Also, I think that it's a bit unfair to compare hours/week of NS2 to DOTA2 because Valve applies some pretty aggressive strategies to boost the playtime.
That is true, but that was one of the points of the discussion that I wanted to compare.
As I said earlier I hate these kinds of strategies that try to force you to play everyday, but unfortunately you find them in almost all the online games nowadays
What worried me a little bit was to realize that the median for ns2 is only 1 hour per week.
Which means that 7k players (out of our presumably 14k total) play less than 1 hour per week. Which seems to imply that the average of 3 hours is heavily skewed by a small portion of hardcore dedicated players in our community.
But after comparing this with the other games it doesn't seem to be a rare result
Edit: @Nordic
I wasn't trying to say that you provided unrealistic numbers with the 16k players. All the contrary, I was just saying that it seems a high number because we only have around 240 concurrent players, but that it makes sense. So I was actually proving that you are right
Also, I think that it's a bit unfair to compare hours/week of NS2 to DOTA2 because Valve applies some pretty aggressive strategies to boost the playtime.
So what about CS:GO then. What kind of strategies do they have to boost average hours played per week?
Also, I think that it's a bit unfair to compare hours/week of NS2 to DOTA2 because Valve applies some pretty aggressive strategies to boost the playtime.
So what about CS:GO then. What kind of strategies do they have to boost average hours played per week?
Also, I think that it's a bit unfair to compare hours/week of NS2 to DOTA2 because Valve applies some pretty aggressive strategies to boost the playtime.
So what about CS:GO then. What kind of strategies do they have to boost average hours played per week?
I don't play any of the other games BLRG listed. I tried them all, and just could not get into them. No game has ever drawn me in like NS2 has. I would think those games have more people playing longer because it is easier to have a good game.
It is incredibly hard, at least for me, to find a good game. I have to play several bad or mediocre games before I finally have a good one. When I do have a streak of good games, which probably has more to do with my mental state than the games themselves, I will play for many hours in one evening.
The average quality of a given round of NS2 is quite low. If NS2 had good games more consistently, I think people would play more. I do not know how to define a "good game" completely. I also fear that the steps to increase the average quality of NS2 rounds would also make NS2 lose its soul in a way.
MephillesGermanyJoin Date: 2013-08-07Member: 186634Members, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
edited July 2017
@Nordic pretty sure those quality games you are talking about are games that you did enjoy playing and were in the flow zone.
In case you don't know what it is, that is a zone where you will have a nice balance between the challenges you are facing and your own skill.
So basically what you just told me that NS2 fails to deliver an experience like that more often than not.
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's well-documented research and wide-scale
gathering of personal observations, the phenomenology of Flow has eight major
components.
1. A challenge activity that requires skills
2. The merging of action and awareness
3. Clear goals
4. Direct feedback
5. Concentration on the task at hand
6. The sense of control
7. The loss of self-consciousness
8. The transformation of time
Not all of these components are needed for flow to be experienced. [Csikszentmihalyi 1990]
Choose for yourself which one of those apply to the average NS2 experience.
Anyway reaching the flow zone is not something everyone will achieve with NS2 since everyone has it's own unique flow zone, here it does matter which target audience NS2 is trying to approach.
But you can try to widen the flow zone for the game by implementing Dynamic Difficulty Adjustments (DDA).
The most obvious one would be a match making system where people of equal skill got thrown into a server to play against each other. Hive2 does kinda balance the teams with the shuffle function already but it can't deal with massive skill gaps of each individual player on the server.
Another DDA is offering multiple ways to play the game so each player can find his unique individual style. It is quite well handled with the aliens (especially with the gorge now) where the player can choose as skulk to try to kill marines or go bite res instead and as gorge you can either choose to be a builder and healer or you can battlegorge.
As marine you have less options to find and play your own unqique style. You got an offensive approach and a defensive approach and the playstyles (weapons) you might prefer are heavily dependant on the marine commander to research them or not.
But I don't rly have a simple solution to that problem.
One approach could be that for example the shotgun research would unlock 3 shotguns that are quite well balanced between each other but all feel differently so players can choose which shotgun they feel like they can handle best. (Exo and grenade research do this already). You could do the same with LMG, MG, pistol and whatever.
(this is a sense of control btw)
moultanoCreator of ns_shiva.Join Date: 2002-12-14Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Has anything interesting come out of the post-round survey data?
I'd really love to know if there's anything measurable that reliably makes a good game, or improves the odds of it. Happy to do the analysis if someone wants to dump whatever data is collected.
