dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
Im sure most people left that fast cause the horrible performance. They buy the game cause they saw some trailers and the good reviewscores, install it , play some rounds on horrible servers (10-15 tickrate) on midrange pcs with 30 fps average and then: deinstall and forget it.
The summertime push back the playercount to beta times now.
If reviewers and gamers told people how bad performance was, UWE wouldn't get any sales. I think I said somewhere once that NS2HD did a good job of selling the game for UWE, avoiding performance completely. Dude could probably sell false teeth to a toddler.
I feel like the only guy who finds playing with people much better than you really fun. If you actually manage to kill that godlike fade or marine you feel like a king! Watching them play can be very revealing about ways to improve your own play. If someone is stomping your team so badly then the game should end soon and you can try again, maybe they'll have a bad round. I can't imagine feeling like I "should" be able to 1v1 anyone on the other team and have a decent chance of killing them, some people are going to beat you 95% of the time that happens even if you do everything right; the mistake you made was choosing to engage with someone who is just plain better than you. Having sufficient game sense to know when to actually engage is a gigantic part of any fps game that seeks to have gameplay more sophisticated than "put the crosshair over the other guy faster than he does".
-To many game changing updates:
Updates introducing balance changes should be released once in 4-6 months or so, not every month. I had quite some 1-2 month stops between plays and it annoyed me so much that I had to re-learn how to skulks so many times... Short term updates should be bug-fixes. Long-term updates balance changes...
OK so I know that the CoD series is massively popular in spite of never ever making any significant patches to their consistently broken games with terrible balance, but nobody else agrees with this right?
Mistake of choosing to engage with someone, who is plain better of you ? He is the whole fucking problem why the team is loosing.Why would I ignore an obvious problem, when I´m INVESTED into winning ? Oh shucks he is so much better. I better go do something else, let him make mistakes(which he wont) ,while he murders everybody and helps capture every rt.
Lol, improve your own play.They track good and magically hit every bullet even when trying to evade you.There is no strategic advice their gameplay can give me.Their computer is good, their ping is good.I´ve watched comp players, I watched videos, I´ve spectated them.Its more to do with confidence anyway.Once they get rolling they feel like the can go through anyone.I´ve experienced the feeling myself and it works.But to do that, you have to be a special kind of asshole, which I dont like to be.
If you manage to kill that godlike fade or marine you feel really good ? What happens to all those other times when you died ?
You´re telling me you feel happy inside when you die 13 times in a row ? You either play way too casually or have not played enough to be bitter.There is no magical time, when its good to kill him.And if you have not noticed they respawn anyway.Killing them ONCE makes no difference.They are going to come back and kill again.
Sure this happens in most games, but it very frustrating in this one though.NS2 should be MORE about about teamwork and the fact that someone is above you helping you.If 1 person can still ruin whole matches for you, its not fun.
I was deciding between both games at the time but I went with NS2 because jetpacks and aliens. Still, while they are completely different games they were in the same situation as UWE being indie with limited resources and close release dates and yet managed to maintain a decent sized playerbase. I have not played so I do not know much about it. Do they even have a comp scene?
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited June 2013
@ymicrazy502 I love chivalry, so i'm not saying this in a bad way, but it's skill ceiling is far lower than NS2. Both in mechanical understanding/complexity as well as aim requirements, positioning and map knowledge.
So its only natural that it would retain more players... they feel rewarded for their time / feel like they have a chance.
You need only hear one of the many views of players like this one:
NS2 should be MORE about about teamwork and the fact that someone is above you helping you. If 1 person can still ruin whole matches for you, its not fun.
Match making in a game with 500-1000 players, zzz.
There's a level of self policing or just "Do the right thing" just about every game relies on, NS 1 was always the worst game in my mind for blatant team stacking that made the game horrible for both teams but I kind of expected it in NS 1, in Australia at least, NS 1 was a crappy little mod used by players in DoD/CS/UT to let off steam so if they could jump on the same team and blow people out the water between scrimming/pracing their main game. I mean crappy and little as in terms of the competition expectation, not the quality of the mod, it was always a great game with little to no interest or infrastructure to get it going.
