreat in to playing against more experienced opponents, not to mention teammates. That should help populate high skill servers, possibly even gathers.
As a little anecdote:
Some of you may have noticed I made a post about a heated argument I made with a friend, about the history of NS2.
So I recently recalled; We got this game two months before launch day on oct 31st. I was curious, when I started playing gathers. Interestingly enough, according to the ensl page, I litterally joined oct 31st that day. What that means is; even me, with about 2 months of experience in the game, I had a skill gap large enough, that I could not be bothered to play with the new influx of rookies at launch day, that I actively seeked out the best players in the game.
Imagine, all these veterans, with 200 hours or what ever, who are still lingering in casual-competitive limbo. I believe many of them will get the push they need, to join the next level, and that I think will validate skill segregated community servers.
Matchmaking is just one of many ways to implement skill segregation
It's actually the worst way possible.. In every game I've tried with matchmaking it has utterly failed in every way at placing me with equally skilled players..
Either I get forced into a game with people who destroy me, or I'm forced into a game where i can get 20+ kill streaks in my sleep...
And of course that's not even counting the endless number of games I'm forced into with ping so bad everyone is warping, or blatant hackers teleporting people in front of them to be killed...
Literally ANY system would be better at skill segregation than matchmaking...
Skill capped servers are great. Dungeon gaming has a cap of 1800 hive 2.0 kdr and it seems like games there are more balanced back and forth matches rather than the typical stomps so common these days. Only been able to play there a couple times though.
Unfortunately you can't just set up a high skill only server and expect veterans to play there. You need to block them out of the "normal" skill servers because a lot if them actually seek out the lowest skilled servers to play on... Gives their pathetic and frail ego a boost to stomp every game.
Matchmaking is just one of many ways to implement skill segregation
It's actually the worst way possible.. In every game I've tried with matchmaking it has utterly failed in every way at placing me with equally skilled players..
Either I get forced into a game with people who destroy me, or I'm forced into a game where i can get 20+ kill streaks in my sleep...
And of course that's not even counting the endless number of games I'm forced into with ping so bad everyone is warping, or blatant hackers teleporting people in front of them to be killed...
Literally ANY system would be better at skill segregation than matchmaking...
Skill capped servers are great. Dungeon gaming has a cap of 1800 hive 2.0 kdr and it seems like games there are more balanced back and forth matches rather than the typical stomps so common these days. Only been able to play there a couple times though.
Unfortunately you can't just set up a high skill only server and expect veterans to play there. You need to block them out of the "normal" skill servers because a lot if them actually seek out the lowest skilled servers to play on... Gives their pathetic and frail ego a boost to stomp every game.
Lol. Yea because everyone loves stomping right? In NS2 you join the one Server with a free Slot, that is the sad truth. I mean before the has been gathers and PCWs but they are dead now so there isn't even an alternative for high skilled players to join Pubs and stomp. Where else can they play?
>Complains hackers will increase if f2p
>Ignores the fact you can already buy the game for sub $5 and create new accounts using steam family share
>Complains the game never has enough players
>????????????????????????
why are you making HORROR examples, i played warframe 250 hours NEVER encountered a cheater.
This is a good example of a free 2 play that could work, it has some guns or items you can only buy or grind for 100+ hours but thats just the nature of the game its free and 27000 people play it because its set in space and have interesting stuff in it. i can only assume gamers want to learn more about it and cannot see why they would not want to learn ns2 if it was out there for the public? sure we can fall down to 100 players during summer oh look 50 come back because its winter but that is still not enough for UWE or the game to survive. they could START with 10 skins or lets say you have armor 1 if you have platinum because COOL ARMOR I JUST BOUGHT FOR REAL CASH thats maybe cuple bucks for a player running around showing of his new sick golden armor rather then cuple bucks on somebody that buys ns2, gets killed by 53 - 2 kdr fade and uninstalls it (that wont help the game)
Sadly in my 2700+ hours I've encountered more than a few high skill players who are in it just to stomp.. They can be 2000 hive skill above everyone else and if you point to a populated server with open slots and players around their skill level, their response is "nah it's more fun here" as they are 63-2 on marine...
