Been playing NS since 1.03 in the early 2000's. Currently I have 700+ hours on NS2.
The player number keeps on dropping, it is no secret. It's becoming harder and harder to find a server to play on. The game used to have 7k players, then we stuck with 5k players for a good while, then 4k, 3k, etc...
These days it normally doesn't go over 1k players.
I hope we all agree that the more players the game has, the bigger the community is, the more mods, the more maps, more money for UWE, faster and bigger updates for the game and so on.
I love NS2, they can make 10000 changes to NS2, and I will still love it. The only thing I really hate about the game and what I think is really hurting the game are the frustrating games caused by imbalance. UWE can spend a life time adjusting the numbers in NS2 (flamethrower's damage, exo's armor, etc... -- like what they did in build 250 which I think was a MAJOR waste of time) and the game will still not be balanced. What causes the unbalanced rounds are the players. Put most of the skilled players on the same team and you got the recipe for a frustrating round which will ruin the gameplay and cause players to quit and uninstall NS2. It's those rounds when 1 team has a kill:death ratio of 5:1 and the other team has a 1:2.
I think UWE needs to put all of their energy to come up with a solution to this problem. Why bother create a Linux version of a game that almost nobody plays? Why bother bring a female marine to the game that almost nobody plays? Fix the major flaw of the game before working on everything else.
85% of the games I play are unbalanced due to "stacked teams". But I keep playing just for the 15% of the rounds that are extremely fun and exciting. Bad news though... most people aren't willing to stick around for the 15%, which I believe explains the low player count.
Solution? there should be a global database that will keep track of player's K:D ratio. And server admins should have the option to enable an "balanced teams" on their server which will ensure that both teams have an equal average K:D ratio. I believe this is the best way to keep the teams balanced.
Anyway, I think that's the reason NS2 is slowly dying and hopefully UWE will come up with something to fix the flaw.
What do you think is the reason, and what does UWE have to do in order to restore the game and bring more players to the game?
The player number keeps on dropping, it is no secret. It's becoming harder and harder to find a server to play on. The game used to have 7k players, then we stuck with 5k players for a good while, then 4k, 3k, etc...
These days it normally doesn't go over 1k players.
I hope we all agree that the more players the game has, the bigger the community is, the more mods, the more maps, more money for UWE, faster and bigger updates for the game and so on.
I love NS2, they can make 10000 changes to NS2, and I will still love it. The only thing I really hate about the game and what I think is really hurting the game are the frustrating games caused by imbalance. UWE can spend a life time adjusting the numbers in NS2 (flamethrower's damage, exo's armor, etc... -- like what they did in build 250 which I think was a MAJOR waste of time) and the game will still not be balanced. What causes the unbalanced rounds are the players. Put most of the skilled players on the same team and you got the recipe for a frustrating round which will ruin the gameplay and cause players to quit and uninstall NS2. It's those rounds when 1 team has a kill:death ratio of 5:1 and the other team has a 1:2.
I think UWE needs to put all of their energy to come up with a solution to this problem. Why bother create a Linux version of a game that almost nobody plays? Why bother bring a female marine to the game that almost nobody plays? Fix the major flaw of the game before working on everything else.
85% of the games I play are unbalanced due to "stacked teams". But I keep playing just for the 15% of the rounds that are extremely fun and exciting. Bad news though... most people aren't willing to stick around for the 15%, which I believe explains the low player count.
Solution? there should be a global database that will keep track of player's K:D ratio. And server admins should have the option to enable an "balanced teams" on their server which will ensure that both teams have an equal average K:D ratio. I believe this is the best way to keep the teams balanced.
Anyway, I think that's the reason NS2 is slowly dying and hopefully UWE will come up with something to fix the flaw.
What do you think is the reason, and what does UWE have to do in order to restore the game and bring more players to the game?