Natural Selection Playercounts
ScardyBob
ScardyBob Join Date: 2009-11-25 Member: 69528Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
ScardyBob Join Date: 2009-11-25 Member: 69528Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
Here's a bit of a blast from the past. Using the combo of the wayback machine's cache of old steam stats/gamespot webpages, I was able to put together a rough playercount of NS. Unfortunately, the farthest back I could get was early 2004, so I'm missing roughly the first year of NS1.0/2.0. Also, I averaged the values by month to provide a smoother looking curve/fill in the gaps (that's why you don't see the big peaks of daily or hourly updated playercounts numbers). I'm going to see if I can get the NS2 number for comparison, but in the meantime, here is what it looks like:
Data here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5490563/NS1 Playercount.xlsx
Data here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5490563/NS1 Playercount.xlsx
Comments
Good lookin' graph though :P
Just guesstimating by that graph it looks like ns2 averages about roughly 1k players. So not to dissimilar to ns2. I am sure whatever info @scardybob is provided it will be a bit better if not just compare than that graph there.
Source
Also doesn't take into account CS and DoD were going to source and everyone realised NS wasn't and the dreaded WoW beta through to release in late 04. By March 05 no one could deny that vanilla WoW was a solid fucking game.
Yeah, I participated in the beta testing of steam. It was really really awful. Took years and countless updates to win me over.
Anyway, nice work ScardyBob. Just wondering why it suddenly dropped dead dec 08. Did the NS2 beta start around that time or something?
And as was said before, the introduction of Steam and the release of new games didn't help too much. I remember playing CS 1.6 when it first came out... Let's just say there was a reason for all those rude Steam gifs.
I don't know exactly when the comp NS scene died off, but I am assuming here that comp players make up the bulk of the second half of NS's playerbase.
With that assumption made, the numbers playing NS during 2005-2008 are a remarkably HIGH portion compared to the first 2 years of those data. This implies that competitive players made up a significant proportion of the entire playerbase. This is something I think the recent data for NS2 also supports: that a significant portion of natural selection players play competitively.
All based on assumptions, mind, but I find this quite an encouraging story for the long-term health prospects of NS2.
Roo
This is also why your stats start in january 2004: 3.0b1 was the first steam release of ns1, so that's when steam started collecting stats for ns1 player counts. Even though your graph contains no stats from 1.0x or 2.0x, it appears as though it contains stats from 2.0x.
For accuracy, I suggest the following granularity and nomenclature: 1.0x, 2.0x, 3.0x (start january 2004), 3.1x (start august 2005), 3.2. The x represents that the most significant part of the period was played using one or more updated versions or betas of that version, for example 1.04, 2.01, 3.0b1,b2,b3,b4,b5,b6,f, et cetera.
Edit: There is also something wrong with the end of the graph. Something must've happened to break stats collection in september 09, because the player count did not drop rapidly like that, it was a steady decline (compare the period march 09-sep09) until today (there are still people playing the game today).
It didn't, the version number stamps on the graph are misleading. See my previous post.
Unfortunately, that conclusion is not supported by the facts. Comparatively, the competitive community is much weaker in NS2 than it was in NS1. My guess is that without UWE's targeted support (sponsored tournaments), it would be a ghost town by now.
Yes... it had nothing to do with Combat. If anything, combat helped keep NS 3.0 alive.
Plus, 3.x and onward were the most balance (3.2 was regarded balanced by practically everyone with few complaints).
The potential problem with 2.0 to 3.0 (if the player decline had to blamed on anything, then here are my thoughts on what the reasons may be) was the move to Steam and the fact that 3.0x was kind of buggy (lots of new gameplay mechanics were changed and added). Finally, the maps and everything was brightened up a lot (mainly because the game wasn't really meant to be super dark in the first place). You could brighten the game up manually before with lightgamma, so the darkness aspect was mostly just a cosmetic thing and hindered a lot of players who didn't know you could just turn up the brightness. Turning up the game's brightness (when it was really dark before) kind of made the game feel less familiar (One of the appeals I did get from playing NS 1.0x the first time was playing as marines on ns_nancy with almost everything dark... seeing a skulk jump out of no where from the dark added a lot to the experience... it was an epic Half-Life 1 mod, so when 3.0x sort of took that away by brightening the game up dramatically, I can see people also disliking that.) (Though the bright up change was welcomed and seen as a good thing later on, especially once people got used to it.)