Of course it's not "everyone" but there are more than enough...
And this is even when they had gathers and high skill servers to play on. Just giving them a server to play on won't cut it.They need to be restricted for it to work.
@RadimaX. I know people who said the same thing about Modern Warfare 2. "I played for (X) hours and never saw a cheater" and it was one of the most hacker infested games ever.
There is a reason why Evolve is in beta now again.
The Devs going to massive dumb down the game right now and removing the need to play as a team. (just read the last patchnotes)
Why are they doing this?
Cause you as an indiviual dont need a healer anymore if you spend real money into some healing perks.
Im sure the devs investing the most time right now of finding ways of how to melk the cow aka player the best. (Like in every f2p shooter)
Its just amazing that some people really believe going f2p is:
Make it free, add 10 skins as extra dlc and thats it.
You want an example of an typical f2p shooter?
Here we go.
Zero skill, crying about cheaters after every death. Nonstop. Every round. What a bright future.
Just because most f2p developers choose to turn their games into grindy cash cows does not mean you have to follow them. These develop games for the sake of money. I'm sure that if NS2 were to go f2p, it would be for the sake of the game, not for money; obviously money is a factor, but it's by far not the only, and hopefully not the biggest one. I think you have a confirmation bias going on there; there are examples of f2p done right out there and NS2 could join their ranks.
Going f2p would destroy anything that's good left in NS2.. Games would become overrun with hackers, smurfs, trolls, and casual herp derp "lets dink around in this stupid free game to kill time" kids...
Matchmaking on the other hand just isn't feasible unless you have at least 100,000+ players, and even then it's still a **** system that requires you to wait while it places you in **** games you'd never willingly join. Even on console titles with 300,000+ players matchmaking is an absolute nightmare..
Matchmaking has been like cancer in the gaming industry ever since they introduced it for shooters on the xbox 360.
Matchmaking is just one of many ways to implement skill segregation
It's actually the worst way possible.. In every game I've tried with matchmaking it has utterly failed in every way at placing me with equally skilled players..
Either I get forced into a game with people who destroy me, or I'm forced into a game where i can get 20+ kill streaks in my sleep...
And of course that's not even counting the endless number of games I'm forced into with ping so bad everyone is warping, or blatant hackers teleporting people in front of them to be killed...
Literally ANY system would be better at skill segregation than matchmaking...
Skill capped servers are great. Dungeon gaming has a cap of 1800 hive 2.0 kdr and it seems like games there are more balanced back and forth matches rather than the typical stomps so common these days. Only been able to play there a couple times though.
Unfortunately you can't just set up a high skill only server and expect veterans to play there. You need to block them out of the "normal" skill servers because a lot if them actually seek out the lowest skilled servers to play on... Gives their pathetic and frail ego a boost to stomp every game.
The first point - hackers, smurfs, trolls - has already been addressed by migalski above. The second one is blown greatly out of proportion. Not to mention: No one forces you to use matchmaking. Community servers can still exist. One does not exclude the other.
Not to mention that in your average NS2 game, you ALREADY have the case where there's people racking up massive kill streaks in their sleeps while others get stomped over and over. How is this any different?
It's different because now you can choose to go to a different server... With matchmaking you can't. It will just keep throwing you back into the same server because it thinks it's the best match for you.
Plus there's the fact that most games that go the route of matchmaking don't have a browser anymore... Especially since you need a crap ton of players for matchmaking to have a chance, and most people would no doubt prefer to choose a local server they can join instantly over having to wait ages in the hopes you'll get placed in a decent server..
If matchmaking is the only option.. It's forced.
With them adding ping bars don't be so sure that they would keep the browser if they added matchmaking... Nobody ever thought IW would drop the server browser but look what happened there...
It's different because now you can choose to go to a different server... With matchmaking you can't. It will just keep throwing you back into the same server because it thinks it's the best match for you.
