Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Getting into competitive NS2

My Natural Selection 2 team, CiB, is now entering competitive tournaments against teams from all over the world. Last weekend we played several matches in the ENSL Custom Map Cup, all of which I have streamed in first person: vs. VexX, KKG, Team 156, flow and AtroX (aPx forfeited).

Of course, we speak Portuguese, so many of you probably won't understand our chatter ;)

After you're done watching the games, or if you want to know the results right now, see our division here.

We did quite well for a newcomer team. We're on par with most teams in our division, but still need to work on Marine tactics and dealing with the higher Kharaa lifeforms, as well as playing them better. Since this was a custom map cup, we had to give feedback on the maps. My overall opinion about them was not very good -- most maps had several balance issues and bugs in the form of stuck spots, missing textures or holes.

After playing these competitive matches, normal (pub) games are no longer the same. They're just for fun -- hop in, kill some aliens/chomp some marines, don't care about winning or losing. It's all about the fun (and honing skills).

On the next weekend we'll be playing the NSL Invitational #1 Qualifiers (see our division here), although we won't be able to get past the qualifiers since we're not an EU or NA team. We're up for the challenge, to learn new tactics, get some practice and, well, just for the sake of playing competitive games (and because they were missing three teams to fill up the 32 slots and decided to pick us). There are two well-known, strong teams in our division: Goðar and True North. We also met Team 156 before. The rest of the teams is new to me; hopefully they'll be on par with the teams we scrimmed.

Wish us good luck!