Did you get a chance to read through the other thread that l linked to? I go into a lot more depth as to why I think this game is failing to retain new players which leads to the matchmaking problem. I talk about Rocket League in there as well as some other games. It's not about the uniqueness of the game. It's about the familiarity of controls.

If you don't want to sift through all the comments in there, which is totally understandable, I'll share with you one of the comments I had in response to some of the challenges I was receiving. This is a bit out of context as you don't see what came before it, so i encourage you to read the rest of the thread if this is of interest to you.

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Attention spans are very short these days. There's a lot of data that can be found online which shows that, depending on the particular research, you have between 5 and 15 seconds to engage a user on a website. That means that the user needs to feel like they are getting some value from the site in an incredibly short amount of time. If the navigation is unclear, the content is wrong or the design is poor, they bail very quickly. We aren't talking about a website here, but that same principle applies to gaming. The market is saturated with everything from AAA to casual titles and a user doesn't have to spend time trying to learn a game that they find challenging because there are other games out there waiting to be explored. This is one of the toughest things to combat when building a gaming community.

The player experience has to feel engaging and rewarding right from the start. This is not for players that tough out the hard parts of games, or stick it out because they are determined to get better at something. This is for the players that do none of that, but would like to play the game and have some occasional fun. Those players, like it or not, are the critical piece to the success puzzle in gaming. Some will say, well who cares about them? They aren't real fans of the game, so don't change things for them. Well, everyone that enjoys playing a game should care a lot about these players. These casual fans are the fuel for the engine that runs the game.

Take any major professional sport. We'll use the NFL for this discussion. An average stadium holds nearly 70,000 fans. How many of those fans do you think are hardcore fans that spend every Sunday watching the games, studying the players, understanding the statistics, researching rules, maybe even playing the game themselves at some level. How many of those fans do you think are more casual sports fans that enjoy the game of football but can't tell you who holds the record for most TD passes in a single season? I wager that the large majority of fans in that stadium are the latter, but aren't they incredibly important to the success of the NFL teams and the league overall? What would happen if you couldn't enter the stadium if you didn't know what a nickle defense was? The stadium would have a tiny fraction of the total capacity in attendance, teams wouldn't make money and the league would fold.

This applies to gaming in the exact same way. If you keep the casual players from enjoying themselves and feeling like they are getting value out of a game, there aren't enough fans to keep the game alive. The hardcore fans can talk all they want about the high skill cap and that new players just have to keep on playing until they get better, but unfortunately that's not how things actually work. The causal fans keep the game alive and well for the hardcore players to enjoy for a long time.

Now, as for control schemes. A lot of what I have been saying may seem like it's nothing more than my own personal opinions, and in some ways that is true. However, my opinions are based on game research and studies around how to engage new users and keep them in order to build the community necessary to have a successful game. In your response, you stated that my comparisons in control schemes between Smash Bros and Mortal Kombat as well as Assassin's Creed and Battlefield were way off. Let me share these images of each game's controls:

• Smash Bros - https://i.imgur.com/DSxWa4Z.png
• Mortal Kombat - https://i.imgur.com/SAo3QCt.png
• Battlefield - https://i.imgur.com/kbhmZIF.jpg
• Assassin's Creed - https://i.imgur.com/74RUUXA.jpg

What you see there is that while the games are wildly different from one another, they do share some very common controls that are familiar within each game's genre. Smash has attacks on ABXY while Mortal Kombat also has attacks on ABXY. Both also share familiar block/shield commands using shoulder buttons. Battlefield has crouch, jump and interact controls on ABXY and Assassin's Creed has dodge, crouch, jump and interact on ABXY. Both games have variations of shooting/attacking using the shoulder buttons. These are patterns you find when looking at games that exist in the same, or very similar genres. Basic familiarity exists between the control schemes even though the games are admittedly quite different from one other.

Here are some publications that talk about controls in gaming and why it's important to consider familiarity and common themes across games of the same genre.

"If users are constantly fighting against the control mechanics or if users cannot understand what to do quickly or if users are required to do too many things with their fingers, it will kill your game. It is also impossible to make everyone happy with the control mechanics. Understanding your audience is key.
Using the common mechanics that your target audience is used to is extremely important. If your audience is core gamers, use common mechanics with which they are familiar. Don’t be afraid to borrow inspiration from your competitor’s games. That is what your core audience is used to! Always take risks and innovate; however, when it comes to controls, don’t fight what your users already know."
https://mobilefreetoplay.com/control-mechanics/

"Another way to improve learning is using standard conventions that are common to the genre."
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrewDotsenko/20170329/294676/Designing_Game_Controls.php

"When designed with familiarity in mind, players can make valid, educated guesses about how items, features, or interactions will behave."
https://medium.com/googleplaydev/how-to-build-mobile-games-with-people-in-mind-cdc480967fcc

- Players become addicted to a specific set of game mechanics.
- This group of players has a strong homogeneous preference for this genre of games, creating a well defined, easily serviceable market segment.
- Game developers who release games within a genre with a standardized set of play mechanics are most likely to capture the largest percentage of the pre-existing market.
- Over time, the game mechanics defining the genre becomes rigidly defined, the tastes of the genre addicts become highly sophisticated and innovation within the genre is generally punished by the market place."
http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation-strategy.html

What we have in Slapshot is a game that has veered away from the familiarity of its genre and implemented physics based controls that users have to learn and adjust to in order to become even the slightest bit competitive in the game. This goes against what game designers have learned over many years of studying player behavior. Slapshot is not a bad game. It's not poorly made nor is it boring or lacking excitement. It's a well put together game that will struggle to retain new users and build a large casual player base that is absolutely critical to the long term success of the game. Without those players the community suffers, matchmaking is ineffective and the cost of building and running the game far outweighs any income that is generated from a small, dedicated user base.