Natural Selection 2 is free to play on Steam all weekend! This Halloween, NS2 celebrates its fourth birthday, and NS1 its 14th!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/4920/

Come and see what this Alien vs Marine shooter / strategy hybrid is all about. We've got new-player-friendly servers springing up all over the world, so don't be shy, come and get bitten by a Skulk!

NS2 has continued to receive constant updates over the past four years, with Update 311 being released earlier today. Even if you've played NS2 before, chances are there are lots of new features and improvements to explore.

- Unknown Worlds :mac: :welder:

Natural Selection 2 is free to play on Steam all weekend! This Halloween, NS2 celebrates its fourth birthday, and NS1 its 14th!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/4920/

Come and see what this Alien vs Marine shooter / strategy hybrid is all about. We've got new-player-friendly servers springing up all over the world, so don't be shy, come and get bitten by a Skulk!

NS2 has continued to receive constant updates over the past four years, with Update 311 being released earlier today. Even if you've played NS2 before, chances are there are lots of new features and improvements to explore.

- Unknown Worlds ːmacː ːwelderː

It’s crazy to think it has been four years since NS2 was launched and even more so to think that many of us were playing Natural Selection 14 years ago. Things have come a long way since then and to allude to the perfect pun, they continue to evolve.

We decided to run a free weekend starting today at 10 am PT to invite every player out there to celebrate this anniversary with us!

Furthermore we wanted to do something special for you ... So say hello to The Infested - an entirely new game-mode which we will be releasing on the Steam Workshop this Friday (October 28th)!



You have been dispatched to deal with a dangerous pathogen which has been detected within a remote TSF outpost. Race to repair the air filtration system before the pathogen corrodes it too severely and the air becomes overwhelmed by infectious spores. But watch out, one of your teammates has already been infected!

Work is also continuing on our conversion to 64-bit, FSFOD is hard at work chipping away at the pieces of this large puzzle and we get closer everyday to unlocking more potential for the future of Natural Selection. Signs of life are appearing, so stay tuned ‘cause there is plenty more to come over the next few months! We can’t wait for you to see what’s in store for NS2.

Additionally this patch includes some spooky/fun enhancements to the official maps and yes, you can throw candy in the ready room again!

Happy Anniversary and Happy Halloween!

Update 311 Changelog

Gameplay

• Players can now see who the enemy commander is during pre-game, to help get games started faster
• Made lights more spooky

Tweaks / Improvements

• Revamped Training menu to be more orderly and useful for new players
• Added the beginnings of a new Progression System to Hive
  
  • Just a first step to pave the way for many future enhancements
• Moved player’s badge customization from old Hive website to be in-game via the Customize player menu
• Play now window restyled to fit new themes and look nicer
• Made some changes to prepare for Infested’s launch
• Added new Halloween effects to various parts of the game, which will automatically change per a server’s seasonal setting. (Thanks IronHorse!)
• You can now throw candy during warmup mode

Fixes

• Fixed several edge-case issues with Hive’s skill calculations
• Fixed edge-case issue that prevented Hive from updating round data when submitted
• Fixed conflicts with Hive changes within Hive Challenge and Tutorials

Maps

• All map readyrooms have been made more spooky (Thanks Zavaro, Flatrectomy, and Samus!)

SDK

• Fixed Overview.exe to not render seasonal groups
• Fixed Decoda update.dll load error
• Added more non colliding and commander invisible seasonal groups for use by mappers
• Fixed that Modloader.SetupFileHook returned an error message even on success
• Fixed that Filehook entry files could not be used as filehook
• Added “Badges+” API to manage in-game badges

It’s crazy to think it has been four years since NS2 was launched and even more so to think that many of us were playing Natural Selection 14 years ago. Things have come a long way since then and to allude to the perfect pun, they continue to evolve.

We decided to run a free weekend starting today at 10 am PT to invite every player out there to celebrate this anniversary with us!

Furthermore we wanted to do something special for you ... So say hello to The Infested - an entirely new game-mode which we will be releasing on the Steam Workshop this Friday (October 28th)!



