The Situation in ShootMania

[novationx]

Hey Tmarc,

I can find myself in what you're saying.

Release a good base game, nice playerbase and give the creative people some solid tools to keep creating new and refreshing content.
If you put it like that it sounds quite good.

When ShootMania came out I honestly believe there was a good base game, but then some things went south. There's no point in listing what went wrong ( and dont forget the good things that happened! ).

Somehow it all became ( and already was a bit ) too complicated. Because of the UI some simple things even look complicated. Some wrong choices, some bugs, some negativity, some bad testing, ...

So what now? What would the ideal future/update be imho:

NOW:
- Fix ( one last time ) the 'gamebreaking' bugs so remaining players can have a decent game experience while NADEO works its magic.

LATER:
- Seperate the game from TM ( confirmed by Hylis )
- 1 complete overhaul of the design ingame, design of menus and tools
--> polished & clean game
--> easy to understand for new players
- 5 or 6 well thought-through official gamemodes which NADEO keeps developing/updating/refreshing after realese. (their main focus)
- Roadmap of things to come (which are discussable)
- Frequent updates to keep us interested
--> a new skin
--> a new block
--> a new weapon

AFTER 2 or 3 years (€€€€):
A new environment and just keep adding polish/features/improvements while maintaining quality.



I want to finish my reply with the one thing I never understood:
If the game is strugling and playernumbers are dropping, why would you spend your precious time on:
A. developing another game mode? (nobody will play it...)
B. developing tools (like this meshthingy)? How many of us actually opened up that tool? 10? 20?

(I would put 10% of my time in tools. 90% of my time on the game. Sometimes it feels like the other way round.)

If you play Elite now or in 2012... what has actually changed besides walljumps, a block or 2 and textures in terms of gameplay? Honestly... (not saying NADEO didnt do anything... Just saying that it feels like nothing changed much. )


PS: thank you Hylis & Missy to reopen the thread.

[Soprah]

Adding new game modes is the outcome of their experiments with their tools ( my own assumption ). It's more or less a side-product that just comes along. I wouldn't hide some of these game modes just for the sake of "not releasing game modes because the community thinks we are stupid if we keep publishing game modes even though they are just side products from our experiments with the ManiaScript and other tools". Cause.. RoyalSquad is definitely a true gem among SM's game modes. I love it.

Furthermore: Nadeo is definitely doing it right to not add new gameplay stuff to Elite directly. Remember the blaming and hate when the falling penalty was implemented? It was such a small change.. but yet.. with big consequences (at least some people claimed it). They are doing it right in a way that they add new gameplay stuff indirectly by adding new blocks like the Teleporter, gravitation blocks etc. So it's more or less the responsibility of the mapper.
Map = Gameplay. And since the community picks the maps that they like, they indirectly pick the gameplay they like. It's the best Nadeo can do. Giving the community the choice to pick which gameplay they want. That's awesome in my opinion and very smart.

However, I deeply hope that Nadeo releases a SM 2.0 soon that is seperated from MP and its mess. Then you have much more freedom and much more clarity. And a fresh, new start. It is their first shooter. Everybody deserves a 2nd chance

[TMarc]

I guess this is exactly a part of the problem.

Pure players are not interested at all in any tools. Those just have to work, and must be very or quite simple to use.
On the other side there are the game creators which need complex tools with lots of possibilities.

For conventional games, the average count of players never got in touch with any map editor. They are playing maps made by the game studios or maps created by the few genius players who dared to try to find out how to create maps for these games.

With Trackmania and Shootmania it suddenly changed.
Anyone can create maps, and they all look more or less like the original maps. Only the layout was the point.

Since Maniaplanet allowed extended modding, where the players have the choice to keep simple or create lot of own stuff, pure players are a bit lost between the multiplicity and diversity of creations.

Not everything is bad, there are often nice surprises.
But it is even too much for the community.
Maps have ratings, but what if they don't work anymore after updates of Maniaplanet?

With the increasing amount of features and possibilities available to everyone, also the expectations of the players and creative heads are rising.

It is a big challenge for Nadeo to keep the balance, between offering new things and the maintenance of working stuff.

They could have chosen a different path, like saying "that's it, we don't work on it anymore" which actually happened with Trackmania United.

Many would have been happy to see Nadeo release new "finished" titles from time to time, as originally thought by Hylis.
Why they did not do it? Nobody knows.
Perhaps they had hoped that their tools would be sufficient for the community...

[djhubertus]

to everyone, also the expectations of the players and creative heads are rising.
It is a big challenge for Nadeo to keep the balance, between offering new things and the maintenance of working stuff.

I mean, for the past 5 years they choosed the path to only support those 4 modders. The only positive thing for players was...RoyalSquad and that's it. Nobody asked for inversion metalpads that put even more troubles in gameplay mechanics. People asked for splitting casual and competitive so comp modes will have actual matchmaking and proper ranking system/maniamatch/clans/official cups while casuals would have chaotic fun experience with progression system and achievements to keep retention. SM was advertised as esports Fast paced shooter. Most of the community members in 2012-2013 were just pros playing Elite/Joust and eventually Royal. Open beta people spent time in casual modes, it was very clear where is your target and where should You go, SM tried to compete with Quake Live and they failed due to wrong decisions and completely ditching the actual fanbase that put hours and hours of practice/preparing cups and leagues/creating content on Youtube(Remember FragDolls? IPL? :>). I guess they just gave up because numbers dropped to like 500 or something on launch day due to no free2play version, You had ssm fanboys on siege, instagib fanatics and elite diehards. We made titlepacks yep, we made modes, I can name only 4 successful ones that are still played, was it really worth it to ditch the community for their 'vision' of maniaplanet? I don't think so, the game wasn't designed and marketed to be a roblox ripoff, not even mentioning how much MP4 destroyed the population due to new demo system, people played for free, because it wasn't worth the price to upgrade, now those people just disappeared.