NS2 blew what I saw in NS 1 right out the water, only 1-2 clans come to mind in NS 1 that specifically made playing in that server at all impossible, R18 and to a lesser degree Boost by activity. Every single clan in Australia in NS 2 has used public servers as their punching bag for hours/nights and in the case of 2-3 clans even weeks on end for reasons unknown and the general public voted with their feet a while ago.
BT mod will successfully invalidate nearly all the public player's hours of game play by changing core mechanics around at face value, nuances like tech tree and movement system tweaks ensure the average pub player will have no fucking idea what he is doing in 250 while the average comp player realises that almost nothing has changed at the core despite the game 'feeling' different, lerks are still out by 3-5 minutes and fades in numbers are out by 9-12 mins. The way lerks and fades engage fights in competitive matches has changed and there might now be some variation in how engagements are played out but they'll be pretty stale regardless playing the same 2-5 clans that are left at least in the US/AU region.
The way lerks and fades engage in pub games is borderline tedious due to the team work now involved, all life forms are easier to kill and the carapace nerf means regen is the new king but it results in a lot less upfront engagements and more waiting and dragging the game out. The general vibe of BT mod is that marines can turtle one base indefinitely until they can roll out an exo train, sound familiar? At least with RFK in NS 1 the marines left the base in about 5-8 mins, not the 10-15 mins I've seen some rounds of BT mod drag on to.
The game isn't reliably enjoyable for most people nowadays, they found it elsewhere.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
If what you say is true, @xao then the "invalidation of a player's hours" would have already occurred, what with NS2 having over 100 patches since launch..
Why are you bothering with the doomsday speech anyways? Are you even being genuine? I really can't tell.
You write how changes to the game will ruin it, while also complaining about certain mechanics/balance that have existed in vanilla for some time - all in the same post.
So you don't like certain mechanics in NS2, (especially judging by your post history) but don't want any fixes/changes/patches to occur... am i getting that right?
Really though.. the doomsday predictions are just silly for a game that has changed continuously in large ways, for hundreds of patches, for the past 3 years.
But, ok.. :-@
I don't know, IronHorse. I've been playing since just after release and from the perspective of a player who players mostly marine or skulk it has felt pretty consistent to me it terms of what I had already learnt still being the correct way to play.
The only exception I can think of is the Gorgeous skulk acceleration nerf. Even then, it didn't feel like the time I had spent learning to skulk was invalidated, it just felt that playing skulk was now hopeless against anyone with remotely decent aim/ability to dodge, because it had been nerfed beyond reason.
In comparison, both marine and skulk do seem to feel very different from what I have played of BT. I'm not sure where to begin with them really, especially the skulk. I feel like I need to watch a video or something to even be able to understand the basics of how it works. I haven't taken the time to do that yet, and instead have been playing the hell out of vanilla getting as many games in as I can before the switch. =(
In the end it probably won't affect me since I think I'm willing to give BT a chance when it is forced upon me, but I think there is a certain amount of risk being assumed by UWE when people start feeling like the time they put in no longer matters.
BT might be a large enough change all at once to bring that feeling out.
What needs to be done is the developers need to swallow their pride and admit the game design is wrong.
They know what to do. They always have. They know what happened with COD and CS and TF and HL and Gungame and NS Combat and all these games and mods that replaced them. Every moddable game has had something made that maimed its host. Natural selection prevails and many of the old games die. And it will prevail here with NS2's death if fundamental changes are not made.
Posts like yours are not unique. They happen on every dead forum for every dead game. I've seen this. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again
You don't ask a child if he wants to do homework, you make him to do it. He'll make what he feels is the right decision for him at that moment rather than the right decision for the long term.
I would apply this same scenario to people complaining about having to relearn the game. They just do not have the game knowledge to make an informed decision on how fundamentally broken the game is (ie. stale, boring, 1 path tech tree's for both sides). BT fixes alot of these issues (not all of them) and provides new skills to learn (increased skill ceiling).
So do you do your homework or not? Fortunately, UWE just like a parent has removed you from the decision making process
FYI: I don't even believe you have to relearn BT, you pick up 99% of the changes in 3-4 games. People are just whinging and being doomsayers
A random survey of some steam friends that have abandoned NS2 revealed that most left due to teams always being uneven, and, being on the losing team in a one sided match is the most frustrating gaming experience out there.
