Tippy-toes, toppy-toes, sneaking up on Poketoes

* Axe quickplay queue, it's unnecessary, splitting up playerbase for no real gain. Even at its quickest, queue times are negligibly faster, backfilling feels awful, leavers disrupt games, it doesn't help properly practice for comp stadium, and even qp stadium games can potentially last 15-20 minutes so I just think a sense of commitment comes with the territory of the game mode.

* Instead of a new hero every season, do bundles of new heroes every couple of seasons. Three new heroes is gonna make a lot more buzz for the game mode than a season where only Roadhog gets added.

* Cut down the gadgets. The ingeniousness of the three armory categories w/ be three rarities is just perfect, if you're having to add a new tab then something has gone wrong. Many gadgets can be streamlined/fused to be more like normal items, maybe they can have their own category at the bottom of the armory for each rarity but these really need to get trimmed to like 5-7 gadgets.

* Similarly cut down or streamline normal items too. Anything to keep the armory slim, I'm sure there's some items in here that just no one is seriously using. I'd esp love to make room for more hero specific items so even cutting out just one or two makes a big difference. Anything to make the armory less intimidating and easier to filter.

* speaking of filter... A search function would be great. I keep thinking this was added and then I look for it and it's not there, so.

* Gadgets have to be a different input than their own button. On console this is apparently even worse of an issue. I'd suggest making it the generic "interact" key F and w/e its console equivalent is, its so rare it would be overridden by team abilities anyway. Alternatively I think crouch-melee would be an intuitive way to activate gadgets, idk, I might be damaged but that input feels a lot more errm normal to me I guess than having to remember a whole other button.

* Seasonally-themed items featured in the armory to make each season a little more unique. So like this season we could have seen items themed after the yokai or the hashimoto. And items that are particularly popular could even be added permanently. Adds a little color to each season, gives gimmick players something new to play with.

And don't even get me started on attacking other drivers... Until a rally is down to like 8 people, using items to directly attack other racers is basically throwing your own game lol. You can masterfully hit three green shells on someone but the latency will decide they didn't actually lose any speed and they just keep rolling ahead in the lead. (That's an exaggeration, but wtf why do I have to land three shells on someone before it actually considers the racer slowed?) It's just better to hold onto these items defensively against the attacks that will absolutely hit you -- except that's ALSO a bad strategy because there's so much shit in this game that can clear out all your defensive items AND get a hit on you, so you're basically punished for not getting mushrooms on your item roll one way or another.

This is how Ice Kings entire story came about, at least it feels that way: a cartoon villain obsessed with kidnapping princesses so that they can be forced into marrying him, later elaborated to Actually Not Be A Misogynist, because that would be bad, so actually he's an insane person (which makes misogyny okay) because the magic crown makes him that way, and Actually he's a gentleman and has a normal attraction to a woman. So don't worry, it's okay, you can like Ice King!

Princess Bubblegum has a similar development imo, and I see substantially less people ever bring it up. Early seasons would tease the audience with glimpses of PB's "dark secrets," played out for laughs, but she remained as goofy as the rest of the Adventure Time brand, and these "morally gray" quirks played well into the eccentric environment. But later seasons buckle down on making her far more obviously evil/compromised, deciding it Isn't Funny to joke around about some of those morally gray quirks.......... and then LATER seasons have to work to make PB NOT that evil, by elaborating semi-tragic backgrounds to Explain why she is the way she is, because the writers want you to know that her tropes are Bad....... but you can still like PB!!! You can like her just in time for her romance with Marcelline to start going somewhere by this point, sort of like the writers realized they were about to fumble a generational canon queer relationship if they didn't work to make PB less-unlikeable.

Obviously things happen during production that cause shifts in the storytelling of a series, and for AT some of these shifts resulted in incredible stories that I wouldn't want to see missing. But also some of this redirecting felt like constant course correction, a change in attitude towards a number of tropes to the point the series feels embarrassed with itself towards the end. Overall I suppose it works out for AT as one of its charming qualities, sort of like it grows up with itself, but theres also a political angle to why it's like that, and from that perspective the charm looks more like messiness from writers trying and failing to clean up after themselves.

I was just asking myself "man that's ridiculous, imagine if people saw a clip of a combo from a fighting game, and then decided they would never play that game because they're afraid they'll lose to that combo." And then I realized that people actually do that all the time lmao.

And that would be fine actually, if the scrubbiness ended there, just a personal taste about how one feels about pvp games. But so often these people go on to insist that the game is FLAWED because you can get good at it -- the casual mindset that a GOOD game would allow anyone to win regardless of skill, apparently. So then it becomes this insult, that you're a try hard if you play the game at a high level, which by extension means you're ruining the experience for everyone else because you're, um, not allowing other people to enjoy the sweet taste of victory. Lol.

It never gets considered that they could try and improve. They'd rather flail on the controller and then complain about tryhards rather than study a clip for a few minutes, practice the route, and then execute it in an actual game. Or fuck, at least try to get good and then vent your frustrations about things like mechanics or the meta -- that at least casts blame on the developer of the game, and not towards fans that are simply making the most of what's given to them.