@Simon: I'm sorry, I certainly didn't mean to "troll"... but I don't see how the line you quoted can be interpreted as trolling on my part?
Both Dullstar and I understood IchoTolot in a way that he would also be fine with no further skills being added beyond the Jumper, and as far as I can tell, he also confirmed this himself:
This seems more to me like an argument against any further new skills than against the Slider specifically.
I am also totally fine with that to be honest!
Haha, that's what I was talking about in my first post in this thread.
The option is always there, we've got way more than enough content! The jumper is being introduced and yet another object type is being considered.
Of course I know which new skills IchoTolot supports, and that this means he is not against a 20th skill in general. It just seems to me like he would rather have no new skill at all than having the Slider?
Meaning: Would you prefer to have the advantage of fewer new skills to learn for new players, than having the Slider for those who want to use it and simply not use it yourself? I'm asking this as a genuine question.
Obviously, nobody is forced to use a new skill if they don't like it. I certainly wouldn't use the Mortar or Spear Thrower that much; I would most likely create an "alibi" level just to try it out once or twice, but that's about it.
So now it bringing very little new to the table is an advantage? You keep on twisting the arguments to be in your favor regardless the direction they are pointing at.
So do you: You criticise the Slider for not bringing enough new things to the table, and at the same time for supposedly being too complex with what it does add.
I actually do think the Slider brings a lot of new stuff to the table, and does so without adding a lot of complexity, because it relies on existing behaviour (splat-height survival, holding on to walls, turning around, transitioning from a wall-state (Climber) to a Shimmier or Jumper).
I think this is the source of our disagreement : What we Slider fans call "new" is what you consider "too complex"; and when you remove those aspects, I can see how the Slider may seem like just a more situational Floater.
Regarding workarounds / emulating a skill with existing features:-
For some skills, you need to engage in a workaround to make them worthwhile. This is what kieranmillar described for the vertical Laser Blaster: A skill that doesn't have a lot of use by itself, you actively need to go out of your way to make it work. I'd also put the Spear Thrower in this category: It's a Stoner at a distance. Breaking falls with it is its natural application. Building bridges with several spears is "actively trying to make them work": If Stoner bridges and staircases are frowned upon, then Spear Thrower bridges aren't much better.
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Then there are skills which you can theoretically replace with a workaround - and this is definitely true for the Slider - but this workaround is a hassle involving many more skills (of different skill types). The more skills you need to provide to make a workaround work, the more easily this workaround can be exploited for backroutes.
For Sliders specifically, any workaround to transition into a Shimmier after a drop is bound to include a Stoner. Stoners are infamous for being one of the most backroute-prone skills out there, because they allow you to go down safely
anywhere, not just at the wall where the Slider would be able to do it.
I'd argue Stoners are more problematic in this regard than Floaters. In some cases, the Floater can replace the Slider; but for all the Shimmier combinations, the Stoner will be needed. And the Stoner is a much more dangerous replacement for the Slider when it comes to opening the doors for backroutes.
Likewise, when you try to emulate the Slider turning, you either need to use one-way fields - but those affect all lemmings walking / falling through them, whereas one of the Slider's greatest powers is making him walk into the opposite direction than everyone else - or Walkers. And Walkers once again are a very powerful, if not the most powerful NeoLemmix skill, because they can cancel any other skill and turn around lemmings simply anywhere.
Thus, the Slider would be worth implementing in my book, because if most of the workarounds required to simulate this skill involve the two most backroute-prone skills we have - Stoner and Walker - then I'd rather have a "safe" option to implement those same solutions.As long as we agree that the solutions the Slider would offer are interesting in principle. It does indeed seem like, in order to be a Slider fan, you need to love the Shimmier as well. People who don't particularly care that much about the Shimmier might also not find its potential interactions with the Slider (as well as Slider with Climber, Slider with Jumper etc.) that compelling.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying you in particular wouldn't like the Shimmier
; I just state this in a general level. Some people prefer to stick to classic skills, so they might simply not care about the Shimmier all that much, and that is fine and valid as well. I could imagine though that some fans of the classic 8 might find themselves replacing the very limited Floater with Sliders here and there, without actually making use of all the interactions the Sliders would offer with other NeoLemmix skills.
To prevent them from being overwhelmed, new forum members can easily be pointed to less complex packs first that only use a fraction of the existing features - like Lemmings Migration and NepsterLems.
Are you really sure you recommended the right packs there?
You ignored the second part of that statement where I explicitly said that those packs are too difficult for beginners. My argument was that pack difficulty is a much larger obstacle for beginners than a large variety of skills and features. Yet, the people who restrain themselves to classic 8 skills tend to be the most adept puzzle solvers, so the levels they create are on the more challenging side.
What we could use would be an introduction pack that just adds a few more skills, maybe the Jumper and the Walker, or the Jumper and the Shimmier. The rest would be the classic 8. Regarding objects, such a pack could also selectively introduce some - for example teleporters - and use those on several levels, rather than using many different skills and objects, but only once each. This would give the player time to familiarise themselves with e.g. the Jumper, the Shimmier, and teleporters before they move on to the next pack that includes some more stuff.