I personally sank 370hours in to NS2, mostly prior to build 240. I had a great time doing it. When you get even teams and a good match NS2 is second to none. Not long after 240 the brick skulks and subsequent marine team stacks put me off. I haven't played more than an hour in the last few months.
We can thank the awesome clans in Australia for the stacking. I don't have a problem playing with people where there is huge skill gap, provided they split the good players across both teams. For some reason in Aus, the better players (aliased or often still clan tagged) always chose to join one team ensuring a one sided stomp round after round. Every damn round would begin with the spamming of F1/2 or people doing the hokey pokey in the RR.
I think Mavick said that one or two people stomping happens in all FPS games and I would tend to agree. The difference is in NS2, I have the choice of 2x24 player fuster clucks which I can't stand or 2 guaranteed stacked 16/18 slot servers at the most, whereas in Hat Fortress (to which I have returned) if I am in a server with stacked teams I can leave and pick from a hundred others.
In Australia I suspect it's a vicious circle of not enough of a population to have enough server options contributing to people not wanting to play because there are not enough places to play. If there was say 10 full servers to choose from chances are you could find one with both even teams and people at your skill level.
I'll probably give it another shot when the next content/balance mode update happens. Hopefully the clans will attempt to retain some casuals by splitting themselves evenly across teams instead of driving them off by all joining marines together.
-To many game changing updates:
Updates introducing balance changes should be released once in 4-6 months or so, not every month. I had quite some 1-2 month stops between plays and it annoyed me so much that I had to re-learn how to skulks so many times... Short term updates should be bug-fixes. Long-term updates balance changes...
OK so I know that the CoD series is massively popular in spite of never ever making any significant patches to their consistently broken games with terrible balance, but nobody else agrees with this right?
I don't mind patches that fix stuff but i'm just saying they might wanna slow the pace down with balance changes. Like with 249, why does this update need to have grenade launchers buffed while in 250 we are gonna get a lot of more changes. It's just plain stupid, you release a balance change week 1 and 3 weeks after that you probably turn it around again...
I for one would prefer more consistency. Don't get me wrong I encourage balance changes but again they should only be implemented once a 4 months or so.
I haven't played much lately in big reason for that is that it's hard to find good games from publics. There is too great variety in player skills that makes the matches often uninteresting. I would like that the game gets some kind of rating system and maybe matching too. Lite version of the matching could work something like that the server skill rating gets calculated from the rations of the players that are currently playing and then you can compare that number to your own ration and choose whether to join that server or join something that is closer to your number.
most ppl did, hence why you have ~500 ppl left to play with.
You're kidding yourself if you really think all the people left because of that.
I'd say its the second biggest reason after performance.
Let's see the evidence to back that claim up. Because the evidence of performance being an issue is right in front of our faces every time we log in.
But thousands leaving because a few competitive players out there have played in public games and had high KDRs is pretty laughable tbh.
We'd all prefer a system where you can just click "Join 6v6" game like an auto-gather system.. but I seriously doubt this issue has caused anywhere near the amount of people to quit that performance did.
And even if it did, who's fault is that for not creating even a really really.. BASIC system for players that have higher skill to use in order to play games outside the 12v12 realm? The ENSL has the gather system on their website which I know a decent amount of people used/still use. If UWE really wanted good players to stay out of public servers that could've done the same with an in-game version.
But thousands leaving because a few competitive players out there have played in public games and had high KDRs is pretty laughable tbh.
It's not just competitive players though. I've only played around 300 hours, hardly played at all in the last two months, I've joined games this week where I've ended up with 20:0 at the end, I've joined other games where I've ended with 0:20. The vast majority of games have ended with comments about team stacking and skill imbalance. The skill differences in this community are huge compared to the population we have, one person joining a team can completely turn a game around. This doesn't lead to particularity fun games, they're often too one sided, and there often isn't another server to join (or there is but it also having the same issue!).
Yes performance is a bigger problem, but given that skill balance often puts me off playing (An NS1 player and NS2 pre-order) the idea that it's not putting off new players is also pretty laughable.
Well, i really like NS2. I'm too much of a noob to care about stuff like balance and all that. I stopped playing cuz of the general performance and as a little point: the way the mouse feels. The mouse movement always feels like you are moving your mouse through mucus. It doesn't feel very direct and responsive, like f.e. the source engine, while even that doesn't feel responsive compared to the old q3 engine.
