The idea of this is to get some input from as many different competetive players / league admins / league organisers etc as possible.

Currently in development, and very close to public release, is a new community aimed directly at the competetive NS scene. The 'features' of this community will (hopefully!) allow it to act as the central focus point for competetive discussion and organisation. The project concept has had a lot of very positive input and feedback ('beta' versions are being tried and tested at the moment) from various people (Nemesis Zero, Puzl, Zunni ... to name but a few), but there is a key group missing so far; YOU!

So, what I'd like to know - from the persective of an active clan leader / play, or a league admin / league organiser, pickup channel owner, scrim-finding channel owner, and all the other areas involved in the competitive scene; what features/functions would you like to see available to you...

I'm reluctant to give examples of what we have as it's all going to be a nice big suprise when it's done - so give me things off the top of your head.
Previous suggestions include a way for clans that don't own their own server to have a way of booking a 'public' server that any clans can borrow for a set period of time. (This will be appearing in a channel on gamesurge very shortly, if it's not there already! Just finished writing the bot script for it!).
An obvious feature would be for well structured forums that allow open discussion about ALL areas of competetive play - while I strongly support the use of the official NS forums, there are some thing thats (quite reasonably) they don't allow the discussion of - such as exploits - while I don't support exploiting, it is a factor of competetive play that a lot of people want to know more about.

One significant advantage of this project/community will be that it'll allow the competetive scene to 'unite' - there was in the recent past issues and discussions over the fact that the clans were't involved in the testing of new version of NS - one of the points commonly raised was 'who should be doing it?' - the competetive scene has no 'leaders' - only people with louder voices... this community will allow the entire competetive scene across the world to put forward a united point to the devs - and when you have several thousand people saying the same thing, people will likely take a lot of notice!

Thats about it really - so your input please! If you know any one who might have any valid points to raise with regards to this, send them this way!

Launch date is coming up very soon, so the quicker the input comes in, the more likely the features will be added before we go public.

Thanks in advance for your time,
- napi

By the looks of what you're doing, we'll need an overhyped vagueness decoder for sure.

we do a server lending on quakenet with Gamingorb channel, its very popular and helps clans out lots, even tho they have personal problems with the servers performance they still use it. Anything like this on a larger scale is very good!

pcw request, the Euro scene would be very beneficial from some sort of IRC bot broadcasting pcw requests to clan channels when possible, it was attempted before on quakenet but i dont think the bot designer ever got permission to use the bots for broadcasting.

recruitment. in europe there is only 2 places that people advertise recruiting. the topic of naturalselection and ns.search. a better place for clans & players to avertise recruitment would be a good thing.

europe lacks commanders, dunno how u can fix this but there are hardly any new commanders coming through.

lower level clans dont get much oportunity for pcw's from what ive seen as most of the time the clans looking are higher level. meaning not many clans are improving & staying active.

testing for the new versions should involve more competative players and possibly full clans. This was not something that went down too well in the past so im told but i think thats just because clans and CL's wernt interviewed. There will always be people applying who shouldnt get the oportunity despite whether they are in a clan or not, you NEED to filter them.

Together with server booking, allow clans to get a HLTV for their match. And maybe add a HLTV agenda, something where people can see upcoming or current HLTVs. Lack of HLTV IPs' one of the usual people complaints.

there always seems to be a shortage of good comms.

I have an hltv that can be set up for this, and may be able to get us sponsored with more if this goes through! Thanks to napi for coding the bot!

So far I believe we have 3 east servers(should be good for the euro teams!), and 1 central

I think that there isn't enough draw for new clans in the scrim scene. They try scrimming one night and get pm'ed by Obs or Terror or cX or whoever else, and we all know how that goes, its very discouraging.

I think that some way to organize a scrim scene where clans can play clans of similar skill at least SOME OF THE TIME, would help a lot in promoting clan activity. Maybe if you were running a scrim channel and you had a requirement that each clan post thier rank in their ads or something. That way, new clans will know who they are starting a scrim with.

Something to keep them from getting raped and never coming back.

Using IRC to encourage new players is like trying to seduce a shy virgin with a gas mask and a bull whip.

As a method of facilitating communication and gaming, IRC sucks. You're asking someone to learn to use a new application and set of commands just to play a computer game.

There's a reason why Blizzard is successful. It's called Battlenet.

I'll stop now, before I go into a lengthy rant about brand management and marketing.

They way I've always seen it is IRC is a good idiot filter. It's too difficult to set up for people to use it in an annoying or useless manner. It is in fact the perfect medium to communicate, mainly due to it's near instantaneous speed, whereas forums usually have at least a several minute, if not hour/day, lagtime. It simply requires more than a simple point and click to get started with.

I think the manual is a good idea. I also think things like #nslearn and farm teams are a good idea.

If the delta clans have the time, why don't they reach out and help give back to the community. I mean hey, there's CO2, refract, was CNS. We need more things like this.

Also the ranking thing in your scrim posts might not be a bad idea. Like in CAL-CS there's o,im,m,p,i . Clans know what kind of scrim to ask for. But there's only one problem we only have 2 divisions. So I'm not sure how that would work out.

People who have lives or lack the technical skills to learn irc are probably not the types to successfully clan.

Also lol battlenet successful lol

irc breeds idiocy

Real men use IRC, meh.