If you told me I was only lying and screwing you over, I would send your lousy 20 dollars back and revoke your account. I bet you got at least 1000 hours of NS2 already. That's 3 cents per hour, b1tch.
And this addresses anything at all of relevance..... how? You took the most irrelevant, emotion driven, baseless assertion of only derwalters's post and completely ignored all of the much stronger and logical assertions made not only in his post, but you completely ignored the much better, reasonable, and informed posts as well.
If you told me I was only lying and screwing you over, I would send your lousy 20 dollars back and revoke your account. I bet you got at least 1000 hours of NS2 already. That's 3 cents per hour, b1tch.
And this addresses anything at all of relevance..... how? You took the most irrelevant, emotion driven, baseless assertion of only derwalters's post and completely ignored all of the much stronger and logical assertions made not only in his post, but you completely ignored the much better, reasonable, and informed posts as well.
Undecided on this. If you'd tell me that ironing out the last few bugs, performance issues and wrapping up ns2 meant we'd get some awesome mods then I'd be all up for it.
What IMHO is more likely to happen is that modding simply won't take of much more then it already has. Sure not breaking mods at every patch will greatly help but the lack of new content will also drive people away.
There's a lot of awesome potential for spark and lot of awesome mods waiting to be made. But this is isn't a game with an user base into the millions. There's room for small communities with mods but those are generally easier to mod on a graphical level. I can't think of a single game with a limited user-base that has a flourishing mod community.
As much as I'd love to be completely false and nothing would give me greater joy then to see cool hide n seek mods using its fantastic lightning engine. Or awesome mod spin offs like hidden or a parasite (TTT) variant with aliens. I just don't see it happening.
With all that being said. It is probably best to iron out the game and provide only necessary fixes at some point soon. Ideally they also focus on using some of the custom ns2 maps and work on importing those to the base game. This would be a massive boost for the mapping community. As it stands it needs loving badly, far too few servers run custom maps.
I understand not all the maps are 100% properly balanced out, but for pub games does it really matter so much?
If nobody hosts your map beyond 1-3 custom map rotation servers, it's not that interesting for people to make maps.
As much of a dilemma as it is to balance maps for NS2 standards, I can't help but notice they flat out stopped adding community maps after summit and veil.
In my opinion I think the game is doing fine. Its exactly the same as in NS1 the game didn't really finish and final patches wernt made until NS2 came into concept. Once NS2 was drawn out and project development began that's when NS1 released its FINAL patch. NS2 is still a new game and has a wonderful engine (Spark) that will keep modders and the game alive for a long time just like NS1 did. I played NS1 for 10 years before NS2 came out and once NS2 Alpha came out I stopped playing NS1 less and less until I fully transferred to NS2.
If you look at the mods that are used in NS1 you will see that a majority of mods are based off of METAMOD or other Founded mod engines. Spark is a WHOLE NEW engine and uses LUA based code to run the game and not many of the original "Hard-Core" coders know LUA. Sure there are mods that change a few things and most of the mods we see now and days are cosmetic texture packs and such but once NS2 Settles down on the patch scale to roughly a Patch every other month that's when you will see HUGE modification projects like XenoSwarm and Marine VS Marine come to life. So to all you dedicated modders out there your time is coming but please be patient, UWE is attempting to do their best at adding new content and adding roughly enough content to keep the game fresh and new for a decent while and once UWE has no more concepts thats were modders come into play to continue where the developers have left off.
NarfwakJoin Date: 2002-11-02Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
Spark still has a lot of room to develop as an engine and it's rather obvious any future UWE games are going to be produced using their own engine technology. Any engine updates to Spark are likely going to see patches developed for NS2 much like Source updates mean updates for much older games like DoD:S and CS:S that don't see a lot of play anymore.
....no, no it's not. Cognitive dissonance is when you intentionally challenge a pre-concieved notion with provocation in order to get the target to think about a subject in a different way. Don't try to flower up someone's entirely off topic and counter-productive post as some pre-meditated strategy of discourse.
Back on topic, the lack of content wouldn't drive people away if the content was both complete and polished. Constant re-working of very basic things, like movement, are just as likely to reduce the player-base as a lull in content releases. There is plenty UWE could do for constant updates aside from content to keep people interested, new maps, rebalancing of old ones, sharpening of hitboxes and registry (seriously, why does no one mention how the engine has a full 1/4th a second of interp built into it?), all of these things would polish the game, build faith in UWE, and facilitate a larger competitive community which are all good of the user numbers.
