The ENSL.org Newcomers Tourney is starting right now!
Join up the Teamspeak 3 server now!
Teamspeak 3 Server Details:
Address: ensl.org
Teamspeak is avaible for free here
Natural Selection 2
ENSL Newcomer's Tournament starts right now!
The ENSL.org Newcomers Tourney is starting right now!
Join up the Teamspeak 3 server now!
Teamspeak 3 Server Details:
Address: ensl.org
Teamspeak is avaible for free here
Update 302 now live on Steam!
This week is all about fixes and fun! As you will see in the changelog below we have made many adjustments to all of the maps including our newest awesome addition Caged. After the re-introduction of projectile spores last week, we decided to continue and tweak values and it shows progress but will probably still need some adjusting. Flamethrowers also are seeing some love as before they were just heavy lighting effects, now they do some damage.
New this week is the addition of a new pre-game mode called Warm-up. Our testing has shown that players generally avoid seeding servers, but with Warm-Up players can play a simple format of the game with all the tech unlocked and no resources required. As soon as there are 12 or more players, or two Commanders, the game will flip into regular NS2. This mode will no doubt go through some additional changes, however we’ve seen many positives to it even now.
Additionally, we have decided to extend the ABYSS unlock achievement until 10AM PST on Monday, June 13th. For those of you of unfamiliar with this, players that complete 2hrs of gameplay on the new map Caged will unlock the ABYSS skulk skin.
So get in the game and earn one today!
UPDATE LOG
Tweaks / Improvements
Fixes
Maps
Editor
Public Beta Play Session
Then switch to the beta branch and join us at "The Thirsty Onos #Playtest".
Instructions how to switch to the public beta can be found here
NSL hosted - Newcomer's Draft Tournament!
Calling all rookies and veterans! Further your knowledge of Natural Selection and gain a sense of accomplishment and camaraderie by joining the newcomer draft tournament! New to competitive? Play on a team, get coached, make risky plays! Veteran player? Profess your love for smashing in your opponent’s teeth by teaching players how to ‘git gud.’
The NSL is hosting a brand new Newcomer's Draft tournament! Read more about it by clicking the link. This is a great opportunity for new players and veterans alike to come together and share knowledge, come up with sneaky gorge tunnel strats, exo rush your way to victory, but most importantly have fun! The tournament begins on June 18th at 12pm EST/ 6pm CEST. Anyone of any skill level is encouraged to sign up.
--->You can sign up here!<---
The winners of the tournament will receive Gorge Plushies.
If you’re itching to play immediately, feel free to sign up for a website account and join the infamous Gather system! Don’t be daunted if it appears empty, players might be watching but not committing to playing just yet.
Welcome to CAGED! Update 301 now live
After the successful construction of a new mining station on asteroid codename: Kodiak, the crew of the Industrial Construction Vessel “Caged” sent out a distress signal. ALTERRA Corp quickly dispatched a private military unit to investigate the source of the distress, what they found was an empty vessel and no signs of human life…
Welcome to Caged, the newest official map in the NS2 universe. A throwback to the original NS1 Map by Nelson ‘manah’ Ferryman, Flaterectomy and other community contributors and testers have worked to honor the original but also offer a new take for the current state of play. Caged offers players a fun four techpoint map with plenty of res and unique rooms and corridors for epic combat engagements.
What would a new map be without some other goodies? As a special treat, players who play on caged for two hours or more within the first week of release will unlock a new skulk skin. This can only be earned until June 10, 2016. After this date you will only be able to trade or buy it from players that earned it in the community marketplace. Get it FREE while you can!
Travel deep into the heart of Caged and see what skulks in the cold darkness. With its piercing blue eyes and ravaging look, this Skulk is sure to make many a marine wary of the fight ahead.
Update 301 sees continued tweaks to the new features we’ve added over the last few weeks and also sees a newer variant of Alien Vision and Spores! With the help of Ironhorse we have gone over a lot of the effects and cinematics and made them friendlier to engagements and less screen clutter. See more in the update log below.
These last few weeks of development have been very interesting with new features and balance tweaks and we have appreciated all the feedback. Thank you again to our Playtesters and Leads for helping us get through the faster rate of updates to the game. Also a big thanks to those of you in the public that have been coming and playing the public beta with us, it has been a huge help. We have seen a recent influx of new players to the community and we hope we can only continue to grow these numbers in the future, but this also happens with your help in supporting and helping the new players feel encouraged. Thank you to those of you taking the time to teach and show new players why we love this game so much!
UPDATE LOG
Tweaks / Improvements
Squad 5 June 2016
Greetings!
Squad 5 badges are handed out by the Natural Selection 2 community and us developers to show our eternal gratitude to those who helped growing NS2 and its community.
