Originally Posted by Nemesis Zero

There has been one cry accompanying NS since the days of 1.0: "NS is dying!"
Since the first announcements to that end, the call has received a companion: "Combat will kill NS!"

I honestly don't think anything we could ever do will rid us of both.

Natrual Selection has currently between 1000 and 2000 players on the servers on any given time. Beta 5 is in so far an improvement; it has increased our playerbase by estimatedly one to twohundred individuals at any given time. Sure, those numbers are dwarved by the commercially distributed HL mods, but if you compare them to 'ordinary' retail products, we're at respectable levels. So, NS is not dying.

"But only because you dumbed it down to admit the unwashed team DM - masses in! The real NS is long dead and you're dancing macarena on its grave!" - Check the numbers.
50% of NS' populated servers play Classic. It has been that way since Beta 2. NS: Classic won't go anywhere. It's true that Beta 5 included mostly combat-oriented changes. Combat had some real issues in B4, so we tried to take care of at least some of them along with the bugfixes. B6 will, predictably, put a significantly greater emphasis on Classic. No, we won't revolutionize the gamemode. All said and done we're at the end of 3.0's development cycle; it's unrealistic to expect, say, five new marine weapons at this point. But there are some changes to existing gameplay elements that we think will be significant enough to make Classic a lot more fun again.
Combat is no danger to Classic. We do not ignore one gameplay mode over the other, we do not plan on 'dumbing' anything 'down'. If you are really convinced we did, I suggest you load 2.0's Steam install up again and take a close look at it. We're not going to stop supporting the Combat players, we're not going to stop supporting the Classic players.

I just thought that was interesting.