they'll matter when you get bant! LULZ

Inactive clans and forfeits always spoiled it for me. Kinda hard to sort out.

We should work on getting ENSL to interface with NS2 far better.

Particularity streaming from a web interface with a lot of features like;
- Accessing brackets and tables from the stream,
- Chat,
- Good control of audio options for streamer
- Clear interface overlay for scoring etc.
- Live feed of predictions people are making (In the form of a percentage bar, split for predicted team win percentages. )

Also ingame overlays for IRC (if we still use it) and the ENSL sites features such as gather notifications.

Obviously this will take a while to develop so I'd best learn lua pronto.

Most important for me:

- Lots of players. I silent rage if I have to wait 20+ mins for a game to start. As nL can testify. <3 C-S where it's "2 mins or leave"

and/or

- 5v5 instead of 6v6. Quicker to get games, don't need 10 player clans

That's my biggest gripe with NS1: if you wanted to play competitive you often had to dedicate entire evenings to play a single 4 map round. Despite there being only 50ish minutes of game time ;e

Okay, UWE can't do anything about the number of players, and there'd likely be an OUTRAGE if competitive went from 6v6 to 5v5.

I don't think there would be an outrage, it's just if you are going to have a commander, at some point it will become imbalanced in favour of aliens - 6v5? 5v4? 4v3? and then there's the res situation. Depends on how much aliens have to build I guess??


And I'm sorry jimbo, it wasn't SILENT

I haven't watched how UWE failed their game advertisement but at least ENSL failed theirs. Its almost impossible to get into competitive, unless your scouted etc. Heck, I don't think many pub players even know ENSL exists. Now (very late) there is that banner where you can actually see ensl there which is good, but we have never really had any popular public server neither we have presented any high quality exhibition matches which would be advertised in public.

I like your point vartija, advertising has been very weak. It's surprising how little coverage the NS site gave to the ENSL, considering it's the most matured league that NS has ever had by quite a long way!

Public servers were tried but there were never regular pubbers to fill them up, usually took an admin spamming friends to get the ball rolling and after 2 weeks of that, most people gave up.

I always wished there was a more formal and efficient way to find PCWs, ns.search used to be great for that but then IRC died down and the PCW system on this site is kinda limited. Not that it makes any difference now as there's only half a clan left.

I don't know what happened, but at some point clans stopped recruiting players from public. During 1.04-2.01 at least in Finnish scene, low level and middle level clans constantly recruited players from public. I should know, in my first clan almost every player was recruited from public. Hell, I even recruited tmk from public, when I was Coldspell's clan leader. Normally, high level clans don't have to recruit players from public, so the responsibly of recruiting from public falls to low level clans. When did low level teams clan leaders get lazy?

If I remember correctly, there wasn't public ENSL server at first seasons of ENSL. Back then there would have been more than enough players to keep it full 24/7.

I set up a server called 3hives during my first time admining ENSL, it had 2 adverts, one for playzen and the other for ENSL.

.. during it's second month of life, playzen decided the server's community weren't integrating enough with the rest of playzen so they pulled the plug.

I think one of BOB_SLAYER's ENSL servers was public? I can't remember.

It was full many times but never caught on. :(

I remember loads of other competitive linked public servers were attempted, most never even started and the ones that did, faily cataclysmic-ally.

Urr, loads of low level clans recruited from public, VCS and rawR were both made from like 90% public players along with loads of other clans doing the same. The mid level clans always aimed for better players and so I guess they took competitive experience as a set requirement and never bothered trialling pubbers.

We've tried he public server later too. Without team balancing plugins, clan players will just stack and then others will leave.

As for advertizement, I know a lot of public community people now and I'm sure we'll share banners and whatnot. Back then the co-operation was practically non-existent.

lol cooperation; I remember trying to set up a link between the main popular servers of the time so that if one was full, it would redirect you to the other one and sharing advertising, icons and things like that.

Most communities were all for it other than yo-clan, cheezy practically told me that YO-clan was the only thing in NS and refused to even consider working with any other communities... nice huh?

Meh recruiting from publics always a risk but definately one worth taking. I've made loads of farm teams during my day and it's nice to see a few players have stuck to it. I even remember pretty much convincing Danny and Zared to play comp and look at them now. [VH2] nublets gone "good" (okay dannys pretty bad still) and Danny's done more for this scene then 80% of the community.
Klawz is another that comes to mind.

However, ofc in 1.04-2.01 you will have pubbers being recruited. The scene was a) bigger and b) fresh - you constantly had a few new players coming into the scene. I mean pretty much after NS went to steam and entered 3.0x (combat mode) that's when the scene started declining.