Plus there's the fact that most games that go the route of matchmaking don't have a browser anymore... Especially since you need a crap ton of players for matchmaking to have a chance, and most people would no doubt prefer to choose a local server they can join instantly over having to wait ages in the hopes you'll get placed in a decent server..
If matchmaking is the only option.. It's forced.
With them adding ping bars don't be so sure that they would keep the browser if they added matchmaking... Nobody ever thought IW would drop the server browser but look what happened there...
That is some incredibly poor logic. "A lot of people are doing it, therefore ns2 will do it as well."
TF2 is introducing new competitive 6v6 matchmaking right now. Are they removing the server browser? Of course not! Why would they?
Same thing applies to ns2.
edit: Obviously the devs might do something incredibly stupid. And yes, they have done stupid things before. But they can't be that daft.
MephillesGermanyJoin Date: 2013-08-07Member: 186634Members, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
@MoFo1 I can't remember that you ever were so... don't even know how to call it...
I remember you being constructive and now it feels like you are destructive in everything you say... wonder what happened for you to become like that (I don't believe you that replacing ping numbers with ping bars is the only reason)
The following is a compilation of copy and pastes I have written, and is in itself a copy and paste from a discussion on matchmaking I had with @Fulgo. He wrote a great response to my post, disagreeing with me on some things that I never got around to responding too. I always meant to. Still though, I will post what I said here.
NS2 can not support large scale matchmaking. The playerbase is too small and the skill ceiling is too high. Forced matchmaking would make for a poor experience. The player base is many times too small to find near skilled games.
I used to play a game called Nosgoth. I played it for about 300 hours according to steam. Nosgoth is a similar game to ns2 in a lot of ways. It is a third person FPS vs a third person mellee fighter. Combat is similar to ns2 in many ways, perticularly in how you engage the enemy. Nosgoth had a fairly high skill ceiling, but I think NS2's skill ceiling is far higher.
At the time I was playing Nosgoth had ~3000 players according to steam charts, compared to NS2's ~400. That is more than 7 times the playerbase. According to their skill system, I was in the 55th percentile. I was literally middle skilled. So in theory, the majority of the players should be near me in skill. One would think matchmaking would work well for me.
Nosgoths matchmaking was incredibly poor and is what ultimately made me quit that game. I, a middle skilled player, would have to wait 15 to 30 minutes for matchmaking to put me into a lobby. I would then have to wait another 15 to 30 minutes for it to be filled with all 8 players. You would think that all that waiting would allow the matchmaking to find players of similar skill. It did not. Games often ended in 30/10 which was a huge stomp.
The problem Nosgoth had was that its playerbase was too small and its skill ceiling too high. This is similar to ns2 except NS2 has a higher skill ceiling and a much smaller playerbase.
NS2's skill ceiling is too high. The average skill of players with more than 50 hours in hive is 1246. Any player with over 2000 hive skill is literally off the charts. In the following spoiler there is a graph and a table that show the distribution of skill in ns2. The conclusion is that NS2 has a ridiculously high skill ceiling.
In this table, I am showing veteran players. For the purposes of this table I have defined veterans as players with greater than 50 hours recorded in hive. These values are from players that played between January 1st 2016 to February 12, 2016.
This histogram shows the distribution of skill for players that played between January 1st 2016 to February 12, 2016.
Standard deviation is a measure of the variation in a distribution or set of data. Basically it is a measure of how far apart the values are. In terms of skill for NS2, standard deviation is a measure of how near skilled teams are. In my experience have seen the standard deviation of skill on a team range from 400 to 1000. Both are ridiculously high values for a standard deviation, but that is the nature of having a small player base.
For an example, what if matchmaking was done for only the middle 50% skill bracket (835 to 1582 hive skill)? In excel I created a simulation of 100 servers. On these servers I put 18 players with a random skill value between 835 and 1582. The resulting teams had an average standard deviation of ~200. That is not great. That is how near skilled we can reasonable expect teams to be. That is what we have to work with.
Continuing that example, the bottom 50% (less than 1124 hive skill) would be less well off. I ran the same simulation with the new parameter of between 0 and 1124 skill value. The resulting average standard deviation of ~320.