You have been dispatched to deal with a dangerous pathogen which has been detected within a remote TSF outpost. Race to repair the air filtration system before the pathogen corrodes it too severely and the air becomes overwhelmed by infectious spores. But watch out, one of your teammates has already been infected!

Work is also continuing on our conversion to 64-bit, FSFOD is hard at work chipping away at the pieces of this large puzzle and we get closer everyday to unlocking more potential for the future of Natural Selection. Signs of life are appearing, so stay tuned ‘cause there is plenty more to come over the next few months! We can’t wait for you to see what’s in store for NS2.

Additionally this patch includes some spooky/fun enhancements to the official maps and yes, you can throw candy in the ready room again!

Happy Anniversary and Happy Halloween!

Update 311 Changelog

Gameplay

• Players can now see who the enemy commander is during pre-game, to help get games started faster
• Made lights more spooky

Tweaks / Improvements

• Revamped Training menu to be more orderly and useful for new players
• Added the beginnings of a new Progression System to Hive
  
  • Just a first step to pave the way for many future enhancements
• Moved player’s badge customization from old Hive website to be in-game via the Customize player menu
• Play now window restyled to fit new themes and look nicer
• Made some changes to prepare for Infested’s launch
• Added new Halloween effects to various parts of the game, which will automatically change per a server’s seasonal setting. (Thanks IronHorse!)
• You can now throw candy during warmup mode

Fixes

• Fixed several edge-case issues with Hive’s skill calculations
• Fixed edge-case issue that prevented Hive from updating round data when submitted
• Fixed conflicts with Hive changes within Hive Challenge and Tutorials

Maps

• All map readyrooms have been made more spooky (Thanks Zavaro, Flatrectomy, and Samus!)

SDK

• Fixed Overview.exe to not render seasonal groups
• Fixed Decoda update.dll load error
• Added more non colliding and commander invisible seasonal groups for use by mappers
• Fixed that Modloader.SetupFileHook returned an error message even on success
• Fixed that Filehook entry files could not be used as filehook
• Added “Badges+” API to manage in-game badges

Today we have a treat for you. New first person animations have arrived for all the core pieces of a Marine's basic kit: Rifle, Pistol, and Axe! Every single animation has been rebuilt completely from scratch and ran through a new modernized pipeline to improve the weight and feel of the weapon handling and movement in NS2. In addition, while updating the animations, we have also fixed many issues in the animation graphs that control which animations play and how they blend together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6pz-u5wgXM

For many, playing the game with new animations may feel like a bit of a shock considering we've all been used to the same animations for upwards of five years; but give it a chance and I think you'll come to love them.

In addition to new animations, we also are switching the game over to Hive 2. This is no miracle fix for team stacking issues, but it does give us a lot more control over the system and ability to fix issues as they come up. There are many technical improvements to the new system, some of which you can read about here.

Although Hive 2 is not going to fix team balancing, it does bring with it some significant improvements to the underlying skill learning algorithm. Moultano has provided a great description of how this works, and an image showing the difference between how the two algorithms might perform when trying to discover a player's underlying skill value.



Moultano's Sage Words: “Imagine a mountain covered in fog…”

Notice how the Hive 2 value gets closer to the target value much faster (with many less games played) than if the same set of games is recorded by Hive 1.
This week we are also working on putting together a 64 bit beta build, which you will be able to opt in to and play with on build 310 servers so that you can help test the stability and performance of the 64 bit version of NS2 in actual games. Come join us in Discord for more details. The more people that help us test it, the better we will be able to make it.

