Time Attack Flag update - Criticism and Feedback
Mar 2, 2024 14:12:31 GMT 1
xelA, ᴘ ʀ ᴏ ɢ ᴀ ᴍ ɪ ɴ ɢ, and 2 more like this
Post by drazaraza on Mar 2, 2024 14:12:31 GMT 1
Hello KoGaMa team, I would like to give my opinion here and hope that I can convince you to reconsider your decisions. Context: You can no longer reset the Time Attack Flag timer when respawning or reselecting a class.
• Replayability is a measure of how suitable a game (or the map within a game) is to come back and play again. It is a formula of various factors to keep players playing a game for a longer period of time. One factor that increases the replayability of games are certain incentives. One of these incentives is the competition among players. A timer is a powerful incentive that changes the way the players play the game and promotes competition among players and speedruns. Both the inability to reset the timer and the inability to move during the countdown (after finishing a map) lead to an incentive issue: It prevents players from spending a lot of time in a game, as it is inconvenient and frustrating to repeatedly finish a map just to be able to reset the timer. It punishes the players for being good at this game and disrupts the competition among players and the speedrun potential of the game, resulting in lower replayability of maps.
• What makes the speedrun experience even worse is the fact that the very first run after you finish the map disables keyboard inputs, so you can't prepare for the next run. You have to start running with the exact frame as soon as "GO!" is displayed. If you press the buttons too late, you lose time. If you press them to early, you don't move and have to press the buttons again, so you lose 1 - 2 seconds. Since you can't reset the timer, you have to finish the whole map to try again. As you can see from the inputs in the clip below, the player pressed too early, couldn't move directly at the start of the run, lost 1 second and 8 milliseconds and had to finish the map again for a retry. It's just terrible and bad game design, objectively. 
KoGaMa has a great speedrun potential because of the variety of gameplay mechanics and good movement. I think that the devs should adapt their updates to all players, including speedrunners, instead of ruining the gameplay for the speedrun community. Having a timer and then publishing this update does not fit together and is a contradiction that makes the game less fun.