oh god help us we agree

News Flash: Guess who owns PK development? That's right (CPL) CPL has full control of PK's development. Anything they want will go into the game.


Here is why NS Is not CPL worthy (dont quote me)
1.) HLTV is not working nor ready to demonstrate the full experience of natural selection. Watching the NFL through one cameraman with no tripod on the field is not fun. You miss 80% of the game.
2.) Look how many people play ns. We have 34 teams in CAL. We have barely a 5th of the number of servers and players of DoD at any given time. CAL is considered the qualifiers for CPL. CPL is HUGE. Why would they make a multimillion dollar investment on a game that has 12 teams that even know how to play the game to a more skilled level? FFS we can't even support a invite division with the number of teams that come and go every season.
3.) Money Money Money. CS, CoD, PK are all backed by sponsors. Huge companies put money in so that people play those games and show off what their hardware can do. Does NS have a sponsor? Does NS have some badical graphics engine or pretty lights to show people? No. This is how CAL/CPL sees ns right now. Until ns:s comes out NS has NO potential for growth, NO potential for any sort of revenue for their company, and NO potential for any publicity. People will be watching TEAM 3D take on the other big clan on cs. Not 2 no name ns clans screaming at each other about ping and scripts.
4.) Does this league and this community look like anything to be taken seriously?

For those who read what I just posted.There are ways to get CAL to recognize NS. Get teams into CAL. Stop being jerks to those new teams and support them. If someone asks some retarded **** question answer it. If someone is watching HLTV and asks a question, take it upon yourself to answer him. WHEN, yes WHEN NS goes to My Games there will be a HUGE amount of people who will download the game and give it a shot. Lets hope we can drag a bunch of them into competitive NS. We dont need 18519851985 more level 50 combat servers.

will happen long before this,

Ever wonder if there's a connection between the two?

I don't believe thats true either to an extent, however I know you'd never admit it, but this community does have a HUGE fissure between the normal ns'er and a clan player. Generally all the insults and assholishness I encounter I ignore. I've been playing this game since 02, and in a clan for neaarly 2 years, I've been, and still continue to be, insulted regardless of skill level, its just a fact of life in cal-ns and if you take the internet too seriously, yeah its going to make you quit and forget it.


Honestly, about the dev's not caring about NS? Utter crap, if they didn't care they wouldn't spend the time on the game, without pay. What IS true in my opinion is the devs are seriously disconnected from the clan scene. Badly. Having a few PTs and devs on cal teams dosen't mean you suddenly are able to balance for the highest common denominator.



An example of the current balance scheme for ns is the new hand grenades. 2 per Marine, 5 marines in a cal match. 10 res to upgrade. So basically each nade costs 1 res for the first wave, after that its free. 10 Grenades bring a hive down to 1/3. Toss in another 20 res in shotguns (30 res total spent) And you have hive down. In pubs this will most likely never happen, but I foresee many new strats surrounding the VERY generous grenades.

I truely think the veterans program should be brought back circa 1.04. 1 Person from each of the top 10 cal teams.


edit: I also want to add that the hypocrisy in NS right now should really be considered, I mean, there's a scripting forum, but a cvar mp_blockscripts. If you want NS to thrive, get rid of that garbage, find a way to stop rate abuse/marcos/_special. Include a 3 jump in the game like Science and Industry did.

I garuentee you that the seperation between sub-communities would dissolve

Do you mean by this, the top tier clans abuse lower clans and public?

Its odd that this isn't mirrored in europe exactly. Usually we who play in the highest division, are generally good guys, its when we go to the lower divisions, and to some extent even division 2, that the bad attitude players appear, the players that by some reason, believe themselves to be better than everyone, unfortunately, for some reason they think this means that the word noob, becomes the largest and most devistating insult they can ever throw at someone.

If you look at our league table last season, the 6 teams in division 1: Knife, <3, levitacus, boonsquad, ownage and netpoint, I can name 3 players from these teams who comes under the category of "assholishness" during play, clan or pub. We are assumed to all be like that, sure, but we aren't. Promise.

Then missing out division 2, 3 and 4, we look at division 5 and 6, both of these divisions players are all great people, and if I ever decide to leave a "top" tier clan, then one of these is probably what I'd try out to play in.

Looking in the middle, no so much division 2, but definately 3 and 4, The irony of division 3 being the team that topped that table isn't this way at all, they play to play, not to win, and they always do well in their games. Has the majority of players who fall under your category communist, the players who as I said before, aren't quite cut out for equal level play, and call everyone noob, more irony is the clan that would have been relegated from division 4, if 2 of that divisions clans hadn't folded, is the worst case of this I have witnessed in Europe.

Edit - This doesn't in any way cover the abuse that we recieve on public, every ounce of our experience means nothing to them at all, just today, someone was swearing and cursing at me, because I killed him at horse shoe -We all know where skulks are likely to hide at horse shoe- I came down the ramp, glanced left saw him, killed him. Of course this automatically means I have ESP or whatever he said, and gives him the right to abuse me.

This happens all the time, but being who we are, we just ignore it completely. You can't play Natural Selection without having the ability to ignore people these days, otherwise you just drag yourself through the same gutter they dragged themselves through.

If by abuse, you mean insult then yes. Actually, thats too much of a generalization, of all 13 teams in cal-ns delta, I can only think of 5-6 people who have habitual e-p33n issues.

Its good to hear that its not a majority, I have and still do, believe that the highest level clans should need to be an example for the rest, it is after all their HLTV that will be being viewed by more people, and to some extent people look up to them.