Update 310 Changelog

Gameplay

• Onos cost increased to 62 pres (was 55)
  When pres gain was increased to 1.25 per tick, Lerk cost had to be decreased to maintain the same initial timings. Because of how late into the game Onos arrive, their cost needs to be raised to account for the additional pres gain and restore the old timings. By pushing out the Oni by a minute or two, aliens have a larger need for Fades, and Marines have a little more breathing room and time to prepare.
• Increased the Shotgun spread slightly to decrease the one-shot range to approximately what it was prior to the alien hit box changes
• Lerk movement tweaks
  • Increase non-celerity flap force to match celerity to reduce Lerk’s dependence on Celerity
  • Improved crouch diving mechanics to help with ambushing and spiking
  • Increased strafe flap force to help with spiking
• Decreased Gorges off-infestation belly slide friction so that Gorges can maintain their speed a bit longer (0.2 to 0.1)

Tweaks / Improvements

• Hive 2.0
  • Algorithm Changes
    • Instead of a constant learning rate, Hive now uses both an AdaGrad-based learning rate and a constant learning rate. This makes skill values change faster initially, but change slower once they've converged. Expect large changes to your skill value for your first several games in the new system.
    • Skill values imported from the old hive system have been modified using a function of play time. (Thanks Nordic!) This fixes the issue where some new players started with a skill of 1000, and others started with a skill of 0. This has the effect of reducing all skill values, particularly those of newer players.
    • Exploits involving switching teams mid-game have been fixed. Players that switch teams will be credited with both a win and a loss, and the skill updates will be proportional to how long they played on each team, weighting the beginning of the game much more than the end.
    • Games with few human players no longer cause anomalously large skill updates. Games with fewer than 12 human players will have a very small effect on skills.
• Added graphical element for mucous shield
• Added an additional diagnostic icon which will appear when a server's performance dips to yellow or red

Fixes

• Fixed that script error icons would flash on screen after map loads
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to regain all energy by exploiting the “Evolve Last Upgrades” feature
• Fixed that you couldn't hit cysts at your feet with the Axe while standing on top of them
• Fixed a client crash caused by trying to read from a model that has not finished loading
• Fixed an scripted error occurring when bot commander got kicked
• Fixed that alien bots tried to evolve upgrades on higher lifeforms even though they couldn't afford them
• Fixed that commander bots would try to build RTs in a weird order due to it using birds-eye distance rather than path distance
• Fixed that command chairs could not be built by bots
• Fixed a bug that would cause a babbler-covered gorge to have a more difficult time heal spraying structures
• Improved how cyst chains are placed.  This should make cysts more reliably connect to the closest cyst

Maps

• Refinery : Stuck spot in Chasm <-> Lava Falls vent fixed (Thanks Zavaro!)

SDK

• In Viewer’s Animation Graph Editor, you can now press the spacebar to recenter your view on either the selected or starting node
• Fixed that LiveMixin:DeductHealth was not using the correct formulas for applying normal damage types, as it advertised

 

Today we have a treat for you. New first person animations have arrived for all the core pieces of a Marine's basic kit: Rifle, Pistol, and Axe! Every single animation has been rebuilt completely from scratch and ran through a new modernized pipeline to improve the weight and feel of the weapon handling and movement in NS2. In addition, while updating the animations, we have also fixed many issues in the animation graphs that control which animations play and how they blend together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6pz-u5wgXM

For many, playing the game with new animations may feel like a bit of a shock considering we've all been used to the same animations for upwards of five years; but give it a chance and I think you'll come to love them.

In addition to new animations, we also are switching the game over to Hive 2. This is no miracle fix for team stacking issues, but it does give us a lot more control over the system and ability to fix issues as they come up. There are many technical improvements to the new system, some of which you can read about here.

Although Hive 2 is not going to fix team balancing, it does bring with it some significant improvements to the underlying skill learning algorithm. Moultano has provided a great description of how this works, and an image showing the difference between how the two algorithms might perform when trying to discover a player's underlying skill value.



Moultano's Sage Words: “Imagine a mountain covered in fog…”

Notice how the Hive 2 value gets closer to the target value much faster (with many less games played) than if the same set of games is recorded by Hive 1.
This week we are also working on putting together a 64 bit beta build, which you will be able to opt in to and play with on build 310 servers so that you can help test the stability and performance of the 64 bit version of NS2 in actual games. Come join us in Discord for more details. The more people that help us test it, the better we will be able to make it.

