The Situation in ShootMania is... bad!

[keeth]

Hmm, a good depiction of what can happen can be seen in south park, episode 5, season 19, safe space. Look at butters, that's a picture perfect extreme example.

â—‰_â—‰'

[muckep]

Dmark, appart from some language part, I agree that you are left in the dark. It's also though for us since we don't want that, but communication requires it's own agenda. We are still far from getting out of the tunnel, but we are working on it.

I really want players that invested time in our game to feel they did in the right place, and we intend to make both Trackmania & Shootmania very popular. This is why the studio is investing so much in the future. Recruiting, teaching, developing and such can take quite some time. Some other games are made in years, even if they are updates, while we tried to make update while doing the next steps. You know how wide are the features we support compared to other more classic games, and it's also quite a job to do. I am happy of it, because it means that the projects are ambitious, instead of just somewhat trying to be better than other games. And this also, it takes time.

Saying that we should do updates, you are also right. And we did a Maniaplanet update in November with even trying to make a new mode (that we can improve, of course) But if you don't acknowledge that it is still something doing this after 6 years of the release and a lot of negativeness around from the players, we will be trap for long in a misunderstanding. Yes, there would be things to fix. But we also need to work on the future.

Our games are also made for the players to be able to create their own stuff, and in the last update, we improved that with the mesh modeler, the script capacities and other things around. It's rather blurry as the impact it can bring to the game, but it's also significant over time to make players more powerful or us more agile.

The negativeness of various players really prevents me from having interesting open debates. I hope you understand this. I will go back to work on both Trackmania & Shootmania.

And yes, we will fix what we just broke. Sorry for the inconvenience.

++

Everything the guys wrote about above is very important and serious right now. All of these things happening in SM, which they have described, it is important to decide here and now. Without it there is no sense to make plans for any future. I fully support the Hype and join to him.

For my part, I can speak for almost all the Russian-speaking community, which is even more or less active. Everyone misses the times with over 500 people online... on game with minimal count of errors and bugs.

The only help that I can offer and provide - is advertising and promotion of the game in Russian-speaking social networks (such as Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, etc.) and can do it for free, if you had the desire, and that you take into account all the things that wrote HYPE and others.

[Vrba]

It's not bugs, it's just features nobody expected.... even the devs. How hard is it comprehend?

[plopp]

[Miss]

And this, exactly, is why a community manager needs to sift through all the bad negative posts and the actual constructive posts in order to bring the message of the community in a clear way to the talented people at Nadeo.

I have to disagree with this. While community manager is a good idea, people still need to experience the current state of the community, be it a bad one or a good one. Separating messages into what your bosses wants to hear, and ignoring those they don't want to hear will not make a difference. That would be the same as current Nadeos' forum where negativity is discouraged, but in a way that it is not as transparent.

You're right, but a good community manager wouldn't just say "people want to see X fixed", but they'd say "people are not happy that X is happening, it should be fixed". Nobody wants to read through posts with tons of expletives. The "current state of the community" can be communicated in a nice and constructive way too. That's part of a CM's job, to translate any anger/frustration from the community to a more coherent language.

[Zeraxex]

I'll bring up some little detail which has been mentioned like 500 times in the past:

Why is there still no tutorial for new players?!

And I'm not talking about some texts on your screen saying "Use wasd to move." I mean like a real tutorial, a map with well made MediaTracker and scrips.

This is not just another complain. In my eyes it's a major thing why the game will never be able to grow.
Seriously, I spent hours and hours on obstacle severs in the past trying to explain movement mechanics to seemingly new and/or inexperienced players. Some of them did progress, slow but steadily, others just quit after few minutes, BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO SPRINT TO GET THE FIRST JUMP. Think about that and let that sink in, people don't know how to sprint, they need another player to teach them! I'm not saying that the way sprinting is handled is bad, no, it's great! But it's not intuitive, and I'm not sure if, and I can't remember that it gets mentioned anywhere on how to do it.
How do you want to make the game popular when there's no way for new players to get into the game?

Like what are these priorities? "Hm, let's add yet another mode to this game!" While still we are falling through the ground when leaving the building area, settings getting reset after restarts and map- and serverswitches, there are holes in some blocks where you can shoot through (and yes, i saw players getting kills with that) and every new player leaves the game after 10 minutes because they don't know how it works.