....no, no it's not. Cognitive dissonance is when you intentionally challenge a pre-concieved notion with provocation in order to get the target to think about a subject in a different way. Don't try to flower up someone's entirely off topic and counter-productive post as some pre-meditated strategy of discourse.
You're possibly the only person on this planet that thinks thats what cognitive dissonance means.
SamusDroidColoradoJoin Date: 2013-05-13Member: 185219Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Playtester, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
edited September 2013
I like how just because there was a few patches where they are killing themselves fixing the performance issues, everyone automatically assumes performance is decreasing every patch and the game will suck forever. Being a PT, I get to be able to run my mods on newer builds and have the time to fix them before the patch goes out. I can tell you it takes a lot of work to constantly continue updating different files when they get changes even if only minor changes, it is still a lot. the amount of time you save is nothing. If they did do this they would likely have to put out a beta build days before they release a patch, and betas are a PITA for the normal person, what server is running this or that. "Why can't I connect to this server?" stuff because they are on different builds. It just means that patches get out slower and delayed by a few days each time.
Funny...
When Gorgeous got released and UWE told us how grateful we should be for this "free post-release content", i pointed out that the game still is missing tons of promised/basic features before it could considered "finished". For claiming such blasphemy and making Cory angry, Hugh "ordered" me to shut my mouth and proceeded to edit and delete my posts, when i wouldn't have that he banned me, for voicing my opinion in an reasonable, non-insulting manner.
Now we have this thread and suddenly everybody can't shout loud enough "Oh the game will always be WIP! Don't be stupid!"
How about you start making up your damn mind? I guess you probably don't want that... because without making up your mind, you can always claim whatever fits the most convenient into the discussion at hand.
This topic is a shining example for that. UWE advertises it's mod friendliness, how great Spark and NS2 are for modding, how big of an overall focus modding is to them.
Yet we have people here trying to explain to us "oh modding has to come last, after performance, performance is key!". Yeah no shit sherlock, we've been waiting and begging for performance increases since the very first builds that allowed actual multiplayer. Performance has always been (and will probably always be) the top priority, simply due to all the LUA in the game, the LUA that's in the game why? To make it more mod-friendly! At that point the whole logic of the argument starts eating itself up...
I'm inclined to partially agree. While I don't think adding new content such as class abilities and new stuff is detrimental to the overall game as long as it's not too often, constantly revamping the core mechanics of the game for the sake of balance needs to slow down or stop entirely.
UWE creating maps however is from this point onward, a bad idea. Modders and mappers can make the maps for you as evidenced with combat maps, tanith and jambi to name a few. They may not be up to a standard of biodome but most players care about the gameplay, structure and layout rather than high fidelity. In addition, they aren't afflicted by development costs in the same way and are less impactful on the game if they are imbalanced or broken.
In almost a year since release, we haven't seen many mods stand on their own as separate modes or experiences and no maps in nearly all servers. Combat and recently Xenoswarm are the only ones but even these are minuscule compared to the main game playerbase. Where's MvM, Last Stand, Proving Grounds, Sanity and NS2c to name a few? They are non-existent and it's such a shame. Hell I'd like to see a horde based game mode like Gears of Zombies from CoD but with how frequently the game is changed, I can't see these mods catching the light of day...
You're possibly the only person on this planet that thinks thats what cognitive dissonance means.
The person who founded the theory disagrees with you: "Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior. According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement)." Source. In rhetorical practices (which is what a forum is, it is a practice of rhetoric) it is the provocation of this dissonant state in an attempt to push the opposition into having to resolve two conflicting opinions typically involving a pre-conceived notion. You contradict that notion with information or a position that directly and fundamentally opposes said position. You might want to not rely on pop-culture and buzzword users to tell you what terms like "straw man", "cognitive dissonance", and "logical fallacy" mean. If you want to further discuss the topic, PM me.
I like how just because there was a few patches where they are killing themselves fixing the performance issues, everyone automatically assumes performance is decreasing every patch and the game will suck forever....
