First off, Ritz, thank you so much for taking the time to provide legitimate, thought-out feedback. It is SO nice to have someone actually explain their problems with specifics instead of "you changed it now it sucks", which is basically all I ever get. Even though the new system is way better balanced, I do think a lot of your complaints have merit. Some comments:
This flow is lost in 2.0 for a number of reasons: There's no hierarchy to follow in how to navigate the map or engage other players. With no ideal weapon, players are free to roam the map at random, and so their movements become impossible to predict. In a game where characters move too fast to visually follow, that
yomi is key to determining the location of opponents in the map. Without it, matches feel formless and chaotic because there are no focal points for action. Also, no one player asserts themselves as a threat because there's no indication as to what they're carrying- tensionless.
This does still exist, but those focal points are perhaps a little too hard to grasp, especially for beginners or rusty players. The focal points are the SRM and the best weapon panels in every map, as well as many map-dependent things such as springs, choke points, and easy to obtain WRMs. A lot of the yomi in new match is more about predicting which way your opponent is likely to move even after he's out of sight. While threats are less obvious, there are also indications who is on a rampage and needs to be shut down, and making that more obvious is definitely a goal, even if it's just a matter of providing streak information in the combat log.
Hoarding weapons actually becomes a liability: I get that having an arsenal of situational tools is meant to give the game a tactical edge, but things move so fast that I'm not able to prioritize weapons the same way I would in any other deathmatch shooter. I'm never in the right frame of mind to switch to bounce or grenade to lock down a hallway, and even if I get the notion, the opportunity's gone by the time I'm done fumbling with the mouse wheel or hotkeys trying to select the right ring.
Generally it's not a great idea to change weapons in combat, fast as our game is. There are times when switching in combat is the way to go, but for the most part switching is something best done between engagements to set up for what your situation is going to be a few seconds from now instead of trying to switch when the situation is already occurring. Hence, the best time to change weapons is while dashing from one room to another, planning ahead for the level architecture in the next room.
When I play 2.X match I am changing weapons pretty constantly, even if I rarely do while engaging an enemy.
Conscious weapon choices don't gel with SRB2, and when I have the locations of 6 weapons and 5 ammo types to memorize across 13 different maps (impossible when I can't manage to play the game frequently enough to learn or remember them)? Too many variables. All that shit to collect when I'm just going to drop it all in one hit? That's heartbreaking.
I definitely agree that the gametype has become too complicated. I also agree that with the focus on collection, getting hit without a shield is absolutely brutal. You'll notice most of the changes made for 2.1 over 2.0 is that we made shields much more common, both with the pity shield mechanic and by literally just spawning more of them. I definitely think deemphasizing collection and making players need less stuff to be combat effective is a good direction to go.
Moreover, coming back to multiplayer after something like an 8 year hiatus, I'm finding that it's totally impossible for me to hit players now, no matter what weapon I'm using. I know that's just me sucking, but now that I have all this deathmatch experience in other games under my belt, the concept of a game where players move faster than the bullets in a pseudo-3D environment with 2D sprites at 30fps is noticeably jarring to me, even when the game isn't lagging to hell. This wasn't a problem when any 2 ring combo was sufficient for hitting the broadside of any barn, and it was fair because Sonic could escape anything short of autorail. We talk about combos being OP, but I'm starting to think they were a necessity for scoring shots with any certainty. It lowers the bar for entry, but the skill ceiling is just about where it always has been. It was win/win.
This is by far the point I think is the most interesting in your whole post. I hadn't thought about it from the point of view from the weapons before, but it's an excellent point. Our weapons are vastly ineffective at actually scoring. The only real method of securing a hit is forcing players into choke points or spam. This is mostly because most of the game was designed around very old quirks of the engine that no longer matter, like how maxmove used to be. We could, for example, double the projectile speed nowadays to no ill effect in the engine.
Instead of weapon combos, though, it makes me wonder if we should restructure things slightly again. Provide only weapons (remove the ammo mechanic) and make those weapons WAY stronger to compensate for the lack of combos. Basically take it in an Unreal Tournament direction with completely overkill weapons that would all be hilariously overpowered in any rational FPS, but because all the weapons are crazy, the whole thing balances out. This could also somewhat handle the issue where it feels so demoralizing to lose everything on hit, since you'd be just one weapon away from effectiveness again.