The major potential factor (if we had to blame it on any reason that is) in the decline NS3.0 is simply due to forced move to Steam.
Steam was really bad back then (I remember the good old Steam signatures everyone had back then).
I remember lots of people complaining about Steam and most wanting to stick with WON (of course that wasn't possible since WON would actually be shut down in favor of Steam).
One of the issues with Steam was that there were lots of crashes (in game for example). Weird errors too. The UI wasn't great and the font needed some to get used to. The one thing that people praised about Steam at first though was the fact that maps downloaded really fast (also there was a friend list, and there used to be games like chess you could play with your friends on steam!). Besides downloading fast and the novelty of playing chess with your Counter-Strike/Natural Selection buddies while you were spectating/dead, Steam wasn't liked that much.
Anyway, I really don't get the dislike towards combat here sometimes (blaming things on combat is totally unfair). Most of the combat hate isn't justified (things like combat just invited the "Counter-Strike" players into the game or it divided the community).
First, inviting more players into a game (specifically in NS) has been good. I won't get into specifics or pros and cons of more players in a game (it varies) but at least what mattered in NS that player community and server community was mostly the same throughout NS1.0-3.x, so if the player community didn't change too much (even with newer players, newer players adapted and learned to be part of the community), then I see no bad with that.
Second, the community didn't get divided due to combat. If people didn't want to play NS Classic, they would have stopped playing NS all together and played some other game instead (that's what a lot of people need to realize... people can play another game altogether instead of playing this game). What I (and many others) did was play both combat and classic (if one got old, I switch to other, vice versa). If combat didn't exist, it just meant that I would be playing less NS overall (same for other people).
Third, combat mode didn't do anything to ruin NS1 because it didn't affect anything in classic mode (or vice versa). It's not like any balancing done in combat affected classic (in fact they were balanced separately... blink usage/acceleration is 2x faster in combat mode than in classic in 3.2, so that shows that something down in classic like the Blink nerf doesn't need to affect combat, and vice versa too).
A particular game mode or game shouldn't be viewed as superior to one or another. I know some people say combat mode is mindless or destroys a big part of what makes NS1 great (the RTS/FPS aspect) but it wasn't a replacement, the game mode was added alongside NS1.
Plus, in my experience, I've seen tons of team play and coordination in the mode just as much as classic mode (with combatbuilding mods, ninja phase gates for marines and/or coordinated onos rush with gorge and lerk support on the CC, etc).
Anyway on topic a bit... 3.0s fall in popularity (if we had to blame it on anything) may have had to do with Steam (that and it was buggy and crashes were made often) and not because of "combat" (which is an excellent alternative game mode IMO, especially with the combatbuildings and extra menu mods).
Edit:
I missed this on my initial post but this is not true (they didn't nerf the Onos because of combat). The Onos was "bad" or "nerfed" in 3.0x because:
1. The "nerf" came from the fact that they fixed the Onos hitbox in 3.0x (before the fix, if you tried to hit the onos, 80% of the shots would miss and deal no damage to the onos). They tried to compensate by buffing the HP and armor though (eventually they did manage to buff the Onos back to a reasonable amount). Onos by 3.1+ is basically the same power as the NS1.0X-2.0 (and the NS2) Onos.
(Bolded and huge font for emphasis and clarification!)
They didn't want you to hit the onos only in a specific spot to actually damage it (they wanted it to be so that if you actually hit an onos, you'd hit it). It wasn't done because of combat at all (they just wanted to fix a broken hitbox so when people hit the onos, they were actually damaging it).
(Onos actually sucked in combat anyway simply because JP + HMG countered it badly in most cases, despite how much HP the Onos actually had.)
Also Onos was only 100 resource(?) in NS2.0 because NS2.0 unlocked the Onos (in 1.0x, you had to have 3 hives to get an onos and by that time, aliens would have won or overrun the marines already since that meant they had the control of the entire map). 2.0 unlocked the Onos by made it cost a lot of resources so it would still be seen earlier in the game. Again, because of the buggy hitbox, Onos was strong back then.
Obviously, you usually don't want buggy hitboxes where you only like 10% of the shots actually hit the alien, so that's why they fixed it in 3.0 (not because of combat but because it was important to have hitboxes that worked right).