The same experiment with the top 50% resulted in an average standard deviation of ~1090. The top 50% would not be able to find anything resembling near skill games. The problem is that the highest levels of skill go incredibly high. Anything above 2000 hive skill is off the charts.
These simulations were simplistic but they highlight the difficulty matchmaking will have. Only the middle 50% would be able to find something resembling near skilled games. The highest level of skills would not be able to find near skilled games what so ever.
This is the nature of the skill ceiling we have. The playebase is just many too small to have enough players to fill out the far ends of the skill bracket. Forced matchmaking would make for a poor experience. The playerbase is too small and the skill ceiling is too high. NS2 can not support large scale matchmaking.
NS2 today has been improved far beyond what it was at launch. Even if NS2 was released in the state it is in today, I doubt player counts would be all that much higher. Sure, they would be higher but I doubt they would be high enough to support large scale matchmaking. NS2 is just too niche of a game. It is, and always would of been like this.
That does not mean matchmaking is not possible. It just can't be done in the traditional sense of matchmaking like other games have used. Any attempt at matchmaking in NS2 is going to have to be very creative.
@Nordic : that's too long, could've added pictures.
Cumulative copy and pastes coming into one giant copy and paste will make for a long post. There are pictures. They are in spoilers. Don't bother looking. They are graphs.
edit: Obviously the devs might do something incredibly stupid. And yes, they have done stupid things before. But they can't be that daft.
Two words...
Ping
Bars
THE NUMBERS WERE NEVER **** ACCURATE! Stop complaining about these stupid bars!
Despite how inaccurate they may have been.. It was still better than these retarded bars.
@Mephilles. It really is mostly those stupid bars. It just brings back too many bad memories of when the IW devs destroyed CoD while *****ing on the community..
The hp bars and their "we don't care what you think" response to the community's overwhelmingly negative reaction to them doesn't help either...
I don't mean to come across as destructive, but it's hard when they do stupid shit that leaves me worrying about them butchering the only online shooter worth playing anymore...
1) They look ugly and give the game an ultra casual feel.. If I was new they would instantly give me a bad impression of the game. If I noticed them in a screenshot before buying it might've stopped me from ever trying the game at all...
2) You have no clue (unless you research it) what they set each bar to represent.. Is 4 bars under 50ms? 100ms? 150ms? Is 3 bars under 200ms or 300ms? All you get is "herp derp its yellow/green so it must be good enough."
3) If numbers were inaccurate then how does changing the icon from numbers to bars make it less inaccurate in any way? It's just lazily trying to cover up the problem. Fix the problem so the numbers are accurate instead of using an ultra vague bar to hide it.
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
If NS2 would go F2P tomorrow we would all have serious issues.
Let alone the griefers, hackers and the like.
Do you think we have enough GOOD running servers for that player spike which a F2P opening would provide?
I will tell you, we do not.
@Nordic : that's too long, could've added pictures.
Cumulative copy and pastes coming into one giant copy and paste will make for a long post. There are pictures. They are in spoilers. Don't bother looking. They are graphs.
Don't forget to put (° )( °) in your pics, I noticed at work people are way more receptives to graphs including a pair or two ...
Sadly in my 2700+ hours I've encountered more than a few high skill players who are in it just to stomp.. They can be 2000 hive skill above everyone else and if you point to a populated server with open slots and players around their skill level, their response is "nah it's more fun here" as they are 63-2 on marine...
Of course it's not "everyone" but there are more than enough...
And this is even when they had gathers and high skill servers to play on. Just giving them a server to play on won't cut it.They need to be restricted for it to work.
Does everyone always play competitive csgo or do players also play casuals? If i want to fuck around or don't have time to commit for a game then why would i sign up for a gather if its only going to piss everyone else off who is trying to get a good game.
"High skill servers"? You mean the captains servers that were filled always. The one where you either had to pay $ for a slot or potentially wait hours during the old peak times?
