I'm going to start this off by asking three questions
The answers to all of these questions lies within how hard it is to learn how to play ESF.
In 1.1, the game was relatively simple to learn. Double click on someone, then double click again to swoop. Hold right click to score a hit. It was an immensely deep system once you learned the ins and outs of it, but it never got to the point where players new to the game had no chance of winning. This is because new players could use HOWing* vs advanced players. New players never felt completely helpless, and eventually, as those who HOWed became better, they stopped using the exploit.
Early on in 1.2, the game was much easier to learn. Because everyone who was previously good had to essentially relearn the game, everyone was on equal ground. Players never felt completely helpless, as there was no one good enough yet to make them feel like they had no chance of winning.
Right now in 1.2, the game is nearly impossible to learn. People have mastered the current mechanics of the game, a newbie coming into ESF will die repeatedly until he asks how to play. The playerbase, tired of the same question over and over, will either not respond or tell said player to RTFM. Of course, the player had no idea there was a manual for the game, it mentions it nowhere. But regardless, even if this new player does read the manual, he is facing what is in his mind an impossible battle in learning how to play the game. New players will have no chance of winning vs a seasoned player and, lacking the crutch that was HOWing, will quit the game.
You see, HOWing was a necessary evil. I realize that everyone hated it at the time, but it really was responsible for a lot of people sticking around and learning to play the game. This brings me to the point of my thread:
For 1.3, I'm aware that melee is still in the planning stages. I'm not trying to push the ESF team in the direction of ruining simple melee, because it really is a great system once you learn to play the game, but whatever advanced melee system you guys come up with, it needs to be as cheap and hated as HOWing was. By that, I mean it has to be easy to learn and extremely effective. If this isn't the case, newbies will once again be pummeled by the system that is simple melee, and we'll be in the situation we're currently in now, with no one wanting to learn how to play the game.
Oh, and small rant here. Change how the swoop system works. I can't begin to tell you how many complaints I've heard about it. "My swoop only works half the time" is the most common. Swooping should work as follows:
You press turbo, you're now in swoop mode, you press turbo again, you now exit swoop mode. While in swoop mode, any direction you move will initiate a swoop in that direction for as long as you hold down the button; if you let go of said direction, your swoop stops. And importantly, if you press fly mode, you exit swoop mode and begin to glide.
If you read through all of that, I commend you. Comments?
*HOWing, for those of you who don't know, stood for head on whoring. Basically, head on hits in 1.1 were determined by who had more ki. If you let someone swoop to you, all you had to do was swoop and hit them at the last possible second. Considering they were wasting their energy swooping while you stood still, you would get the hit. This was also known as LSM, or last second meleeing.
- Why was there always a constant influx of people learning how to play ESF during 1.1?
- Why isn't there this constant influx of people learning how to play ESF in 1.2?
- Why have all of the players playing ESF today either started in 1.1 or when 1.2 first came out?
The answers to all of these questions lies within how hard it is to learn how to play ESF.
In 1.1, the game was relatively simple to learn. Double click on someone, then double click again to swoop. Hold right click to score a hit. It was an immensely deep system once you learned the ins and outs of it, but it never got to the point where players new to the game had no chance of winning. This is because new players could use HOWing* vs advanced players. New players never felt completely helpless, and eventually, as those who HOWed became better, they stopped using the exploit.
Early on in 1.2, the game was much easier to learn. Because everyone who was previously good had to essentially relearn the game, everyone was on equal ground. Players never felt completely helpless, as there was no one good enough yet to make them feel like they had no chance of winning.
Right now in 1.2, the game is nearly impossible to learn. People have mastered the current mechanics of the game, a newbie coming into ESF will die repeatedly until he asks how to play. The playerbase, tired of the same question over and over, will either not respond or tell said player to RTFM. Of course, the player had no idea there was a manual for the game, it mentions it nowhere. But regardless, even if this new player does read the manual, he is facing what is in his mind an impossible battle in learning how to play the game. New players will have no chance of winning vs a seasoned player and, lacking the crutch that was HOWing, will quit the game.
You see, HOWing was a necessary evil. I realize that everyone hated it at the time, but it really was responsible for a lot of people sticking around and learning to play the game. This brings me to the point of my thread:
For 1.3, I'm aware that melee is still in the planning stages. I'm not trying to push the ESF team in the direction of ruining simple melee, because it really is a great system once you learn to play the game, but whatever advanced melee system you guys come up with, it needs to be as cheap and hated as HOWing was. By that, I mean it has to be easy to learn and extremely effective. If this isn't the case, newbies will once again be pummeled by the system that is simple melee, and we'll be in the situation we're currently in now, with no one wanting to learn how to play the game.
Oh, and small rant here. Change how the swoop system works. I can't begin to tell you how many complaints I've heard about it. "My swoop only works half the time" is the most common. Swooping should work as follows:
You press turbo, you're now in swoop mode, you press turbo again, you now exit swoop mode. While in swoop mode, any direction you move will initiate a swoop in that direction for as long as you hold down the button; if you let go of said direction, your swoop stops. And importantly, if you press fly mode, you exit swoop mode and begin to glide.
If you read through all of that, I commend you. Comments?
*HOWing, for those of you who don't know, stood for head on whoring. Basically, head on hits in 1.1 were determined by who had more ki. If you let someone swoop to you, all you had to do was swoop and hit them at the last possible second. Considering they were wasting their energy swooping while you stood still, you would get the hit. This was also known as LSM, or last second meleeing.
