On March 04 2013 11:03 Durak wrote: I've played 150 hours and I'm pretty sure I've never played a hacker.
I've played over 200 hours. I've played against a single obvious hacker. The rest of the guys who would be claimed during matches "OMG HE HAX GUYS WHAT THE DUCK WHY, THIS GUY NEEDS TO GET BANNED" are active clanners who scrim all the time. You can't get away with that in such a tiny competitive community.
First person view is finally out which is essentially required. If you see a legit hacker, just move server. They reallllly don't pop often. Usually you get the quake effect, really good players are so good at this twitch shooter they utterly dominate a team of mediocre players. I love games with a high skill cap though.
On March 04 2013 11:03 Durak wrote: I've played 150 hours and I'm pretty sure I've never played a hacker.
I've played over 200 hours. I've played against a single obvious hacker. The rest of the guys who would be claimed during matches "OMG HE HAX GUYS WHAT THE DUCK WHY, THIS GUY NEEDS TO GET BANNED" are active clanners who scrim all the time. You can't get away with that in such a tiny competitive community.
First person view is finally out which is essentially required. If you see a legit hacker, just move server. They reallllly don't pop often. Usually you get the quake effect, really good players are so good at this twitch shooter they utterly dominate a team of mediocre players. I love games with a high skill cap though.
There are definitely hackers out there for sure, we aren't boys just crying wolf. But I did run into a legit beast the other day, there's a distinct difference between good players and hackers. First of all the dude's score was 27 - 7 on a skulk, which absolutely wrecked us. I was skeptical so I hopped in spec and found out that he just had excellent tracking with his bites. Plus the fact that he died 7 times made him more credible from the start.
I've been playing a lot of Quake Live and I don't think that all our skills transfer over to NS2 too well... Skulks are really freaking erratic and I have the worse time trying to kill them when they catch me by surprise and start dancing in circles around me, you necessary have that in Quake. This only applies to the Rifle though, since I basically treat it the same as the machine gun or the lightning gun from Quake, where you basically want to just make small adjustments to your aim with your mouse and have the keyboard strafing do most of the work. Only in situations where I see the Skulk coming do I feel like my LG accuracy shining through to NS2. Railing with the Exo suit is hilariously fun btw haha.
Well I gotta say, the gorgeous DLC is pretty gorgeous! As if Gorges weren't cute enough, now they got babblers!! Awwww so cuuuuute! :D
On the topic of being shit-stomped though, I have to say one of the things I enjoy about this game is that it actually is IMO pretty noob friendly compared to other twitch shooters. What I mean by that of course is that K/D isn't everything. If you can't kill a skulk to save your life you can still suicide into alien territory killing harvesters and go 5-25 and do good by your team. Likewise if you are terrible at killing marines, going gorge and clogging hallways/healing shit/building structures is a huge boon to your team.
This is of course excluding the situations where theres simply one or 2 amazing players on the same team just dominating everybody. But if you make sure to heart your favorite servers and get involved with the regulars you'll generally see much better team balance and a very enjoyable sporting attitude. This game alone has tripled the size of my steam friends list from people who frequent the same server as me. Definitely the best multiplayer shooter I've played in a looooong time!
Also I'd like to throw out props to this community for being one of the most noob friendly communities I've seen. I don't think I've ever seen someone actually be berated for being bad at the game unless they hop in the chair for the first time not knowing what they are doing, and even then players seem amazingly helpful to new commanders unless you absolutely refuse to take advice/communicate.
Old news but if somebody is wondering why natural selection 2 vanished from his steam libary its probably because of this scam. Besides that the new dlc update is great! Killing stuff with the Railgun Exo is so much fun.
