Anticheat is a good example. It's much more complex to deal and to talk than making you aware of how it works. Your lack of thrust between yourselves (false accusations) and toward us, is again, a negative attitude. The fact is that there has been many false accusations that we busted, and that's it's much more difficult to do that than the opposite: telling someone is cheating is ten times easier than affirming that he is not. There are good reason for us to keep informations private, but it does not mean that we are not running a good anticheat system. I just can't talk on how it's done. But most matches are looked upon the anticheat system. I can not tell under which conditions and how for obvious reaons. But stop to have this lack of trust. You see that the online teams win also offline, and it happened with a lot of top players, and still happening by the way.
On the other hand, you do not answer clearly about the top level player attitude issues. It's running since more than a year, and is still not fixed. People tend to disregard the game, bash it as much as possible in many public occasions, and it's strange to see that people that support my strategy feel obliged to write me in private to tell me so. You are totally not taking this trouble with as much passion as you are attacking us on other points, while I strongly believe that your scene (not mine, I am not playing at top level) is suffering much more than that. When you will start to fix this among yourselves, then I will start to believe that you are really talking for the good of your scene. Otherwise, it is easy to understand that I am not going to fight as hard for people that are not even capable to handle this on their side, for themselves. We supported tournaments, I have been present a lot, and yet, it's mainly post of critics and even insults etc. Okay, it's not you, but if the positive people are ashamed to answer other players and ask to fix something, but have no trouble to give me development lessons, there is something wrong around. And I know I will have support from people that read that. People that organize stuff, make maps, support actions, spend a lot of time to communicate and are badly threated knows exactly what I am talking about. Make comments, post and poll to fix this if you want to ask us to fix stuff. And answer this issue clearly once and for all, not in a hollow way.
For the things we have done, you are telling that we made obvious thing for your confort, but you are totally ignoring the priorities. Tell to a trackmania player that the force color opponent should be a priority, and we will see how he reacts. Look other games, and tell me if they would do this, change the textures or else for the competitivness. When top players try to insinuate that the game is bad, and I ask what they would play instead, the list is not that long. Last time they just answered me with a future game that is not even out yet. All of this to avoid to acknowledge that making priority in development for the competitive scene has been really good from the studio, opposed at what they would like to make believe.
I like the post of pksens, since it brings another angle to express the situation, base on accumulation. Some frustration are based on lack of explanations (like for the invitation system) and the other based on the game direction having to adapt to other constraints, as compromise. I see it more as an opportunity to solve both quests, but along the way, it looks like compromise. The left/right strage spamming of the alpha removal was under that category. But using this to teleport was really ugly, even if top players wished to keep it.
So, to ease your pain a little, at least I can explain the invitation system. Of course, we believe that the invitation system is better for the future of the game, or we would be really strange to do it. The reason are multiple and complicated.
One of them is that the game does not lack so much of capacity to entertain players (we see the ingame numbers) but the capacity to be known and explain to other players what the game is and why it is interesting to come in the first place. So, we would like to invite them more than saying just it's available. Playing a game for free is a privilege that we would like to leverage in order to raise the visibility of the invitation.
Another one is that we want to move more surely. We can easilly go from invite to open demo, while it's complicated to do on the other way around. Big success have used the invite system, and we would like to learn some stuff there. So, it's an oppoturnity to test and improve, like we did with progressive jump, for example. And the fact that invites are more progressive is a safety belt. There are more Echelon 0 everyday, and they integrate a game with other players. We are working on making matchmaking infrastructure grow as simple as possible. We are fine tuning more the access etc. So, it's just more strategic. We have future steps in that strategy, and adapt them each day, looking at the situation.
The game seem ready to go by the viral aspect of it, we just need more seeds. But this seeds should not be made by sacrifying the virality of the game. So, we will carefully look at how we can seed and how.
Of course, if people would invite other players, on other sites, and try to explain that the the game is interesting, it would help. But as I said to Caspa, I think you are part of the problem, without seeing how much some negative players are supporting the opposite of what you would like. You are harvesting the fruits of letting this attitude going around. You, as a group of top players, let an article writes that they would like to put fire to the studio when we say that the Elite would be free at release, and you let people still make strong critics about it last week. Of course, it's not you, or Caspa. But Caspa saying that he does not agree with his team mates saying that 99% doest not like the game, but spending time to explain how he disagree with me, is not helping the popularity of the game, and especially for the competitive players. And honnestly, it's more your trouble than mine, because my role is to make a superb game, and I have enough feedback to do it already. It's more about time than being capable to know what has to be done. For MJ & WJ, it was a necessity step to be able to reach higher: like a sand castle that you have to hit on top to make it more solid to had something. I am saying this, because I don't think I will be able to answer you anymore before me leaving for well deserved holidays, even if some are still here thinking we are so bad at game dev.
I know many loves the game, and play it, and train hard etc. I am here for them. But I invite them to be more positive since a long time. We are here for the party, it's a game
Have a nice month of august, and see you in September!
