NS2News.org Poll: How important are mods to your everyday NS2 game?
Pelargir
Join Date: 2013-07-02 Member: 185857Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, WC 2013 - Silver, Forum staff
Join Date: 2013-07-02 Member: 185857Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, WC 2013 - Silver, Forum staff
Controversial issue lately, your replies would help me making a new http://ns2news.org/ article (possibly). Please explain your answer.
(Examples of mods: NS2+, CompMod, Shine Administration, etc)
Crosshairs are excluded in this poll.
(Examples of mods: NS2+, CompMod, Shine Administration, etc)
Crosshairs are excluded in this poll.
Comments
I'll play NS2 Classic for sure. I'm about to. I don't appreciate not having NS2+ but its not gamebreaking for me in the same way. (Except health bars, the circles literally kill me)
But UWE team need more time to fix or change something in UI, like a terrible exo's UI which switch off by one click in NS2+ or Fade blink motion blur.
I don't really understand why all NS2+ features still not integrated in vanilla.
Vanilla on itself has improved a lot over the years. I see less issue with playing vanilla then it used to be.
Also mods themselves also have bugs. Understandable, but just like mods fix stuff in vanilla, it has happened that vanilla had stuff fixed which mods still had broken.
The base game is a bit lacking to say the least, people ask for specific features but feel the devs aren't listening or adding them fast enough. So dedicated community members mod the game to improve the overall game experience, now that their issues were solved by a community mod people stopped talking about them for the most part. Forward to this scenario where the biggest modders in the game pull their mods to show their frustration of the issues they've been dealing with, people who've depended on the mods to improve their gameplay experience are once again slapped in the face by vanilla, which doesn't have a lot of the features they've grown accustomed to because they have relied on modders to add it for them.
So it's safe to say mods are integral to NS2 because UWE and the community have become reliant on them.
Shine (and it's many plugins) and NS2+ are the power team behind a SIGNIFICANT amount of what pub players don't even realize happens. I don't know that I wouldn't be playing if not for them, but I definitely never would have started my own server, maintained a community, or help continue maintaining communities after i gave up my own server.
Basically, if you play on anything but a vanilla server, you can thank @Person8880 for all of the Administration tools that Shine does in the background.
It's pretty safe to say I would have lost a lot of interest in the game without the QoL brought by NS2+ for my own personal game experience. Add to that the numerous bugfixes that have gone into NS2+ before going into vanilla.
at this point i'm really loving the accuracy box after a death too.
Same here. The worst part of it for me is having to constantly change my mouse sensitivity.
Haveing to change my mouse sensitivity and my fov everytime i switch teams sucks so
much.
Having to turn on alien vision after doing anything on aliens is annoying.
The fact there is so much fog and mist/holograms everywhere is distracting.
The background noise levels r not constant and with no way to turn it off on vanilla. I could keep going but the only reason I'm playing right now with out mods is to get better for my team I play for, and to play with friends...
mods like skulks with shotguns or faded contribute to a variety in gameplay like different gamemodes provide in other games (not mentioning combat here which even made it to an own game , huge mistake if u ask me)
custom alien visions like huzes or crazys improve the visual apperance alot especially back then when we had fanta av.
sure some stuff might be controversial like the option to turn of viewmodels in ns2+ but they were nice to have features, but features like the lowlights which back than gave us the little bit extra performance we wanted.
most of these features where not implemented in mods cause a single person thought hey let's have that but because it's needed.
playing vanilla lately just made me aware of how much rly nice features there are cause of mods like ns2+ and are totaly missing in vanilla while some are "nice to have" others are more like "wtf! y are they not in here?"
imho the game is playable without mods but way more enjoyable with 'em
a year later, i was gifted ns2 over the holidays and i haven't picked up another video game until last week. honestly i wouldn't be playing this game in the first place if it wasn't for the ability to revert so many superfluous additions to the game. ns2+ reminds me of the absolutely manditory NineLegends knife gaming pack which allowed me to enjoy ns1 from the mid-late 2000s to late 2014. i watched the ns1 competitve community slowly evaporate right before my eyes; ns2 feels HEALTHY in comparison, the balance changes in comp mod, which constantly introduce new nuances and build orders to the meta game are dream come true. i really hope my experiences playing ns for the past 2 months continue, i've met many amazing friends and people from all over the world and i love you all so DEARLY. hope we can play some GrEAT GAMES s00n
Mods enhance the faults in the gameplay that the original dev team never bothered to fix, it's almost not playable and very frustrating without delicious features that are situated withen mods such as Mendasps NS2+ and xDragon's compmod, that and i like to play with ice's LMG which i have uploaded so it works client-side, hell i even run some local private mods such as crosshairs and other goodies that are yet to come.
