Please make main menu more competition friendly.
Schwa
Virginia Join Date: 2013-11-18 Member: 189444Members
Virginia Join Date: 2013-11-18 Member: 189444Members
So I'll keep it short,
I've mentioned this idea to Zefram but I haven't pursued asking the right people to make this happen.
There's no doubt in anyone's mind that plays in the competitive scene that our NS2 community is dwindling and the Seasons have been waning as well. This season is a perfect example of that with the amount of forfeits and disbands.
We need new ideas to bring in the new players and I think that our front page needs to focus not just on the content and builds, but it needs to tell every new player that there is a competitive scene.
We have NSL Servers, a Reddit Mumble for Pugs, but you hardly ever see Pubs talk about matches or how to join a team, they just may not know about these resources. I, like many, found the Reddit Pug by dumb luck by Googling about NS2 competition. It wasn't thrown in my face in the main menu, it was a curiosity.
Right now on our main menu, we're being advertised about the Reaper Pack and Build 270, I don't see anything that's spot lighting our competitive community. I think this needs to change, we need a "marketing" department to push and grow our competitive community.
People love to be a part of teams and organizations, we should foster that need and welcome everyone. We need to advertise this idea. Sure, this could be rebuilding, we won't see many Premier teams for awhile...whatever, the point of the league is to have fun and get better with people we get along with on a team.
CDT, I beg you to start using the front page for marketing our competitive scene. I think this is a good idea, and I haven't seen much of it before except for spurts where the World Championship was mentioned, or when Season champions were mentioned as well.
http://i.imgur.com/HGDhy0S.jpg
Our community thus far is about 321 people on average, with a low of 270. NS2 is not popular, it's a dying game, but there are so many people who we don't know in our community and don't support or even ask to join our competitive scene.
Let's make some changes and at least work on making our community more tight knit. We can worry about growth later, first things first though.
I've mentioned this idea to Zefram but I haven't pursued asking the right people to make this happen.
There's no doubt in anyone's mind that plays in the competitive scene that our NS2 community is dwindling and the Seasons have been waning as well. This season is a perfect example of that with the amount of forfeits and disbands.
We need new ideas to bring in the new players and I think that our front page needs to focus not just on the content and builds, but it needs to tell every new player that there is a competitive scene.
We have NSL Servers, a Reddit Mumble for Pugs, but you hardly ever see Pubs talk about matches or how to join a team, they just may not know about these resources. I, like many, found the Reddit Pug by dumb luck by Googling about NS2 competition. It wasn't thrown in my face in the main menu, it was a curiosity.
Right now on our main menu, we're being advertised about the Reaper Pack and Build 270, I don't see anything that's spot lighting our competitive community. I think this needs to change, we need a "marketing" department to push and grow our competitive community.
People love to be a part of teams and organizations, we should foster that need and welcome everyone. We need to advertise this idea. Sure, this could be rebuilding, we won't see many Premier teams for awhile...whatever, the point of the league is to have fun and get better with people we get along with on a team.
CDT, I beg you to start using the front page for marketing our competitive scene. I think this is a good idea, and I haven't seen much of it before except for spurts where the World Championship was mentioned, or when Season champions were mentioned as well.
http://i.imgur.com/HGDhy0S.jpg
Our community thus far is about 321 people on average, with a low of 270. NS2 is not popular, it's a dying game, but there are so many people who we don't know in our community and don't support or even ask to join our competitive scene.
Let's make some changes and at least work on making our community more tight knit. We can worry about growth later, first things first though.
Comments
The tweets being displayed on the website and at the very bottom in the main menu is already a good start. I just think it worth a shot to dig deeper.
Until then, maybe @Mendasp could put a little somethin something in his already-awesome NS2+?
Can you give a rough ETA of when changes may be implemented? 10 years from now? :disagree:
It's a massive undertaking and will take a good amount of time to do properly. Everything pretty much needs to be rewritten from scratch. I don't have any idea when it will be finished as we haven't started on it yet, but it'd take a guess that it will take approximately 2 months/2 patches (on the high side) from the time we start on it until it's released.