Here's the thing, to a normal player the game *does* look like it's constantly broken. The frequency of patches and drastic changes that have to be fixed with hotfixes and follow up patches is rather high for a post-release game and to people who don't look up patch notes, comments and plans from the devs, or just have the notion that "post-release" means "finished", it really does look like it keeps getting broken for no real reason. This is also a completely legitimate reason to be turned off of the game, imagine if you're a casual player and you've had the misfortune of trying to hop on the game just after a patch drops. Now imagine if about 30% of the time you've tried to play the game in the past two months you've had performance issues and what little you knew about the game has drastically changed. This is not a good environment for a consistent or casual player base.
For what both rebirth and razdaz said UWE really is maintaining a state of "We can do anything at any time with the game" and they have left that state entirely open ended. Obviously modders aren't going to put time into a game that's constantly changing. No one will invest a month of their free time to make a complicated map to go with a conversion mod knowing that it's really likely to break or need to be overhauled entirely in the face of core engine and game changes. Once again, the two driving forces of longevity of a multiplayer game are the the competitive community and the modding community. Obviously there are exceptions, but NS2 is not one of them and neither of these communities are supported by the game at all.
.
In almost a year since release, we haven't seen many mods stand on their own as separate modes or experiences and no maps in nearly all servers. Combat and recently Xenoswarm are the only ones but even these are minuscule compared to the main game playerbase. Where's MvM, Last Stand, Proving Grounds, Sanity and NS2c to name a few? They are non-existent and it's such a shame. Hell I'd like to see a horde based game mode like Gears of Zombies from CoD but with how frequently the game is changed, I can't see these mods catching the light of day...
Have you even looked at the server browser? Or read any thread other than this? Last Stand is working, there is combat XS classic faded and more.
SamusDroidColoradoJoin Date: 2013-05-13Member: 185219Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Playtester, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
But it has only been a month since they implemented something people have been begging for forever. That they had to release on a strict deadline that could not change.
Comments
And this addresses anything at all of relevance..... how? You took the most irrelevant, emotion driven, baseless assertion of only derwalters's post and completely ignored all of the much stronger and logical assertions made not only in his post, but you completely ignored the much better, reasonable, and informed posts as well.
What IMHO is more likely to happen is that modding simply won't take of much more then it already has. Sure not breaking mods at every patch will greatly help but the lack of new content will also drive people away.
There's a lot of awesome potential for spark and lot of awesome mods waiting to be made. But this is isn't a game with an user base into the millions. There's room for small communities with mods but those are generally easier to mod on a graphical level. I can't think of a single game with a limited user-base that has a flourishing mod community.
As much as I'd love to be completely false and nothing would give me greater joy then to see cool hide n seek mods using its fantastic lightning engine. Or awesome mod spin offs like hidden or a parasite (TTT) variant with aliens. I just don't see it happening.
With all that being said. It is probably best to iron out the game and provide only necessary fixes at some point soon. Ideally they also focus on using some of the custom ns2 maps and work on importing those to the base game. This would be a massive boost for the mapping community. As it stands it needs loving badly, far too few servers run custom maps.
I understand not all the maps are 100% properly balanced out, but for pub games does it really matter so much?
If nobody hosts your map beyond 1-3 custom map rotation servers, it's not that interesting for people to make maps.
As much of a dilemma as it is to balance maps for NS2 standards, I can't help but notice they flat out stopped adding community maps after summit and veil.
If you look at the mods that are used in NS1 you will see that a majority of mods are based off of METAMOD or other Founded mod engines. Spark is a WHOLE NEW engine and uses LUA based code to run the game and not many of the original "Hard-Core" coders know LUA. Sure there are mods that change a few things and most of the mods we see now and days are cosmetic texture packs and such but once NS2 Settles down on the patch scale to roughly a Patch every other month that's when you will see HUGE modification projects like XenoSwarm and Marine VS Marine come to life. So to all you dedicated modders out there your time is coming but please be patient, UWE is attempting to do their best at adding new content and adding roughly enough content to keep the game fresh and new for a decent while and once UWE has no more concepts thats were modders come into play to continue where the developers have left off.
....no, no it's not. Cognitive dissonance is when you intentionally challenge a pre-concieved notion with provocation in order to get the target to think about a subject in a different way. Don't try to flower up someone's entirely off topic and counter-productive post as some pre-meditated strategy of discourse.