If the average elo is 1200, 2000 over would be at 3200, you act like there has been enough players with that skill that a server could be filled, when in reality, at most there was maybe 12 online at any given time (during invite gathers).
There has been players like that in the past however but a large majority at that level strongly prefer to have a real game rather than the mess that are pubs. In my history of ns2 I've known maybe 10 players who just stomped rookies or low elo players for the "fun" of it. Of that 10, maybe 2 have logged on in the past year.
You act like high elo players are out to fuck up your game experience when in reality we just want to have fun as well, expect the only place we generally can play is a captain server that is populated maybe twice a week or pubs with everyone else. This is the problem with such a small population as well as how the ns2 matchmaking was built.
@Nordic : that's too long, could've added pictures.
Cumulative copy and pastes coming into one giant copy and paste will make for a long post. There are pictures. They are in spoilers. Don't bother looking. They are graphs.
Don't forget to put (° )( °) in your pics, I noticed at work people are way more receptives to graphs including a pair or two ...
Are they from Australia btw, they seem upside down...
@Nordic : that's too long, could've added pictures.
Cumulative copy and pastes coming into one giant copy and paste will make for a long post. There are pictures. They are in spoilers. Don't bother looking. They are graphs.
Don't forget to put (° )( °) in your pics, I noticed at work people are way more receptives to graphs including a pair or two ...
Are they from Australia btw, they seem upside down...
Nah, it's the optimistic version, Mofo's are like this : (.)(.)
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
@MoFo1
Just a sidenote to the "pingbar problem".
Click on the server and check the ping on the window that pops up. Voila.
Also you are playing on the same servers anyway each time. And im sure you know the pings of your favorite 3 servers anyway. So its not a big deal.
Also the high level pub stompers are not a real problem anymore, cause most of them are playing OW now.
So you telling the ns2large players that they can find there server very easy but you cant find the pings?
Cmon.
@Nordic and here I am feeling like a bad player with 2.5k elo
It just goes to show how high the skill ceiling is in this game. You're more skilled than myself, yet we both feel like we are horrible at the game. We both recognize how much more we are able to learn.
It also goes to show how bad most players really are, and how difficult it is for high skilled players to find near skilled games.
Comments
@radimax: dont forget that summer is coming. summer time was always a bad time for computer games. i think the playerbase will rise again near winter.
The Devs going to massive dumb down the game right now and removing the need to play as a team. (just read the last patchnotes)
Why are they doing this?
Cause you as an indiviual dont need a healer anymore if you spend real money into some healing perks.
Im sure the devs investing the most time right now of finding ways of how to melk the cow aka player the best. (Like in every f2p shooter)
Its just amazing that some people really believe going f2p is:
Make it free, add 10 skins as extra dlc and thats it.
You want an example of an typical f2p shooter?
Here we go.
Zero skill, crying about cheaters after every death. Nonstop. Every round. What a bright future.
Matchmaking on the other hand just isn't feasible unless you have at least 100,000+ players, and even then it's still a shit system that requires you to wait while it places you in shit games you'd never willingly join. Even on console titles with 300,000+ players matchmaking is an absolute nightmare..
Matchmaking has been like cancer in the gaming industry ever since they introduced it for shooters on the xbox 360.
Right now, that's probably not very feasible, if you wish for an active server. That's what happened to HBZ basically. It had some of the best games on that server, even outshining gathers imo, but the low population simply couldn't sustain that.
But with a big influx of players? I think it's very reasonable to have high level servers, like the old HBZ.
Because while a lot of veterans might enjoy the first few hours of rookie influx massacres, many will probably retreat in to playing against more experienced opponents, not to mention teammates. That should help populate high skill servers, possibly even gathers.
As a little anecdote:
So I recently recalled; We got this game two months before launch day on oct 31st. I was curious, when I started playing gathers. Interestingly enough, according to the ensl page, I litterally joined oct 31st that day. What that means is; even me, with about 2 months of experience in the game, I had a skill gap large enough, that I could not be bothered to play with the new influx of rookies at launch day, that I actively seeked out the best players in the game.
