Who are...? DiamondGamers

In our "Who are...?"-series we are going to present all kind of communities, which live inside the NS2-world. The right community for your needs and interests might be just a few clicks away.

We start with the North American community DiamondGamers. A community, which loves to play and create content for their favourite games - including NS2, CS:GO, Minecraft and more. This introduction is written by Rusty. All credit goes to him.

DiamondGamers is a professionally run gaming community. DMD offers only the best in terms of game quality, server performance, and custom content. We are open to everyone!

DMD caters to “VIP” members by ensuring that, when you get home from work or school, there is a server waiting. We try to have dinner ready by 5, but at times many people are going beyond membership into the ranks of family and help to create “the perfect dinner” for all to enjoy. We have programmers, 3D artists, animators, playtesters, mappers, moderators, administrators, server ambassadors, systems operators,... all working behind the scenes to give you a full course meal!

Being in DMD is a blast. We are the ones who created Captains Nights back in NS1 days. We introduced it again in NS2, which was further adopted and welcomed by other communities. For DMD I wanted something unique, though and so had this insane idea of telling the 750+ people in our steam group to be on a particular server at a particular time. We had five full servers running simultaneously. Everyone joined their assigned server and as such the Rumble event began! It was a five week event. You can read about the Rumble on our forums, but it was a blast and I look forward to re-doing it again in 2016!

Our community isn’t structured like a business. It’s more like a family household. If someone sees something that needs to be done, they can message me for approval and they get it done. If we need more moderators (green diamond icon), I promote some VIP’s to moderate the servers they play on. If people want to run events, or run a training camp, it’s encouraged!

DMD has a mapping team that has one purpose: to make NS2 even more fun! We meet up every Tuesday night and go over the maps we're working on. Charlie created NS2 with hopes of people making custom content and that’s just what we are doing. Yes it takes about 2500+ hours to make an NS2 map, but we are about 80% done with NS2_DMD_Ayumi which should be released sometime close to 2016. We’ve included all new hive designs, 4 tech points, weldable vents, elevators, a well planned vent system, and have utilized the NS2 map format into an old NS1 favorite that we are sure all will enjoy for years to come. We've done some good balance changes to some of the vanilla maps too. Refinery for instance (vanilla) used to be a marine win 78% of the time - averaging 7.5 minutes. We made a couple of simple changes and now marines win 56% of games - averaging 40-60 minutes. We slowed down the marine rush capabilities - fixed the lanes for better lane management, and ensured that aliens have an easier time keeping their naturals up.

If you’d like to get VIP to help cover our server costs and become not only one of our respected members, but another addition to our family, we welcome it! Your support is appreciated and in return you get some awesome swag!

Have feedback for us? Got some ideas for improving gameplay, or adding another game to our server collection? Want to come say hi in our intro section? It’s all in the forums at diamondgamers.net. Thanks for reading, and we look forward on seeing you on the servers!

~Rusty and the DMD team.