Super Guide in NSMB series. I remember a lot of outrage over this completely optional thing that players didn't have to use, with disagreements boiling right down to the same "lol Nintendo fanboys will defend anything" rhetoric.
There are people who can never be happy. Anything designed to assist a novice will be met with some form of backlash.
Propose an alternative, any alternative, that hasn't also been met with backlash from hardcore gamers. I'm thinking you won't find one that some group of people won't gripe about. It's a no-win situation.
Super Guide backlash is a completely irrelevant argument. You're right, people
will complain about anything. The Super Guide backlash was an example of that. But firstly, that was a vocal
super minority composed entirely of the nutty gaming elitists who hate the idea of accessibility and casual gaming, and think the idea of providing players a tool to overcome difficult levels is a cancer on gaming. That only the people who "legitimately earned" their progression to the next level have the right to play the game. People who complained about that feature are far from a significant group in any measure, and wheeling them (or the any number of groups who have complained about any number of other dumb things over the years) out is pointless at best, completely and totally disingenuous at worst. And unfortunately I see these kind of comparisons all too often. The idea that because people would complain no matter what it's suddenly a lose-lose situation is completely false, because the amount of complaints and their rationality are
not consistent across all scenarios. It's a false equivalence and tremendously poor argument that's invoked far too often.
To discuss specific options, it makes immeasurably more sense to dole out content based on gameplay-related milestones, be it time-based or feature-usage based. Because that means that players are actually learning these features inside and out, and are being rewarded for their learning and progression with progressively more advanced tools in a very organic way. A gamer who has spent all afternoon mastering various features would logically be ready to use more features. Someone who turned on the game for 5 minutes one day to poke around the menu before going to bed would
not logically be more knowledgeable, nor do people learn how to use game maker tools while sleeping, so forcing people to wait until tomorrow makes no sense at all. "Tomorrow" means literally nothing. If Nintendo had rolled out the features as I described, sure, there probably would have been people complaining - like you said, they always do. But again, it's completely disingenuous to say this, because it implies that it would be anywhere near the same volume. If you truly think as many people would find this method as arbitrary and pointless, I don't know what to tell you other than you're wrong. This topic likely wouldn't be a thing, and at the very least the amount of complaints would be far, far fewer. You don't need a crystal ball to know that.
And again, it makes even more sense to include optional, in-depth tutorials that actually walk you through these features progressively, starting with simpler features and working up to more complex one and more complex design ideas/objectives in general. This way, new users are guaranteed to be taught the ins and outs as they progress, unlike the calendar-based solution, which literally only guarantees the user is one day older each time something is rolled out. Meanwhile, users who are unafraid to dive right in can, without any unnecessary handholding. Perfect for virtually everyone. Sure, maybe some people will still complain - again, like you said there's always someone. But these are the kind of people that complain
when a game has an easy mode and nonsense like that. They're a super minority who is literally meaningless, and to say it one more time, it is completely and totally disingenuous to compare the discussion in this thread to those kinds of people.