If you can't tell what Skill Issue means, it's probably a Skill Issue :smork:
I think you're trying to think about targeting too hard. This is SS13/CM, it's a mess. Different people have varying opinions.
Some will push for a more roleplayey game, some will push for a more actioney game. Just based on that, that should tell you how scattered we are when it comes to direction and audience. The game naturally evolves over the years based on what people make of it - and as hard as we've tried in the past with CM to have a more coherent vision, it's simply not worked out overall.
My personal take on the game follows oldschool SS13. The game isn't unforgiving per se, and doesn't aim to be: it's rather that you should play it with the expectation of failure. And of all things you shouldn't be here to win, because you won't. In that sense, if you're getting frustrated at the game, it more often than not actually means you just need a break.
To explain in more detail, a good part of what made SS13 popularity in my analysis historically is the freeform fail-stories style. Nothing interesting ever happens when everything goes by-the-book. The fun comes from the derailing and the stories they provide, be it hard roleplay or more spontaneous gameplay/player interaction. In a way, this is a theater. You're playing a role, enacting the broader story, and watching it go FUBAR.
So the game literally sets you up to fail. Like, that's it, i'm not kidding. It's not about the game being hardcore or unforgiving: you're simply just, flat out, setup to fail. CM might break from SS13 on many instances, but it to date retains a lot of that aspect. Things will go wrong and players are "encouraged" to.
As a random example in our current code, most of the game gives damage a 2-5% critical chance, but marine-to-marine explosions have higher armor bypass and 10% critical chance. It's all literally on purpose.
So yes. The game literally pushes you to failure, because you might get unlucky, but most of the time it mainly creates ridiculous memorable situations for others and dchat to laugh/bruh at. It's by design.
This also brings up a very interesting point in that this makes the cryptic UI and mechanics bit of a feature indirectly, they're not just here as intricate secrets for robustos.
And you can clearly see that as game got streamlined in modern codebases, the above aspects are fading away gradually.
So ultimately, the way i see it, the target of the game is both very broad, and yet very precise: anyone that can have fun in spontaneous interaction and remembers that this is just a videogame to not get mad when things will inevitably go wack.
... That's a lot less people than you might expect, and very often just playing too much makes it easy to forget
Edit: This doesn't really address what you meant regarding new players in the pure PvP sense, but I personally totally think this is the resulting of forgetting the above and too much focus on balance and "Competitive TDM" mindset over the years instead... We're running this game on an engine from 1996, made by hundred clueless volunteers over more than 15 years, and with more cross interactions than any modern commercial game, do you expect this to possibly ever run smooth for pure fast-paced TDM gameplay ? Seriously ? People need to wake up....
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Originally Posted by Fira
