So we're not talking about the same thing ^^. I mean if people want to play 6v6 they can add to gather. I'm really talking about set up some draft tournaments once a month or something like that. You signup and says "I'm low/mid/high" with "I'm lerk/fade/gorge onos or commander" and "I can be captain". We pick some captains on the "high people", Captains makes teams before the draft day. Or staff make teams. Each team play one map against another team. GG cyu next draft. Some random teams with random players. I mean, playing with some high people could help rookies and myb some of them will be interested about joining a team.
Yes I can
I'm not proficient neither about mod maintenance, but I really think we can make some events with SWS !! Need it !! ^^
Yes there is, I played on it yesterday. Myb some ppl like to spectate, I personally don't. We need more servers like this one. It was full yesterday.
I see, well, it is not that different. It seems, you want each draft to be its own little tournament, with a complete round-robin, every team playing once against each other? And you propose the captains to make the teams beforehand.
I thought of it being more casual. Have only 2 maps and the teams are picked live, a few minutes after start - basically directly after the team-captains are chosen. The weekly thing, I suggested, is always 4 rounds and you only play one other team.
I agree on your framwork being held not every week. It requires a longer setup and a bit of management. It also requires to reserve more times of the players, as they play each other team (only one map, though, but still, that can easily be 8 rounds... depending on sign-ups, of course).
Both concepts can work and it depends on what the community prefers to do - although they are not necessarily exclusive to each other.
Awesome. I am still in sighting the material - as we produced over 20 hours of gameplay last Sunday. I will note down everything, which catches my eye and message you personally about it in the future :)
I think what you propose is like a gather but with 2 maps (myb I'm wrong). If there is more than 3 teams on my proposition we can do like that :
- team A play team B => winner 1
- team C play team D => winner 2
- winner 1 play winner 2
(and if looser 1 and looser 2 want to play, they also can).
I mean, ofc people don't want to stay 6hours playing. That's why I said only 1 map for each match. And as you said it requires longer setup that's why once a month is fine :p Also, I think people get bored with drafts and just let it die if it's too often. At least it happened on games I played before.
My point is to let "rookie" learn from "high" by playing with them and against them. Anyway, we can do something :p :)
20hours o_0 That's why I said I want timestamps :p.
The commander is the ultimatively unique part of NS2, leaving a heavy amount of macro and micro in his hands without any real direct influence. Public players often sees the shortcomings of the commander instead of their own. As a premier commander, I have more than once been ejected because people didn't agree with my very informed decitions. They dont trust the player in the chair, and everything he does is wrong - unless you know what is absolutely right, and can see through the player. And that frustrates me. I can only imagine how it it for less informed/experienced commanders.
An NS2 commander has in many ways, a more difficult job than a musical conductor - and those fuckers have +10 years education in most cases. And as a musicial studying classical music, it is fucking hard. And you are supposed to just enter the chair and rock it? That is delutional.
With these things in mind, it is very hard just socially to aquaint yourself with the role of the commander, much less the tactical part. After ½ a year in 2eZ learning close from one of the ultimate masters, heraklees, i am beginning to get an idea.
Please be nice to the commandors. It is already impossible to forfill their job, unless they, like hera, have 10 years of experience. And thats why I love commanding, i know theres a hard way and alot to learn - i love the challenge. But that cannot be challenged unless the team gives themselves as hard as the commandor does. Theres nothing more infuriating than a team giving 50% when you give 100% - lollygagging their own game and not paying any heed to his/her own role in the current state of the match. And I do not doubt that this is a major killer too for many commanders.
I dont believe the role of the commander needs to change - but the fucked up mentality from many players, competitive and public, need to be adressed for each and everyone on their own terms.
"It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, despite as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope" - J.R.R. Tolkien
While I had to laugh when I read the "As a premier commander, I...." (come on man, really? xD), I was actually surprised by the rest of this post. I never looked at it this way, and only now I notice how much of a problem it is. "Theres nothing more infuriating than a team giving 50% when you give 100%" THIS is exactly what happens in my own team right now, and i fear it's going to lead to just another commander leaving ns with some more players leaving, because people don't get their shit straight when trying to compete at a high level.
I don't know if there are any other cases like this and I doubt it can be changed anyway, I just found this very interesting. Take good care of ambitious commanders guys, cause they're the only ones making ns fun to play.
