This is a very good question.sadzealot wrote:And this is where Nadeo is going wrong. They seem to think that having complex, difficult and even outright bastardous hard things in their game means that it won't be suitable for everyone. That's simply not true.
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There is nothing wrong by making a game accessible to all levels of play, but when you nerf the skillceiling in favour of beginners you are pissing in the face of the high level players telling them they don't matter (and this for a mode that was sold as being made into a competitive esport title).
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Then how come Hylis and Nadeo are insisting on taking away the few features that the high-level players want and seem to enjoy? How come this has to go away in order to "make beginners enjoy the game as well"?
I don't think that they think like this generally, perhaps they thought like this regarding walljump and other things changed between B3 and release.
What has happened towards the release could let assume it indeed, perhaps they did not want to snub the majority - the beginners, taking the risk to snub the lower count of beta and pro gamers, and to (re-)introduce some changes later.
What this means, we know well now.
Here you hit a second major point.sadzealot wrote:This game already IS accessible to beginners, but do you know what really scares beginners away from this game? There's zero tutorial, no explanation of anything. Not what the blocks do, not how they affect stuff (like stamina and ammo reload).
The original TrackMania came with a nice booklet that showed what one could do with the game. Certainly not in all details. Such kind of minimal handbook is definitely missing for all newer games.
Not just "here it is, try out and find out". Only few will be able to find out all themselves.
On the other hand, such paper information is outdated very fast.
What would be the best place? The ManiaPlanet Wiki?
On many things Nadeo relies on the community to help others and to contribute, which is not bad, but also not perfect.
To setup and maintain a "block guide" is a very tidious work. But who knows the blocks best if not the creators themselves?
Partially we are kept to experiment the game, which is nice to discover things.
But it is not really intuitive to need to open a Wiki everytime you want to do something with a new block - that reminds me a lot of MineCraft: there are so many crafting possibilities that no one can keep them all in mind.
Here we are back on the general dilemma to fix bugs, provide new features, and to document / explain it.
There is no space for everything at the same time unfortunately, and this is where we have to accept Nadeos time schedule (even if we don't know the details).