2. Again, like I said, the balance is done separately for both sides.
Fade blink got nerfed in 3.2 in Classic but not in Combat (just a recent example, as 3.2 was the last patch for NS1 anyway).
The only real change that was done for combat was Lerks getting Bite instead of Spikes (and most actually liked that change in classic too since the NS1.0 Spore was basically just as good and useful as spikes in terms of a ranged attack).
Besides that, NS Classic wasn't affected by NS Combat's balance problems or anything. (NS Combat had their own way of balancing anyway... like with how much a weapon or lifeform costs and how players respawned).
To be fair, he is right in saying that vanilla balance was unaffected by Combat, and it is unlikely that Combat had anything to do with the decline of ns1's popularity.
It wasn't due to the graph at all. If you view the context of my post, I was just responding to the combat related posts (which involved a "I don't get combat haters" rant admittedly).
1. But it is true that Fade blink was nerfed in classic but not in combat in 3.2. Blink usage was halved (which meant energy consumption was halved "as" well as acceleration) in classic but in combat, the values are the same (when you blinked in combat, you moved as fast as Fades 3.1 and before since Blink wasn't changed/nerfed in combat from 3.2).
Not sure what else to say to prove/disprove this (besides just busting out a local NS1.0 server in classic and combat with cheats enabled, and testing out blink in both cases), and I'm not sure what made you say it was false in the first place.
2. About "The only real change that was done for combat was Lerks getting Bite instead of Spikes" being false, but they did say one of the major reasons they gave Lerk back bite again was because of combat. It might not be the primarily reason (I know lots of people actually like the changes, regardless of whether it was for combat or not) but it was said one of the reasons was Lerk's role in combat needed bite more than spikes.
Edit - Anyway, my initial post is really rant-y but outside of the rants, the facts are totally there, like totally (the hitbox fix for the onos for example is totally true). Also the context of the combat discussion isn't just in this thread, I read a decent amount of "combat dislike" throughout these forums recently (for example, there have been a lot of dislike posts regarding the thought of combat returning in NS2). I think the combat hate is mostly unjustified and mostly based on false premises which is why my post had to do a lot with defending combat (then admittedly, it did turn into an off topic rant about game communities).
Blink was never "nerfed". 3.2 slightly slowed down blink acceleration, which was noticeable, but at the same time introduced the +movement bind which made blink movement significantly easier to use and more flexible even for expert players. There is no difference between the unmodded vanilla ns1 fade blink and the unmodded ns1 Combat blink.
First, I am using "nerf" in sort of general context (the ways players responded to the blink change). While they did introduce the "r" for +movement, it didn't really change too much because you could switch weapons really fast anyway (especially with hud_fastswitch set to "1"). I already said/clarified how blink was "nerfed" (the usage was halved which meant that while energy used at first was halved that also meant "acceleration" was also halved). It did make a huge deal and it meant that Fade couldn't just nearly "insta blink" in and out anymore like before.
To clarify (and I admit, I didn't clarify it in my initial post), "if NS3.0 had anything to do with NS1's decline, it was mostly related to the move to Steam over anything like 'combat mode'" is what I wanted to say (and what I meant) in my initial post.
Yes, I'm not sure if the move to steam is what caused the player decline, but "if" it was anything, then I'd say the most likely outcome is steam.
When I played combat in NS3.2, blink accelerated much faster than in regular classic NS3.2. Now, I don't have NS1 installed anymore but that was the general thing I remembered. If anyone with NS1 3.2 still installed could test it on combat and classic mode, Blink speed, that would be appreciated (it probably won't take too much time).
You may have got me on this one.
Anyway, most of my initial post was aimed to stop and clarify any misinformation in the first place (the Onos hitbox change for example). I'm not sure what the blink thing now, but I just wanted to use it as an extra case (and I am glad you also agreed that balancing on combat didn't affect classic too). I just don't want any unjustified combat hate.
Anyway, I apologize and I'm sorry for the off topic rant in my post, but again the reason for most of everything in my post was simply to try to tone down the combat hate I've been seeing on these forums (by clarifying some things, etc). The only thing I am not sure about now is the Fade blink in 3.2 (if I still had NS1 installed, I'd test it out. I just remember playing 3.2 and asking if there was a mod that kept 3.1 Fade Blink in, but it wasn't the case, which is why I think that Blink still had 3.1 values in combat while in 3.2, they had the new values) but besides that, I say most of my points/facts from NS1 were accurate.