Don't forget TECHNOROBOCOP gibbz

Gibbons

Klawz is another that comes to mind.

Gibbz is another fellow that comes to mind. Weren't you modding some extralevels before you knew about competitive?

Practically all players are public players before they go competitive.

'GibbZ'

I mean pretty much after NS went to steam and entered 3.0x (combat mode) that's when the scene started declining.

I agree with most of what you're saying, but in the interest of historical accuracy: Competitive NS actually peaked during 3.0b4-b5, fall 2004. In Europe, at least.

peaked in activity. not number of clans

I think the lower level clans stopped recruiting at some point when the community kept growing thinner due to the natural aging. It's difficult to motivate yourself to take new players if finding and organising a 0-4 overrun from some higher end team takes an hour or so. Good luck introducing people to the game that way. That probably kept diminishing the lower end scene and the whole thingy fed itself to death. I was a comp newbie on earliest ENSL seasons though, so I might fail to see some longer term transitions and outcomes.

Also, pubs grew more and more different from the comp play. Right now you can't specate players and 32 player meatgrinder gives you very little idea of whether a person is capable of playing one bit. I guess you could recruit from gathers now if you wanted to do so. The easier gather interface even seemed to attract some new names to the organised play, too bad there were hardly any teams recruiting.

Once the mid-high teams disappeared, the scene was always going to die.

I remember with config we had a chance to take some rounds against ownage, used to rock levi most of the time and once in a while even stole rounds from BM iirc?? Whenever we played knife we got rolled though.

Once the top teams could roll pretty much anyone we were fucked.

'jiriki'

Gibbz is another fellow that comes to mind. Weren't you letting your brother speedhack before you knew about competitive?

Practically all players are public players before they go competitive.

OH NO YOU DI'UNT

i was competitive straight a way in ns ; PPPP

Well I dunno. I ran a modded server (completely retarded so many plugins) and had my own community clan. But I was oblivious to comp. play. As soon as I found out you could actually play each other in organised games I tried to get my community involved. Some accepted and others didn't. It was all a good laugh.

I remember playing one of our first games against config, and captscum[uk] (csm) was saying "they must be really good aimers, because they keep crouching so they obviously play cs". Thinking back at this now, it's quite funny.

Still, I think there have been lots of efforts to get players into comp play personally. But yeah in NS2, I hope ensl can do more. Maybe even run some public servers would be a great start! Let's hope the game's good.

oh no George, not


THE TERRIBLE GORGES?!

in ns2, just run 1 public server, and every 5 minutes or so have some message appear on the screen (like it does on most pub servers)

have it say something like "join gathers at ensl.org for a diffrent experience" or something.

We've had public servers before. The issue competitive players will stack and just make a lot of boring games and people will leave. We've had a public server before. You can compensate with ABLE-sized servers but not completely.

One solution is to implement a team-balancing plugin.

Admins are a better solution.

Warservers had 2 almost permanently full servers with the likes of FSA, bP, [eH], .torment., Fek, LoG, .BM, VETS, comm^ etc playing all the time and the admins knew how to keep teams reasonably balanced.

I don't think so.

Balancing teams is a mechanical task. A plugin will be much equal and rational than any human would be. I don't manually balance gathers either. Actually manually balancing gathers fucks up more than it fixes and has caused some major whine which is why I don't do it anymore. Just ask frG how he likes when I try to fix the teams. ;)

Besides, clanners always have kind of group attitude. When a player from a clan is banned or punished, others will arrive to defend their mate. It has happened so many times in ENSL. To control such whine, you'd have to ban the whiners aswell and then soon you have a very split-up community.

Basically balancing teams means you have some set of criteria that you apply to all players when they choose teams. Trust me, it'll be easier to improve a plugin rather than moderate all the flaming and whining of people and try to keep a bunch of admins to have same criteria. It'll never be the same. One admin's good player is another admin's bad player, which is just a recipe for disaster.

Even in ENSL, a lot of admin decisions have not been equal because admins will have different kind of judgement. Before plugin for example had time limit, some admins just gave other team 30mins and some admins 5mins. And this is with simple task of limiting time. That's why you want to automate a lot of such administration.

Besides I think back in torment day the skill gap was much lower than it was today and skill-level was a lot less than it was around later in Knife era.

Seriously though, if we have the server capacity to run a public server in NS2, I'll gladly let you admin the server and see what happens.

I think stacking is more late-ns phenomenon. If rounds are too easy, you don't learn anything anyway. I have never understood idea of stacking anyway. Clans used to host public servers also. Fek's public server was probably the best Finnish public server, even if high skilled players used to play there.

