It’s been two weeks since our last update, be honest you missed us! Moving to this model has allowed for us to make some much needed changes to our way of implementing and testing changes to the game. This update may seem light, but it has some good fixes and more enhancements to our server browser including a friends filter. This filter will allow you see what servers your steam friends are playing on and get you connected to them. One of the new additions I mentioned above is “Playtest with the Dev’s,” a weekly opportunity to jump into the beta of next update and play a series of games and give your feedback on the upcoming changes. We strive to make changes that have a positive impact on the community and next to our discord or forums this is a nice direct interface for the players and devs to communicate. Our newly implemented feedback system has given us some nice results over the last couple weeks. The most selected option for lower rated rounds was “Uneven Teams” and for newer players was “Inexperienced Commander.” To attack these issues we have begun work on a set of new features, the first being a long needed update of our backend Player Skill tracking system HIVE. Hive 2.0 will go a long way towards helping us resolve some old internal bugs, and add some much needed speed to the communication between servers and the database. The second feature is our continued expansion on the tutorials available to players. A new Commander Tutorial is being drafted and developed to give players a better grasp on commanding a team for both Aliens and Marines. These two features are only the beginning of our Phase 3 plans. We will be starting a new series of QA videos on our YouTube channel to better explain and show off upcoming development on NS2. There will be another blog post next week going into more details on how you can submit questions and feedback for us to talk about in our series. See the full changelog below and happy hunting! UPDATE 305 CHANGELOG Tweaks / Improvements

• Added a Friends tab to the serverbrowser
  • Easily join your friends, wherever they are
• Bots will now fill up empty servers up to 12 slots by default
  • Makes it easier to form teams as player can directly join the team they want to play
  • Makes Warmup mode engaging even without other players
  • Makes it faster to start a game without many human players
  • Bots are ignored by the Warmup Mode check
• The cooldown of Belly Slide and Charge get now displayed by the HUD (Thanks Steelcap!)
• Increased the rate with which each Minigun heats up from 0.2 to 0.3 to compensate for them being independent now
• Autobalance doesn’t stop players from spawning anymore when teams are uneven

Fixes

• Fixed the description of the Machine Gun and Lerk Spores
• Fixed that sometimes you couldn’t evolve if you had babblers attached to you
• Fixed most issues with stuttering when running past clogs caused by desync of the clog collision in the predict world
• Fixed that the server browser was sending significant more pings than needed
• Fixed issue with NS2+ causing health bars to show up when players were spawning in

Map Fixes

• ns2_derelict (Thanks Zavaro!)
  • Fixed Occlusion Geometry in Nursery
  • Geothermal No longer a marine spawn
  • Western Entrance No longer an Alien spawn