Update 310 Changelog

Gameplay

• Onos cost increased to 62 pres (was 55)
  When pres gain was increased to 1.25 per tick, Lerk cost had to be decreased to maintain the same initial timings. Because of how late into the game Onos arrive, their cost needs to be raised to account for the additional pres gain and restore the old timings. By pushing out the Oni by a minute or two, aliens have a larger need for Fades, and Marines have a little more breathing room and time to prepare.
• Increased the Shotgun spread slightly to decrease the one-shot range to approximately what it was prior to the alien hit box changes
• Lerk movement tweaks
  • Increase non-celerity flap force to match celerity to reduce Lerk’s dependence on Celerity
  • Improved crouch diving mechanics to help with ambushing and spiking
  • Increased strafe flap force to help with spiking
• Decreased Gorges off-infestation belly slide friction so that Gorges can maintain their speed a bit longer (0.2 to 0.1)

Tweaks / Improvements

• Hive 2.0
  • Algorithm Changes
    • Instead of a constant learning rate, Hive now uses both an AdaGrad-based learning rate and a constant learning rate. This makes skill values change faster initially, but change slower once they've converged. Expect large changes to your skill value for your first several games in the new system.
    • Skill values imported from the old hive system have been modified using a function of play time. (Thanks Nordic!) This fixes the issue where some new players started with a skill of 1000, and others started with a skill of 0. This has the effect of reducing all skill values, particularly those of newer players.
    • Exploits involving switching teams mid-game have been fixed. Players that switch teams will be credited with both a win and a loss, and the skill updates will be proportional to how long they played on each team, weighting the beginning of the game much more than the end.
    • Games with few human players no longer cause anomalously large skill updates. Games with fewer than 12 human players will have a very small effect on skills.
• Added graphical element for mucous shield
• Added an additional diagnostic icon which will appear when a server's performance dips to yellow or red

Fixes

• Fixed that script error icons would flash on screen after map loads
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to regain all energy by exploiting the “Evolve Last Upgrades” feature
• Fixed that you couldn't hit cysts at your feet with the Axe while standing on top of them
• Fixed a client crash caused by trying to read from a model that has not finished loading
• Fixed an scripted error occurring when bot commander got kicked
• Fixed that alien bots tried to evolve upgrades on higher lifeforms even though they couldn't afford them
• Fixed that commander bots would try to build RTs in a weird order due to it using birds-eye distance rather than path distance
• Fixed that command chairs could not be built by bots
• Fixed a bug that would cause a babbler-covered gorge to have a more difficult time heal spraying structures
• Improved how cyst chains are placed.  This should make cysts more reliably connect to the closest cyst

Maps

• Refinery : Stuck spot in Chasm <-> Lava Falls vent fixed (Thanks Zavaro!)

SDK

• In Viewer’s Animation Graph Editor, you can now press the spacebar to recenter your view on either the selected or starting node
• Fixed that LiveMixin:DeductHealth was not using the correct formulas for applying normal damage types, as it advertised

 

As we announced in last week’s Changelog, we’re releasing a patch this week! This patch contains all the tweaks and updates we held back from build 308, in favor of having more time to solely focus on the issues that came up after the LUAJit update.

Included in this update is the brand new Marine Commander tutorial. This will teach potential new commanders the basics of commanding and the marine tech tree. So if you wanted to get a basic understanding of commanding without being in a live game, there is now a way to do so.

But that’s not all! Thanks to the tremendous work of Trevor, with the help of a group of volunteers from the community, the new tutorial is packed with more easter eggs and secrets to discover. So even as a veteran commander it’s worth giving it a shot, if only just to unlock the new achievements!

We’ve been listening a lot to the community’s feedback about the current balance situation and the performance issues that have been showing up since the last few builds. With this build we started including changes which are trying to resolve some of those issues that were brought up. More improvements will follow in the future.

Meanwhile the team is still working on items from our roadmap that remi posted two weeks ago.

There is much more to come for NS2 on the horizon, so stay tuned and happy hunting!