That's exactly what's happening to your team, and I agree on the fact this is the biggest issue Commanders have to deal with. I'm not sure about public players though, most of them gets only one strategy, if the Commander doesn't do so, they're fast at ejecting him and that's pretty retarded actually. That's also why I'm only playing on servers with people knowing each other, that kind of 'problem' does not occur that often on these servers, apart a few times when some random guy jumps into the chair.
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
And would you want to be the permanent commander for your team? This is pretty much off-topic, but you're basically saying commanders are not needed in ns. It' not important to have a super awesome high skill commaner, because they can't win games for your team, true. But AMBITIOUS commanders are important for the game... you can see it every day in pubs, people don' want to comm. This results in no games happening, you should know what I mean.
While i don't want to judge Ixian's way of commanding in any way, he's a perfect example for what I mean. He went from casual pubber over div 1 commander into commanding 2ez, only because he showed sooo much ambition for improving and so on. He just has fun at commanding, it's what made him skyrocket into premier division, no matter how good his commanding actually is (no offense). Most people just don't have fun at commanding, at least that's the way I get it
You're misunderstanding him. He's not saying commanders are useless. He's saying Commanding is an unforgiving job. His statements is correct. If I have 5 bad players on my team, there is absolutely nothing I can do to "carry" them to victory.
Exception field players can, however, carry a bad commander.
But you do judge, Bauer, you do. You have nothing but secondhand bullshit to state the facts of mý "career". Everyone in public is a casual - its just odd that you have to put those words together, And my frustration with the public players and curiousity got me into competitive. Since not a single team were missing a commander, I for fun asked oF to try out. And despite all the odds I got a tryout. I didn't get the post, blind got that, but I did get a seat in the chair whenever he was unable to. Going from public to div 1 is unheard of, but still these hardcore veterans were satisfied with the level I was currently at. At the same time i merced alot in div 4. It was infuriating, mostly because of my high standarts i set for myself and see them unforfilled, and it quicky became apparent that I was above that level of compertition.
I have always wanted the challenge. And I have enjoyed it. And I have learned from it. Try and think of it not as teams having a problem but players too, and then read this again.
I have been taking the challenge with every step. I have tried poking to premier so many times for a "training season", which people from premier also have wanted to close the gap between div 1 and premier. I have put myself up against the odds every time, constantly playing against my betters, whom I with more and more ease can call my peers. I have fought alone against the system, which shouldn't have allowed me to do anything of what I have done. And now you belittle that I have succesfully done, where some many others have failed?
Having fun commanding is really a moronic arguement to advance to div. 1 and much less premier. There are no jerks amongst the higher div. teams generally - those get kicked as they cannot be tolerated by their teammembers for an extended period of time. I was handpicked by 2eZ.. You will never find anyone without skill in premier. I worked hard, and I learned alot, problems and oppotunities i never dared dream of existing, were found, and now you want to shit on my achievements of my hard work? You, sir, are an asshat. I take offence to your comments, and your demeaning attitude to my work and my hardwon achievements, to which only a handfull of people preceeds me and none of them commanders.
I am more or less what the system shouldn't have been able to produce, Don't you fucking dare say I have not earned where I am now. There have been tears of defeat and screams of frustration. And it have not always been fun - but it has been worth it ten times over.
And if you so desperately want to keep clinging to whatever illusion made you write those words, you can PM me. Lets get back on topic, shall we?
"It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, despite as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope" - J.R.R. Tolkien
I still believe that the main difference between lower- and prem div coms is following:
In lower divs you are more like a shepherd.
On the other hand the prem div players have so much gamesense so they can organize there game by themself most of the time.
So a prem div com need only 2 abilitys primarily:
- Good resmanagement
- Fast and precise medpacks
Well some people tend to overrating themselfes but like Herakles wrote earlier:
There very good players in lower divisions also. So , there is nothing special for me if someone is or was playing in prem div.
As a com you need a good personality also.
You can forgive a stupid call or a missed medpack from an nice guy but not from an idiot.
So why do we have not enough good coms in pub or competitive?
There not enough nice guys with the needed skills.
So you have to choose: Skills or personality.
I have seen so many nice guys mutated into complete a-holes the higher there skill raise.
the issue atm is the comp community getting smaller.
What do you guys think about the theory of removing the alien commander?
- it would allow teams do be less depending on a commander, since marin commander is easier to play and more enjoyable for non commander players (who just sit in the chair only)
- more teams are able to form because they dont need the commander as the biggest issue of forming a team
- it would make the game more asymmetrical since it would be different number of players on the field
but thats just one of the issue.
The game performance is rly rly awesome atm and it would be sad to see the game die slowly on the competitv side.
