[Suggestion] Pause buffering and master mode

[LucyAwawa]

You are able to pause and unpause as often as you would like, even when not in practice mode, which results in some issues in the difficult modes. In master, (spoilers for 1000 & 1300 mechanics ahead) it is possible to pause between pieces to be able to react to cyclone with much more time, and think about what inputs you need to get the piece to go where you want . This becomes particularly an issue after 1300 where the ice blocks are added, which are supposed to be an additional challenge on top of cyclone. When high speed cyclone can be somewhat trivialized, the potency of the difficult ice blocks is reduced. I have noticed a friend be able to use pause buffering to great effectiveness in practice, though I am not sure if she has tried to implement it during a full master run. I felt it was necessary to bring attention to this because it absolutely seems unintentional that you can pause the game to think. If the board is hidden when the game is paused, this would not solve the issue, because the board can be remembered and the pause still used for more thinking time. I believe there needs to be some restriction on pausing. Perhaps a maximum amount of times you can pause, minimum time between pauses, or simply disabling the pause feature past a certain level. I believe pause buffering is not an issue in the lower levels, but has the potential to make high level gameplay less fun.

1000 mechanic:
Regarding cyclone, pause buffering is more of an issue because you only get to see the correct orientation of the first next piece. The pro players I have talked to about this see the next queue "lying to you" as an issue. I completely understand why the pieces are not displayed in their rotated states, as they would then be overlapping. I assume this was tried in development and deemed to be too ugly. I suggest that there still be some icon next to each piece that indicates the orientation it will spawn in, so that we can use that information to inform our decisions and button presses. Even small text would work. "L" (left rotate), "R" (right rotate), and "180" would work for english players. I like the idea of small arrow graphics that indicate the direction better (e.g. ⤼, ⤻, ↻), as it does not have to be localized.

I hope this is helpful for your consideration!

[LucyAwawa]

A friend of mine who I have been talking about the Cyclone issue with, Electra, also recently made a post about his suggestions for improving the mechanic. It is much more detailed than what I wrote in the second half of this post, and is very well thought out. It's a good read!
https://steamcommunity.com/app/3328480/discussions/0/603026769788844745/