Hi everyone

As some of you know there will soon be some changes made to the vanilla ns2 soon that does not fit competitive play, such as the new EXO changes and more beginner friendly upgrades like redemption being added again to ns2. After some discussions with Rantology we decided it would be a good idea to start work on the comp mod again make it the official NSL mod. We want to use this season as a testing ground to for changes that will better improve the game in the future, hopefully bringing part of the changes to vanilla ns2 afterwards.

Dragon agreed to join me on this project and both of us will be leading the way once again with Rant on the sidelines. We have decided to bring out the first update on Friday next week so everyone has some time to play their official matches on the current patch if they want to, that date is final. The reason why we won't change the date is because nothing will ever get done if we don't. I simply ask you for the trust that you had in us when we worked in making comp mod in the past and remember how well it has played out until now.


Here are the changes we have in mind for the first iteration of the new NSL mod:

-Increase resource flow speed by from 1 res every 6 second to 1 res every 4 second, adjust cost of everything accordingly (increased by x1.5). This goes for both pres and tres.

-Increase medpack cost to 2tres. (Basically making it 1.5 tres)

-Slight increase in Skulk walk speed and base speed

-Remove marine sprint and slight increase in marine base speed

-Remove powernodes

-Increased Fade HP

-Removed exos

-Bilebomb is now a bio 2 upgrade

-Moved nano armor upgrade to proto lab and it now works like ns1 heavy armor. Marines can buy it in the proto lab after it has been upgraded giving them +100 armor.


*The increase in resource flow is to give us more freedom to adjust the cost of things in the game - the first one being the increased medpack cost.

*The increased base speed on both skulks and marines will make engagements more skillfull and fun. Instead of marines being bricks that barely can dodge and depend on medpacks to survive - they will be able to avoid skulks effectively with good movement. The increased marine speed will also allow them to dodge fade better to counteract with their hp buff.

*Powernodes and exos are just stupid and deserve to be removed

*We want to see what happens with nano armor, it should not change the gameplay too much as it’s such a late game upgrade. After we see how the new gameplay plays out we will work on modifying and adding new tech paths in the early/mid game for both teams.

*The rest is pretty much self explanatory.

Note we will have more detailed numbers in coming days after some testing.


Feel free to leave some input. All rage will be ignored and we will only listen to good and solid arguments.

2 things.

1. I genuinely hope this happens, because yay for change.

2. well... I don't think I need to explain this one tbh... have a nice "day"

These changes sound great. Not sure how the overall balance will play out but nothing seems like a dealbreaker. I hope the exo removal is only temporary until vanilla gameplay can be worked out. Marines do need more useful endgame tech.

I like these ideas of improvement so far. But keep in mind, that if you are going to remove powernodes, marines will be capping RT's much faster. Extending building time for RT's would settle it though.

Also there are negative aspects by having significant differences to vanilla:

(1) It might be harder to convince players to try out the competitive scene.

(2) Competitive players might not find any motivation to play public anymore.

Not sure if radical changes, or cruel April Fool's joke

Seems like a lot of changes to be implemented quickly with power nodes being a huge one that would need a lot of plans behind it. Also the post happens to be made on april 1st, so yea. If this all did happen someday...

I do like most of the ideas except I'm not sure about the increase for marine and skulk speed. That would need a lot of testing, but maybe it would work better.

Heavy armor and removal of powernodes.

Inb4 frozen needs to change his pants.

april fool?

-Increase medpack cost to 2tres. (Basically making it 1.5 tres)

any plans to remove medpack pickup cooldown?

-Slight increase in Skulk walk speed and base speed

-Remove marine sprint and slight increase in marine base speed

-Remove powernodes

nice nice nice

-Increased Fade HP

how much hp are we talkin?

-Removed exos

-Moved nano armor upgrade to proto lab and it now works like ns1 heavy armor. Marines can buy it in the proto lab after it has been upgraded giving them +100 armor.

-Bilebomb is now a bio 2 upgrade

nice nice nice

Tussio's right. This sounds fantistic. Not a word of it can be easily construed as true or fools.

If it's real though I need a team

edit: wow Tussio, I'm literally honored that was your first post.

Okay its now officially not april 1st anymore (EU-BIAS)... is this a troll or are we actually going to see some big changes coming?

Omg why so many changes at once? It's a wrong way to make balance in the game if you going to change 30% of game's mechanics every update. Better to do more small updates and scrutinize their impact on the gameplay (and reset them if it sux).
Just imo.

CRaZyCAT says

Omg why so many changes at once? It's a wrong way to make balance in the game if you going to change 30% of game's mechanics every update. Better to do more small updates and scrutinize their impact on the gameplay (and reset them if it sux).
Just imo.

That sounds terrible and boring

Can we please get some info as to whether this was an april fool or not... My guess is it was, but so much in this post has been discussed in a serious manner in the past it is potentially true as well.

Regardless if any of this happens....I agree with frozen that more than 1 change should be made at a time so we can see how it's going to play out with possible new meta. If it's just one little change and we all have to play test everything, then we end up with negativity and we never see any changes. Might as well make a few good changes at a time and then we all have to adapt. Can still be balanced from that, but at least you're balancing from a new way to play and not from the original one.

Having a new meta sprung onto everyone at the start is going to lead to a very fun evolving season of NS2. With sweeping changes you get to see teams adapt and think of new interesting ways to win.

Making all the changes at once is a horrible idea, chances are the game will end up imbalanced as hell and then it'll be nearly impossible to tell which changes were good for the game/balance and which weren't.

I agree that it's better to go with small updates, maybe not ONE change at a time, group up the changes that go together and then update the game, but just dumping a bunch of changes into the game that aren't even related to each other just seems like it'll create a huge cluster fuck and nothing else.

Making all these changes in one go and hoping it'll be balanced just seems foolish to me.

april fooled

Make it happen. It sounds really interesting,

its a joke


ha ha ha