Imagine, all these veterans, with 200 hours or what ever, who are still lingering in casual-competitive limbo. I believe many of them will get the push they need, to join the next level, and that I think will validate skill segregated community servers.
It's actually the worst way possible.. In every game I've tried with matchmaking it has utterly failed in every way at placing me with equally skilled players..
Either I get forced into a game with people who destroy me, or I'm forced into a game where i can get 20+ kill streaks in my sleep...
And of course that's not even counting the endless number of games I'm forced into with ping so bad everyone is warping, or blatant hackers teleporting people in front of them to be killed...
Literally ANY system would be better at skill segregation than matchmaking...
Skill capped servers are great. Dungeon gaming has a cap of 1800 hive 2.0 kdr and it seems like games there are more balanced back and forth matches rather than the typical stomps so common these days. Only been able to play there a couple times though.
Unfortunately you can't just set up a high skill only server and expect veterans to play there. You need to block them out of the "normal" skill servers because a lot if them actually seek out the lowest skilled servers to play on... Gives their pathetic and frail ego a boost to stomp every game.
Lol. Yea because everyone loves stomping right? In NS2 you join the one Server with a free Slot, that is the sad truth. I mean before the has been gathers and PCWs but they are dead now so there isn't even an alternative for high skilled players to join Pubs and stomp. Where else can they play?
>Ignores the fact you can already buy the game for sub $5 and create new accounts using steam family share
>Complains the game never has enough players
>????????????????????????
This is a good example of a free 2 play that could work, it has some guns or items you can only buy or grind for 100+ hours but thats just the nature of the game its free and 27000 people play it because its set in space and have interesting stuff in it. i can only assume gamers want to learn more about it and cannot see why they would not want to learn ns2 if it was out there for the public? sure we can fall down to 100 players during summer oh look 50 come back because its winter but that is still not enough for UWE or the game to survive. they could START with 10 skins or lets say you have armor 1 if you have platinum because COOL ARMOR I JUST BOUGHT FOR REAL CASH thats maybe cuple bucks for a player running around showing of his new sick golden armor rather then cuple bucks on somebody that buys ns2, gets killed by 53 - 2 kdr fade and uninstalls it (that wont help the game)
*EASY under1000 rank from hive
*MEDIUM over 1000 rank from hive
*HARD over 2500 rank from hive
it wont be that segregated since there could be THOUSANDS of players rather then 300 now ( assuming its only 100 rookies 100 regular 100 pro´s)
could even simplify that rookie is under 1500 easy server and over 1500 to join hard server
Sadly in my 2700+ hours I've encountered more than a few high skill players who are in it just to stomp.. They can be 2000 hive skill above everyone else and if you point to a populated server with open slots and players around their skill level, their response is "nah it's more fun here" as they are 63-2 on marine...
Of course it's not "everyone" but there are more than enough...
And this is even when they had gathers and high skill servers to play on. Just giving them a server to play on won't cut it.They need to be restricted for it to work.
@RadimaX. I know people who said the same thing about Modern Warfare 2. "I played for (X) hours and never saw a cheater" and it was one of the most hacker infested games ever.
Just because most f2p developers choose to turn their games into grindy cash cows does not mean you have to follow them. These develop games for the sake of money. I'm sure that if NS2 were to go f2p, it would be for the sake of the game, not for money; obviously money is a factor, but it's by far not the only, and hopefully not the biggest one. I think you have a confirmation bias going on there; there are examples of f2p done right out there and NS2 could join their ranks.
Second:
The first point - hackers, smurfs, trolls - has already been addressed by migalski above. The second one is blown greatly out of proportion. Not to mention: No one forces you to use matchmaking. Community servers can still exist. One does not exclude the other.
Not to mention that in your average NS2 game, you ALREADY have the case where there's people racking up massive kill streaks in their sleeps while others get stomped over and over. How is this any different?
Plus there's the fact that most games that go the route of matchmaking don't have a browser anymore... Especially since you need a crap ton of players for matchmaking to have a chance, and most people would no doubt prefer to choose a local server they can join instantly over having to wait ages in the hopes you'll get placed in a decent server..
