Discussion/Suggestion: Do lives belong in a game as difficult for newbies as SRB2?
Due to the fact that life monitors are very frequently used in v2.2 levels, this is obviously something that we can't just change during 2.2's patch cycle, but I still think it's something worth thinking about for the future unless some alternative function for lives was to be created. (maybe special stage retries? or they could be changed to be 50-ring boxes? either way, that's still a pretty huge change for a minor patch.)
My personal stance is that lives are a bad game mechanic that only serve to waste the player's time by forcing them to replay entire levels they've already proven they can get most of the way through. I think future versions would only benefit from their removal.
2.2's changes to how continues work are definitely a huge help in alleviating the inherent frustration that comes from a game over, but losing all of your progress in a difficult level that can possibly take upwards of 6-8 minutes on your first run will never not feel awful. Hell, when i'm playing mappacks and I get a game over, it's essentially become muscle memory at this point to quickly plug devmode 16; setlives -1
into the console, but utilizing dev commands to get around the problems lives cause isn't really something you can expect of the average player, especially given how doing that disables saving, not to mention how it's quite literally cheating.
Lives are especially problematic in netgames, since if you happen to lose all of them, you're just totally fucked and will need to wait sometimes upwards of 15 minutes just for everyone else to get through the level. This is only made ten times worse by SRB2's delay-based netcode, which can make dying significantly easier, alongside the fact that 100-ring lives aren't really gonna be much of an option most of the time due to everyone else also attempting to collect rings. Honestly, in the context of multiplayer, I think infinite lives should just be the default at this point. I've lost count of how many times i've had to ask the server host to turn on inflives, or had to turn them on myself when hosting a private game with friends.
I'm not sure if i'm in the minority here with my distaste for lives, but I do think this is something that deserves to be discussed. Lives are inherently very beginner-unfriendly, and the huge strives this game has taken torwads making the experience more accessible just really make me wonder if lives are something that we should be considering ditching in the future. I'd really like to hear other people's opinions on this subject, whether they be for or against the inclusion of lives, hence me creating this issue.