ESF, from a gameplay perspective, is broken. This is coming from someone whose been playing ESF since 1.0 came out. 1.3 needs to bring some major changes to the table and I honestly doubt that it will.
Let's cut to the point though. Why is ESF broken?
The main reason ESF is broken is because of the learning Curve. This is by far the biggest problem with ESF, but it's infact caused by a mixture of other problems.
Let's face it, the learning curve is huge. You might say to yourself that this is ok, but when 99 percent of the people playing quit because it's too hard to learn, there's a problem. There is no safe place where people can go to learn to play the game. They can't learn ingame, they'd get killed before they even got a hit off. There's no place outside of the game, the only outside reference people have is the ESF manual, which doesn't help much. We can't even say the "secret melee combos" on the forum.
The next big reason is melee. Melee is a load of fun, don't get me wrong, but it's incredibly unbalanced. It's also the main cause of the huge learning curve the game has, simply because it's so effective. I'm talking about Simple Melee of course. Advanced Melee is neither fun nor useful. There's a pretty steep learning curve for Advanced melee and not any return to the player for learning such a system. This is because the outcome of Advanced Melee fights usually relies on random hits.
It kind of creates a Paradox. Yeah, you can have a lot of fun with Simple Melee and it's a great system, but no one learns it because of how effective it is. If you look at ESF's playerbase in America, the majority of the people playing are the ones that got the game when 1.2 first came out. Why is this? Is it because that was the only time when people could play the game without being dominated? I think so.
Then there's SSJ. This is the one area in the game that I believe will actually be fixed in 1.3. The current problem is that upon transforming, you gain two times the speed, Ki, PL, and more attacks. It's completely ridiculous. You can travel twice the speed at half the Ki cost. It removes one key aspect from the game, Ki managment. From my understanding, in 1.3, there's a constant ki drainage once you transform. This is a perfect way to fix the problem.
Truth be told, the issue of PL all together is unfair. You're rewarding the good players by making the game easier for them. If there is one pro on a server (which is usually the case), he can get enough of a PL advantage that anyone dies in one sequence of hits (for example, three simple melee hits + Yellow beam = death). The entire server is essentially at the discretion of the one pro in the server. If he wants to beamspam, everyone in the server will die, a lot. It's unacceptable to have one player consistently get a score of 100 - 5 and everyone else scores like 2 and 20.
I'm sure i'm leaving a lot out, but that's enough to build off of for now. Anyway, do you think I'm completly wrong? Completly right? Discuss.
Btw, keep it civilized please.
Let's cut to the point though. Why is ESF broken?
The main reason ESF is broken is because of the learning Curve. This is by far the biggest problem with ESF, but it's infact caused by a mixture of other problems.
Let's face it, the learning curve is huge. You might say to yourself that this is ok, but when 99 percent of the people playing quit because it's too hard to learn, there's a problem. There is no safe place where people can go to learn to play the game. They can't learn ingame, they'd get killed before they even got a hit off. There's no place outside of the game, the only outside reference people have is the ESF manual, which doesn't help much. We can't even say the "secret melee combos" on the forum.
The next big reason is melee. Melee is a load of fun, don't get me wrong, but it's incredibly unbalanced. It's also the main cause of the huge learning curve the game has, simply because it's so effective. I'm talking about Simple Melee of course. Advanced Melee is neither fun nor useful. There's a pretty steep learning curve for Advanced melee and not any return to the player for learning such a system. This is because the outcome of Advanced Melee fights usually relies on random hits.
It kind of creates a Paradox. Yeah, you can have a lot of fun with Simple Melee and it's a great system, but no one learns it because of how effective it is. If you look at ESF's playerbase in America, the majority of the people playing are the ones that got the game when 1.2 first came out. Why is this? Is it because that was the only time when people could play the game without being dominated? I think so.
Then there's SSJ. This is the one area in the game that I believe will actually be fixed in 1.3. The current problem is that upon transforming, you gain two times the speed, Ki, PL, and more attacks. It's completely ridiculous. You can travel twice the speed at half the Ki cost. It removes one key aspect from the game, Ki managment. From my understanding, in 1.3, there's a constant ki drainage once you transform. This is a perfect way to fix the problem.
Truth be told, the issue of PL all together is unfair. You're rewarding the good players by making the game easier for them. If there is one pro on a server (which is usually the case), he can get enough of a PL advantage that anyone dies in one sequence of hits (for example, three simple melee hits + Yellow beam = death). The entire server is essentially at the discretion of the one pro in the server. If he wants to beamspam, everyone in the server will die, a lot. It's unacceptable to have one player consistently get a score of 100 - 5 and everyone else scores like 2 and 20.
I'm sure i'm leaving a lot out, but that's enough to build off of for now. Anyway, do you think I'm completly wrong? Completly right? Discuss.
Btw, keep it civilized please.