I can't be super specific on what it'll have (as I don't even know) but more steam integration is the main goal, so seeing friends in the menu, in game transactions, dlc promotion, etc...
The competetive scene is currently barely accessible to the average player. I fully agree that it needs to be slammed in peoples face in the main menu / front page.
Definitely don't talk to Zefram about anything that requires work / common sense. He'll just scapegoat Wooza's and call it a day. [-X
Whats wrong with left side? I like it, it feels natural. We are more used to look left/right rather then up/down.
Ive seen the concepts on the trello. I dislike them, strongly.
I also dislike the combat SA menu, because its top.
Why? To see a nice image background? if im in the menu I would like the screen to be used, for the bloody menu!
An official stats page of teams W/L and participation of scrims against other teams and whatnot.
The above mentioned tools are all good, the problem is exposure, a simple link on the game menu front page will suffice.
It's a BAD suggestion, stop it!
Dude, people BS in ready rooms all the time lol. Every game has their chatters.
Besides that, I don't think a simple link will suffice. There needs to be a tab with a section about comp. I don't know the best formulae, I know Eve has a section for guilds or clans where they advertise what they do, what they like, their requirements, and you can apply their or on the site. It's a neat idea, but for sure it needs to be shoved in peoples faces right now.
Just by curiosity:
How many active teams in all NSL ? How many new teams per month ?
Maybe the gap is huge concerning skill (old team vs new team)
I guess my earlier attempt at humor was not clearly communicating this sentiment :
Cease derailing this thread by making it about users you don't like or your own server yet again.
-Ironhorse
In any case, it's feasible. Whether it's successful is a whole different story.
I guess a lot of players would quickly learn to avoid the general area where forum users assemble. :-&
You cannot proceed in this way. There are new teams for every season and new registrations (players accounts) everyday. The gap between "old" and "new" teams isn't relevant here, those teams are split into different divisions once a season starts, after playing seeding matches to determine their skill level and make sure they gonna stand up against teams at their own level and feel entertainment at playing those matches.
As Schwa said, a simple link cannot suffice by itself, making separate tabs displaying news from our website or even replays of ongoing season might be better and get a larger audience from the public players (admitting they look at it).
You don't mind if we stick around the original subject that is a way more interesting? Especially for the people who have no idea what you're talking about, although I don't wanna know here actually.
There is a problem with this. You can't specifically mention a community site without having to mention every single other one. This is a whole can of worms that the cdt might not want to get into I would imagine, and I'm not speaking officially here. You can't 'advertise' the NSL without mentioning AusNS2 or Wooza's or TAW or NS2.pr or NS2FR the list goes on. Its just unfair because they are all communities that deserve equal attention even if they aren't all 'competitive'.
It would however make sense to have more access to the news feed to be able to advertise competitive EVENTS instead, which is a little bit fairer to all the communities and there won't be an issue with favoritism. Maybe even a weekly or fortnightly update on the competitive scene. A representative from each community puts in a short snippet, kind of like a newsletter of the past 2 weeks or month. It would be up to the community rep to provide that to the collator so no blame could be put on the CDT for favouring any particular group over another.
Another idea is for the twitch api to be built into the main menu, which is becoming increasingly more viable with the possible new main menu (https://trello.com/c/Id2hUsmj/568-new-main-menu-concepts) which has already been discussed in this thread.
Either way, it is a great sentiment and I agree 100%
This thread right now is not about what's fair, it's not about favorites, it's about conveying the message about a competitive scene and communicating it to the public scene. Atm, what is lacking is an effective marketing technique to garner long-term players in NS2 and bringing the community together. Competitive players know about the pub scene, pubs may not necessarily know there is a competitive scene.
We can discuss what goes in the Competition tab if there is even one added to the menu later, right now it's about getting the CDT to support this idea and implement it hopefully into the new main menu.
