Okay, the point of this thread is not to discuss the gameplay changes, there are others places for that. I am not part of focus group and have no influence, but I hope SyncError will lurk in here to read at least what I / we say. The thing is, let's try to be positive .

I'd like to bring some ideas as to the beginners experience for the steam release.

First of all, I saw that id implemented some gameplay tip in the new main page design, which I think didn't exist before, and this is a very good thing according to me. Still, this is not enough.

Here is what goes through my mind :

New players need to be introduced to everything step by step.

- The idea of having to fight Crash as an introduction - like it was some years ago when creating a QL account - was okay, but it wasn't effective enough. The two practice levels for strafe jumps and rocket jumps are okay, but I don't remember if there are mini videos for the player to see before he starts the levels. If there are already some videos available (like "click here to see an example") then it's okay. If there are not, it would be a good idea to do so. Actually, I don't know where to find the practice for strafe jumps and rocket jumps with the new design.

- I think it would be cool to make a "weapon training level". Something like small rooms with one weapon only each time, and a fight against a bot or something, along with gameplay tips, so that beginners understand the pros and cons of each weapon. Having the god mode on could be cool. Imagine, you are immortal, there is a door in the room to go through when you are finished with the objective or fed up with the weapon, you just take the weapon in the middle and bots come one by one from somewhere but cannot harm you. Your only concert is to train the weapon. I think this kind of practice would be efficient. The best thing would be to have some awards when finishing the training. I don't know exactly what could be done... but let's say you unlock the Xaero bright models if you go through all weapons rooms, etc.

- Having a timing training arena could also be interesting.

- Now the impossible part I guess... but according to me, QL would benefit from having multiple languages : spanish, russian, german, portuguese, corean, japanese... I already proposed that a long time ago and I remember the reactions weren't really positive ("you only have to know few english words to play in QL", etc.). Well, people may have a point, it's easy to play in QL, but as to understand the gameplay tips and the rest is another thing. I still think younger players would like to have the game in their mother tongue. All big games have multiple language, or am I wrong (I never played LoL) ? I'm not talking about havong new sounds and all in different languages, only the text, the menus, etc. I know I would be okay to translate the game to French for free for instance.

- Perhaps make all modes available for free, but make some of them (I'm thinking of Freeze tag, domination, harvester), unlockable. You play 10 full games of FFA / Duel / CA / CTF, you unlock this, or that, etc., so that beginners don't get lost in tons of modes immediately. In a way, having only certain modes available for free could very much solve the problem too, but maybe having to play to unlock thing could encourage some people, I don't know. I'm not completely sure, just saying.

- Now to make some money, what about having only 5 models available for free accounts, and having the possibility to pay for them for few cents. The idea seems a bit absurd actually, but games like dota and LoL make money with these kind of things (and maybe others but I don't play these games so I'm not in the best position to compare and voice some ideas).

My two cents.What do you think of it, do you have some things to propose ?