Keeping in tune with our weekly releases is key to our continued work on NS2. What’s great about this schedule is that we can make tweaks and improvements across all aspects of the game, get real world feedback on gameplay and then just a few days later release more fine tuning and even more changes. Throughout these last few months, some of our experiments and changes have worked out better than we’d ever thought…and sometimes they don’t. However, what’s true is that we continue to push forward and try new exciting things. Update 295 begins our movement towards a continued shakeup from the norm of NS2 gameplay. We are always looking for ways to simplify and also spice up gameplay throughout the game. Another great improvement comes from our good friend Matso in the way of some additional network updates that will hopefully improve the experience for those of you having redplug issues. Lastly, thank you again to our awesome community. We recently re-launched the NS2 Translation site and have already gotten a lot of great submissions from people from all over the world. You can help the cause by visiting translate.naturalselection2.com! Our community is so rich with talent and it does not go unnoticed. We have some exciting things to come over the next few weeks and can’t wait for you to get your hands onto it, plus remember you can access the beta branch any time you want to see what’s going on behind the scenes of the next update. UPDATE NOTES Tweaks / Improvements Ragdolls will dissolve faster and be colorized faster to give more feedback that they are dead already and you can stop shooting Hitsounds will be enabled by default for new players so marines get better feedback when shooting aliens New item pop-ups will no longer show for duplicates Updated the in-game fonts to better support Latin Extended A chars (Thanks navazka) NS2 now remembers the last selected server browser tab and will reselect it as soon as the server list has been fetched. Gamemode server browser tabs now display the amount of players of the given mode. Removed unique popup warning about gameplay issues on large servers Warning popup for operating outside recommended settings changed Will show if server exceeds 24 player slots as well as if network settings have been changed from default Warning message will not show for servers you have favorited “Never Show Again” option removed for rookies Your nickname in NS2 will now automatically update with changes to your Steam name (this can be disabled from the options menu, under General -> Keep Same As Steam) When failing to connect to a server due to reserved slots or because of having been banned, you will now be told so more explicitly Added disconnect reasons for wrong build numbers, to make patch day less confusing for players Default server moverate reduced from 30 to 26. This restores it to approximately what it was prior to build 279, and should help server performance Servers will report now the sum of the median and standard deviation of all player skill rating as average player skill. This should make the skill row of the server browser more reliable. Removed over 200 no longer used game strings to help our community translators. Feel free to help us localizing the game at http://translate.naturalselection2.com/ Fixes Fixed issue where moverate was being improperly calculated, potentially causing a client to send an excessive number of moves after returning from being alt+tabbed, or if their framerate stuttered (Thanks Matso!) Rookie only server alert message will now be hidden forever when you tell it to be so Fixed weird behavior with popups when trying to join servers with reserved slots where the same popup would appear more than once SDK Raised engine hard limit for max players to 99. It is still recommended to stay under 24 Servers can now supply a refuse reason in the CheckConnectionAllowed callback