If matchmaking is the only option.. It's forced.
With them adding ping bars don't be so sure that they would keep the browser if they added matchmaking... Nobody ever thought IW would drop the server browser but look what happened there...
That is some incredibly poor logic. "A lot of people are doing it, therefore ns2 will do it as well."
TF2 is introducing new competitive 6v6 matchmaking right now. Are they removing the server browser? Of course not! Why would they?
Same thing applies to ns2.
edit: Obviously the devs might do something incredibly stupid. And yes, they have done stupid things before. But they can't be that daft.
Two words...
Ping
Bars
THE NUMBERS WERE NEVER FUCKING ACCURATE! Stop complaining about these stupid bars!
I remember you being constructive and now it feels like you are destructive in everything you say... wonder what happened for you to become like that (I don't believe you that replacing ping numbers with ping bars is the only reason)
NS2 can not support large scale matchmaking. The playerbase is too small and the skill ceiling is too high. Forced matchmaking would make for a poor experience. The player base is many times too small to find near skilled games.
I used to play a game called Nosgoth. I played it for about 300 hours according to steam. Nosgoth is a similar game to ns2 in a lot of ways. It is a third person FPS vs a third person mellee fighter. Combat is similar to ns2 in many ways, perticularly in how you engage the enemy. Nosgoth had a fairly high skill ceiling, but I think NS2's skill ceiling is far higher.
At the time I was playing Nosgoth had ~3000 players according to steam charts, compared to NS2's ~400. That is more than 7 times the playerbase. According to their skill system, I was in the 55th percentile. I was literally middle skilled. So in theory, the majority of the players should be near me in skill. One would think matchmaking would work well for me.
Nosgoths matchmaking was incredibly poor and is what ultimately made me quit that game. I, a middle skilled player, would have to wait 15 to 30 minutes for matchmaking to put me into a lobby. I would then have to wait another 15 to 30 minutes for it to be filled with all 8 players. You would think that all that waiting would allow the matchmaking to find players of similar skill. It did not. Games often ended in 30/10 which was a huge stomp.
The problem Nosgoth had was that its playerbase was too small and its skill ceiling too high. This is similar to ns2 except NS2 has a higher skill ceiling and a much smaller playerbase.
NS2's skill ceiling is too high. The average skill of players with more than 50 hours in hive is 1246. Any player with over 2000 hive skill is literally off the charts. In the following spoiler there is a graph and a table that show the distribution of skill in ns2. The conclusion is that NS2 has a ridiculously high skill ceiling.
In this table, I am showing veteran players. For the purposes of this table I have defined veterans as players with greater than 50 hours recorded in hive. These values are from players that played between January 1st 2016 to February 12, 2016.
This histogram shows the distribution of skill for players that played between January 1st 2016 to February 12, 2016.
Standard deviation is a measure of the variation in a distribution or set of data. Basically it is a measure of how far apart the values are. In terms of skill for NS2, standard deviation is a measure of how near skilled teams are. In my experience have seen the standard deviation of skill on a team range from 400 to 1000. Both are ridiculously high values for a standard deviation, but that is the nature of having a small player base.
For an example, what if matchmaking was done for only the middle 50% skill bracket (835 to 1582 hive skill)? In excel I created a simulation of 100 servers. On these servers I put 18 players with a random skill value between 835 and 1582. The resulting teams had an average standard deviation of ~200. That is not great. That is how near skilled we can reasonable expect teams to be. That is what we have to work with.
Continuing that example, the bottom 50% (less than 1124 hive skill) would be less well off. I ran the same simulation with the new parameter of between 0 and 1124 skill value. The resulting average standard deviation of ~320.
The same experiment with the top 50% resulted in an average standard deviation of ~1090. The top 50% would not be able to find anything resembling near skill games. The problem is that the highest levels of skill go incredibly high. Anything above 2000 hive skill is off the charts.
