Mario Maker is Terrible

Mario maker is a fun game. OK that flys in the face of the title above. I didn't say it wasn't fun, I said it was terrible. Lots of bad things are still fun, like voting for Donald Trump just to see what happens (topical joke ✓). At any rate I was thinking about the mechanic whereby people star courses.

This is supposed to work in that the best courses get starred and enough stars lets that person upload more. Courses which people give a low completion rate to may simply be remove and are not re-upload-able. If you remember when Newgrounds was a big thing this should sound a lot like their Blam!ing system, because it is.

Essentially there's no objective way to vote on a course but just because a course is hard does not mean it is bad. And based on the event courses it seems a lot of players are not, shall we say, very good at the game. Most of the event courses aren't even particularly hard.

Something else which makes this a lot like Newgrounds is that it becomes a popularity contest. YouTube personalities-- some of which I even like, mind-- will get more traffic on their courses and more plays... which means more stars and they can upload more. Whereas Philip Q. Noboby (such as myself) has an uphill battle against courses that play themselves or are so easy you wonder why they get stars.

Furthermore, in practice what is happening is that if someone finishes a course easily they star it. This creates a chalange vaccum for any mid-skilled player. Levels either play themself and get a star or are insanely hard for the super-skilled players. What we have is the oppisite of a bell curve where instead of most courses falling into a mid-skill range the fewest courses fall into the mid-skill range.

It's terrible and it's why I'm not playing Mario Maker anymore. Humph.

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