I'm not in disagreement with you about that, I'm just saying it probably won't happen like that if the intention is to advertise certain groups and not others. I don't think there will be any resistance with this idea either, it has already been and will continue to be discussed internally and on the forums just like a lot of the other features and fixes that have gone into the game so far, so it is probably more worthwhile to talk about what the best thing to put under the competitive content umbrella than to ask if this can happen at all. Once there are enough ideas floating around on how to do it, then it might or might not happen.
Having a separate feed for competitive events makes the most sense for something like the comp community, if it gets added. The events tab is a good idea.
To be honest, even if I put on the same level AusNS2 and the NSL (apart the number of players in each other), I wouldn't put Wooza's, TAW and all these other communities because they're not part of the competitive side.
And we're talking here about the competitive community, as you said, all the communities need attention and I'm guessing they will if a tab system is implemented, meaning that it could be one for AusNS2, NSL, UWE/CDT. What about the other communities?
Well, let's be honest, NS2-FR is quickly dying unfortunately if it is not already done (I'm part of it, trust me). Admitting it wasn't true, news that you'd see on the menu would be in French, so it would be only a kind of possibility for us, French, to get an easier way to be informed about what's going on in our community, but this is definitely too late for us.
Other international communities will get the same issue, you gonna see the news in Polish, Russian or whatever, you could add a tab for them if needed, but not sure it is relevant. The community is too small and I assume when you're Russian, you know about the Russian community and so about the others. At least, it looks to work in this way for the french one.
TAW is a community, probably the biggest one remaining that provides also many competitive teams. However, it is kind of different communities, I mean that TAW members have a private Teamspeak, their own forum and website and if they need some advertising, not sure a dedicated tab would help, because it would be unfair for other teams, TAW is as much a community than the regular competitive teams and you're not going to talk about teams in the menu, are you?
Wooza? I don't really want to go deeper about it because I wouldn't talk about servers.
I do think that these tabs must be more focused on the competitive side, not the other communities. Competitive NS2 is a huge part of the game that is also slowly? dying. The purpose would be to bring more public players to it thanks to advertising and so forth. The Wooza server is always full, TAW hasn't its number of players dwindling, NS2-FR is already dead and the other communities such as Polish and Russians are too small in my opinion to make any advertising that could worth a shot, these people already know about these communities. But most of the public players, does not know about the competitive side, I have no clue about AusNS2 but it is true about the NSL. Not that they're not interested, they just don't know. Let's also say that the competitive community is somewhat a pillar of the game and it is also the biggest community that also needs the hardest work and the most (including AusNS2 again).
I don't think I would implement it with tabs in the main menu, maybe one overall tab for a 'competitive' section but even then you would get significantly less click through than if it was a feed on the main menu. Take a look at CS:GO and Company of Heroes 2 for good examples of twitch integration and competitive integration into the main menu.
Hmm, yeah different people have different opinions about what is 'competitive' and what isn't. This was exactly my point. What differentiates TAW from AusNS2 if they both are running events for NS2? Even if one is more casual than the other, they are still playing the same game and people from both sides of the spectrum would be inclined to believe that they deserve front page real estate, even though the more hardcore league level player may think otherwise. How do you draw the line in this instance? It's something to think about...
There is another question as well, what do you put on a theoretical main menu thingo? All these communities have their own sites, their own front pages, their own forums, their own news feeds etc. Is it a matter of just double posting content from the front pages of these sites or would it require something different, more oriented towards the audience that would be potentially looking at this content.
Sorry if I'm getting a bit deep with this thread, but its a good idea and I think it deserves good discussion.
AusNS2 need to be advertised as well as NSL, but not Wooza, NS2-Fr and other communities because they are not Competitive communities per say. Basically any NS2 comp league needs to be put somewhere on the front page, that's it.
Sure it won't bring new people to NS2 but it could bring new players to competitive, and that's what makes a game stay alive.