And for the performance..... i really thought the latest patch (249) with the LuaJIT would do any good for me. It didn't. I haven't really gotten more FPS nor are my FPS more stable. It's the same as before the patch. My PC is not the best ( I7 2.2, 4gb, gtx 485m ), but i think a game like NS2, which does not have revolutionary gfx, should run at at least stable 60 fps ( everything on low....). I can handle BF3 on ultra on 32 player servers with huge maps with a better performance than NS2. No offense ...but that's a joke.
Maybe UWE should release a non-moddable version of NS2 which runs completely without LUA for people, that don't wanna play with mods anyway. Like me.
I told my friends about NS2, most of them quit after not even 1 hour and didnt come back, cuz of the performance. It's not a single player game ...multiplayer games have to run smooth and feel good. NS2 doesn't.
Do you even have Linux servers yet? Hosting a server for NS2 is also a pain in the ass. You'd run 16 CS:GO servers on a root, while still maintaining a good perfomance .... but maybe 1 NS2 server.
Performance, performance, performance. ( not to mention streaming, which also affect your CPU, but is a valid point nowadays...)
Metal ManJoin Date: 2011-11-13Member: 132717Members
edited June 2013
*SNIP* Please try this post again in a more civil manner. I really don't feel like having to deal with cleaning this post infested by profanities every other sentence... -Kouji San
most ppl did, hence why you have ~500 ppl left to play with.
You're kidding yourself if you really think all the people left because of that.
I'd say its the second biggest reason after performance.
Let's see the evidence to back that claim up. Because the evidence of performance being an issue is right in front of our faces every time we log in.
But thousands leaving because a few competitive players out there have played in public games and had high KDRs is pretty laughable tbh.
We'd all prefer a system where you can just click "Join 6v6" game like an auto-gather system.. but I seriously doubt this issue has caused anywhere near the amount of people to quit that performance did.
And even if it did, who's fault is that for not creating even a really really.. BASIC system for players that have higher skill to use in order to play games outside the 12v12 realm? The ENSL has the gather system on their website which I know a decent amount of people used/still use. If UWE really wanted good players to stay out of public servers that could've done the same with an in-game version.
Unfortunately, we don't have a survey of people who left the game so there's not much hard data on who and why they stopped playing NS2. However, from what I've read on the forums, seen in-game, and general experience from other FPS games, I'd say that skill-stack imbalances are a pretty likely cause of quitting NS2, after crash/performance problems.
Its not hard to see why. If you can regularly only play basketball against the Miami Heat, you'd probably not play it for very long either.
most ppl did, hence why you have ~500 ppl left to play with.
You're kidding yourself if you really think all the people left because of that.
I'd say its the second biggest reason after performance.
Let's see the evidence to back that claim up. Because the evidence of performance being an issue is right in front of our faces every time we log in.
But thousands leaving because a few competitive players out there have played in public games and had high KDRs is pretty laughable tbh.
We'd all prefer a system where you can just click "Join 6v6" game like an auto-gather system.. but I seriously doubt this issue has caused anywhere near the amount of people to quit that performance did.
And even if it did, who's fault is that for not creating even a really really.. BASIC system for players that have higher skill to use in order to play games outside the 12v12 realm? The ENSL has the gather system on their website which I know a decent amount of people used/still use. If UWE really wanted good players to stay out of public servers that could've done the same with an in-game version.
Unfortunately, we don't have a survey of people who left the game so there's not much hard data on who and why they stopped playing NS2. However, from what I've read on the forums, seen in-game, and general experience from other FPS games, I'd say that skill-stack imbalances are a pretty likely cause of quitting NS2, after crash/performance problems.
Its not hard to see why. If you can regularly only play basketball against the Miami Heat, you'd probably not play it for very long either.
Personally for me I still play but I dropped a lot of hours due to the 240 patch. Mostly brick skulk related issues. I could tolerate the game up until that point.
I'm still waiting for my free game I was supposed to get with pre-ordering NS2! :P
That rabbit game looked awesome, anyone know what ever happend to it?
Anyway, BT mod is pretty easy to pick up, takes some getting used too but you do.
I'd say that skill-stack imbalances are a pretty likely cause of quitting NS2, after crash/performance problems.
