I know there's a huge gap between noob and pro to the game but I disagree that it's esf's biggest problem. In my honest opinion I think it's what makes the game so great, the only reason I got into esf in the first place was because I saw the awesome things the pro's could do, and only wished I could compete on that kind of level, the more I played the closer I got, that sense of achievement is what inspired me to play. I agree It puts some off but it's also what creates the most dedicated players.
It's all about appealing to newcomers with the right attitude. I think 1.2 only deterred players because they were given such mixed messages about how to be good at the game. The option of "simple" and "advanced" could quite easily make the new player confused by the fact that you're lucky as hell to actually benefit from an advanced melee fight, and simple melee is the real way to go, the other option of throwing seems all you can do at first if you haven't read the manual, that and a wide choice of high damage beams gives a player who's freshly downloaded no clue as to what they should start using when they start playing.
I think 1.3 beta's failings are quite simple, they've over complicated the movement system, and only aimed to improve the gameplay for an element of the game that hasn't even been implemented. The new attacks and thing's that have been spruced up are great and I think they're a nice addition, but the actual gameplay from 1.2 is pretty much the same but the movement system has made what used to be a simple choice of "move in chosen direction" to "move a little over there to a non-controllable distance", or "wait a bit and move over there at a rediculous ki cost". This has its good points and its bad, but overall it just seems too over developed and gets in the way of what you actually want to do, which is go where you want, when you want with a 100% degree of reliability it's done nothing to aid this, infact its got in the way, with almost unpredictable ki costs and unpredictable distances. 1.3 is aiming for new players, however it's just made the simpliest part of the game into the most complicated.
Ranting about that aside, I also believe what's killing esf more than anything is the lack of actual gameplay updates, I've already established how I think the biggest gameplay update that has been implemented so far is more damaging than good. The reason there isn't many gameplay updates is the focus is the new advanced melee system which I think, if anything, will decide the fate of esf once and for all. If the programmers are indeed that dedicated to implement something so complicated that will require so much work, we will actually have to wait until the bulk of that hard work is done before knowing if it's good enough or infact playable, that will be the ultimate test for ESF. I really think we need to stop, simplify our idea's, reduce our workload and complete the game as soon as possible, this arduous task of implicating this very complex and (I find) incomprehensible new system can only lead to failure imo.