No, jiriki. Plugins are easily abused. Man does way better intelligent job than machine. Its just the lack of manpower that limit that. I think wh2 or some other well known server had some balancing plugin like if you try to join team and the team is full it puts you to other team and no f4 possibility. You just wait until someone tries to join the full team and then join yourself. If that fails retry and repeat. But just out of curiosity, what kind of plugin were you planning?

I kind of find it funny to hear that kind of talk from the man who is always the first one to whine about imbalanced teams in gathers (unless not in worse team). You should know this better. :D

Plugins are easily abused? We already had this discussion in another thread about quantifying skill. With probability mathematics, it is possible. Besides nothing has to be perfect, plugins can always be improved. For example if we don't use KPD or probability mathematics, we could use gather rankings (how quick are you picked) aswell. There're lots of methods. If they predict your skill with 70% accuracy, we should have roughly 70% of games with relatively balanced teams.

vartija

I kind of find it funny to hear that kind of talk from the man who is always the first one to whine about imbalanced teams in gathers (unless not in worse team). You should know this better. :D

Whining is one thing but I don't support admin changing teams, and haven't done that in months exactly because I don't think humans can stay unbiased enough. I think machines do a better job. That's why we don't let referees referee their own team matches.

Look for example gathers use players to pick teams, this is a mechanical system that uses information from the players themselves but nevertheless its not the admins who make the teams. Think about all the drama if every 2nd gather admins would manually start fixing the teams. If you think plugins are bad, wait until you see that.

There was some drama some months ago when I saw people intentionally voting captains to stack teams in gathers so I did something about it, namely changed the captains manually and huge whine ensued. Part of this was pointless but part since I didn't really fix manually teams when they were equally fucked, just not intentionally (atleast it didn't look like it). But here's exactly the problem, when you start fixing one gather, you'll have slippery slope fixing a hundred other gathers where people are not happy about it. And when it goes to a verbal debate, it'll be as useful as every drama in ENSL matches. This is why I prefer plugins.

But seriously if you have no problem with this, go ahead I can give you admin rights if we host a server in NS2 and you can fix the stacking and see how fun it is. Go ahead, my pleasure.

'jiriki'

But seriously if you have no problem with this, go ahead I can give you admin rights if we host a server in NS2 and you can fix the stacking and see how fun it is. Go ahead, my pleasure.

First of all I steeply refuse! As always I evade responsibility and won't stop here. But I don't think its too pain in the ass to find proper moderators to run a server. You just need to find some active players who may have lots of free time and like to use your server. Machines can help but not really replace people (yet). Machines don't make mistakes, humans do. But who makes the machines? Even the fact that there is an admin/moderator on server gives a little feel of threat to users not to stack. Maybe the plugin could calculate some team balance thing to an admin and he could do changes if feeling like its needed. Also its not like fully balanced teams guarantee good games.

The plugin. You didn't really describe what you had in mind but personally I think I could live with something like first you let everyone join in any team they want (give players the change to tell what they want to do) and after that plugin would make adjustments if necessary. For some reason I think I have seen one like that in some ns server before. But then there's again what if player doesn't join a team. Also this could be seen unfair (I don't really like that word) to dedicated good players who have to switch team many times. I wouldn't leave this entirely to machine but if there's not admin available it could do the with as little changes as possible.

But basically you want to use some previously collected data to decide teams. You should take the scene size to account here. With big scene and lots of players getting data can get complicated. If its like that data should be collected fast (like 1 round kpd can give good fast result). But its not even close the best way to measure skill. Also abuse like falsifying test result by dying a lot on purpose or using other steam account should be considered. It can take a lot of effort to get working properly. You just need to patch things at the same pace as people invent new abuses.

The gathers. I'm not sure even now if that captain changing thing functions properly. I get the feeling you were testing that like fist time on live gather. Kinda shakes your trust to the system.

Was there really some whine about simply changing captains? Must have missed that. But as you said it doesn't seem like a really good solution to try to fix manually something that shouldn't be broken because you can't always be there. But on the other hand if there is someone who can fix it I don't see why he shouldn't do it if you see someone abusing the system. Actually you could say an admin have also responsibility to do it. Maybe he can ask the users (make vote) if this is what they really wanted.

Also here as well you should make voting (inputting user information) as easy and simple as possible. Maybe sort the users to order of how many times they have been a captain. Make them not jump up and down when you try to click the right name.

I really think you should consider making plugins to help people not replace them. Not too much at least.