As for why a Sniper may pull ahead of wins over a Spy, given that both players have eyes-on (and not hands-on) experience, I feel you are only partially correct.  The Spy certainly needs hands-on experience in order to better his/her performance, but the Sniper’s main tool of performance is their eyes.  Learning to divide your attention consciously is something that can be learned effectively without holding the controller, but it isn’t entirely subconscious.  Likewise, a high level Spy can use the same element of perception to watch the party from the inside, observing AI behaving oddly, and determining a list of assumed suspects their opponent might have, and may use this information against them.  Learning to spend your attention as a resource is a conscious effort a Sniper makes, and an aspect of performance that must be practiced in order to remain proficient.  I genuinely believe the number of Sniper games I’ve won due to a subconscious “gut feeling” is decisively lower than the number of wins I’ve procured from a conscious effort to divide my limited attention in an efficient manner.

Another point I feel I should mention is that this particular masterclass features heavy discussion on the subject of pathing, and general performance, because the featured player (r7stuart) is something of a pathing expert in the game.  Not all players focus primarily on this aspect; in fact, most elite players have their own unique approaches (and specializations) to the game, which range from pathing to camping to behavioralism.  I really hope future episodes will highlight these different playstyles, so you can see the different approaches players take, and see better how mind-games fit into the overall gameplay of SpyParty at high levels of play.

Unfortunately, at Beginner and Intermediate levels, performance is currently the most prominent aspect, since it takes less time for players to learn about bad movement than it takes for them to learn to avoid it.

The interesting thing about designing games is you’re constantly making decisions that preclude some types of play and emphasize others. There are so many games in this area!  So, yes, taking out click-to-move in favor of direct-control was an aesthetic decision, it’s not clear one is absolutely “better” than the other, they’d lead in different directions.  I hope others come in and explore this territory, since I can only make one of the games in here, and slowly at that!

On the specific subject, I think the elite play (of which I’m not a good example, yet!) has some of the stuff you’re talking about, because there’s more mastery over the micro end of things.  That’s a good thing, I think.  You want the game to change as the level of skill increases.  I’m definitely going to re-write the entire pathing system, hopefully only one more time.  After that, we’ll see how things settle down for the long term.

I agree that performance and observation definitely give depth to the overall game, but I’d like the dominant gameplay to be about mind-games. I think the action-test and walking manually brought a great deal of immersion, TENSION ;), live and depth to this game so I am pretty sure that is the right way to go. But I feel like it might have pulled this game into vastly different territory BEFORE anyone had the chance to really explore the other side of the game, with automated walking. I think it would be really interesting to see how the game would play out and develop if players would no longer be bothered or could no longer rely on pathing and movement stuff.

So in short I guess, what I am trying to see is, I feel like the game took an early left by adding manual walking (and action-test to a lesser extent), disrupting the exploration of the gameplay that lies beyond it. I do believe adding manual walking and action-test belong to this game, but they were added to soon before other gameplay aspects could become dominant.

I think I will try to get back into this game as soon as the new art is in, it is still my most promising game of all time, and you are by far the best Dev there is in my humble opinion, I wish more indie developers would take your approach! And I think you should at least thoroughly consider doing a major overhaul on the pathing system.