Ok - I have been working on and off on making a more standard mod for use in competitive NS2, which would force certain standards to hopefully slightly improve game play (lower interp and such) and also to turn on or off other options (friendly fire). I have run into a couple issues, and also want to offer up the chance of some discussion on what changes/rules should be enforced.

Currently I am looking at the following options - this is copy pasted from the config file so the names are not exactly pretty.
kPauseEndDelay = 5 seconds
kPauseStartDelay = 1 second
kPauseMaxPauses = 3
kPausedReadyNotificationDelay = 30 seconds
kPausedMaxDuration = 120 seconds
kInterp = 70ms // 100 ms is default
kMoveRate = 50 // 30 is default
kClientRate = 20 //Doesnt work
kFriendlyFire = true
kFriendlyFireDamagePercentage = 0.33
kTournamentModeAlertDelay = 30 seconds
kTournamentModeForfeitClock = 20 minutes
kTournamentModeRestartDuration = 90 seconds
kTournamentModeGameStartDelay = 15 seconds

There is also a small issue I have encountered - looking at the old ENSL plugin which is opensource on GitHub, i found out how to query the site to find users and their teams and such. However it seems that most users I query don't actually return a team, even if they are on one.

This mod also currently includes the custom spawns & lights mod.

Can you give me an example? It only returns the team if its set as primary like when you comment on something on ENSL, it shows the team they are on.

I think that's problematic, because the "Set primary" button does not work afaik.

well .. if you could manage to get that connection to the page back again it would be really good .. i mean you could get rid of about 80% of your refs and 50% of your Admins 8) !

So Keep up the work NotDragon !

Yeah lets remove blind and any other incompetent admins ;P

i am not directly saying that .. but at least u dont need to have a ref at every match checking the IDs and shit cause u can have the page do that automatically.

Stuff like that!

Ok I expect that the team problem is because of the setprimary option then, iirc when I tested it swalk did have a team but fana did not, as examples.

Beyond that, do you happen to have a list of all the ranks of admins/refs? From that I can give them access to some of the basic additional commands (just pause/info commands atm).

pm me on steam dragon i can give you a full list with steamids ;)

Awesome, dragon!

I was hoping someone could do us a NSL comp mod with general settings and helping ref work :)

big D :3

Good work, but I think that the players should be able to pause the game if necessary. Not only refs/admins.

wiry

Good work, but I think that the players should be able to pause the game if necessary. Not only refs/admins.

like in dota ? yeah that would totally work :S

Maybe make a system that reconizes if there is a referee/admin on the server or not?
If there is a referee/admin present, then only they can pause. Else teams will also be able to pause themselves.
Too much work? Not sure, up to Dragon.

There are a lot of players from teams who are also referees, so it'd have to make sure that the person who is pausing the game, is in spectator and not in J1 or J2. Is that possible? no clue. :) Just a thought.

Good thinking Syknik.

Comp ns2 matches are hardly comparable with public dota2 matches katze.

In competitive dota2, however, if your team mates game crashes you can pause the game with the push of a button, without being taken out of the game in order to text chat with the ref and potentially affecting the game.

This is the obvious answer. Comparing it to retards pausing pub games is beyond stupid. There will still be refs in the game and if one team pauses in order to abuse or in any way hinder the game the refs should take action.

Perhaps this could give refs something to do instead of just being glorified spectators.

This mod would actually give the referees less to do.

That was not the point i was making.. jesus christ..

I can restrict the pause to only refs and only people in spectate also. Currently anyone can pause but each team is only allowed 3 per round, so it could just be balanced that way. There is also a maximum time for pause. However, the pause is not finished currently, there are some bugs and also there are some limitations, things like grenades will still explode after the game is paused. So it may not make it for the initial version.

Related to the pause duration by the way, I think it could do with being bumped up a bit to 3, maybe 4 minutes. I am just thinking of the worst case scenario of someone having to reboot their whole PC (without an SSD). Personally I have had nothing but good interactions with this community so I am not that worried about abuse myself.

Thanks for your work by the way!

We played with the mod tonight, some feedback on the mod page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=170777320

I like the friendly fire, the "referee" text could have different color, forgot to try pause. I put the mod id in command line and subscribed to the mod and checked it in the web admin, no other mods except NSL maps. Good work.

I'm Against FF in this game.

FF was already in the game back in NS1, and to be playing a competitive game with no FF to me, makes no sense. It just needs to be adjusted properly.

I think FF is fine. Only time I've ever died to it is from another skulk as we were killing a phase gate... and the guy that killed me was just some random that was in one of the reddit pugs. It doesn't really affect Marines that much imo. Unfortunately it's affecting Aliens a little worse, but even there it's not really doing anything to change the balance. It just forces you to learn better positioning, which can really only be a good thing.

More feedback:
- there is no warmup phase, no damage being dealt, not sure if intended
- if game is reset (sv_reset) after ready-ing some time ago, over re-ready limit it should allow you to ready again.
- not sure if I should just set it on server, but mod doesn't disable autobalance by itslef (not being able to spawn when some of the enemies leave). Same with autoconcede. I think ns2stats did it in tournament mode. Might be intended and is needed to set in server configs.

I think that's about it from tonight.

Warmup time is up for discussion, I am not sure what people want in that regard, but I always thought that pregame antics really don't have a place in the game. Not sure what you mean by sv_reset not clearing re-ready limit?
Autoconcede and autobalance can be disabled if desired.

Maybe I just don't get it, so I'll try to explain what happened. A and M ready because we are waiting for 6th players and want to warmup (damage, etc..). Now it took pretty long time before teams were really ready, at that point new ready wouldn't work because of the limit on re-ready (this kTournamentModeRestartDuration = 90 seconds, I mean writing ready again wouldn't work as it did in ns2stats). So we sv_reset. Typed ready and nothing happened, so we just said live on reset and sv_reset again.

We used this on a game last night, someone crashed part way through so we paused. He didn't return within the allotted time, so we ended up pausing a couple of times. After a while we were not sure that he was coming back in so we asked a spectator to join. He wasn't able to join, and upon restart we had an alien that couldn't spawn and the marines couldn't get any upgrades from the arms lab.

I'm not sure what could have caused this - but if you want to add me on steam to discuss it further etc let me know.

The mod also has the AFK auto kick from DAK active which should be disabled.

Yea pause is pretty buggy atm, I think i have fixed most of the bugs with pause and should update that soon, but it still has some missing things (grenades and such). Auto AFK kick is a server config option, along with autobalance and autoconcede, i will be having those automatically disabled by this mod however. There will also be a config option to turn on/off the mod (well, most portions of the mod). Also, i hope to have it sense if NS2stats is running and in tournament mode and disable parts to prevent conflicts.

As for the re-ready time, yes after 90 seconds you can no longer 're' a game, I think ns2stats used 120 seconds? But it sounds like you found a bug when sv_reset is used so ill look at that too.