Mar 8, 2013

Natural Caution: The Perils Of Cheap Game Keys

Steam Community Items - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)

I chew-chew-chews you

Here’s a cautionary tale, and a stark reminder that digital goods are still the World Wide Wild West. While a majority of PC games these days seem to ultimately involve a Steam key (which is itself an understandably controversial state of affairs), ownership of one of those keys can be sold by any number of third parties. So we see online stores both reputable and troublesome striving to offer downloads for less than a direct Steam activation, less than each other and, most commonly, less than the frequently outrageously inflated official pricing in some territories. Such was (and presumably is) the case for Natural Selection 2. Revealed developer Unknown Worlds yesterday, “Recently, a batch of 1,341 NS2 Steam keys were purchased using stolen credit cards. These keys were then offered for sale by various resellers. The owners of said cards disputed the transactions, and thankfully received their money back.”

Thankfully for them, but less thankfully for a) Unknown Worlds and b) the people who had bought the keys.

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Mar 6, 2013

Natural Selection 2 Update Released

Natural Selection 2 - Valve

In the battle that is the shipping of a big patch, we do our best to achieve total victory. The bane of our development lives is the ‘hotfix.’ Hotfixes are horrible. They suck up disproportionate amounts of development time, they are inefficient uses of development resources, and just generally suck.

But try as we might to avoid them, sometimes they are needed. Gorgeous needed one, and here it is! 241 is small and won’t make big differences to the way you play. It will fix some hidden nasties that snuck out it the Server process, and some bugs causing consternation to people using babblers, wall jump, and fullscreen windowed mode.

At their release, Babblers were a little bit useless. This uselessness boiled down to the fact that they were too slow to keep up with their host Gorge, catch friendly players hit by the baitball, and close distance with marines. Now, they are much faster, and much more useful.

Winrates in Gorgeous have been exceptionally good. After 25,798 games (on Sunday), the probability of a marine win in a randomly sampled game was 0.507, our best result yet, and a big improvement on build 239′s ~0.41. However, some of this improvement came from a bug causing Skulk’s to lose momentum when they hit the ground. That is fixed in 241, so we expect the probability of marine wins to decrease back below 0.5 for now.

Servers will update over the next hour or so, so if you can’t find games at the moment, sit tight. Here is the full changelog:

Improvement

Added super-sampling when generating reflection cube maps to improve quality.

Balance

Increased Babbler run speed from 5 to 7.

Fix

Fixed bug that prevented an Alien from evolving if they had Babblers attached to themselves.
Eliminated uninitialized data when sending packets with strings less than the maximum length (may cause problems with some firewall rules)
Fixed exploit which allowed Gorge tunnels to be build outside of the map.
Fixed bug which caused Skulks to lose all their momentum instantly when touching the ground.
Fixed bug where mines were ignoring damage falloff.
Fixed bug where Alien attacks got blocked by attached Babblers.
Fixed bug where fullscreen windowed mode forced vsync on.
Changed the maxfps console command to only allow values above 30 FPS to prevent exploitation

Optimization

Reduced overhead of isa method.
Improved server performance.
Reduced the cost of updating entities in the query manager.