(Again, the context of "Steam killing NS" was in response to that "if" anything killed NS, and we "had" to point a finger at one thing, then it's probably Steam since the negativity surrounding it was vocal at the time.)
Edit - Anyway, I apologize for any off topic rantings (I'll edit my main post to be less "rant-y" sounding) and I didn't mean to misinform or attack anyone. I just don't like "dislike" towards any game mode or game genre that is, and that's where most of the basis of my post was towards (discussion regarding combat mode). So, sorry again if I was aggressive towards anyone.
I should say that what, if any, effect the development of combat had on the development of vanilla is known only to the devs. Vanilla and Combat gameplay were developed simultaneously, by the same team, for the release of 3.0b1 in january 2004. My impression is that Combat was originally intended to be a minigame, something the players could do while waiting for the server to fill up, and had no effect on the design of the actual game. Even though its popularity grew far beyond that intention, the ns1 devs never provided any significant support or improvements to Combat after the first release, except for keeping it up to date with every new release of vanilla ns1.
The default bind was r, but anybody worth their salt immediately changed that to mouse2. It was a noticeable improvement even for players who used scripts to gain similar functionality before 3.2. I don't mean to sound harsh here, but your proficiency at the game must have been very limited if this is new information to you.
Sorry, but they aren't, including your inaccurate description of the Onos hitbox fixes -- strictly speaking the only factually accurate part of your hitbox fix description is that they "fixed the Onos hitbox".
As a side note, they later performed similar tweaks to the fade hitbox for 3.0f. I suppose you could legitimately call that a fade nerf.
The only hypothesis supported by the stats is a natural decline due to the game's age (possibly sped up by the lack of support by the developers from 2008 and onwards).
Edit: Made several significant edits to clarify.
And there is something wrong/missing with those playercounts, when I came back to NS1 in 2010 there was still 100+ servers, with easily ~500+ players average. It wasnt until late in 2010 that it really started to drop off.
Bugger! You're right, my bad.
Apologise for spreading misinformation.
Lots of people talking poo here about things they know nothing about. There was never a single change made to NS movement or combat abilities to support NS:Combat game mode. Combat was designed as something to fill servers and introduce people to game mechanics in a much simpler environment. I personally think it was wasted effort, but others more knowledgeable than me disagree.
We came very close to releasing on Steam - up to the point of actually having a Test App ID Installing and running from Steam, but unfortunately it was not to happen due to factors outside of our control.
There comes a point when you have to accept that, in the end, all good things fade away.
Im fairly sure combat did severely help kill of NS1, although not entirely.
More and more servers ran combat in pugs back then, severely limiting the fights in classic. When you had a classic fight on a server it was often worthless compared to before because the combat players did not put in enough effort or experience. It could takes days at times to even find good strong classic play.
Mix with that the problem that so many servers started using crap mods and crap bots that made the game even worse.
No pugplay was definately bad somewhere after combat. And it got worse and worse.
I eventually quit because I couldn't keep up myself with the amount of fail matches, followed by hours of combat, only to have 1 or 2 enormous fail classic matches again.
As for pugs, I cannot think of any pugs that were played on combat, outside of warmup games/practice celerity vs resupply. There was quite a few pugs on classic here and there, and while many were quite fail it was atleast amusing, and wasnt because there was combat players in the pug. Im not sure what group/area of people you were playing with however. In the last days of public NS1 that I played the classic server was always the one populated, even over the combat server.
I played a ton of classic NS1, then switched mostly to combat with xmenu/buildmenu because of all the troll comms and troll gorges going SC first. Anyone remember Phone? High nasally voice, knew what he was doing but trolled anyway and got away with it with silent approval from the server admins.
IMO, my time spent on combat were the best in NS1 - you still had a team, but your individual efforts meant a LOT more, plus trolling was almost non-existent. I would rush straight for HMG (3 pts), and eventually end up as a hmg ua5 nano3 catpack static 5 resupply jp (something like that), basically I killed anything that came in range except the top fades.
After the combat servers started to die, I went back to classic and found that I had forgotten how much I missed it. Played classic for about half a year or so, then saw that NS2 had gotten to a playable state and switched.