Anybody who makes a sustained, positive, and reasonable effort to support NS2 and / or the vibrancy of its community may be awarded with a blue icon.
Silver and Gold are 'big deals' and are only awarded extremely sparingly for outstanding efforts.
Thank you all for your contributions even if you haven’t made it into Squad 5 yet, and thank you to those who took the time to nominate them.
Note that the only way a community member can be considered for Squad 5 is if YOU nominate them here!
Be sure to congratulate these community members, in game or in these forums, they deserve it.
Squad 5 Gold
@Person8880 - For his “Shine” modification and the outstanding support of the server operator and modding community in the last 3 years.
Squad 5 Silver
@Zavaro - Being a PT Lead, MT Lead and now the ENSL Admin. All of these take a phenomenal amount of time and effort, and absolutely deserves our thanks and gratitude
Squad 5 Blue
@Well - For all his work to get Natural Selection 2 speaking Russian. It's a difficult task to translate that much, but it's a worthy endeavor as it brings more players into our community. We appreciate everything you've done.
@Brute - For his “Wonitor” modification. Everybody always like to have fancy graphs about the in-game stats of a server.
@Scatter - For his various mods e.g. “NS2:Assault”, “NS2:Overhaul” and “Modular Exo”. Furthermore, he was always a driving force in ensuring the Australian NS2 Community stayed healthy and strong
@Oozle For being another force inside the Australian NS2 Community. Without him hosting NS2 servers for years Down Under we would have never known how passionate the Australian folks can be about Natural Selection.
Your badges will be ready to claim for use in game by visiting http://hive.naturalselection2.com/ and clicking redeem badges after you've logged in.
Thanks everyone, and congrats!!
HUNT a Dev!
Update 300 Released!
“THIS IS ALTERRA!” First off, how amazing is it that we are at Update 300? The blood sweat and tears that have been poured into this game by so many people over the last few years is nothing short of awesome. Now we look forward to what’s to come.
This update sees us making continued improvements to the server browser and an additional notification for news or updates on first open. After playing many games, reading and discussing feedback with players we’ve made some additional tweaks to newly introduced abilities and weapons. Aliens now have a new ability in Focus, so play around and see what you think. Also on the map front Derelict has seen some performance improvements, thanks Loki!
We would like to introduce the newest skin to the marine arsenal, Skull ‘n’ Crossfire. This black beauty is almost splattered with the blood of its enemies and is enshrined with the skull of the fallen to taunt those foes that dare face it next! Check it out now in the ITEM STORE.
NS2 is currently running a 50% off sale through May 30th, we hope to see some new players on the battlefield. Your help to encourage and inspire teamwork will go a long way to retaining them for the long haul. Thanks for playing NS2!
Tweaks / Improvements
Fixes
Translations
SDK
Maps
Update 299 Released!
This week we have brought you a whole bunch of new alien toys including a new ability for the Shade hive which saps health, a new Crag hive ability which allows players to do extra damage to armor, and a totally revamped bone shield for the Onos!
Aliens didn’t get all the love, though. Marines have also received some new toys and changes to their existing tech. A preliminary version of the Heavy Machine Gun (HMG) has been added. This is a gun that was loved in NS1 and one which many of us have always wanted to see make a return in NS2. The HMG was pioneered successfully in Comp Mod, and now it has made its way into the main game.
We’ve also heard your cries and beacons, and recognize that Contamination tended to be very frustrating for Marines. We’ve made some changes to how it works to give Marine players more time to react to it. It will now do its damage over time rather than immediately when the ability is activated.
All of these gameplay changes are sure to shake up the meta, but that’s not all we’ve been doing. We’ve also been making general improvements to the game, including integrating many features from NS2+ as the defaults that new players will see when they play on any server.
We are excited to see how these changes are received and we want to hear from you, especially about how the new abilities and weapons impact the balance of the game and your own experiences. Please come join us at our Discord server or discuss it in our forums. Although we will be playing games as well, if you think something is completely overpowered, we want to know.
Tweaks / Improvements
- Alien abilities have been shuffled around, and two new abilities have been added!
