NSL Season 4 has been highly exciting, very refreshing and a huge success after the World Championship. What’s made this season great? What’s coming up next?New Volunteer Staff - Behind the ScenesAs you can see from the diagram above, in just 1 week, we had a huge number of different casters, combinations, and referees powering through each match week by week. We’re talking up to 22 matches, 88 rounds, every week for hobbyists like me to get through. That could easily be between 40 and 50 hours of NS2 content weekly for the past few months. Thanks to these guys as well as the audience who made all this so much more fun.The Balance Mod - Refreshing the GameOver the course of the season, the game evolved. Within 6v6 competitive matches, we were running the “balance mod”, which served a very simple purpose. To make the game fundamentally fun for players and teams by promoting a strong sense of balance, as well as improving weaker elements of strategy that were underpowered.It began strong with an overhaul to the cost of Alien upgrades: chambers like Shells and Spurs were cheaper, Biomass was made more affordable, and Lifeform upgrades were reduced in cost too, for an overall cut of spending by about 30% in each case. This made Alien teams stronger at the mid and late game, by allowing them to more easily recover from losing an upgrade chamber, or to spend their resources on valuable improvements to lifeforms rather than static support buildings like Crags.In the second iteration, personal resource costs for Alien lifeforms were reduced to make comebacks for the Alien team more possible, and allowing the Alien team to take risks more often, promoting more aggressive and exciting gameplay!Next Steps - Whats coming up!The weekly games have ended and the tiebreakers and playoffs have begun. Some of these have already been played and you can hunt through the ENSL website for more information and VODs available for those matches. Still remaining to be played are the Premier teams’ semi finals and finals matches, where we will see the top 4 teams battle for the first place of the season!The Legendary Snails, an extremely confident and powerful team, highly aggressive, but at a cost to their defence;Titus Gaming, the American strategists with excellent tracking accuracy and a highly intelligent and adaptive commander;The Saunamen, wonderfully consistent with strong discipline and an extremely impressive Marine lineupTeam Imagine, reckless underdogs having demonstrated some phenomenal teamwork, great communication and strong performance when morale is high.The deadline for the semi finals is June 22nd, so you can expect the first set of matches within the next two weeks. Its a best of 7 so the first team to get 4 rounds moves on to the finals.Choose your map, choose your side and play for the number one spot!