Greetings Master Sword forum goes, this is Mazzma. You may know me as Kanta in-game, or maybe Sir Galano from years ago. I have something pretty serious to discuss today. But before we get into the grit I'd like to address anyone who has ever developed/worked on or created content for MS:C. Thank you, this game is fantastically unique and by far one of the most amazingly unique experiences I've come across in Half-Life modding. It's fun, I love it, we the community love it. You've created something awesome and it is really something that I personally want to see continue to be the best that it can be.
Unfortunately, the game is stuck in a pretty bad rut at the moment. What's keeping the game alive at the moment is the older players. People who have been with MS:C for years and have grown accustomed to it's quirks. This can't be said the same for new players. To a new player (we've all been there) Master Sword can be pretty overwhelming in terms of learning different mechanics/how the progression works in the game but now a days bugs and crashes are making this game even harder for people to get into. The game crashes, a lot. Now I know what you're thinking, "Of course it does, Master Sword has always crashed you fool." No, this game crashes even more now. MS:C has started to crashed more in the past 2 years of my playing than the entire ~8 or 9+ years I've been with it. A large majority of these crashes are server related when you just want to change the level. It is resoundingly infuriating to wait 10+ minutes for a level change, and most of the time choosing another server to change level will more often than not result in a crash too. Disconnecting before the server changes level works sometimes, but not everyone knows this (Mostly new players). Foohy, Cold Finger, Eboldus, Freekill, and King Geemayn, these are 5 new players that I personally played with for the month or so as they tried to deal with MS:C. They had fun and enjoyed themselves quite a bit from what I saw, when they could actually change levels and reload maps... Constant crashes are not something you can always expect a new player to just come to accept. In short, people LIKE the game, but not being able to play for more than two maps at the most is something that is turning players away from the game. I no longer see the players I listed in-game.
As for bugs... I can recount two times that I have joined a game with new players and noticed that they chose the dwarf player race (Players who are dwarves can be differentiated from humans by their nametag lacking any kind of Friendly/Wary/Deadly tag.) I cannot recall seeing this players ever again after I told them about the race being broken and that they should remake their characters. This bug seems to be the most harmful to new players at the moment but there are countless others as everyone is aware (healing/support damage points, crescent/bb block, cleicert, npc shops, I could go on), some of which are marked as fixed in next release. Those bugs have been marked as fixed for ages, which begs the question... Why can't we actually have them?
New content is always nice but it's not what MS:C needs at the moment. Fixes need to take priority over new content at the time being. Whatever it is you have that is fixed at the moment, please give it to us, we want them. The game needs them. So whatever it is, if it works, release it. I understand that the people behind this game are only human but anything is better than this agonizingly long wait and we (at least, myself) are ready to give feedback and help squash these problems. Thank you for reading.
Unfortunately, the game is stuck in a pretty bad rut at the moment. What's keeping the game alive at the moment is the older players. People who have been with MS:C for years and have grown accustomed to it's quirks. This can't be said the same for new players. To a new player (we've all been there) Master Sword can be pretty overwhelming in terms of learning different mechanics/how the progression works in the game but now a days bugs and crashes are making this game even harder for people to get into. The game crashes, a lot. Now I know what you're thinking, "Of course it does, Master Sword has always crashed you fool." No, this game crashes even more now. MS:C has started to crashed more in the past 2 years of my playing than the entire ~8 or 9+ years I've been with it. A large majority of these crashes are server related when you just want to change the level. It is resoundingly infuriating to wait 10+ minutes for a level change, and most of the time choosing another server to change level will more often than not result in a crash too. Disconnecting before the server changes level works sometimes, but not everyone knows this (Mostly new players). Foohy, Cold Finger, Eboldus, Freekill, and King Geemayn, these are 5 new players that I personally played with for the month or so as they tried to deal with MS:C. They had fun and enjoyed themselves quite a bit from what I saw, when they could actually change levels and reload maps... Constant crashes are not something you can always expect a new player to just come to accept. In short, people LIKE the game, but not being able to play for more than two maps at the most is something that is turning players away from the game. I no longer see the players I listed in-game.
As for bugs... I can recount two times that I have joined a game with new players and noticed that they chose the dwarf player race (Players who are dwarves can be differentiated from humans by their nametag lacking any kind of Friendly/Wary/Deadly tag.) I cannot recall seeing this players ever again after I told them about the race being broken and that they should remake their characters. This bug seems to be the most harmful to new players at the moment but there are countless others as everyone is aware (healing/support damage points, crescent/bb block, cleicert, npc shops, I could go on), some of which are marked as fixed in next release. Those bugs have been marked as fixed for ages, which begs the question... Why can't we actually have them?
New content is always nice but it's not what MS:C needs at the moment. Fixes need to take priority over new content at the time being. Whatever it is you have that is fixed at the moment, please give it to us, we want them. The game needs them. So whatever it is, if it works, release it. I understand that the people behind this game are only human but anything is better than this agonizingly long wait and we (at least, myself) are ready to give feedback and help squash these problems. Thank you for reading.