So is it like here, and its the... "wannabe" (for need of a better word please =/) players that act the most like this?

I am quoting this here as I think that the competitive players just don't mean "You don't understand competitive play", but more "You don't understand what we will try to do, to keep this community together"

I personally believe you have a very valid point.

I agree, it needs to come to a point where only a players experience and ability, make him stand out from the rest.

I agree we need to fix it, but its just not that easy, for every step we can make, the idiots who belittle and attack the public players will cause 5 steps backwards.

The only way I can think for getting this to not happen at all, would be a mutual agreement from all the higher up clans on all the continents, to keep these people out of the community. Maybe have leagues enforce a rule, that offers the offenders a nice 6 month suspention, WE need to remove the antagonists from the clans, however skilled or not they are shouldn't matter. And even although it removes another person from the community, so be it?

We are at a stage now with NS that soon there will be a huge influx of players, I am 90% confident of that, these people are reason enough to get the idiots out of the clans, if they make their own clan, fine, just don't play them. They will soon get bored.

Go for passive-aggressive exile.

amen to that

Just how can we go about things then?

How can we fix things? There isn't long to go before we get another push of impressionable new players, and by then, it would be a damn sight harder to make right any wrongs.

edit - I would like to know, as we can start pretty much right away, all it'll take is conversations with clan leaders, and we can sort it.

And I would like a solution to the divide that stops lower division clans from wanting to play and learn from higher division clans. I've tried talking it out with them, even giving them help.

1. I was under the impression that things like revamping the onos were a lack of coding time. Is this inaccurate?

2. The CAL preseason comes rarely enough that I bet it would be feasible to polish things up temporarily. You'd have to rethink the development processes a little bit, but maybe this is a good thing? You'd have regular milestones to meet for fixing bugs. This would also help if the development model tended towards smaller more regular patches. You could implement 1~2 features, fix the bugs, push it out.

I misunderstood your first question, I somehow didn't read the word "client side".

As for the second one; We've used a pretty tight development process for 3.1, and I am not so sure it is possible to do it even tighter without hitting some really tight bottlenecks for QA and build distribution. I know it sounds like a good idea, but it could be very hard to pull off since all of us working on this is not co-located neither in time nor geographically.

Not saying it'd be impossible, but I'm not sure that's the best way to go.

not that you really needed me to voice my opinion about massively game altering mods again...

Right now in competitive ns there is no real reason to be one of the best teams... you get nothing (besides sponsorship, but nothing too great)

The thing with extralevels, is that Depot made it FUN...not balanced or anything relating to competetive play whatsoever. I enjoy it from time to time just when im screwing around, but its on too many servers and because it is so fun, many ppl just keep going back to play that, and most servers running extralevels is combat only, so all these people are getting no ns experience and aren't REALLY learning how to play the game.

I'm not against extralevels, im against how many servers run it and how its run.

I think it should not be possible to make combat only servers!

What are the chances that a person who plays only 50-level Combat is going to move on to NS, let alone competitive NS? You cannot deny that it has an effect.

That said, we cannot blame the mod's creators or the admins that run it for creating and running a game that many people like to play. We can only try to make the other options more attractive. And that is what Zephor was asking us to do.

Its due to the bad name we get from the mid level clans. Something I want to fix.

See my last post if you missed it...

it's only "fun" because everyone besides the one cal player there is terrible at it.

one good player throws the balance to ****

Please joee, add to the stereotype they have of us more.

Why blatantly attack him for airing his concerns or views?

"dumbing the game down" won't make it more streamlined, unless by steamlined you mean easier for 6 year olds (or people with equivalent brain functions to 6 year olds) to play without having to ask mommy to help them. Blizzard has very successful RTS games that are anything but simple, yet once people understand the mechanics, they are fairly easy to play, yet impossible to master. NS has the problem of having an oft-clunky interface system that nowhere comes close to the clean, mostly bugless interface of more successful games (Compare the commander interface to the SC/BW or WC3/TFT GUI). There are bug or balance issues that quite frankly would have been fixed earlier by a company that makes money off the product. One expects too much from the development team if they expect NS to emulate the quality of professional, made for money games that compete in the CPL.

The game concept is too complex for Johnny FPSer to pick up and play, yet not readily noticed by the people who one should want playing the game. I've always thought the target audience for a game like NS should be hardcore RTSers, because they'll make some of the best players. Throw in people with great FPS skills and you have a competitive team in the making. It's not the game complexity that will make it more popular, changing the target audience from mainly FPS players to RTS players will make it more popular.

Actually I LOVE this suggestion. When NS goes to My Games, why not ask gamespy, gamespot, bluesnews, and IGN do a review on the 'finished' game. It will get A LOT of publicity. FREE GAME THAT IS FUN OMGOMGOM DOWNLOADL DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD. I think the game is ready for a surge of 80000 players, I'm not sure the community is ready to accept them though.


If you're whining about how there is no link between competitive players and devs why not PM some of the competitive players that are PTs or Devs? If you're not coming off as completely retarded they will answer your question. Whining in a public forum to other members wont get a lot done but if you really have a serious question and you really put some thought in it, then I for one will at least do my part and help you get that idea known to the devs. Whether you know it or not, the I&S forums is actually the best place to address your balance changes.

because nobody really even brought up whatever dumb plugins combat servers use

really i could care less if they use them or not but he's trying to play victim

A lot fewer than tried it when it first came out.