@depara the commander needs way more quality then that, if you play on even higher skill level.
But the pressure on the commander and the team depending on the commander gets to high.
If you elemintate at least the commander from 1 side it would make it so much easier for all.
I don't have much knowledge about neither the technical parts of NS2 nor the social parts of NSL anymore since i quit playing the game after onFire left the season. But i obviously care enough about this place to feel i should point out some universal truths about gaming communities having a lot of knowledge running them in the past.
First of all, regardless of all other factors for the reason of a community losing members, a community always needs more people coming in on a regular basis because it always has people leaving on a regular basis. This is a rather big weakness that NS2's had ever since the WC was over and done with. We need more enthusiasm. And i think TAW's newcomer tournament is the best idea i've seen for this so far for NS2. And when you think about, this wasn't even that big of a deal to put together. Yet it acquired such a great amount of interest.
So, to get straight to it, i think we should make newcomer tournaments a premium feature of NSL that runs every month. We make some nice logos for it (or maybe just color the current NSL logo to a green one; green for rookie, and add "Newcomer Tournament" above the "NSL" text), advertise this tournament all over the web, we make a few good video reels focusing on exciting moments that casters captured from previous matches, focusing on a welcoming experience, the awesomeness of stepping into the e-sports world without fear of the consequences, showing off our many good casters with hundreds of followers to make people understand that there's still quite a bit of people watching them play, maybe create a separate website-portal for this tournament (just like naturalselection2.com only is a portal site to unknownworlds.com/ns2) maybe even with a separate domain-name, making the feel of the whole thing seem truly professional but with a friendly spirit. This is gonna take some work, but it can definitely be done. And once it is, we'll slowly but surely keep spreading the word about this relatively tiny game to more and more people and thus without a doubt ensuring its growth.
The game itself has its issues, but i think its indie-status is a bigger factor than its quality in terms of it never making it big. As such, we don't have a huge amount of developers working on it either. But they sure are committed! NS2 is NOT dead. It IS going places, even on the technical and practical level. So if we just keep helping out with the spreading of the word and provide enthusiasm with continued reasons for new people to come check it out, i think we have it in the bag right there.
Performance is of course a big factor for any game in terms of player-numbers as the majority of gamers are not sitting on enthusiast rigs. NS2 being a game built for speed in mind, a high framerate is rather important. So right then and there we have what probably *previously* has been the biggest technical hindrance for acquiring more players. But the performance *has* improved considerably. I don't think we can blame this anymore. And this isn't by magic, people. That's hard work put in by committed developers. I don't know just how much experience the EDT team actually has with development, but we've all seen a few problems created as well as improvements. They're hardly perfect, but if you wanna complain about imperfection, why don't you give Ubisoft a call? Or EA? Or X amounts of companies with enormous amount of devs throwing away money on products filled with as many bugs as there are polygons? We have to give the EDT time. And meanwhile we have to do our part in solving the fucking problem we constantly harp on about.
The newcomer tournament worked. Let's build on it while we figure out other ways to make this the place to be. NS2 being one of the few e-sport games that has a really solid newcomer tournament going every month is a pretty awesome vision. Unless anyone has got any other ideas that you can *practically* make into fruition, and not just sit here and spout fancy words about how good this or that would be, i don't see what we're waiting for. Tudy should put a committee together and outline a plan for making the best monthly newcomer tournament in the e-sport world. And it doesn't even need any cash prize in it. People new to e-sport are more than happy to simply experience the fun of competition and getting their plays streamed to hundreds of people watching.
I think a newcomer tournament every months is too much. At first we needed more than a months to plan this stuff correctly and also if we do it every months it's not that special anymore. I would go for a newcomer tournament between the NSL seasons which would be like twice a year. This would also give more time for more people to come into ns2 and gain interest in the competitive aspect. If we do it too often we might end up with only 3 teams participating and I think that's boring to watch. (I actually thought if we are lucky we get 6 or 7 teams to sign up for the first newcomer tournament)
Anyway, I agree on everything that has been said but that kind of tourney shouldn't be hold every months. Better to do so between each regular season as Mephilles pointed out.
Nevertheless, our current staff needs more active and volunteer players and so does competitive NS2 in its whole. People like Tudy help making the community bigger and growing. But it also requires time.
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
That's a very low skill ceiling for prem div comms. You should be able to find a whole lot of them by that standard. And if a premiere division exists that only needs comms of that caliber, that's a shitty premiere division. If you want to compete against prem comms that I know of, you need a LOT more than that.
wut, someone actually missed my jiriki-imitating ranting about your positioning?
