New Natural Selection 2 Server + Donor Benefits *Soon*

[Plasma]

A year and one month ago, I was writing my first Natural Selection 2 news post on this site. The reason? Ten years after the original mod for Half Life was released, it's completely remade sequel appeared on Steam for sale. We opened a server almost right away, and played a LOT of matches between the Kharaa and the Marines. I still think NS2 is the best multiplayer Aliens game. That server is still online: 66.151.138.182:27085

Unfortunately, NS2 requires a very fast processor and doesn't handle multi-cores very well (yet). This means performance has been pretty poor when more and more entities are spawned on the map, which decreases the server's tick rate dramatically, in turn lagging everyone playing.

The only option was to rent a separate server, dedicated to run Natural Selection 2. This means we had to increase our costs by $50, which is a lot. Fortunately, we've been receiving a lot of donations from you guys to cover our costs (this is reflected in our Donation Center).

Where can you find our new NS2 server?
HyperionGaming.org *NEW* | NS2 | West Coast: IP: 74.91.118.234:27015
[small](Name will most likely change at some point, but not the IP). Make sure to add it to your favorites![/small]

You should notice much better performance. We're still tweaking settings a little, but there should be a big difference between our old NS2 server and this one.

For our NS2 Community:
The plan is to create a donor membership similar to our TF2 Donor program. We haven't decided the actual benefits yet, but you'll receive reserved slot access (we're thinking 18 slots + 2 reserved) and unique in-game badges. We will let you know when the NS2 Donor program is ready to go. Keep an eye on our forums and we'll advertise it in-game as well. If you have any questions or suggestions, please post in the Natural Selection 2 boards: Suggestions.

For our TF2 Community:
Don't worry! We are still primarily a TF2 focused community! We are still considering adding additional TF2 servers (if needed), and while your donations covered the costs of this new server, the goal is to have donations from our NS2 community to pay for this server. If the server cannot be paid by NS2 donations, we will close it.

For everybody:
The goal is to offer the same Donor benefits to everyone. A $5 donation will grant you Donor access to both our TF2 and NS2 servers for a month. [small]Again, things may change in the future.[/small] Finally, to celebrate this new NS2 server, we're giving away 2 copies of NS2 through Steamgifts.com!.

[Plasma]

To reiterate:
Donor benefits for the NS2 servers are NOT live yet. We're still working on it. Right now, we're planning reserved slot access, unique in-game badges and potentially access to some admin commands. For reserved slots, we're thinking 18 + 2 reserved.

We're not sure what to do with the other NS2 server yet. Performance wise, it cannot handle 20 slots well. Most likely, we will decrease it to 16 slots + 2 reserved and see how it's doing. If tick rate is still too low, we might have to go down to 14 + 2.

The current plan is to do a flat rate, full Donor access to all our servers for $5/month. This means reserved slot access to our 2 TF2 and 2 NS2 servers, and including other in-game benefits specific to each game. This might change in the future, and it might require an extra step when donating. We're still figuring this out.
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As usual, please post your thoughts/suggestions either in this thread or in the Natural Selection 2 boards here: http://hyperiongaming.org/index.php?board=21.0