The high concentration of hardcore players stacking servers is because the normal people quit... because the game isn't fun.
"Blame the players, blame the performance" are delusions, and will keep the game broken and dead. The developers need to make a new, fun game. The good news is they have all the tools they need. And there is no shortage of ideas. People have been suggesting good ideas for 10 years.
The failure of NS2 is completely the fault of the game designer. Not asshole players.
A random survey of some steam friends that have abandoned NS2 revealed that most left due to teams always being uneven, and, being on the losing team in a one sided match is the most frustrating gaming experience out there.
I personally sank 370hours in to NS2, mostly prior to build 240. I had a great time doing it. When you get even teams and a good match NS2 is second to none. Not long after 240 the brick skulks and subsequent marine team stacks put me off. I haven't played more than an hour in the last few months.
We can thank the awesome clans in Australia for the stacking. I don't have a problem playing with people where there is huge skill gap, provided they split the good players across both teams. For some reason in Aus, the better players (aliased or often still clan tagged) always chose to join one team ensuring a one sided stomp round after round. Every damn round would begin with the spamming of F1/2 or people doing the hokey pokey in the RR.
I think Mavick said that one or two people stomping happens in all FPS games and I would tend to agree. The difference is in NS2, I have the choice of 2x24 player fuster clucks which I can't stand or 2 guaranteed stacked 16/18 slot servers at the most, whereas in Hat Fortress (to which I have returned) if I am in a server with stacked teams I can leave and pick from a hundred others.
In Australia I suspect it's a vicious circle of not enough of a population to have enough server options contributing to people not wanting to play because there are not enough places to play. If there was say 10 full servers to choose from chances are you could find one with both even teams and people at your skill level.
I'll probably give it another shot when the next content/balance mode update happens. Hopefully the clans will attempt to retain some casuals by splitting themselves evenly across teams instead of driving them off by all joining marines together.
If that's really how your friends feel then it's hard for me to argue. However, I know team stacking has nothing to do with why I've not played in a few months. And in terms of "picking from a hundred others" you're not really increasing your odds if the population is that much bigger there's probably the same percentage of people who can stack a server. I just think it's a really, really weak excuse because, like I've said, I've seen it in EVERY fps game I've ever played. True, this game isn't exactly a TDM game so it can be more tedious to deal with at times (even tho they've added in surrender which people STILL bitch about), but acting like it's unheard of outside of NS2 is crazy.
But thousands leaving because a few competitive players out there have played in public games and had high KDRs is pretty laughable tbh.
It's not just competitive players though. I've only played around 300 hours, hardly played at all in the last two months, I've joined games this week where I've ended up with 20:0 at the end, I've joined other games where I've ended with 0:20. The vast majority of games have ended with comments about team stacking and skill imbalance. The skill differences in this community are huge compared to the population we have, one person joining a team can completely turn a game around. This doesn't lead to particularity fun games, they're often too one sided, and there often isn't another server to join (or there is but it also having the same issue!).
Yes performance is a bigger problem, but given that skill balance often puts me off playing (An NS1 player and NS2 pre-order) the idea that it's not putting off new players is also pretty laughable.
Christ, maybe I'm just too old school. I remember playing TFC back when the top players could conc jump into bhop (before it was removed by valve), pipe jump and rocket jump around everywhere and I was just coming in with nowhere near these kinds of skills or any idea how to do any of it. It was intimidating at times but in no way did any of that make me not want to play the game. Eventually I learned how to do all of that too and could hold my own, even tho I was never a pro at it.
I know games of the last several years haven't exactly been the pinnacle of skill cap type games, but I have a real hard time considering that gamers now are that big of pansies when it comes to getting better at video games. Of course, all of what I just said probably coincides with what has already been said about how NS2 is just that niche'y of a game. I mean, if people are going to quit because they sometimes have to lose (which is basically what the whole "omg team stacking" "omg there's just so much difference in skill" boils down too), then honestly I'm not going to miss those players.
The only legitimate reasons I can intellectually accept for people leaving in mass quantities is performance and balance. Those are factors that are totally outside a player's control and totally understandable for seeing people get frustrated and quitting over. And yes, sometimes players just aren't good and they can't help that either. But it doesn't mean they're going to be good in any other game or have more fun in any other game either.