Not sure why you even bothered to split people up into categories, that's pretty rude. Although i will come off as militant, these positions sway every-second, but i'll never side on people who disrespect community leaders and modders,
Team sensitivities, really frustrating having to fart about in options everytime I change teams.
Alien Vision defaulted to ON upon spawning after death.
Low lights option, this dramatically helped my fps whenever I played vanilla maps, you can really feel the pinch when joining large player count servers.
Endgame stats, really useful to me in determining which tech was researched first, player accuracies, how much resources our commander spent on meds, ammo etc etc.
In the end I would like to surmise. Yes NS2 is playable without mods. Is it as fun without them, definitely not.
I don't touch game mode modes, from CompMod to Combat, and I avoid LF and hells servers as much as possible due to their balance mods.
NS2+ has many things that I consider vital to the game, without them I can still play, but my enjoyment of the game is significantly lessened.
Mods like NSL, Compmod, Last stand etc, are fantastic mods and I play them regularly, they offer different ways to enjoy NS2, without them the lifespan of NS2 would be lessened in my opinion.
Other mods (NS2 tweaks for example) fix many of the issues NS2 has and makes the game noticeably more enjoyable.
So my answer would technically be "They contribute to a better NS2 life experience, I could and would play without them, but the time I put into NS2 would be significantly less"
EDIT: Trying the vanilla game again was just a painful and terrible experience, like cooking a hamburger with rotten meat. It is still a hamburger, but would you eat it?
That's unfair. Stale food sure, but not rotten food.
It might as well be rotten. I did try to give vanilla a chance again but there is no pull. I KNOW it is the same game, but there is just nothing fun about it any more. And it makes it even worse knowing that it could be - therefore rotten.
The fun of competitive 6v6 ns2 is just insane, sadly a lot of people on the forums will never experience that. But it pretty much beats any game I have ever played in terms of actual fun.
As saddening as it is, there are other games out there. Ciao.
Though I do play LS / SWS etc but I feel this poll is mainly about NS2 + and the compmod
NS2+ honestly should be integrated for real.
EDIT For Scope:
- No more Server Permissions (at least, they're no longer easy, but then, there's no more commands worth running without Shine either...)
- No more Forced Balance
- No Mapvotes
- No Admin panels
- No AFK Kick (I'm pretty sure this isn't vanilla)
- No Reserved Slots
- Basically no other server-side mods, since the vast majority are built on Shine (TGNS, TF, DMD should confirm though)
- Half of the bans would be gone
- No more Pregame
- Conceed vote is locked at 10 minutes (IIRC)
- No more Unstuck (at least no button, there's a console command in game?)
- No more workshop update notifications (lol, as if we'd still need them).
- No custom badges
That's just Base SHINE, if we take into account the Epsilon package:
- No PregamePlus
- No VACPlus
- No Custom Spawns
- No Enforced Team Sizes (for those of us on 8v8/7v7 servers)
- No ExtraIps (idk if anyone other than Medi's server runs this though).
All in all. What little is left would not be friendly. Vanilla is truly lacking.
Server administration is impossible without it.
True, but it's done better in Shine. I don't think we should compare the usefulness of Shine and the pulled mods as they serve different purposes and are all very useful.
Calego has a point about Shine being taken for granted too since, for everyone but server ops, there is no easy way to tell if a feature is provided by Shine or if it's in vanilla.
over the last few years, aside from the occasional classic arcade game and console emulation here and there i haven't really played much of anything but NS2.
hope things can be resolved soon, because i just re-installed something called 'Planetside 2'