So that's the core mechanics down, but I've got some big issues with the level layouts post-2.0. All these new maps look pretty, but they're relatively flat, labyrinthine and chock full of tight corridors. Object bouncing is all but extinct now, maybe even deliberately since nearly every monitor is tucked away in a corner. I've bitched about that plenty by now, but that vertical play is really the hallmark of this game for me, and the object placement isn't presenting any opportunities for it. Even the springs are all flush up against walls, like they're just begrudged stepping stones and not an opportunity for complex freeform space traversal, as they would be if allowed to sit out in the open.
I think there are some merits to symmetrical design: Having revisited 1.08 and 1.09's maps, I realized the common theme was for maps to share at least one single open space, so you generally had a clear line of sight to every other player in the map- being able to see every player conflict at once was visually exciting, but it also made these insane speeds manageable when you're less likely to lose sight of players entirely. Layouts are square or circular with either the inner or outer regions elevated, so that there was always a space to jump down into from a height. That space was always populated by unobstructed monitors and springs, which rewarded precise jumps with massive space coverage and novel routes which then become temporarily unavailable to other players. This makes sniping more fun and useful too (It currently is neither). This style of play is only present in the veteran CTF maps now. Tree Ring is still the standout example for this style in match. We lost some other decent maps along the way, like Flying Shrine, Starlit Warehouse (perfectly catered to autorail), maybe Air Haven. I know there were some gems in the OLDCs too, eager to rediscover what those were.
This is the one part of this I vehemently disagree with. The new stages, while they do take a bit longer to learn and get the hang of, introduce so much more play and counterplay that the old stages just didn't have. There was a major conscious effort to make most maps have multiple routes into and out of every room and try to make the rooms visually unique to help players learn the design as quickly as possible. Some levels do this better than others, definitely, but overall I think we've done a pretty good job of making the levels in the default game as easy to learn as we possibly can. Sure, you'll need to play a round or two to learn the layout, but once you do, there's just so much more you can do in gameplay.
I also disagree with the idea that symmetry is a good idea pretty firmly. I don't mind the idea of making single-room maps, as we do still have Sapphire Falls and Meadow Match in the rotation, but symmetry makes it basically impossible to have one of anything in a map except at the very center, and often you want to have the map focus on something other than the very center. You'll notice a trend in 1.X maps being that the central room was the only important one. Tree Ring is a perfect example of this problem; it was huge and had all this wonderful space, yet everyone just stuck around the center where the random monitor was. In most of the games I played on Tree Ring, the entire outside and upper part of the map could have been removed and the match wouldn't have changed at all. Of all the things in your post, I think Tree Ring and Air Haven are the only things with complete rose-colored glasses at work. I hope you do get to play some rounds on them again to see how bad they really are.
Now, on the other hand, I may have inadvertently exacerbated this problem by including so many stages in 2.1 to expand the roster. It's probably better to focus on 8-10 levels instead of making a huge roster so that players can more rapidly learn all of the built-in stages. There's also a lot more we could do to help let newbies learn the maps more rapidly, such as more texture differentiation in the stages that could use it, and something to represent the weapon spawns even when the weapon isn't there.
I also don't mind the idea of using more springs in design, as we went away from that a lot in recent designs because so many players hated it, but of course we also have a water and lava level, so having a level with lots of springs and vertical movement would be some nice variety. With the monitors, there was a conscious effort to prevent bouncing on any randomized monitor for significant benefit, but other monitors have been out in the open quite a bit. There's just less motivation to do so outside of the more vertical maps like Desolate Twilight and Sapphire Falls. I find monitor bouncing far more effective as an ambush tactic than just getting around nowadays.
Was recently thinking the same thing.... Overwriting the older special ring whenever a third is collected would open up new level design possibilities on the older match format. Also, the two-ring combinations would be a lot more interesting with bounce and scatter in the mix.
This is actually something we considered when we were originally designing 2.0, but we decided against it because it would be absolutely rage-inducing to overwrite your perfect combo unintentionally when dashing through someone's stuff. If you've ever played Symphony of the Night, imagine the subweapon drop replacements, only trying to manage two at once.