Comments
The summertime push back the playercount to beta times now.
Mistake of choosing to engage with someone, who is plain better of you ? He is the whole fucking problem why the team is loosing.Why would I ignore an obvious problem, when I´m INVESTED into winning ? Oh shucks he is so much better. I better go do something else, let him make mistakes(which he wont) ,while he murders everybody and helps capture every rt.
Lol, improve your own play.They track good and magically hit every bullet even when trying to evade you.There is no strategic advice their gameplay can give me.Their computer is good, their ping is good.I´ve watched comp players, I watched videos, I´ve spectated them.Its more to do with confidence anyway.Once they get rolling they feel like the can go through anyone.I´ve experienced the feeling myself and it works.But to do that, you have to be a special kind of asshole, which I dont like to be.
If you manage to kill that godlike fade or marine you feel really good ? What happens to all those other times when you died ?
You´re telling me you feel happy inside when you die 13 times in a row ? You either play way too casually or have not played enough to be bitter.There is no magical time, when its good to kill him.And if you have not noticed they respawn anyway.Killing them ONCE makes no difference.They are going to come back and kill again.
Sure this happens in most games, but it very frustrating in this one though.NS2 should be MORE about about teamwork and the fact that someone is above you helping you.If 1 person can still ruin whole matches for you, its not fun.
Rookies play with rookies and so on...
http://steamcharts.com/app/219640#7d
I was deciding between both games at the time but I went with NS2 because jetpacks and aliens. Still, while they are completely different games they were in the same situation as UWE being indie with limited resources and close release dates and yet managed to maintain a decent sized playerbase. I have not played so I do not know much about it. Do they even have a comp scene?
So its only natural that it would retain more players... they feel rewarded for their time / feel like they have a chance.
You need only hear one of the many views of players like this one:
There's a level of self policing or just "Do the right thing" just about every game relies on, NS 1 was always the worst game in my mind for blatant team stacking that made the game horrible for both teams but I kind of expected it in NS 1, in Australia at least, NS 1 was a crappy little mod used by players in DoD/CS/UT to let off steam so if they could jump on the same team and blow people out the water between scrimming/pracing their main game. I mean crappy and little as in terms of the competition expectation, not the quality of the mod, it was always a great game with little to no interest or infrastructure to get it going.
NS2 blew what I saw in NS 1 right out the water, only 1-2 clans come to mind in NS 1 that specifically made playing in that server at all impossible, R18 and to a lesser degree Boost by activity. Every single clan in Australia in NS 2 has used public servers as their punching bag for hours/nights and in the case of 2-3 clans even weeks on end for reasons unknown and the general public voted with their feet a while ago.
BT mod will successfully invalidate nearly all the public player's hours of game play by changing core mechanics around at face value, nuances like tech tree and movement system tweaks ensure the average pub player will have no fucking idea what he is doing in 250 while the average comp player realises that almost nothing has changed at the core despite the game 'feeling' different, lerks are still out by 3-5 minutes and fades in numbers are out by 9-12 mins. The way lerks and fades engage fights in competitive matches has changed and there might now be some variation in how engagements are played out but they'll be pretty stale regardless playing the same 2-5 clans that are left at least in the US/AU region.
The way lerks and fades engage in pub games is borderline tedious due to the team work now involved, all life forms are easier to kill and the carapace nerf means regen is the new king but it results in a lot less upfront engagements and more waiting and dragging the game out. The general vibe of BT mod is that marines can turtle one base indefinitely until they can roll out an exo train, sound familiar? At least with RFK in NS 1 the marines left the base in about 5-8 mins, not the 10-15 mins I've seen some rounds of BT mod drag on to.
The game isn't reliably enjoyable for most people nowadays, they found it elsewhere.
Why are you bothering with the doomsday speech anyways? Are you even being genuine? I really can't tell.
You write how changes to the game will ruin it, while also complaining about certain mechanics/balance that have existed in vanilla for some time - all in the same post.
So you don't like certain mechanics in NS2, (especially judging by your post history) but don't want any fixes/changes/patches to occur... am i getting that right?
Really though.. the doomsday predictions are just silly for a game that has changed continuously in large ways, for hundreds of patches, for the past 3 years.