Your priorities seem to be straight up WRONG. And I know that you in the past said that we can't know what your priorities are and that you think that your priorities are at the right place, but we get to see what happens. You throw unfinished ideas, projects and updates at us while the base game is flooded with flaws. That doesn't look like good priorities.

ShootMania in it's current state is a big recycling bin full of ideas and features that have a lot of flaws but might be recycled at some point.

[wawawawu]

I read your lines, Hylis, and it seems to me, sorry to say this in great respect, as a meaningless text from any politician. There is no empathy for the situation, just the same texts as always. We can read this lines since years. And while the situation gets more dramatic every year, nothing happens. I don't talk about bugs, updates or whatever. I am talking about the fact, that at the time i started SM (and i started in first open beta) this game was hyped on all channels. In youtube, print, even in german tv! And every host, journalist or vlogger was full of emotions for the game. We had huge amounts of servers and on some days you could'nt find a place in a royal server because there were so much gamers, no single slot left...

Don't you ask yourself, why there is just a shadow from this left? Thousands of gamers left the game, because they are all negative? Come on...
Stop closing your eyes and start seeing. It may hurt, but it's not to late...

This is something I learned in my life, that has quite a lot good and bad experiences in business and private:

As an entrepreneur you always have to decide the direction, and as much as you can try to get informations and advices - at the end you have to find and decide the way your company goes. And its your shoulder, your responsibility. May the consequences good or bad. It's how I did it since 1989 and ev'ry other one does before and after...

When I was a young boy in 1983, apprentice in a financial institute, my boss found me talking presumtuous to a customer with financial problems. He took me aside and said: Stop this! Even if this is a poor man with problems, you are not better because you are working here! This guy is A CUSTOMER, and always treat him like this. He may now be in trouble, but this won't last forever... And how can you expect him to treat you well, when he is in better financial shape in the future? Treat him as a man, a person. With respect! And LISTEN to the words he is saying! NOW LEARN THIS LESSON FOR LIFE! It's not important which businesses you will have in your life, ONE RULE is important forever! LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS! THEY are everything you have, they are what you need to earn money. If you don't respect them, you will lose them. If you don't listen, you don't know, what they want and what they spend their money for. And your business is history...

I don't expect you to understand this, but I am a salesman. It hurts my soul when there is a incredible, phantasic good and noone knows. Stop putting "the salesstart" in the future "when the game is perfect"... It will never be perfect and the gamers accept this.

All they want to have is your respect and the feeling that you take it serious.

You can invent or create the best thing in the world. There must be someone who buys and gives his hard earned money. Therefore you need their trust in you and the future, and that your product is worth the money.

You just make it easy to you. No need to think, if we could be right... But face the fact, that all of this "negativity" (as you call it) comes only from ONE cause. WE CARE ABOUT THE GAME! If this wasn't true - we just would leave as all the others do. WE LOVE THIS GAME! This is why we put so much time and money in it... THIS IS why we are writing here and try to tell OUR NEEDS. THE CUSTOMERS NEEDS. It hurts our soul that we play a great game and noone else knows, because of lack of advertising...

If you don't like us to be your customer... well, just tell us.

[plopp]

And we did a Maniaplanet update in November with even trying to make a new mode (that we can improve, of course) But if you don't acknowledge that it is still something doing this after 6 years of the release and a lot of negativeness around from the players, we will be trap for long in a misunderstanding.

I think this is a part of the problem. Not sure if I misunderstand this, but from what I read it says: "How can you complain when we're actually doing stuff?".

It feels like anything done for SM is just a second hand thing. "Hmm... we haven't fed the baby in a while, let's just give it some shit and hope it survives". Adding stuff is no use if the core product is broken. Sure, some of these bugs are probably hard to fix. Maybe they're impossible, but then say that and don't just add a bunch of things to distract us from what the real problem is.

Finally I'd like to ask: What's the point of Maniaplanet? Why can't the games just be separate things?

[muckep]

I read your lines, Hylis, and it seems to me, sorry to say this in great respect, as a meaningless text from any politician. There is no empathy for the situation, just the same texts as always. We can read this lines since years. And while the situation gets more dramatic every year, nothing happens. I don't talk about bugs, updates or whatever. I am talking about the fact, that at the time i started SM (and i started in first open beta) this game was hyped on all channels. In youtube, print, even in german tv! And every host, journalist or vlogger was full of emotions for the game. We had huge amounts of servers and on some days you could'nt find a place in a royal server because there were so much gamers, no single slot left...

