[nsxwolf]

I liked the idea of these games and own the 3DS game and 2 on the Switch. I like making levels, but for the most part I haven’t had a lot of fun playing other people’s levels.

I gave up on the games because it seemed like most of the user submitted content were weird non playable machines where people bend the rules of the engine to hurl Mario along to the goal automatically.

Interesting to see that, but it got to the point where I saw nothing else, and it’s been on the shelf for years.

[GlickWick]

I still maintain that the Mario Maker series could be absolutely brilliant if Nintendo would invest in better discovery algorithms and searchability. The pool is going to be flooded with garbage, and rightfully so given that kids love to play and make things too. There's nothing wrong with that, but in the end it means you've fallen into a tough situation where the internal discovery tools don't work, and the only way for a level to be "discovered" is for an influencer to find it.

I doubt you can ever build a perfect fix for this, but it could be a lot better than it is right now. Unfortunately it's just an abandoned project at this point, and the inevitable Mario Maker 3 will likely just have the same issues.

[physicles]

It's not a full solution, but there must be lists of good levels out there on the internet. I just found https://www.reddit.com/r/TraditionalMarioMaker/.

For me, couch multiplayer would make it 10x better. I bought the game and was sorely disappointed to see that this wasn't included.

[cubefox]

Actually people on social media sites like Twitter solve a similar discoverability issue by following interesting people. Subscribing to interesting level creators inside the game reduces the problem to finding these creators.

[robrtsql]

Same—unfortunately most of the content that other players produce is either impossible to lose or is specifically designed to be as hard as possible. You can still find levels which are suitable for your skill level, but the “10 mario mode” or whatever is specifically built around selecting the next level FOR you, so that entire game mode is basically a waste.

[wesleychen]

If you filter levels by a higher difficulty you can get some that require you to actually play.

[rtpg]

Kinda weird, I've found that Mario Maker 2, if you queue up on the next-to-hardest difficulty, is basically good? I've encountered plenty of "top quartile of SMW" difficulty levels.

There's some garbage in there too, but that's the game! There's definitely good sets of levels nowadays IMO.

[nosrepa]

DumbDog's levels in Mario maker 2 are fantastic if you like fair but hard levels.