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
I know right!!
Yet when I point out that the game has a toxic community I'm labeled as some whining nub who only complains because they don't like losing (never understood this logic)
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
I know right!!
Yet when I point out that the game has a toxic community I'm labeled as some whining nub who only complains because they don't like losing (never understood this logic)
Unless the NS2 vanilla community has changed drastically in the past year, I rarely see any toxic players. However, I have nothing against ejecting a rookie who is trying to comm (get some field experience first), especially if they don't listen.
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
I know right!!
Yet when I point out that the game has a toxic community I'm labeled as some whining nub who only complains because they don't like losing (never understood this logic)
When you have a problem with everyone, maybe you should consider that you are the problem.
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
The game is a lot more enjoyable when you mute people. Even if they aren't abusing people, some people that keep talking are just as annoying. You don't have to mute everyone, just those that you can't stand. If that means you lose due to poor teamwork, so be it.
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
I know right!!
Yet when I point out that the game has a toxic community I'm labeled as some whining nub who only complains because they don't like losing (never understood this logic)
When you have a problem with everyone, maybe you should consider that you are the problem.
Except its not everyone its only certain people. And when rookies make posts saying the exact same thing I have been all along...
Or when I play and hear people in-game making the same complaints I have made here...
"Exp is so op now"
"Boneshield is useless now"
"It's no fun with X player here stomping everyone"
"Hive needs to be more accurate"
"Man this community is so toxic"
"Do the devs even test these changes"
etc..
Clearly the "problem" is not me... But whatever. ignore me, flame me, call me a troll, it doesn't matter.. The community will go on being toxic, games will continue to be one sided stompfests 80-90% of the time, and poorly thought out changes will continue to make things easier for high skill vets and harder for low skill casuals/rookies.
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
I know right!!
Yet when I point out that the game has a toxic community I'm labeled as some whining nub who only complains because they don't like losing (never understood this logic)
When you have a problem with everyone, maybe you should consider that you are the problem.
Except its not everyone its only certain people. And when rookies make posts saying the exact same thing I have been all along...
Or when I play and hear people in-game making the same complaints I have made here...
"Exp is so op now"
"Boneshield is useless now"
"It's no fun with X player here stomping everyone"
"Hive needs to be more accurate"
"Man this community is so toxic"
"Do the devs even test these changes"
etc..
Clearly the "problem" is not me... But whatever. ignore me, flame me, call me a troll, it doesn't matter.. The community will go on being toxic, games will continue to be one sided stompfests 80-90% of the time, and poorly thought out changes will continue to make things easier for high skill vets and harder for low skill casuals/rookies.
A lot of people here have no such problems. Sure, there are abusive players in the game, but they are in the minority. There are a lot of nice and helpful people in the game, so when you say the community is toxic, and the common denominator is you, you are the problem. Simple? If people are nice to everyone else but not to you, you really should reflect instead of deflecting.
Gameplay has issues. I agree. That is a separate issue from the community being toxic. Your quotes aren't helping your case.
moultanoCreator of ns_shiva.Join Date: 2002-12-14Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Ya'll really need to learn to separate the UX issues from the mechanic issues. NS2 generally has interesting and intuitive mechanics. It does not have great UX for communicating how those mechanics work to a new player, especially for the mechanics that were added later in development.
Good UX is really really hard, and requires you to assume the user is drunk, distracted, can't read, can barely see. They won't read text, they won't watch videos, they won't notice things on their screen that seem blindingly obvious to the person who designed them. Broadly, you have to communicate how things work in every aspect of the design so that it is unmissable. You have to make the feature "feel" like the thing that it "is" with all the subtle cues that the user won't even be consciously aware of, but combine to create an understanding.
For some examples of this:
it took me 6 months to figure out how to tell how much armor my Exo has left. Every other health meter in the game is in the lower left hand corner. It never occurred to me to look at the top of the screen, and I still don't look at it intuitively, and never really know how damaged I am unless I consciously think about it. I think half of the fragility of exos in pubs is players not knowing when they are getting severely damaged since the feedback is so bad.
I still don't have a good intuition of how dual rail exos work. I don't really know when clicking will do something and when it won't. If I really focus on it when I'm playing it becomes clear, but nothing in the UI makes it intuitive. It doesn't behave the way it feels like it should behave.
There's really no way to discover how the momentum preservation mechanics for aliens work outside of tutorial. Some great sound design could really improve this, but right now it's totally opaque.