Update 309 Changelog

Gameplay

• Skulk HP raised to 75/10 (was 70/10)
  The intent of this is to make early game skulks a tiny bit less fragile and to make early game engagements more stable (the innate regen threw a RNG factor into those engagements)
• Machine Gun changes
  • MG research time halved to 30 seconds (was 60)
  • Decreased MG spread to 4 radians (from 4.5)
  • Increased magazine size to 125 (from 100)

The MG is primarily designed to give Marines a chance to hold and extend their territory in the late mid game. The MG wasn’t really able to do that in the past. Halving the research time should help get it on the field before it’s too late. Furthermore decreasing the spread and increasing the magazine should make it reward players better for good positioning.

• Railgun damage type changed to Structural (was normal, railguns now do double damage vs structures, and have no change vs players)

The Railguns can be fun to use against alien players, but at it’s current damage numbers it took 2-4 shots to pop a cyst which made it feel very underpowered. Doubling their damage output to structures will help give them more utility.

• Marines now can’t turn their upper body as far to the right, without also turning their lower body (this makes it easier for aliens to tell which direction a marine is facing)
• Marines now use a different animation while jetpacking, rather than the jumping animation

Tweaks / Improvements

• New Commander Tutorial now available in the training menu!
  • Two new achievements added related to the commander tutorial
  • Removed the “commander help” in-game tutorial
• Improved bot server performance by adding a tick rate for the bot logic routine which is set to 10 by default
  • This should lower the impact of bots onto the server performance by at least 50%
• Updated the bot name list including more recent contributors
• All serverbrowser filter act now the same way: Enabled will show given servers, disabled will hide given servers. Old filter settings are converted
• The “full server” serverbrowser filter will now also take reserved slots into account
• Added the server admin command “sv_rookieonly” to change the rookie only state of a server without requiring a map change or server restart
• Replaced the server runtime error (SRE) icon when a script error occurs on the client with something prettier
• Added another diagnostic icon which will appear when a script error occurs on the server (it’s purple!)
• List the exact number of script errors that occurred on the server in net_stats and the client log
• Windows servers now automatically save a mini memory dump into their log folder on crash (if your server crashes please send this to us so we can help diagnose it)

Fixes

• Fixed that the subscribed mods did not show up in server details window
• Fixed that the rookie only check didn’t work on most rookie-only servers (this was previously deployed via the extension system)
• Fixed that the buttons of popup that showed up when a non rookie tries to join a team at a rookie only servers did not work
• Fixed that you could get stuck in place if you attempted to evolve a trait twice before turning into an egg
• Fixed a script error in the alien commander bot routine
• Fixed a small performance issue in the scoreboard update routine
• Fixed that numbers in the options menu were too precise
• Fixed that the pistol slide was not staying open when the gun is empty
• Fixed that blink effects could cause visual artifacts when bloom was enabled
• Fixed that protolab could cause blow out while being biled if bloom was enabled
• Fixed that spectators could end up spectating non player entities in a rare case

SDK

• Added the ability to lock the view horizontally with the space bar in film mode (Thanks Samus!)
• Added ability to communicate with Webviews (Lua <-> Javascript)
  • WebView::ExecJS allows Lua code to call javascript inside the webview
  • WebView::HookJSAlert allows Lua code to respond to any Javascript alert( message )
• Added Client.GetNumServerScriptErrors() to get the number of script errors that have occurred on the server (since map change)
• The spread vectors table of the shotgun is now referenced via the class to make them easier to mod
• Improved the Lua TraceLogger error messages to include more details
• Viewer
  • Added JSON Export to Animation Graph editor
  • Improved Animation Graph editor visuals by highlighting incoming and outgoing lines from the selected node different colors.
  • It’s now possible to have one-way labels in the Animation Graph (animation state can jump out of this node to other nodes of the same label, but can only be entered by discrete connections)
• Model Compiler
  • Fixed an issue that could cause models’ scaling to be strange when playing animations.
  • Fixed a bug that would cause cameras to not load properly.
• Fixed possible crash on exit due to bad access in FMOD dll (when using Spark’s tools)

As we announced in last week’s Changelog, we’re releasing a patch this week! This patch contains all the tweaks and updates we held back from build 308, in favor of having more time to solely focus on the issues that came up after the LUAJit update.

