Thankyou for doing this Zman, alot of tronners in the community are very excited to hear this news.
I have been talking with the community and have gathered some feedback, I think it would be most effective if we created a Discord group with the people active and wanting to help, it is much easier to get in contact with people this way and we can voice chat if needed.
The steam authentication sounds really good it would help prevent trolls or banned players if they need to re create a steam account each time. It could also lead to some form of stat tracking which is very appealing to the players. The servers with high scores get alot of attention, if it were somehow easier to have a more accurate, possibly elo based leader board/ high scores that would be really cool.
Another thing that most of the players agree should be implemented is a client authentication, to have the full potential of trons competitive side there needs to be some way to prevent players using a modified client. Players are known to use these to cheat in normal game play and in tournaments. Also if trons playerbase really succeeds to the point where cash prize tournaments are on the communities mind, players wont play with cheaters.
The community also feels like there could be some more things built into the Tron client such as:
- Ability to change movie pack details like the bike shape, tail patterns and colours and background movie packs within the client, or even better make it some form of unlockable for example, access to a unique bike after 50 global server kills ect. I remember i used to have a pacman movie pack, it was really cool but difficult to setup by myself as im noob on a computer.
- Tutorials
- Leaderboards
- more is being discussed, alot of the community doesnt really know what is possible, which is where i think better communication between the community and the coders, marketers, server hosts ect would be beneficial, Discord is definitely the way to go, players can easily get in contact and contribute their videos, screen shots ect and most importantly devs can let the people wanting to help on the project know what needs to be done.
Some other things that have been discussed:
- Donation page setup for work that needs to be done by coders or other? There are alot of players willing to donate to improve this game whether it be graphic design or changes to the coding to improve lag, better servers ect.
- Once tron/Armacycles is uploaded to tron, will the dev team be open to other more active devs finding and liking this game, coming on board to help improve for example graphic design?
There have been some efforts from the community already, alot of players more motivated to help how ever they can. There are now around 7-10 server hosts that i can think of, all helping organise tournaments and help with scripting. Light and Nelg have been very helpful with improvements and i'm interested to hear from them.
There is so much potential for tron on steam. I like to look at a game called rocket league as an example. It is a basic concept, soccer played with cars, you unlock different cars and cosmetic features and play social or ranked games. It has pretty nice graphics and million dollar prize tournaments.
It has the 3 most important things a game needs for online success, an extremely high competitive skill ceiling, satisfying gameplay and a good social aspect, all of which Tron has. If Tron had more features and ways you can progress like some of the things mentioned above, that alone would be enough to massively increase and hold Trons player base. Improved gfx would help but come second to the basics and i feel would be improved as the dev team grows and becomes more active?