These simulations were simplistic but they highlight the difficulty matchmaking will have. Only the middle 50% would be able to find something resembling near skilled games. The highest level of skills would not be able to find near skilled games what so ever.
This is the nature of the skill ceiling we have. The playebase is just many too small to have enough players to fill out the far ends of the skill bracket. Forced matchmaking would make for a poor experience. The playerbase is too small and the skill ceiling is too high. NS2 can not support large scale matchmaking.
NS2 today has been improved far beyond what it was at launch. Even if NS2 was released in the state it is in today, I doubt player counts would be all that much higher. Sure, they would be higher but I doubt they would be high enough to support large scale matchmaking. NS2 is just too niche of a game. It is, and always would of been like this.
That does not mean matchmaking is not possible. It just can't be done in the traditional sense of matchmaking like other games have used. Any attempt at matchmaking in NS2 is going to have to be very creative.
Cumulative copy and pastes coming into one giant copy and paste will make for a long post. There are pictures. They are in spoilers. Don't bother looking. They are graphs.
Despite how inaccurate they may have been.. It was still better than these retarded bars.
@Mephilles. It really is mostly those stupid bars. It just brings back too many bad memories of when the IW devs destroyed CoD while *****ing on the community..
The hp bars and their "we don't care what you think" response to the community's overwhelmingly negative reaction to them doesn't help either...
I don't mean to come across as destructive, but it's hard when they do stupid shit that leaves me worrying about them butchering the only online shooter worth playing anymore...
How? "Bars are dumb/inferior to numbers" is not an argument.
I find that hard to believe.
Anyway, I'm done here.
1) They look ugly and give the game an ultra casual feel.. If I was new they would instantly give me a bad impression of the game. If I noticed them in a screenshot before buying it might've stopped me from ever trying the game at all...
2) You have no clue (unless you research it) what they set each bar to represent.. Is 4 bars under 50ms? 100ms? 150ms? Is 3 bars under 200ms or 300ms? All you get is "herp derp its yellow/green so it must be good enough."
3) If numbers were inaccurate then how does changing the icon from numbers to bars make it less inaccurate in any way? It's just lazily trying to cover up the problem. Fix the problem so the numbers are accurate instead of using an ultra vague bar to hide it.
Let alone the griefers, hackers and the like.
Do you think we have enough GOOD running servers for that player spike which a F2P opening would provide?
I will tell you, we do not.
Don't forget to put (° )( °) in your pics, I noticed at work people are way more receptives to graphs including a pair or two ...
"High skill servers"? You mean the captains servers that were filled always. The one where you either had to pay $ for a slot or potentially wait hours during the old peak times?
If the average elo is 1200, 2000 over would be at 3200, you act like there has been enough players with that skill that a server could be filled, when in reality, at most there was maybe 12 online at any given time (during invite gathers).
There has been players like that in the past however but a large majority at that level strongly prefer to have a real game rather than the mess that are pubs. In my history of ns2 I've known maybe 10 players who just stomped rookies or low elo players for the "fun" of it. Of that 10, maybe 2 have logged on in the past year.
You act like high elo players are out to fuck up your game experience when in reality we just want to have fun as well, expect the only place we generally can play is a captain server that is populated maybe twice a week or pubs with everyone else. This is the problem with such a small population as well as how the ns2 matchmaking was built.
Are they from Australia btw, they seem upside down...
Nah, it's the optimistic version, Mofo's are like this : (.)(.)
Just a sidenote to the "pingbar problem".
Click on the server and check the ping on the window that pops up. Voila.
Also you are playing on the same servers anyway each time. And im sure you know the pings of your favorite 3 servers anyway. So its not a big deal.
Also the high level pub stompers are not a real problem anymore, cause most of them are playing OW now.
So you telling the ns2large players that they can find there server very easy but you cant find the pings?
Cmon.
It just goes to show how high the skill ceiling is in this game. You're more skilled than myself, yet we both feel like we are horrible at the game. We both recognize how much more we are able to learn.
It also goes to show how bad most players really are, and how difficult it is for high skilled players to find near skilled games.