I think Natural Selection 2 needs a free weekend in an attempt to get more people to hopefully buy and play it. I say this because everytime I look at the "Top Games by Player Count" on steam I see that War Z has more people playing it then Natural Selection 2 and its so disgusting
On March 17 2013 06:28 Disengaged wrote: I think Natural Selection 2 needs a free weekend in an attempt to get more people to hopefully buy and play it. I say this because everytime I look at the "Top Games by Player Count" on steam I see that War Z has more people playing it then Natural Selection 2 and its so disgusting
I really hope they do a free weekend together with their apperance on pax east that should increase playernumbers alot. But most of them will probably stop playing after that because of the high skill ceiling/entrance of the game itself.
btw they want to stream from pax and hold an event that everyone can participate in. Details about the event are released tomorrow. http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/pax-east-2013/
So theres a free weekend coming up, and im really thinking of picking this game up... any advice for a noob?
Sure. Long time ns1 vet here.
Rule number 1: Always try to stick together, at least move in pairs. If you wander alone you will be most certainly killed.
As a marine, always try to engage aliens with as much room between them as possible. You have the gun, they only have claws/teeth to kill ya in the earlygame.
As a skulk, try to negate the marine tip: Hide in the ceiling and wait for the enemy to come into bite range so you can engage immediately without taking damage.
If your commander gives advice/orders listen to him, because he has knowledge what's going on. When playing aliens, feel free to try the different trait combos to understand yourself which are the best ones.
The biggest thing you need to understand from this game is that it's a team game and winning needs teamwork. Go play cod if you just want to rack up those kills so your score looks good.
And yesterday was ninja patch day! Release of build 242 most of the improvements are aimed at worst-case fps ! FPS improvements of 30-50 % in lategame for average rigs.
Fixed issue where video cards with small amounts of off-board memory would unload textures unnecessarily. Optimized lighting shaders. Optimized occlusion culling rasterization using SIMD. Infestation is no longer derived from entity and produces less network traffic. Multi-threaded effect updating. Infestation updates less often when it is “stable” Smoother velocity input for player animations. Flinches are updated less often on the Client. Optimized lighting. Removed need to constantly check if a unit should be deselected based on LOS. The code that determines what effects to trigger now has a memory. Disabled unnecessary C++ features.
Change
Units appear now red on minimap when under attack. Score board will now reset on round start (instead on round end) Babbler Bait is now hit scan when the target is close enough. When building more than 3 babbler eggs, the first babblers will get destroyed (same as Clogs and Hydras) Babblers now follow more disciplined the Gorges orders and will cling onto an Alien until told to leave. Increased Babbler lifetime to 5 minutes, up from 2.
Feature
Added “FollowAndWeld” order for the MAC. The MAC will follow a target and attempt to weld/construct anything in range.
Fix
Fixed bug where “Removing old version of mod” would not actually remove the mod from disk. Fixed issue where HUD and other important textures would take a long time to load on some Machines. Decreased the number of performance samples stored on the server to prevent hitches while the admin is using web admin. Fixed rounding error for damage numbers. Fixed script error caused by a render model not being initialized in some cases. Fixed potential crash when dequeuing a texture for loading. Fixed crash when docking windows in the Editor. Don’t show the game needs a restart message on computers with no input and/or output devices. Fixed Flamethrower showing flame effect during deploying. Fixed death messages being incorrect when multiples of the same unit die in the same server tick. Fixed LOS not being reset when viewer dies. Fixed certain Marine structures not ragdolling. Fixed crash when calling Server.GetClientAddress with a nil value. Fixed script error caused by a Commander being ejected. Fixed bug where cached shader files would not always be rebuilt when necessary.
Editor
Added ambient_sound_player entity, useful for making a button play nearby ambient sounds for a jukebox as an example.
Sdk
Added Entity:AddTimedCallback() API, replaces the old TimedCallbackMixin. Increased the maximum number of entities to 4096.
Refinery
Reduced travel time from Flow Control by moving Smelting & Transit further west. Tracked down and deleted some prop entities that had invalid file references. Made cosmetic improvements to Flow Control and Exchange
Has anybody read something about the event that UWE is doing at PAX that everyone can participate in?