Back on topic, the lack of content wouldn't drive people away if the content was both complete and polished. Constant re-working of very basic things, like movement, are just as likely to reduce the player-base as a lull in content releases. There is plenty UWE could do for constant updates aside from content to keep people interested, new maps, rebalancing of old ones, sharpening of hitboxes and registry (seriously, why does no one mention how the engine has a full 1/4th a second of interp built into it?), all of these things would polish the game, build faith in UWE, and facilitate a larger competitive community which are all good of the user numbers.
You're possibly the only person on this planet that thinks thats what cognitive dissonance means.
When Gorgeous got released and UWE told us how grateful we should be for this "free post-release content", i pointed out that the game still is missing tons of promised/basic features before it could considered "finished". For claiming such blasphemy and making Cory angry, Hugh "ordered" me to shut my mouth and proceeded to edit and delete my posts, when i wouldn't have that he banned me, for voicing my opinion in an reasonable, non-insulting manner.
Now we have this thread and suddenly everybody can't shout loud enough "Oh the game will always be WIP! Don't be stupid!"
How about you start making up your damn mind? I guess you probably don't want that... because without making up your mind, you can always claim whatever fits the most convenient into the discussion at hand.
This topic is a shining example for that. UWE advertises it's mod friendliness, how great Spark and NS2 are for modding, how big of an overall focus modding is to them.
Yet we have people here trying to explain to us "oh modding has to come last, after performance, performance is key!". Yeah no shit sherlock, we've been waiting and begging for performance increases since the very first builds that allowed actual multiplayer. Performance has always been (and will probably always be) the top priority, simply due to all the LUA in the game, the LUA that's in the game why? To make it more mod-friendly! At that point the whole logic of the argument starts eating itself up...
UWE creating maps however is from this point onward, a bad idea. Modders and mappers can make the maps for you as evidenced with combat maps, tanith and jambi to name a few. They may not be up to a standard of biodome but most players care about the gameplay, structure and layout rather than high fidelity. In addition, they aren't afflicted by development costs in the same way and are less impactful on the game if they are imbalanced or broken.
In almost a year since release, we haven't seen many mods stand on their own as separate modes or experiences and no maps in nearly all servers. Combat and recently Xenoswarm are the only ones but even these are minuscule compared to the main game playerbase. Where's MvM, Last Stand, Proving Grounds, Sanity and NS2c to name a few? They are non-existent and it's such a shame. Hell I'd like to see a horde based game mode like Gears of Zombies from CoD but with how frequently the game is changed, I can't see these mods catching the light of day...
The person who founded the theory disagrees with you: "Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior. According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement)." Source. In rhetorical practices (which is what a forum is, it is a practice of rhetoric) it is the provocation of this dissonant state in an attempt to push the opposition into having to resolve two conflicting opinions typically involving a pre-conceived notion. You contradict that notion with information or a position that directly and fundamentally opposes said position. You might want to not rely on pop-culture and buzzword users to tell you what terms like "straw man", "cognitive dissonance", and "logical fallacy" mean. If you want to further discuss the topic, PM me.
Back on topic.... again....
Here's the thing, to a normal player the game *does* look like it's constantly broken. The frequency of patches and drastic changes that have to be fixed with hotfixes and follow up patches is rather high for a post-release game and to people who don't look up patch notes, comments and plans from the devs, or just have the notion that "post-release" means "finished", it really does look like it keeps getting broken for no real reason. This is also a completely legitimate reason to be turned off of the game, imagine if you're a casual player and you've had the misfortune of trying to hop on the game just after a patch drops. Now imagine if about 30% of the time you've tried to play the game in the past two months you've had performance issues and what little you knew about the game has drastically changed. This is not a good environment for a consistent or casual player base.
For what both rebirth and razdaz said UWE really is maintaining a state of "We can do anything at any time with the game" and they have left that state entirely open ended. Obviously modders aren't going to put time into a game that's constantly changing. No one will invest a month of their free time to make a complicated map to go with a conversion mod knowing that it's really likely to break or need to be overhauled entirely in the face of core engine and game changes. Once again, the two driving forces of longevity of a multiplayer game are the the competitive community and the modding community. Obviously there are exceptions, but NS2 is not one of them and neither of these communities are supported by the game at all.