Dear community,
The purpose of this thread is to come up with a list of changes/fixes/additions to NS2 that we, the casting and competitive NS2 communities, feel UWE needs to work on before Wasabi's NS World Championship tournament in the early part of 2014. What makes other games successful as competitive games, and how does NS2 differ?
With specific focus on the most important fixes to the game, UWE should be able to attain the following goals:
Why not just let UWE get on with it?
Ultimately, this is an opportunity for us to highlight what we as comp players feel is the most important set of issues. This is a means for us to communicate those ideas back to UWE in one place, and also provides a single platform for discussion between UWE and their gaming community regarding these issues.
So here is the list.
It is a work in progress and I need your help to populate, curate and prioritise it. I will update this through discussion in this thread, or alternatively feel free to PM me.
Any suggestions about the contents, viability, format etc welcome, just please keep this civil and constructive.
Edit reordered and updated.
Edit2 to reflect update b251
The purpose of this thread is to come up with a list of changes/fixes/additions to NS2 that we, the casting and competitive NS2 communities, feel UWE needs to work on before Wasabi's NS World Championship tournament in the early part of 2014. What makes other games successful as competitive games, and how does NS2 differ?
With specific focus on the most important fixes to the game, UWE should be able to attain the following goals:
- stronger competitive community worldwide - more clans, better retention of comp players
- more prominent casting of games - through better interface, and with more games happening as a result of a stronger community
- better public play experience (perhaps through matchmaking and skill-matching teams)
- higher concurrent player counts
- better player retention
Why not just let UWE get on with it?
Ultimately, this is an opportunity for us to highlight what we as comp players feel is the most important set of issues. This is a means for us to communicate those ideas back to UWE in one place, and also provides a single platform for discussion between UWE and their gaming community regarding these issues.
So here is the list.
- Client performance. Progress already has been made, and I'm sure this is a running feature of UWE discussions. Still need to run _nsl_ map versions so more progress welcome.
- Server performance. Took a blow recently compared to some older builds. Probably higher priority than client performance right now.
- Matchmaking. Hive is sort of running, and this is obviously being worked on...
- Net Code.
- Net performance in low ping environments can already be boosted significantly by tweaking the rates. Can more be done here for the wider public too?
- Client updaterate fixed at 20: flexibility to allow server admins to optimise values would be helpful
- Anti Cheat features. This has been raised by eg Gliss and others. More details needed from those better informed than me.
- Support for replays. Big task but would be extremely beneficial
- First Person spectate performance. Switching is still fairly slow; we could really use an HLTV-type client but I realise this is a very big ask to implement.
- ----Fixed below here----
- Collision code. - UPDATED, thank you!
- UI clutter. - UPDATED, thank you!
- Key configuration support. For commanders and players with different keyboard and language layouts. - UPDATED, thank you!
It is a work in progress and I need your help to populate, curate and prioritise it. I will update this through discussion in this thread, or alternatively feel free to PM me.
Any suggestions about the contents, viability, format etc welcome, just please keep this civil and constructive.
Edit reordered and updated.
Edit2 to reflect update b251