Included in this update is the brand new Marine Commander tutorial. This will teach potential new commanders the basics of commanding and the marine tech tree. So if you wanted to get a basic understanding of commanding without being in a live game, there is now a way to do so.

But that’s not all! Thanks to the tremendous work of Trevor, with the help of a group of volunteers from the community, the new tutorial is packed with more easter eggs and secrets to discover. So even as a veteran commander it’s worth giving it a shot, if only just to unlock the new achievements!

We’ve been listening a lot to the community’s feedback about the current balance situation and the performance issues that have been showing up since the last few builds. With this build we started including changes which are trying to resolve some of those issues that were brought up. More improvements will follow in the future.

Meanwhile the team is still working on items from our roadmap that remi posted two weeks ago.

There is much more to come for NS2 on the horizon, so stay tuned and happy hunting!

Update 309 Changelog

Gameplay

• Skulk HP raised to 75/10 (was 70/10)
  The intent of this is to make early game skulks a tiny bit less fragile and to make early game engagements more stable (the innate regen threw a RNG factor into those engagements)
• Machine Gun changes
  • MG research time halved to 30 seconds (was 60)
  • Decreased MG spread to 4 radians (from 4.5)
  • Increased magazine size to 125 (from 100)

The MG is primarily designed to give Marines a chance to hold and extend their territory in the late mid game. The MG wasn’t really able to do that in the past. Halving the research time should help get it on the field before it’s too late. Furthermore decreasing the spread and increasing the magazine should make it reward players better for good positioning.

• Railgun damage type changed to Structural (was normal, railguns now do double damage vs structures, and have no change vs players)

The Railguns can be fun to use against alien players, but at it’s current damage numbers it took 2-4 shots to pop a cyst which made it feel very underpowered. Doubling their damage output to structures will help give them more utility.

• Marines now can’t turn their upper body as far to the right, without also turning their lower body (this makes it easier for aliens to tell which direction a marine is facing)
• Marines now use a different animation while jetpacking, rather than the jumping animation

Tweaks / Improvements

• New Commander Tutorial now available in the training menu!
  • Two new achievements added related to the commander tutorial
  • Removed the “commander help” in-game tutorial
• Improved bot server performance by adding a tick rate for the bot logic routine which is set to 10 by default
  • This should lower the impact of bots onto the server performance by at least 50%
• Updated the bot name list including more recent contributors
• All serverbrowser filter act now the same way: Enabled will show given servers, disabled will hide given servers. Old filter settings are converted
• The “full server” serverbrowser filter will now also take reserved slots into account
• Added the server admin command “sv_rookieonly” to change the rookie only state of a server without requiring a map change or server restart
• Replaced the server runtime error (SRE) icon when a script error occurs on the client with something prettier
• Added another diagnostic icon which will appear when a script error occurs on the server (it’s purple!)
• List the exact number of script errors that occurred on the server in net_stats and the client log
• Windows servers now automatically save a mini memory dump into their log folder on crash (if your server crashes please send this to us so we can help diagnose it)

Fixes

• Fixed that the subscribed mods did not show up in server details window
• Fixed that the rookie only check didn’t work on most rookie-only servers (this was previously deployed via the extension system)
• Fixed that the buttons of popup that showed up when a non rookie tries to join a team at a rookie only servers did not work
• Fixed that you could get stuck in place if you attempted to evolve a trait twice before turning into an egg
• Fixed a script error in the alien commander bot routine
• Fixed a small performance issue in the scoreboard update routine
• Fixed that numbers in the options menu were too precise
• Fixed that the pistol slide was not staying open when the gun is empty
• Fixed that blink effects could cause visual artifacts when bloom was enabled
• Fixed that protolab could cause blow out while being biled if bloom was enabled
• Fixed that spectators could end up spectating non player entities in a rare case