[Miss]

- 5 or 6 well thought-through official gamemodes which NADEO keeps developing/updating/refreshing after realese. (their main focus)
[...]
- Frequent updates to keep us interested

I know this is meant nicely, but think about it from another perspective - will updating/refreshing a game help bring in new players (aka. sales aka. money) as well? That's always a more important thing than trying to keep existing players happy. (Aka. people who aren't giving Nadeo any more money until the next game releases.)

Keeping players is of course important to a healthy game community as well - but it's definitely only a small part of the work.

I'm just going to wait and see what Nadeo's next game will bring.

[novationx]

- 5 or 6 well thought-through official gamemodes which NADEO keeps developing/updating/refreshing after realese. (their main focus)
[...]
- Frequent updates to keep us interested

I know this is meant nicely, but think about it from another perspective - will updating/refreshing a game help bring in new players (aka. sales aka. money) as well? That's always a more important thing than trying to keep existing players happy. (Aka. people who aren't giving Nadeo any more money until the next game releases.)

Keeping players is of course important to a healthy game community as well - but it's definitely only a small part of the work.

I'm just going to wait and see what Nadeo's next game will bring.

You"re right.
If they would do this now for SM... money wouldnt come from anywhere. But imo the ship called SM has already sailed. If they do release a new game I wish they'd do it as I mentioned in my previous post.

[OrecaShadow]

As one who always tries to get back to the game from time to time i have to say, The biggest part of me not staying for more then one hour is the lost satisfaction,

When i started playing, it was full of people all on a ship to learn the mechanics of the game, and from time to time we got the pros rising, Separating from the lower skilled players. I have been an Elite diehard fan, climbin the leaderboard was fun and even so the game made me also rage, i still had a lot of overwhelming moment hitting lasers and rockets, winning by a split second capture etc.

All these thrills, began to be fewer when the lower bracket playerbase started to vanish, and the gold players got put together with the Silver players. At that point the game started to demotivate me playing against pros, in ~20 games, i had only 5 wins.

And people started to abuse maps and the game mode itself. The biggest call was rushing the attacker.
I would feel like comming out of school and just get fucking punched by 3 dudes standing on the entrance without beeing able to defend myself.

Sure, there are some players who managed to overcome that, but 90% of people getting rushed, the chat was full of insults, deathwishes etc.
How great is the chance of these people to come back the next day to play this game. Well i would reduce it every day by 20% on average.

But, now you could say, why not playing some other mode?..... Well Elite has been titled THE ESPORT mode, the mode where "you can proof how good you are"

Just take elite and look at it like the league of legends ranked mode, people are tryharding on it, because they take it seriously and want to compete in a mode that they think matters the most to show of.
Almost all Cups there were in the ESL back then only just took Elite and didnt bring diversity in.


Some peronal notes here, I hate how shootmania looks with the current textures.. I came to it back then and loved the look of it before MP3.

And since those werent just some minor changes i canr bare it. I saw in the trailers how the game looked like and i never would have wanted anything either besides from some changes which would bring back some alpha looks cause there were great too.

And i do understand that these changes were competitive focused, at least thats what i got told all the time, but i think players should addapt to the game in this way, not the other way around.

[Hylis]

I like your post NovationX

The reasons why we are developping some side stuff instead of the core experience are to improve the overall system, for both TM & SM. And for modes, it's to explore new stuff. You should also keep in mind that these are different people that work on different stuff, so it's not always "do that instead of this"

Keeping a roadmap is complicated because it can change and create a lot of frustration toward the players as well or prevent the developpers to assume that they need to change the plan.

My answer is not to justify or else, it was just to cast light on your interrogations.

For everything else, I quite agree with what you said!

[novationx]

I like your post NovationX

The reasons why we are developping some side stuff instead of the core experience are to improve the overall system, for both TM & SM. And for modes, it's to explore new stuff. You should also keep in mind that these are different people that work on different stuff, so it's not always "do that instead of this"

Keeping a roadmap is complicated because it can change and create a lot of frustration toward the players as well or prevent the developpers to assume that they need to change the plan.

My answer is not to justify or else, it was just to cast light on your interrogations.

For everything else, I quite agree with what you said!

Thank you for your reply. Looking forward to the result and the direction SM will go into and how it will be different from 2013-2018. Good luck.

[HAScrashed]

I think u are still forgetting that shootmania is just old and its the main reason why it seems dead and abandoneded ~ it is Old, it looks Old and it has Old mechanics. There wont be any fresh feeling by New updates, bug fixes because the game itself is not fresh. From people who dont know this game they can just think that its just some dead old multiplayer Indie game From 2012 so there is nothing interesting in it. And I really think that it will never again be So crowded by players and it can be only less, less and less played.. Natural game death.