WHO IS THAT SPASTIC SKULK IN TOPO
:)
but ontopic, yup the lack of commanders was already a problem in NS1, but got worse in NS2 when you can't even field play on alien side. but aioros' suggestion is unthinkable with UWE/CDT, it's way too late for that (like since beta). so the only option you have is keep fresh blood coming in (newcomer tournaments are nice) and BE NICE to them, especially your commanders. since hell, it's a damn frustrating job sometimes and not always feels like a game you wanna spend your hobby time on. just watch casual pub play, last time i played (think 6 months ago) i wanted to play a quick pub game and - like so often - waited 20 mins before game starts (no one wants to command) for a 5 min spawncamp victory. so even when the game design is a bit unfortunate regarding commanding, try to fix it by community efforts. which means, treat a comm carefully and highly respected even when he just recylced his obs instead of beaconing ;)
but it takes far more than that to keep it fresh. ENSL always lacked motivated people to organize stuff, you never had more than, say, 2-5 people actually doing something while 200-500 bitched at them. but that's as tudy said, in 1000 fresh people you recruit there might be 1 caster and 1 organizing talent willing to spend all his free time on working for the community. and out of 10 active organizers you might find 2-3 who are no self-loving arrogant idiots who just like the idea on having "power". but you need all working bitches you can get to always maintain the image to outsiders "hey this is an active well-run thing and looks nice" - it should promise an environment that seems growing, not shrinking. because, well, new people don't jump on ships that seem to sink. in that case there is also some truth in tudy's statement that you destroy your own environment if you keep calling it dead. it's less about taking a fact into consideration, since after the 123th time you read "NS is dead" i think you got the message already. try the opposite for a change, even if it's sometimes a blatant lie, who cares, keep the image as you want it. but it often seems that everyone is rather happy with a dead game they liked and being able to say "HAH! i called it 3 years ago that this will happen, i was right".
this is not politics where i wouldn't follow socrates saying that the state is the only instution who should be allowed to lie - this is goddamn marketing. and in marketing, you stretch the truth as best as you can. get your newbies, get as many as possible, and provide them an environment which let's them APPEAR that NS2/ENSL is a growing thing, not a sunk ship with the remaining captains discussing on when to release the last boat.
nceromanting threads while looking back on gud old times is a nice hobby :)
@blind: I don't know why, but I really miss you. I am glad you are still lurking around from time to time. Maybe you would like to do one-time co-cast with me, just for the hell of it?
I forgot what I wanted to say on the topic.
I think i would look really stupid on co-casting since I am heavily out of touch by now. But I could troll your twitch chat if you like.
greetings from narnia ;)
I had an idea a moment ago, not sure if its even good or not [its REALLY late here atm] the idea is around the alien comm situation.
I propose a slight change in the way hives and "hive research" works... to hopefully offer the opportunity for comms to play more like the old Alien comm could [pre biomass]
Biomass and lifeform abilities progress as the hives mature [meaning you no longer have to research lifeform abilities or biomass, they occur automatically based on hive maturity.] more RTs = faster maturing.
Maybe have lifeform abilities occur based on the type of hive you have upgraded to as well. e.g shift gives metabolize [standard or advanced based on how many hives] and bilebomb.
Crag gives metabolize [again, if first hive, metabolize, if second it gives advanced] leap and charge. etc [note this would need serious balancing and testing i'm aware that as I wrote it hives would be totally unbalanced.]
Add that to tudys idea of having drifter abilities based off of hive types.
This should allow the option of being in or out of the hive based on comms preference in theory, Would this make alien commanding more interesting for people? I have no clue, i'm tired!
I know what I wanted to add. About alien comm. I am not a commander myself, but isn't it a case that in comp mod you can already jump out, be field player and gather pres? You can even switch around in hive, like you spawn, drop something get out and continue on then someone else jumps in and drops and so on and on. I wouldn't want to completely split the game from vanilla and I think how it is now, it gives khamms and option. I mean, if you change it and take away the khamm and make him field player that's that option gone. I think it works like it is now. Khamms, just get out and start skulking. Khammander lerk!
Yes Simba, no one can have a legitimate grievance with NS2 as to do so is just because of either a lack of understanding of alien commander or a pining for ns1. So sick of this "it's fine" argument that I see all the time.
Why don't we just roll back to release balance and have 5 minute onos because there were people like you proclaiming "it's fine".
A few of us have been around the block a few times and we aren't fooled by this retarded argument.