SDK

• Added the ability to lock the view horizontally with the space bar in film mode (Thanks Samus!)
• Added ability to communicate with Webviews (Lua <-> Javascript)
  • WebView::ExecJS allows Lua code to call javascript inside the webview
  • WebView::HookJSAlert allows Lua code to respond to any Javascript alert( message )
• Added Client.GetNumServerScriptErrors() to get the number of script errors that have occurred on the server (since map change)
• The spread vectors table of the shotgun is now referenced via the class to make them easier to mod
• Improved the Lua TraceLogger error messages to include more details
• Viewer
  • Added JSON Export to Animation Graph editor
  • Improved Animation Graph editor visuals by highlighting incoming and outgoing lines from the selected node different colors.
  • It’s now possible to have one-way labels in the Animation Graph (animation state can jump out of this node to other nodes of the same label, but can only be entered by discrete connections)
• Model Compiler
  • Fixed an issue that could cause models’ scaling to be strange when playing animations.
  • Fixed a bug that would cause cameras to not load properly.
• Fixed possible crash on exit due to bad access in FMOD dll (when using Spark’s tools)

We'd like to take a moment and shine a light on our partners over at the Natural Selection League. Sign-ups are under way for season 10 of great competitive NS2 action and we couldn't be more excited! Below is all the information and links you might need to get involved with the next season, so gather your friends, create a team and get in on the action!

Welcome to the Natural Selection League. If you’re looking for getting more out of your Natural Selection 2 experience, look no further. Power plays, crackpot strats, and the greatest competitive minds of Natural Selection 2 converge here to duke it out on the battlefield. Talk strategy, metagame, and high-level concept Natural Selection 2 on our forums, or enjoy a gather and fight to the top of the food chain. If you’re looking for more information, check the bottom of this post.Any questions can be directed to our help desk or by messaging an admin on ENSL, Steam, by email or Discord. A full list of current admins can be found here.

Brace yourselves, Season 10 is upon us! But.. we will be extended the deadlines for signups for two weeks. The signup deadline for Season 10 is now October 13th. We want the potential to seed a lower division as high as possible, with the intent of more and better matches. A reminder to sign-up if you haven’t already, as time is ticking!For all new players, you need a team of at least six players to compete in Season 10, please read the final section of this post on how to create or join teams.

Gathers have picked up steam and are running again. You can join a gather by registering an account and joining up here. Joining is easy, and practice can come in handy for the upcoming Season 10. Be sure to play more rounds to familiarize (or refamiliarize yourself on Mesh (formerly Docking2), Nexus, and Mineral, as these custom maps are staples of an ENSL season, and some have changed for the new Season.

Some of our mappers have come forward concerning high-level gathers on ns2_ayumi, a reimagining of the Natural Selection 3.0 map of the same name. Huge changes have happened recently with the map concerning balance, and feedback is necessary. Contact Kasharic or Mephilles for more information. If you have another map you’d like to see played in gathers, contact an admin.

If you don't have a team or have yet to join the ENSL, it's easy to create an account or team with the following steps. If you want to register a pre-existing team, skip to step 4.

• To create a team, register an account and create a new team! Creating a team is not necessary, nor is joining a team. If you’re looking to join a team, find a team and select the Request to Join button on their page. You’re free to use the ENSL website without any pressure from any teams.
• Get your players to register and tell them to Join your team in their Agenda, which you can find at the top of the page! You can meet players in-game, in ENSL gathers, or on the ENSL or Unknown Worlds forums. As per usual ENSL rules, you must have at least six players for a valid Season 10 team!
• To accept your players on the team, go to Agenda → Click your team name → Edit and scroll down → Members → Change their status from Joining to Member, Leader, or Deputy. These roles can define what a player is to your team.
• To join the tournament, go to Agenda → Click your team name → Edit (scroll down) → Contests → Join Season 10 Signups. This will reserve your space in the upcoming Season 10. Get ready to rock!
• Verify that your team name exists on the Contest page. If your team does not appear here, please follow these steps again. If all else fails, contact an admin.