The Veteran program has now been opened up to ten members of every participating clan. This was done to make sure adequate balancing could be done, and to fully simulate the competitive environment. Many thanks to our playtesters and the following clans and organizations for their ongoing help: CRI, CX, ER, EVE, HAM, PANDAS, STD, RED, SYN, UE, CAL and NS Archives. A lot of people are growing impatient with the time needed to balance 1.1, but the results will be worth it. Please, don’t send any more playtesting or veteran requests.
In other competitive play news, there was recently a big "US vs. New Zealand" match held, along the lines of the last "US vs. Korea" match. There has been lots of speculation about which country is home to the best NS players and it seems like it could be New Zealand. Check out the demos here. Special thanks to pandas|churro and everyone else that made this possible.
There have also been many questions asked about VALVe’s new HL2 engine ("Source"), and whether there are plans to bring NS over to it. That is a huge amount of work, and would require redoing all the artwork and levels at a bare minimum. This is something the team is considering, but haven’t made any decisions on yet.