- Crag Hive - Crush
- Increases armor damage to structures up to 15%, when you have 3 shells
- Increases armor-fraction used on players up to 15% (amount of armor that is used when calculating damage) on players by 15%. Does not affect early game balance
- Increases armor damage to structures up to 15%, when you have 3 shells
- Shade Hive - Vampirism (replaces Phantom)
- Provides cloaking and heals your health every time you damage players with a direct attack (no spores / bilebomb)
- Lifeform specific values for life leech (at 3+ veils):
- Skulk: 14hp for bite
- Gorge: 15hp for spit
- Lerk: 2hp for spikes, 10hp for bite
- Fade: 20hp for swipe and stab
- Onos: 40hp for gore
- Skulk: 14hp for bite
- Lifeform specific values for life leech (at 3+ veils):
- Provides cloaking and heals your health every time you damage players with a direct attack (no spores / bilebomb)
- Shift Hive - Silence
- This was moved from the Shade Hive to Shift, and split out from Phantom
- Makes all movement and attacks silent
- This was moved from the Shade Hive to Shift, and split out from Phantom
- Crag Hive - Crush
- Biomass scaling has been increased for Lerk and Onos to help their survivability in late game
- Lerk has been increased from 2 to 3hp per biomass
- Onos has been increased from 25 to 30hp per biomass
- Lerk has been increased from 2 to 3hp per biomass
- Onos Bone Shield has been revamped, and now refills armor!
- Costs 40 energy to trigger, can only be held for at most 4 seconds, and a 10 second cooldown has been added
- Regenerates 100 armor / second while in use
- Will now block 66% of damage from the front instead of 75%
- No longer saps energy while in use
- Costs 40 energy to trigger, can only be held for at most 4 seconds, and a 10 second cooldown has been added
- Cysts no longer die when disconnected from hive
- Cysts instead rapidly lose maturity when the chain is disconnected, making them easier to destroy. When reconnected, maturity is regained rapidly.
- Nutrient mist can be used to prevent the maturity loss.
- Cysts instead rapidly lose maturity when the chain is disconnected, making them easier to destroy. When reconnected, maturity is regained rapidly.
- Contamination Tweaks
- Increased cooldown to 6 seconds (was 5)
- Bile now sprays every 2 seconds, up to 3 times, and can be stopped by destroying the pustule
- Increased cooldown to 6 seconds (was 5)
- HMG has been added, to help deal with those pesky lifeforms
- Note: Sounds and art assets for HMG are temporary.
- Note: Sounds and art assets for HMG are temporary.
- Jetpacks now use more fuel based on a weapon’s weight
- Shotgun and Flamethrower now use 7.6% more fuel
- Grenade Launchers use 15% more fuel
- HMGs uses 130% more fuel
- Shotgun and Flamethrower now use 7.6% more fuel
- Mine changes
- eHP changed to 40 (from 100)
- Cost reduced from 15 to 8
- You now get 2 mines instead of 3
- eHP changed to 40 (from 100)
- Medpacks can snap to players from a slightly larger radius, snapping already existed but previously was not shown to the commander
- Alien vision has been replaced with “Huze’s Minimal”
- Alien vision will default to On every time you spawn in
- Crosshairs have been updated with new art
- If you prefer the old ones, you can still use them by activating this mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=686960508
- If you prefer the old ones, you can still use them by activating this mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=686960508
- Power nodes can now be rebuilt at the same speed with a build tool as with a welder
- Wrench damage icons now show how hurt teammates are, and have an outline if you have a welder
- Dropped weapons expiration bar will now be colored based on how much time is left before it is destroyed
- Range circle indicators have been added for many alien commander abilities, as well as a secondary circle to Shifts to indicate the radius of the energy regeneration passive effect
- Mines and Welders will be highlighted and show as pickupable even if you already have one
- Dropped weapons will be picked up automatically, if you have an empty slot
- Server browser:
- Added the ping filter
- The server details window now has a short delay so users can doubleclick at the server entries wherever they like.
- The server count display is not clickable anymore and has a tooltip
- Favorites and History are now a toggle, clicking again at them while show your previous game selection
- Added the ping filter
- Reduced amount Enzyme particle effects obscure view
- Death screen blood splatter effects will disappear immediately when you start respawning
Fixes
- Fixed the issue of ragdolls not getting destroyed
- Players will no longer have nutrient mist effects applied to them unless they are an embryo
- Server browser Join button should work better
- Reduce network cost of the concede cinematics slightly
- Fixed an issue where welders would build faster with E than with LMB
<*>Fixed that medpacks got weirdly offset when hovered over marines. It will now show where the medpack will actually spawn
Update 298 Released!
After the response and tracking of a lot of the changes we introduced last week we decided to continue with another update of shakeups. There are some minor adjustments to a few items from the patch after more feedback. Also new this week is a revamped server browser! We have been hard at work to create a better way to filter and sort the list and even provide more information to the user before choosing what server to connect too. Our week to week experiments and changes have been very interesting to watch and see what works and what doesn’t and we aren’t done just yet! Over the next couple weeks there are plans for some additional UI changes, maybe a new weapon? A new map? Additional weapon skins? And if we sell more shadow fades then maybe that Onos will appear (hint: go buy more shadow fades).
Special shout out and thank you to xDragon for allowing us to use his code.
Until next week, happy hunting!
UPDATE NOTES
Tweaks / Improvements
Fixes
Translations
SDK
Maps