Quickly off the heels of the NS2 World Championships, there was a renewed enthusiasm for competitive play that hadn't been seen in quite a long time. With numbers not seen since Season 1, we saw 49 teams register for Season 4. Participation soared to new heights as players shaped the league with their input into seedings and the divisional break ups, the overhaul of the rules, the revamping of the website that had languished for almost a decade, and the addition of the Competitive Mod. One of the best mods that made the experience of the player more enjoyable, NS2+ was also allowed for the very first time.

This season saw many changes and may arguably have been the most successful season the NSL has ever had. 49 teams started the season. Only 3 disbanded (6% rather than 15 to 20% in previous seasons). 146 matches played. Only 6 matches were forfeited due to scheduling conflicts. Virtually all matches were refereed. A whopping 138 of 146 played matches were casted. Ren26 once said that every single week, an NS2 fanatic could watch over 40 hours of competitive NS2 on twitch, either live or in replay. Large credit for this goes to the rule that encouraged teams to play weekly matches rather than lumping a massive amount for one time. It assisted in a regular schedule and created an active community for 3 to 4 months as the season progressed. Not only did matches get played, but it allowed teams and the NSL staff to not be overly burdened with multiple one weekend marathons of matches, directly contributing to a smoother experience.

This is the best time to be a competitive player. Since the introduction of the Community Development Team, there are more programmers than ever in the development of NS2, working on adding features, methodically crushing bugs, and planning for the future of our game. On top of a progressive and outstanding season, the player has had an unprecedented influence in shaping the game they want to play with the Competitive Mod and NS2+.

The Comp Mod was born from the frustration of stagnation. Please remember that we’re shaping the game for the present, but more importantly for the future and that every iteration and release may not be perfect. One of the most important benefits with the mod is that we can quickly address issues of imbalance. A few have also voiced the concern that the mod is quickly drifting away from the vanilla game. Is this necessarily an atrocious thing when the vanilla game is fundamentally broken and stale? Let’s also remember that for a long time, our favourite mod, NS2+ was rejected by players and the community at large, but over time, it’s gained in popularity and used across many servers outside our league. In fact, an inordinate amount of features from NS2+ has now migrated into the vanilla game and its future releases. This is my hope for the Comp Mod, that the bridge between the Comp Mod and vanilla will grow smaller over time, with more features from the mod trickling into vanilla and that the transition from being a pub player to a competitive player isn’t too jarring and the experience not too divergent.

Lastly, a special thanks goes to Pelargir and a supportive NSL staff of referees and casters, too numerous to name individually. Without these volunteers, matches would be more disorganized and we couldn’t even watch competitive NS2. A massive thanks to csm for managing the massive facelift of our website. Thanks to rantology, Dragon (who maintains the NSL mod also), Grissi, RioS, and many others who participated in balance chats and left thoughtful and well reasoned feedback on the forums to shape the Comp Mod. Let’s also not forget our favourite Spainard, Mendasp and remi for maintaining NS2+.

Season 4 was a good season.

Please leave thoughts on how we can make Season 5 even better.

I really like how in the top right of the main page there is a match schedule with a link to whoever is going to stream said match. Only problem is that once the match time has passed it seems to be pretty hard to figure out who streamed which match.

Would it be possible to add maybe a link to a calendar with all the past match schedules on? Including who streamed it of course. Like you said, every week you could watch 40 hours of NS2 but it isn't very convenient figuring out all of the twitch links if you aren't very familiar with them.

Next season, make the playoffs shorter, don't do quaterfinals and/or do a competion for those that aren't playing the month long playoffs. The EU scene at least, managed to go completely inactive before any competetion were available after the group play and now we're in the middle of the holidays.

Scrap the added abilities and weapons in the compmod and stick to actual balancing and improving of what is already there. Unless of course those additions would be added to the vanilla game. The gap between compmod and vanilla is currently too wide.

Other than that, congratulations on the many matches played and casted, it's a job really well done and a victory for the community. Also goes to show that the community have matured a bit and we see less clanhopping.

Yeah swalk for admin plz.
Everyone managed to play all games on time during season 4 untill the finals. Suddenly it took 2 months for a few teams to play 2 matches, leaving everyone else to burn in the hell some like to call "Real life".

We could have a weekly Draft game night *A Gather but at a set time so people will actually be online at the same time* Because due to the lack of anything over the summer for anyone it seems impossible to find 11 other players randomly looking at ensl.org to join the gather.

I love the admin post above, i am also really thankful for the work the admins put in over the years and its great to hear optimism about the future of ensl, but i feel the admins really have dropped the ball again this summer. You are more-than partly-to-blame for inactivity over the summer, its got nothing to do with the sun.

skyice says

Yeah swalk for admin plz.

No plz.

Great season. Enjoyed it. GL with next season. pce out.

I've had few concerns about the last season, and since the next season is finally announced i would assume it's the best time to bring few topics to the surface again.


1. length of the season
As posted in the announcement week 1 starts on September 27th. My ideal thought would be for rest of the year to finish of group stages by the end of October, then use November to mop out the playoffs, leaving December completely free as off-season. But in general would prefer to finish off the season well before the hassle that is christmas/newyear begins.

2. division/group sizes // cross continental groups
In some terms this is tied to how long the season would last, for how many weeks you would play group stages for, smaller groups would ensure a more compact season, i feel that last season there was a need to shove more than necessary amount of teams in a specific division, which just made the group stages last a long time in addition to inducing gaps of matches for teams that already had a BYE.

