The low skill ceiling:
Spawn with Armor and Weapons*
Gimped Shield Pack
Smooth Terrain (No Jagged Terrain)
Unimportant Generators
Fast and Easy Discs
No Hand Grenades While Shooting
More Air Control
Built In Happy Flag
Very Low Offensive Base Control
Weaker Turrets
Heavy On Flag
Lack of skidding
Pretty much every major decision they made with this game was designed to lower the skill ceiling, and reduce the skill gap between new players and old ones. It's a very smart marketing decision. The other route they could have gone, segregating servers by experience level, wouldn't have been nearly as successful as convincing newer players that this is a game to be enjoyed. Weakening high level players, and limiting their capabilities allows newer players to come in and feel like they can hang, thus bolstering their desire to play the game and become more involved.
I'm all for noobie friendly games. I'm all for attracting newer players. In fact, it's a part I thought Tribes was very weak at, so it's great that they were thinking about this. But in my opinion, they went about it in the completely wrong way. They essentially ruined the game for high level players. They catered almost completely to new players, and ignored the long time veterans completely.
The decision they made to drastically lower the skill ceiling makes me think of someone changing the game of soccer to "Hey, no running. Everyone has to walk now to make it fair." And dictating rules that make it so "everyone can succeed." "Let's just remove pitching in baseball, and have everyone bat from a tee instead to make it fair." "Let's change all the pieces on a chess board to pawns, to make it fair for players that aren't Grandmasters." All decisions like that do is make the game no fun for anyone, and ultimately cause everyone to stop playing. For a time, there will be people who get super excited, because they can now move as fast as some of the best soccer players in the world, but their fun will not last and they will stop playing soon after they realize the game has lost the spirit of whatever made it great.
Because of decisions that follow this line of "make it fair" thinking, player retention will be very low. The moment people start realizing that the game has no depth and never did, they will just go play whatever other hugely popular game is dominating the market, because if you are going to play a game without depth, you may as well play a super popular one that has a large following. The sole and unique reason to play Tribes was for that enhanced depth of gameplay, and thus there will be no hook or addiction that keeps people playing in the long-term.
Spawn with Armor and Weapons*
Gimped Shield Pack
Smooth Terrain (No Jagged Terrain)
Unimportant Generators
Fast and Easy Discs
No Hand Grenades While Shooting
More Air Control
Built In Happy Flag
Very Low Offensive Base Control
Weaker Turrets
Heavy On Flag
Lack of skidding
Pretty much every major decision they made with this game was designed to lower the skill ceiling, and reduce the skill gap between new players and old ones. It's a very smart marketing decision. The other route they could have gone, segregating servers by experience level, wouldn't have been nearly as successful as convincing newer players that this is a game to be enjoyed. Weakening high level players, and limiting their capabilities allows newer players to come in and feel like they can hang, thus bolstering their desire to play the game and become more involved.
I'm all for noobie friendly games. I'm all for attracting newer players. In fact, it's a part I thought Tribes was very weak at, so it's great that they were thinking about this. But in my opinion, they went about it in the completely wrong way. They essentially ruined the game for high level players. They catered almost completely to new players, and ignored the long time veterans completely.
The decision they made to drastically lower the skill ceiling makes me think of someone changing the game of soccer to "Hey, no running. Everyone has to walk now to make it fair." And dictating rules that make it so "everyone can succeed." "Let's just remove pitching in baseball, and have everyone bat from a tee instead to make it fair." "Let's change all the pieces on a chess board to pawns, to make it fair for players that aren't Grandmasters." All decisions like that do is make the game no fun for anyone, and ultimately cause everyone to stop playing. For a time, there will be people who get super excited, because they can now move as fast as some of the best soccer players in the world, but their fun will not last and they will stop playing soon after they realize the game has lost the spirit of whatever made it great.
Because of decisions that follow this line of "make it fair" thinking, player retention will be very low. The moment people start realizing that the game has no depth and never did, they will just go play whatever other hugely popular game is dominating the market, because if you are going to play a game without depth, you may as well play a super popular one that has a large following. The sole and unique reason to play Tribes was for that enhanced depth of gameplay, and thus there will be no hook or addiction that keeps people playing in the long-term.
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