@moultano That post reminds me of Nintendo's careful design of what new Mario players experienced:
Along those lines, in ns1 the action menu was on the right click button because @Flayra was worried people wouldn't find it, but being a halflife mod, would expect the weapons to have an alt-fire and would try right clicking.
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
I know right!!
Yet when I point out that the game has a toxic community I'm labeled as some whining nub who only complains because they don't like losing (never understood this logic)
When you have a problem with everyone, maybe you should consider that you are the problem.
Except its not everyone its only certain people. And when rookies make posts saying the exact same thing I have been all along...
Or when I play and hear people in-game making the same complaints I have made here...
"Exp is so op now"
"Boneshield is useless now"
"It's no fun with X player here stomping everyone"
"Hive needs to be more accurate"
"Man this community is so toxic"
"Do the devs even test these changes"
etc..
Clearly the "problem" is not me... But whatever. ignore me, flame me, call me a troll, it doesn't matter.. The community will go on being toxic, games will continue to be one sided stompfests 80-90% of the time, and poorly thought out changes will continue to make things easier for high skill vets and harder for low skill casuals/rookies.
A lot of people here have no such problems. Sure, there are abusive players in the game, but they are in the minority. There are a lot of nice and helpful people in the game, so when you say the community is toxic, and the common denominator is you, you are the problem. Simple? If people are nice to everyone else but not to you, you really should reflect instead of deflecting.
Gameplay has issues. I agree. That is a separate issue from the community being toxic. Your quotes aren't helping your case.
Did you even read the post you quoted? It's very very clear that the problem does not lie with me.
Maybe 10% of the toxicity I see in-game is directed at me.. At the absolute most.
I'm not saying there are no nice and helpful people left, but they are few and far between. (at least on US servers, might be different for UK servers)
Hi, I'm a newer player, and just have to say the game is a lot of fun, sure the playerbase is low, but the biggest problem I encounter is when other players insult those who aren't doing as good. I just lost rookie status, but have players berate me, telling me to get better, that I need to listen more, ect ect. I even was in a game, covering for someone who ragequit because he died, and he screamed at me for not covering him? People like this make me NOT want to play the game, or just mute everyone on the server as soon as I join.
I know right!!
Yet when I point out that the game has a toxic community I'm labeled as some whining nub who only complains because they don't like losing (never understood this logic)
When you have a problem with everyone, maybe you should consider that you are the problem.
Except its not everyone its only certain people. And when rookies make posts saying the exact same thing I have been all along...
Or when I play and hear people in-game making the same complaints I have made here...
"Exp is so op now"
"Boneshield is useless now"
"It's no fun with X player here stomping everyone"
"Hive needs to be more accurate"
"Man this community is so toxic"
"Do the devs even test these changes"
etc..
Clearly the "problem" is not me... But whatever. ignore me, flame me, call me a troll, it doesn't matter.. The community will go on being toxic, games will continue to be one sided stompfests 80-90% of the time, and poorly thought out changes will continue to make things easier for high skill vets and harder for low skill casuals/rookies.
A lot of people here have no such problems. Sure, there are abusive players in the game, but they are in the minority. There are a lot of nice and helpful people in the game, so when you say the community is toxic, and the common denominator is you, you are the problem. Simple? If people are nice to everyone else but not to you, you really should reflect instead of deflecting.
Gameplay has issues. I agree. That is a separate issue from the community being toxic. Your quotes aren't helping your case.
Did you even read the post you quoted? It's very very clear that the problem does not lie with me.
Maybe 10% of the toxicity I see in-game is directed at me.. At the absolute most.
I'm not saying there are no nice and helpful people left, but they are few and far between. (at least on US servers, might be different for UK servers)
This is actually a thing I noticed. This is obviously anecdotal, but every time I play on a US server, people seem to be a lot... rougher than on EU servers. And every time I tell myself "never again".
Ya'll really need to learn to separate the UX issues from the mechanic issues. NS2 generally has interesting and intuitive mechanics. It does not have great UX for communicating how those mechanics work to a new player, especially for the mechanics that were added later in development.
Good UX is really really hard, and requires you to assume the user is drunk, distracted, can't read, can barely see. They won't read text, they won't watch videos, they won't notice things on their screen that seem blindingly obvious to the person who designed them. Broadly, you have to communicate how things work in every aspect of the design so that it is unmissable. You have to make the feature "feel" like the thing that it "is" with all the subtle cues that the user won't even be consciously aware of, but combine to create an understanding.