Don't you ask yourself, why there is just a shadow from this left? Thousands of gamers left the game, because they are all negative? Come on...
Stop closing your eyes and start seeing. It may hurt, but it's not to late...

This is something I learned in my life, that has quite a lot good and bad experiences in business and private:

As an entrepreneur you always have to decide the direction, and as much as you can try to get informations and advices - at the end you have to find and decide the way your company goes. And its your shoulder, your responsibility. May the consequences good or bad. It's how I did it since 1989 and ev'ry other one does before and after...

When I was a young boy in 1983, apprentice in a financial institute, my boss found me talking presumtuous to a customer with financial problems. He took me aside and said: Stop this! Even if this is a poor man with problems, you are not better because you are working here! This guy is A CUSTOMER, and always treat him like this. He may now be in trouble, but this won't last forever... And how can you expect him to treat you well, when he is in better financial shape in the future? Treat him as a man, a person. With respect! And LISTEN to the words he is saying! NOW LEARN THIS LESSON FOR LIFE! It's not important which businesses you will have in your life, ONE RULE is important forever! LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS! THEY are everything you have, they are what you need to earn money. If you don't respect them, you will lose them. If you don't listen, you don't know, what they want and what they spend their money for. And your business is history...

I don't expect you to understand this, but I am a salesman. It hurts my soul when there is a incredible, phantasic good and noone knows. Stop putting "the salesstart" in the future "when the game is perfect"... It will never be perfect and the gamers accept this.

All they want to have is your respect and the feeling that you take it serious.

You can invent or create the best thing in the world. There must be someone who buys and gives his hard earned money. Therefore you need their trust in you and the future, and that your product is worth the money.

You just make it easy to you. No need to think, if we could be right... But face the fact, that all of this "negativity" (as you call it) comes only from ONE cause. WE CARE ABOUT THE GAME! If this wasn't true - we just would leave as all the others do. WE LOVE THIS GAME! This is why we put so much time and money in it... THIS IS why we are writing here and try to tell OUR NEEDS. THE CUSTOMERS NEEDS. It hurts our soul that we play a great game and noone else knows, because of lack of advertising...

If you don't like us to be your customer... well, just tell us.

101% agree! Respect and reverence to you, wawawawu

[TMarc]

Well said, wawawawu

@ zerarex: No tutorial? Nadeo made the Platform title for that, for the very basics.

Someone from the community could have done one or more tuturials long time ago already, if it was so important and necessary ... If you know some, please give the links and I'd be happy to place them in prominent topics here or in the documentation page.

After all, Nadeo relies a lot on the community.
The creative community has already done a lot of astonishing stuff, including amazing video productions, so why no Shootmania tutorial?
Think about that... You could do one?

Besides this, getting to know how to use a game by observation and own trying is also a part of the experience. If there is nothing to discover and to learn on the own, this is not really funny and rather boring.
It would be just "shoot and go".

Then, there should always be other helpful players who are ready to show some stuff.
I know that they were in past time, and I hope there are still some.

With and without tutorial, nobody is perfect at the first steps anyway.

However I agree that tutorials are necessary for the editing tools like advanced map or replay editor, or the new mesh modeller.

I remember well the times of Doom and Quake. There was no tutorial for anything. It was self-teaching only. And there were no big forums that time.

That the past updates broke the game is a pity, and should encourage the team to really consider to have a stable branch for releases.

I see the problem that the older and current players of Shootmania have lost any confidence, because it is getting worse and worse instead of better.

@ Hylis, please don't take the few negative comments as excuse to communicate nothing, again. Because then those evil indivues win, they disrupt the team from the community. But this is absolutely not right.

Actually you are basically telling the same story since years already, like that the team is growing and in good condition etc.
But we only punctually see results, and then you disappear for long time, which is very frustrating.

Except for a few cracks who are willingly asking for, and accepting the changes, the average players only see problems and nearly no improvement.
At least for Shootmania.

Regarding Trackmania I'm quite happy, but this is not the question here.

Even if you cannot tell exact dates, a rough estimate of things to be expected this year would be very nice to know.

Please don't be frustrated - there are always people complaining, whatever you do.
The people which are happy are much more, to bad they almost never appear.