But, ok.. :-@
The only exception I can think of is the Gorgeous skulk acceleration nerf. Even then, it didn't feel like the time I had spent learning to skulk was invalidated, it just felt that playing skulk was now hopeless against anyone with remotely decent aim/ability to dodge, because it had been nerfed beyond reason.
In comparison, both marine and skulk do seem to feel very different from what I have played of BT. I'm not sure where to begin with them really, especially the skulk. I feel like I need to watch a video or something to even be able to understand the basics of how it works. I haven't taken the time to do that yet, and instead have been playing the hell out of vanilla getting as many games in as I can before the switch. =(
In the end it probably won't affect me since I think I'm willing to give BT a chance when it is forced upon me, but I think there is a certain amount of risk being assumed by UWE when people start feeling like the time they put in no longer matters.
BT might be a large enough change all at once to bring that feeling out.
What needs to be done is the developers need to swallow their pride and admit the game design is wrong.
They know what to do. They always have. They know what happened with COD and CS and TF and HL and Gungame and NS Combat and all these games and mods that replaced them. Every moddable game has had something made that maimed its host. Natural selection prevails and many of the old games die. And it will prevail here with NS2's death if fundamental changes are not made.
Posts like yours are not unique. They happen on every dead forum for every dead game. I've seen this. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again
I would apply this same scenario to people complaining about having to relearn the game. They just do not have the game knowledge to make an informed decision on how fundamentally broken the game is (ie. stale, boring, 1 path tech tree's for both sides). BT fixes alot of these issues (not all of them) and provides new skills to learn (increased skill ceiling).
So do you do your homework or not? Fortunately, UWE just like a parent has removed you from the decision making process
FYI: I don't even believe you have to relearn BT, you pick up 99% of the changes in 3-4 games. People are just whinging and being doomsayers
I personally sank 370hours in to NS2, mostly prior to build 240. I had a great time doing it. When you get even teams and a good match NS2 is second to none. Not long after 240 the brick skulks and subsequent marine team stacks put me off. I haven't played more than an hour in the last few months.
We can thank the awesome clans in Australia for the stacking. I don't have a problem playing with people where there is huge skill gap, provided they split the good players across both teams. For some reason in Aus, the better players (aliased or often still clan tagged) always chose to join one team ensuring a one sided stomp round after round. Every damn round would begin with the spamming of F1/2 or people doing the hokey pokey in the RR.
I think Mavick said that one or two people stomping happens in all FPS games and I would tend to agree. The difference is in NS2, I have the choice of 2x24 player fuster clucks which I can't stand or 2 guaranteed stacked 16/18 slot servers at the most, whereas in Hat Fortress (to which I have returned) if I am in a server with stacked teams I can leave and pick from a hundred others.
In Australia I suspect it's a vicious circle of not enough of a population to have enough server options contributing to people not wanting to play because there are not enough places to play. If there was say 10 full servers to choose from chances are you could find one with both even teams and people at your skill level.
I'll probably give it another shot when the next content/balance mode update happens. Hopefully the clans will attempt to retain some casuals by splitting themselves evenly across teams instead of driving them off by all joining marines together.
I don't mind patches that fix stuff but i'm just saying they might wanna slow the pace down with balance changes. Like with 249, why does this update need to have grenade launchers buffed while in 250 we are gonna get a lot of more changes. It's just plain stupid, you release a balance change week 1 and 3 weeks after that you probably turn it around again...
I for one would prefer more consistency. Don't get me wrong I encourage balance changes but again they should only be implemented once a 4 months or so.
Let's see the evidence to back that claim up. Because the evidence of performance being an issue is right in front of our faces every time we log in.
But thousands leaving because a few competitive players out there have played in public games and had high KDRs is pretty laughable tbh.
We'd all prefer a system where you can just click "Join 6v6" game like an auto-gather system.. but I seriously doubt this issue has caused anywhere near the amount of people to quit that performance did.
And even if it did, who's fault is that for not creating even a really really.. BASIC system for players that have higher skill to use in order to play games outside the 12v12 realm? The ENSL has the gather system on their website which I know a decent amount of people used/still use. If UWE really wanted good players to stay out of public servers that could've done the same with an in-game version.
