Writing an article related to eSports - can you help?

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I'm out!

No you're not. That's the sad thing about everything you say.

[Nerpson]

I love your username, ano.

[wooloo]

You should also take their posts with huge grain of salts, because on these forums Nadeo have managed to create and atmosphere of people defending them at any costs.

Do you know why we "defending them at any costs" and how they made this atmosphere? Simply because they made a very great game!
And its of course okay when you see this not like us/me.

[novationx]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T00c4B82ow
The REAL ShootMania

[UrinStein]

I gotta say I pretty much (90%) agree with Sanctjews. In my opinion there is certainly a point in Shootmania's history, where the development abandoned its idea of a streamlined and skill based experience for a more casual and visually umm... elaborate one.

Anyway, I'd just be repeating what Sanctjews said, and I am obviously in the minority anyway. Let me instead point out some things that i think make Shootmania Storm what it is. One disclaimer though: I am not a pro player, I just happen to have played this game for 2,5 years now, not really competitively.


Controls and Movement - Mhhmm... this is one of my favourite parts.
You have only 3 buttons in this game: WASD, LMB and RMB. WASD for moving and LMB for shooting shouldn't be much of a surprise, but RMB is the button of many possibilities in this game. I call it "the Action Button". You use it to jump, to sprint, to walljump, to zoom and whatever else. It sounds strange at first, yet once you get used to it, it feels really solid and is a lot of fun. Some peope play ths game for its movement mode(s) only, and I also enjoy just running around maps for hours if I don't feel like doing anything really.
Two core mechanics in the movement system, next to (wall-)jumping and sptinting, are Stamina, which you will always have to keep an eye on, so you don't end up stuck at a place you don't want to be at, and also the rocket movement. The rockets movement is a lot more powerful as it might seem to be in the beginning, especially since most modes use the rocket as their standard weapon.

Long story short:
The movement is very agile and offers quite a lot of possibilities. It is also very satisfying.
And even though there are only a few buttons to work with, gameplay can get quite complex at times.


Skill > Tactic
I don't really know much about TF2, but I believe to know that it's mostly played in big teams with diverse classes of characters. You'll probably need good coordination and an overall tactic. That's not really the case in Shootmania.
Shootmania is really best played 3vs3 and its "most competitive" mode (the one that is played the mot at least) is actually only a 3vs1 mode. Individual skill, cleverness and intuition are much more important here than tactics and teamplay.
There might be community made modes with an emphasis on teamplay, but still it's much less than the same mode might have in a game like TF2.


Creativity
This is something that I think sets the whole concept of Maniaplanet apart from other gaming communities. User created content is of high significance here. Competitional maps are built and chosen by the community, some of the most popular modes are in the hands of the community and the game has easy to use tools accordingly.
It was a conscious decision of the developers to have the community take the game into the direction they like, after all, it worked pretty well on a smaller scale in Trackmania.
Some of the most important modes, like Elite and Siege, are still in Nadeo's hand though. They can still squeeze the communites balls if they want to, and they do from time to time.


Those are the msot important things I wanted to add to this discussion. Other people might think differently though.