Yea, that was quite literally the point I just made in my post. I agree with you, personally, that AusNS2 and NSL are the communities here that have the most traction, but I am saying diplomatically that we have to be careful going down this path, otherwise it can end up being a terrible for a bunch of people because even though we are the only communities that run a 'league' and 'competition' doesn't mean the other communities aren't competitive or whatever.
Me neither, people tend to not care about many tabs, especially if those are somehow named "AusNS2", "NSL", "TAW", etc. I'm pretty sure most of the people will more focus on titles such as "Competitive", "Official", sort of. I have no clue how it works for these games however. Twitch integration would be such a good feature though. Getting access to the whole NS2 life once you start up the game would make a larger audience, are the people aware of the various number of communities, do they know them? I'm sure, they don't.
Well, that's a tough question to be honest. NSL and AusNS2 are definitely not the only organizations that run competitive on NS2 but are still the biggest ones and those that may have the strongest impact on the game itself. Competitive isn't only the 6 vs. 6 aspect, there's more such as events (tournaments, custom cups), events that are running most of the time with the 6 vs. 6 system but what if we would organize events like SWS for instance? Would they be classified as competitive? TAW can of course run their own events, the difference remains that those guys organize private tourneys, at the contrary, NSL and AusNS2 run public events.
Let's make it simple, if a such category is going to be put down into the main menu, there must be people dealing with it. It is called "competitive", but must be run by both NSL and AusNS2. If there are any other events provided by TAW, Wooza, other servers or communities, they might be free to contact those in charge of dealing with this category and relay every valuable events, informations from them. NSL and AusNS2 may have priority because they are the most active groups, there is news every months (minimum), but other communities could use it when they wish to organize their own events.
In my opinion, the best thing would be to merge AusNS2 and NSL into an only one organization, even if there are subdivisions such as AUS stuff, NA, and EU but gathered onto a same website. Things would be easier for people to get the informations because there will be a single front page that will be linked and displayed on the main menu of the game. Other communities would just need to write down what they want through one of the writers (Seb, Zefram, Bonage, etc) and will see their events finally displayed as other regular events and tournaments organized by the most popular institutions and those that have means to do it.
Depends on what communities you wanna display. Let's take an example, if the NSL has access to post their stuff on this menu, it would probably be Zefram's monthly news, upcoming matches and why not, replays of the ongoing season. Would it be just as it is now, meaning the front page news? Something more appropriate and shorter than large news to get a wider audience? It needs thinking to figure this out. I am not designer so I cannot really imagine a such menu and how it could be conceived and designed at the moment.
otherwise >> You got +1 sir !
First, I believe that the main VOIP servers need to be mentioned in the competitive section of the menu...specifically AusNS2 and the US Reddit Mumble. From my personal understanding, that is where the main competitive teams hang out. I don't want to get into diplomacy about adding Russian, German or French VOIP servers - the point is to inform new comers that we have communication servers where people can hang out and 1) pug, 2) join a team, 3) look for higher level play. To add onto this, everyone in the competitive community has used (or mainly uses) the US Reddit Mumble to chat - that includes the EU, AUS, US and some Russians. As you can tell, most US teams have their own channels there too.
Secondly, social media should be in this tab too. I agree that information such as main events and matches should be advertised here with the Twitch link so people can watch if there is a caster.
Third, a "Want to get competitive in NS2?" link or section as well, which tells people to come to ENSL and/or directs them to sections where they can say they're looking to make or join a team.
I think these three things are important as a starting point to discuss the how/where the content will get go on the main menu.
Basically it boils down to
1) VOIP servers
2) News Feed
3) "Get Involved" or "How to Join the Competitive Scene"
I'm not a coder, I don't know how difficult this would be but this is just my idea of what should go there first.
The issue with menus is that it has to be the smallest possible
1/ easier to read
2/ space on the screen... That one always force to do bargains (as a developer).