I can't say if the group setups could have been made different to ensure less scheduling conflicts, but i can say that there was no thought at all put towards how different national holidays would affect scheduling.


In the end, while there was a lot of good to be said about the previous season, there are rooms for improvements. But in general my thought is Season 4 lasted too long, holiday extensions + extensive group stages + poor playoff planning, all of this combined into most teams quitting the game before playoffs even began, or piss poor (although entertaining at times) games played at playoffs.


Thus I conclude the ideas to the table
- to have some sort of survey for all signed up teams, how long the season should be, and tune the group/seeding accordingly.
- Try to fix the groups to negate too much timezone difference between EU-US and EU-AUS teams if put into same groups(for playoffs this shouldn’t matter imo)
- Map out the national holidays, quick search gives me this http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/ with which and some common sense + help from different nations it should be easier to predict dates when people aren’t MIA to play their matches(more of an issue for EU-US EU-AUS matches)
- Shorter seasons would make us play the whole season with the same version of compmod
- Shorter season would help Arj to finally keep one team alive for a complete season, no matter how fucking terrible the team is!


I’ll add more thoughts once they come to mind, but let’s start with those..

With season 5 coming up very soon, I'd like to see some drastic changes to the comp mod to negate the, currently extremely wide gap between vanilla and the compmod.

But there is only one way to do that and that is removing the added abilities and weapons that are in the comp mod which are not in the vanilla game.
I thought the idea of the comp mod was to balance the game, not add features. New features counteracts balancing of the game. BALANCE WHAT IS ALREADY THERE. With baby-steps, please.
Please note, I don't mind all the actual balancing changes, ONLY the added abilities/weapons that are not to be found in vanilla.

You can put the added weapons/abilities in a seperate mod, so you can test and play that if you want to sit and hope they get added to vanilla. But the official matches should NOT have a mod like we have now, it's on the brink of stupidity. People are mad because of the drastic changes to the mod all the time. That will result in people stopping playing, or not joining the competitive community at all. I know you'd like to add these features because they were in NS1 and I like would like it too if the features were actually in the vanilla game. But fact is that we are playing a completely different game from vanilla at the moment. That should be very high priority to be adress before the season begins. Please, you are currently strangling the community.

Well, I'm not sure how much I'm actually allowed to say, but you can already see on the CDT trello board that there are balance changes planned, with attempts to close the gap between vanilla and the comp mod. B268 should already include some of these changes.

Neoken says

Well, I'm not sure how much I'm actually allowed to say, but you can already see on the CDT trello board that there are balance changes planned, with attempts to close the gap between vanilla and the comp mod. B268 should already include some of these changes.

Great. Then keep the things that go in vanilla, scrap the rest to a seperate mod that isn't used in the official league.

Iots says

I've had few concerns about the last season, and since the next season is finally announced i would assume it's the best time to bring few topics to the surface again.

1. length of the season
As posted in the announcement week 1 starts on September 27th. My ideal thought would be for rest of the year to finish of group stages by the end of October, then use November to mop out the playoffs, leaving December completely free as off-season. But in general would prefer to finish off the season well before the hassle that is christmas/newyear begins.

2. division/group sizes // cross continental groups
In some terms this is tied to how long the season would last, for how many weeks you would play group stages for, smaller groups would ensure a more compact season, i feel that last season there was a need to shove more than necessary amount of teams in a specific division, which just made the group stages last a long time in addition to inducing gaps of matches for teams that already had a BYE.

Ideally, I want seasons to conclude in less than 3 months. with 6 to 7 weeks of group play and then a 2-3 week play off period. That's a reasonable amount of time for people to be committed to an NS2 team and season. It's not a long or protracted season at all. The rules that I have in place dictate weekly matches during the regular season and the schedule for each division's playoff was set IMMEDIATELY after it was done. Schedules for play are put out WELL IN ADVANCE - weeks to months, so teams should easily be able to schedule and know when they need to play matches.

The reason this season was longer than I wanted were multiple teams vehemently requested extensions because of vacations or some other reason. What am we suppose to do? Do we just assign them forfeits and have them cry foul? If we want a league with semi-professionalism that follows a strict rule/schedule, I get complaints about how NS2 is casual and it should just be more fun. And of course, if we go the other way and grant extensions to teams, eventually I get complaints about how long the season is and how other teams have to wait. My preferred method is to adhere to a schedule and stick with it and if teams can't make the time then they can accept forfeits. But teams don't find that palpable and, ideally, I want matches played... I play each extension request by ear, especially during the playoffs.

About divisions - ... I know a few people are licking their chops to cry about how divisions were terrible and "fucked" last season, but were they really? In every division, we had 6 to 7 teams (save Premier and Div 1) that were closely skilled and seeded. Remember, you guys had input into these seedings. The one or two teams that weren't or misplaced, were asked to be in other divisions but choose not to.

Some brought up that some higher level players had started "slumming" in the lower divisions just to "own noobs". That's really a narrow view of a game with massive amounts of team play. The only questions that really should be asked when thinking about team seeding is "Can this team beat this team?" and "Can they compete in this division?" If the team as a WHOLE, regardless of one player, cannot compete in Div 1 or Div 2 or whatever it may be, then they're in a lower division. At the start of the season, teams like Table for Six and Cheesecake (who received these complaints against them)... could not compete in Div 1. We can have this divisional seeding discussion in another thread and people can argue about how the divisions were wholly incorrect and I'll argue the other side.


Thanks for the feedback everyone. It's really appreciated. It shows that you guys are as much invested into this league as I am. Keep it coming, even if there's stuff you absolutely hate. But also, let me know the things you liked also.