I'm a UX designer and the points you make are mostly correct, however there are a few things in there which should be cleared up. Good UX design does not work off of designer assumptions and initial bias - in fact it is the opposite. So you really shouldn't start with an assumption that a user is drunk, distracted etc and base design choices around that because it's often not the case. You will have a large number of users who don't fit into that category so excluding them from design decisions won't benefit the end product. The challenge of good UX design is using research and user-centered design approaches to validate prototypes that are based on initial reasoning (not assumptions) and hypotheses.
But yes - definitely agree that NS2 would benefit from more involved UX design as probably accounts for some of the user retention issues.
Ya'll really need to learn to separate the UX issues from the mechanic issues. NS2 generally has interesting and intuitive mechanics. It does not have great UX for communicating how those mechanics work to a new player, especially for the mechanics that were added later in development.
Good UX is really really hard, and requires you to assume the user is drunk, distracted, can't read, can barely see. They won't read text, they won't watch videos, they won't notice things on their screen that seem blindingly obvious to the person who designed them. Broadly, you have to communicate how things work in every aspect of the design so that it is unmissable. You have to make the feature "feel" like the thing that it "is" with all the subtle cues that the user won't even be consciously aware of, but combine to create an understanding.
I'm a UX designer and the points you make are mostly correct, however there are a few things in there which should be cleared up. Good UX design does not work off of designer assumptions and initial bias - in fact it is the opposite. So you really shouldn't start with an assumption that a user is drunk, distracted etc and base design choices around that because it's often not the case. You will have a large number of users who don't fit into that category so excluding them from design decisions won't benefit the end product. The challenge of good UX design is using research and user-centered design approaches to validate prototypes that are based on initial reasoning (not assumptions) and hypotheses.
But yes - definitely agree that NS2 would benefit from more involved UX design as probably accounts for some of the user retention issues.
This is difficult to answer without doing a proper discovery process. For retention problems, it could be anything from interface interaction (think main menu, health bars/energy etc) to user journeys ( eg is evolving as an alien as intuitive as it could be / is it obvious for a user how to win a game etc) as well as some other factors. Hard to answer without seeing numbers/data as well.
Comments
That is true, but that was one of the points of the discussion that I wanted to compare.
As I said earlier I hate these kinds of strategies that try to force you to play everyday, but unfortunately you find them in almost all the online games nowadays
What worried me a little bit was to realize that the median for ns2 is only 1 hour per week.
Which means that 7k players (out of our presumably 14k total) play less than 1 hour per week. Which seems to imply that the average of 3 hours is heavily skewed by a small portion of hardcore dedicated players in our community.
But after comparing this with the other games it doesn't seem to be a rare result
Edit: @Nordic
I wasn't trying to say that you provided unrealistic numbers with the 16k players. All the contrary, I was just saying that it seems a high number because we only have around 240 concurrent players, but that it makes sense. So I was actually proving that you are right
So what about CS:GO then. What kind of strategies do they have to boost average hours played per week?
Cosmetic drops, ranking systems, events, performance
I don't play any of the other games BLRG listed. I tried them all, and just could not get into them. No game has ever drawn me in like NS2 has. I would think those games have more people playing longer because it is easier to have a good game.
It is incredibly hard, at least for me, to find a good game. I have to play several bad or mediocre games before I finally have a good one. When I do have a streak of good games, which probably has more to do with my mental state than the games themselves, I will play for many hours in one evening.
The average quality of a given round of NS2 is quite low. If NS2 had good games more consistently, I think people would play more. I do not know how to define a "good game" completely. I also fear that the steps to increase the average quality of NS2 rounds would also make NS2 lose its soul in a way.
In case you don't know what it is, that is a zone where you will have a nice balance between the challenges you are facing and your own skill.
So basically what you just told me that NS2 fails to deliver an experience like that more often than not.
Choose for yourself which one of those apply to the average NS2 experience.
Anyway reaching the flow zone is not something everyone will achieve with NS2 since everyone has it's own unique flow zone, here it does matter which target audience NS2 is trying to approach.
But you can try to widen the flow zone for the game by implementing Dynamic Difficulty Adjustments (DDA).
The most obvious one would be a match making system where people of equal skill got thrown into a server to play against each other. Hive2 does kinda balance the teams with the shuffle function already but it can't deal with massive skill gaps of each individual player on the server.
Another DDA is offering multiple ways to play the game so each player can find his unique individual style. It is quite well handled with the aliens (especially with the gorge now) where the player can choose as skulk to try to kill marines or go bite res instead and as gorge you can either choose to be a builder and healer or you can battlegorge.