On March 22 2013 03:18 BrTarolg wrote: Ive never played a hacker in NS2, though i've played against some really REALLY good players in gathers
Aimbot/Wallhacker are rare but they do exist in ns2 but since they introduced first person spectating you can spot them alot easier. Mostly im encountering pistol scripts these day but its just a matter of time until that is solved from UWE. They will probably increase the hard cap inbetween shots for the pistol so it will resolve itself. Edit: Just go to 1:00 to see pistol script in action.
Hmm I need to try again with the new patch to see if my old rig can hold NS2. It's really too bad. I played so much NS1, I like NS2 a whole lot but can't play it :|
After looking around for it bit more its seems the free weekends is what they were talking about. I hoped there would be a event for the pax icons like last time.
On March 22 2013 11:31 anatase wrote: Hmm I need to try again with the new patch to see if my old rig can hold NS2. It's really too bad. I played so much NS1, I like NS2 a whole lot but can't play it :|
In beta it was a nightmare 20 fps for a power rig! Hardware dying left and right under the pressure! Lots of bluescreens! It was horrendous. When they released the game on steam this was the smoothest playable build since beta and still fps was terrrible! :D Nowday i can finaly play with everthing on max without droping into slidesshow mode. UWE is working on optimisation all the time and in my opinion they have done a good job until now but still more performance is always good for everyone.
I have a question: Are these long loadingtimes normal? I have a new PC and set everything to high but loading a map takes up to 50sec/1min. Maybe I am just too spoiled by other games...
On March 23 2013 01:03 gTank wrote: I have a question: Are these long loadingtimes normal? I have a new PC and set everything to high but loading a map takes up to 50sec/1min. Maybe I am just too spoiled by other games...
I got the same loading times as you. I have the game installed on a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 7200rpm, 64MB Cache, SATA III. Personally i dont mind the waiting in the meantime i get something to drink/eat or browse TL. Enabling texture streaming in your options menu can decrease loadingtime at about 10 seconds but in return can hurt your fps ingame. Usally people that have it installed on ssd get around 15-20 seconds between mapchanges from what i have read in the past.
On March 23 2013 01:03 gTank wrote: I have a question: Are these long loadingtimes normal? I have a new PC and set everything to high but loading a map takes up to 50sec/1min. Maybe I am just too spoiled by other games...
I got the same loading times as you. I have the game installed on a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 7200rpm, 64MB Cache, SATA III. Personally i dont mind the waiting in the meantime i get something to drink/eat or browse TL. Enabling texture streaming in your options menu can decrease loadingtime at about 10 seconds but in return can hurt your fps ingame. Usally people that have it installed on ssd get around 15-20 seconds between mapchanges from what i have read in the past.
The SSD I have mine on seems to help a ton. When I first got the game I kept asking, "What do you mean long load times?"
I don't have a fantastic rig, and people with better specs get longer times, so I think the SSD is the way to go. Also, amazing boot times for everything,
On March 23 2013 01:03 gTank wrote: I have a question: Are these long loadingtimes normal? I have a new PC and set everything to high but loading a map takes up to 50sec/1min. Maybe I am just too spoiled by other games...
I got the same loading times as you. I have the game installed on a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 7200rpm, 64MB Cache, SATA III. Personally i dont mind the waiting in the meantime i get something to drink/eat or browse TL. Enabling texture streaming in your options menu can decrease loadingtime at about 10 seconds but in return can hurt your fps ingame. Usally people that have it installed on ssd get around 15-20 seconds between mapchanges from what i have read in the past.
The SSD I have mine on seems to help a ton. When I first got the game I kept asking, "What do you mean long load times?"
I don't have a fantastic rig, and people with better specs get longer times, so I think the SSD is the way to go. Also, amazing boot times for everything,
I don't know how big the game is but a ramdisk may be viable for this game (I use softperfect ramdisk) if you have enough ram to spare that is.
EPT