It's not just competitive players though. I've only played around 300 hours, hardly played at all in the last two months, I've joined games this week where I've ended up with 20:0 at the end, I've joined other games where I've ended with 0:20. The vast majority of games have ended with comments about team stacking and skill imbalance. The skill differences in this community are huge compared to the population we have, one person joining a team can completely turn a game around. This doesn't lead to particularity fun games, they're often too one sided, and there often isn't another server to join (or there is but it also having the same issue!).
Yes performance is a bigger problem, but given that skill balance often puts me off playing (An NS1 player and NS2 pre-order) the idea that it's not putting off new players is also pretty laughable.
And for the performance..... i really thought the latest patch (249) with the LuaJIT would do any good for me. It didn't. I haven't really gotten more FPS nor are my FPS more stable. It's the same as before the patch. My PC is not the best ( I7 2.2, 4gb, gtx 485m ), but i think a game like NS2, which does not have revolutionary gfx, should run at at least stable 60 fps ( everything on low....). I can handle BF3 on ultra on 32 player servers with huge maps with a better performance than NS2. No offense ...but that's a joke.
Maybe UWE should release a non-moddable version of NS2 which runs completely without LUA for people, that don't wanna play with mods anyway. Like me.
I told my friends about NS2, most of them quit after not even 1 hour and didnt come back, cuz of the performance. It's not a single player game ...multiplayer games have to run smooth and feel good. NS2 doesn't.
Do you even have Linux servers yet? Hosting a server for NS2 is also a pain in the ass. You'd run 16 CS:GO servers on a root, while still maintaining a good perfomance .... but maybe 1 NS2 server.
Performance, performance, performance. ( not to mention streaming, which also affect your CPU, but is a valid point nowadays...)
Regards
HAHAH that has gotta be the best post ever. Even Xao would be impressed
It's not as easy as simply removing lua from the engine, the entire game is and engine is interconnected with both programming languages
Its not hard to see why. If you can regularly only play basketball against the Miami Heat, you'd probably not play it for very long either.
Personally for me I still play but I dropped a lot of hours due to the 240 patch. Mostly brick skulk related issues. I could tolerate the game up until that point.
That rabbit game looked awesome, anyone know what ever happend to it?
Anyway, BT mod is pretty easy to pick up, takes some getting used too but you do.
The high concentration of hardcore players stacking servers is because the normal people quit... because the game isn't fun.
"Blame the players, blame the performance" are delusions, and will keep the game broken and dead. The developers need to make a new, fun game. The good news is they have all the tools they need. And there is no shortage of ideas. People have been suggesting good ideas for 10 years.
The failure of NS2 is completely the fault of the game designer. Not asshole players.
They just did. Its called build 250.
If that's really how your friends feel then it's hard for me to argue. However, I know team stacking has nothing to do with why I've not played in a few months. And in terms of "picking from a hundred others" you're not really increasing your odds if the population is that much bigger there's probably the same percentage of people who can stack a server. I just think it's a really, really weak excuse because, like I've said, I've seen it in EVERY fps game I've ever played. True, this game isn't exactly a TDM game so it can be more tedious to deal with at times (even tho they've added in surrender which people STILL bitch about), but acting like it's unheard of outside of NS2 is crazy.
Christ, maybe I'm just too old school. I remember playing TFC back when the top players could conc jump into bhop (before it was removed by valve), pipe jump and rocket jump around everywhere and I was just coming in with nowhere near these kinds of skills or any idea how to do any of it. It was intimidating at times but in no way did any of that make me not want to play the game. Eventually I learned how to do all of that too and could hold my own, even tho I was never a pro at it.
I know games of the last several years haven't exactly been the pinnacle of skill cap type games, but I have a real hard time considering that gamers now are that big of pansies when it comes to getting better at video games. Of course, all of what I just said probably coincides with what has already been said about how NS2 is just that niche'y of a game. I mean, if people are going to quit because they sometimes have to lose (which is basically what the whole "omg team stacking" "omg there's just so much difference in skill" boils down too), then honestly I'm not going to miss those players.
The only legitimate reasons I can intellectually accept for people leaving in mass quantities is performance and balance. Those are factors that are totally outside a player's control and totally understandable for seeing people get frustrated and quitting over. And yes, sometimes players just aren't good and they can't help that either. But it doesn't mean they're going to be good in any other game or have more fun in any other game either.