As marine you have less options to find and play your own unqique style. You got an offensive approach and a defensive approach and the playstyles (weapons) you might prefer are heavily dependant on the marine commander to research them or not.
But I don't rly have a simple solution to that problem.
One approach could be that for example the shotgun research would unlock 3 shotguns that are quite well balanced between each other but all feel differently so players can choose which shotgun they feel like they can handle best. (Exo and grenade research do this already). You could do the same with LMG, MG, pistol and whatever.
(this is a sense of control btw)
I'd really love to know if there's anything measurable that reliably makes a good game, or improves the odds of it. Happy to do the analysis if someone wants to dump whatever data is collected.
I know right!!
Yet when I point out that the game has a toxic community I'm labeled as some whining nub who only complains because they don't like losing (never understood this logic)
Unless the NS2 vanilla community has changed drastically in the past year, I rarely see any toxic players. However, I have nothing against ejecting a rookie who is trying to comm (get some field experience first), especially if they don't listen.
When you have a problem with everyone, maybe you should consider that you are the problem.
The game is a lot more enjoyable when you mute people. Even if they aren't abusing people, some people that keep talking are just as annoying. You don't have to mute everyone, just those that you can't stand. If that means you lose due to poor teamwork, so be it.
Except its not everyone its only certain people. And when rookies make posts saying the exact same thing I have been all along...
Or when I play and hear people in-game making the same complaints I have made here...
"Exp is so op now"
"Boneshield is useless now"
"It's no fun with X player here stomping everyone"
"Hive needs to be more accurate"
"Man this community is so toxic"
"Do the devs even test these changes"
etc..
Clearly the "problem" is not me... But whatever. ignore me, flame me, call me a troll, it doesn't matter.. The community will go on being toxic, games will continue to be one sided stompfests 80-90% of the time, and poorly thought out changes will continue to make things easier for high skill vets and harder for low skill casuals/rookies.
A lot of people here have no such problems. Sure, there are abusive players in the game, but they are in the minority. There are a lot of nice and helpful people in the game, so when you say the community is toxic, and the common denominator is you, you are the problem. Simple? If people are nice to everyone else but not to you, you really should reflect instead of deflecting.
Gameplay has issues. I agree. That is a separate issue from the community being toxic. Your quotes aren't helping your case.
Good UX is really really hard, and requires you to assume the user is drunk, distracted, can't read, can barely see. They won't read text, they won't watch videos, they won't notice things on their screen that seem blindingly obvious to the person who designed them. Broadly, you have to communicate how things work in every aspect of the design so that it is unmissable. You have to make the feature "feel" like the thing that it "is" with all the subtle cues that the user won't even be consciously aware of, but combine to create an understanding.
For some examples of this:
Along those lines, in ns1 the action menu was on the right click button because @Flayra was worried people wouldn't find it, but being a halflife mod, would expect the weapons to have an alt-fire and would try right clicking.
Did you even read the post you quoted? It's very very clear that the problem does not lie with me.
Maybe 10% of the toxicity I see in-game is directed at me.. At the absolute most.
I'm not saying there are no nice and helpful people left, but they are few and far between. (at least on US servers, might be different for UK servers)
My point still stands - there is a huge lack of tutorials / hints how this game really works...
Ok EU servers then :P
This is actually a thing I noticed. This is obviously anecdotal, but every time I play on a US server, people seem to be a lot... rougher than on EU servers. And every time I tell myself "never again".
I usually go back because EU servers are full and I actually feel like playing for a change
I'm a UX designer and the points you make are mostly correct, however there are a few things in there which should be cleared up. Good UX design does not work off of designer assumptions and initial bias - in fact it is the opposite. So you really shouldn't start with an assumption that a user is drunk, distracted etc and base design choices around that because it's often not the case. You will have a large number of users who don't fit into that category so excluding them from design decisions won't benefit the end product. The challenge of good UX design is using research and user-centered design approaches to validate prototypes that are based on initial reasoning (not assumptions) and hypotheses.
But yes - definitely agree that NS2 would benefit from more involved UX design as probably accounts for some of the user retention issues.
Any thoughts on what could be improved?
This is difficult to answer without doing a proper discovery process. For retention problems, it could be anything from interface interaction (think main menu, health bars/energy etc) to user journeys ( eg is evolving as an alien as intuitive as it could be / is it obvious for a user how to win a game etc) as well as some other factors. Hard to answer without seeing numbers/data as well.