NS2 Sale Time has started again (NS2 for 3€; 3,5 € Deluxe Upgrade; 1,5 € kodiak dlc)
GhoulofGSG9
Join Date: 2013-03-31 Member: 184566Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Supporter, WC 2013 - Supporter, Pistachionauts
Join Date: 2013-03-31 Member: 184566Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Supporter, WC 2013 - Supporter, Pistachionauts
So the sale time has started today again for NS2 (https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/naturalselection2_storefront)
Time for us to welcome the green folks and maybe some server admins to setup "rookie-only" servers again
Time for us to welcome the green folks and maybe some server admins to setup "rookie-only" servers again
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With "rookie-only" server i refer to servers only allowing certain "mentors" and ppl with less than 25-50 hours playtime to play on them. That concept had some success at the last sales.
But please, if you're not interested in mentoring, go to a server like that with higher end players like yourself.
Count me in!
I didn't check for any sales since teaching a server FULL of rookies will be quite the challenge. Instead I prefer when there's just a few of them, much easier to teach the basics and game mechanics. So far it has been a great success! Sure, some competitive players have been rather annoyed by the fact how we changed the server but it won't last forever, come help the rookies, tell them what to do and be extremely patient with them.
What's the dark side in all of this then? Well, without any skill-restriction mods it'll be difficult to monitor stacking. (No, I won't install any of them.) I've been manually shuffling the teams and encouraging veterans to take supportive roles, build RT:s, go gorge, command if you need to. The absolute, biggest annoyance have been the prim division players. Why? Because apparently getting into teamspeak and stomping a huge amount of new players is fun, no, it's really not. The gaming experience was completely ruined and no one had any fun playing those rounds.
Despite that we've had great fun so far and people have been really cooperative with the project. Rookies have had some time to learn the game and a couple of them actually said that they're going to introduce the game to their friends. Isn't this the kind of approach we want for the community? Huge respect for all the other server admins who tries to help with the dying player base. Sometimes it's a chore but just seeing a couple of those rookies smiling and hearing them laugh has been worth the hours we've spent to teach them.
Server info down in my signature.
If you need a commander. I am free and need practice anyway.
Greetings,
War
Not good for your health, I swear.
All these "teaching programs" didnt work in the past and wont work at this sale.
Rookies going to play on servers like this: http://ns2servers.devicenull.org/servers/273546/66.151.138.182:27085
getting stomped on rubberbanding bullshit servers and deinstalling the game.
This was and is the sad truth @ every NS2-sale.
Why do you think its differnet this time?
We doing the same @ every sale/free weekend again and again and again.
The only solution are skill restricted servers (rookie only, "normal", and no rookie servers).
Rookies should be forced to play on the "rookie only" servers for around 10 hrs min to learn the basics in an stomp free enviromnent.
Active admins should ban "fake-account" stomper who going 120-3 on these servers.
But we had this discussion in another thread already.
For me this is another lost chance to grow the playerbase.
And this "oh, btw. there is an sale going" should be "We have a sale in 3 weeks, what can we do to make it a success?"
Hell there is another thread going about exact that.
Did someone of the CDT/UWE team even trying to implement some of the ideas there?
Lets welcome the rookies with an friendly 130-5!!!
I think that's a great initiative. I will do the same thing if there are enough rookies around.
Edit: where experienced players are welcome to join to command or help but not to stomp.
More "rookie friendly" servers, yes. That is exactly what NS2 dont need at the moment.
I really can't understand why you're always so negative about server related things. There's MORE than enough whitelisted servers around where veterans can go and play, heard anyone complaining about lack of servers? Nope, neither have I. No one's just willing to seed them.
Teaching rookies ain't such a big task especially when there's active admins playing with them. Preventing stomping and giving them enough time and space to learn how the game works. If you're not willing to teach them, that's fine, you don't have to. I just personally think they will learn better if there's supportive veterans giving them hints and tips throughout the matches.
On rookie friendly servers you may learn some basics, like what the armory does or how to build, etc etc, but apart from that they are taught bad behavior, since everybody arround them is bad. A mentor who answers questions won't change that.
We had a rookie on our server the other day and he learned the game properly right from the start. At least that is what I observed when we both played marines. He kept pushing with the others all the time, and was not armory humping at our natural rt. (and yes, he was definitely a rookie, considering the questions he asked)
These kind of 1 dollar sales probably have hurt the game quite a lot in terms player retention. The player base was never big enough to teach those heaps of rookies properly.
We needed a low, but constant influx of new players to have around 10 veteran player for every rookie, and not 1 vet to stomp 10 rookies.
Edit: of course, I understand that UWE may have needed these sales in order to survive. I'm not trying to make them look like idiots, who don't know what they're doing.
"New players have a bad 1st impression on 3 Tick rubberbanding servers" = negative?
"New players have half of there possible fps on >24 slot servers cause higher entity ammount" = negative?
So telling the truth is negative?
Ok, then i have some positive for you:
This sale is going to bring the game to an new level.
The influence of the 1500 new players willing to learn the game guided by awesome pro players teaching them all there secrets without any stomp will be the biggest thing in NS2 history.
NS2 now 75% off on Steam too
At least the deluxe upgrade is only 3,50 € which is kinda nice
Just click on the observatory and beacon me.
Some people are "defensive pessimists"; imagine the worst that can happen and find a way to deal with it; get rid of the anxiety/uncertainty/problem by discovering that the worst that could happen isn't too bad or if it is, acting preemptively before it becomes a problem.
Others are "strategic optimists"; imagine the best that can happen, and then try to work backwards on how to make it happen.
On the extremes these groups will only ever see each other as self-delusional optimists / positivity nazis or toxic people /energy vampires respectively.
I disagree with a lot of what you said in your post, @dePARA - although I am more of an optimist than you so maybe that's why...
However, this is absolutely true! Having advanced warning of a sale would have been much more useful. dePara makes a good point - time to allow planning for success during this sale time could have been very helpful.
What I will say in favour, though, is that the sale comes at a time not immediately after a patch (eg requiring a hotfix) - the timing is much improved over certain previous sales, and whoever arranged that did a good job.
Do you really and truly think they read ?