Funny the perceived difficulty of this game's learning curve, I actually had an easier time learning Nexuiz 2.3 and 2.4 (which were considerably harder to learn, Xonotic came pretty naturally) than learning how to play say, Quake III: Arena or StarSiege: Tribes. The only other arena FPS I had an easier time learning than Xonotic was Unreal Tournament 99. Anyway, this does show how much a set of tutorials or instruction videos is needed given that a player of professional background in a wide variety of other arena shooters took quite a bit to learn the game. At least it's still easier to pick up and play than Warsow, you know that super hardcore arena FPS that manages to be both BORING and hard to play. Also, the IMMEDIATE first thing we need to do IF Stermy registers on here is to direct him to WW. lol
Certain mechanics I noticed that Stermy wasn't too familiar with in this game:
WEAPON COMBOS, he knows the game has fast weapon switching, but I'm not sure he understands how useful this is. It's useful because you can fire a different gun while your previous gun is still cooling down from the previous shot, thus allowing you to fire more shots than you are otherwise capable of doing.
Game physics, I noticed he didn't quickly catch onto the trick jumps and other things like that that exist in this game. Strafe jumping and those sort of things weren't immediately obvious to him from what I can tell. Using bunnyhopping, it's also possible to ski just like in Tribes 2.
Certain weapon behaviors didn't come too easily to him until they were explained, for example when he kept detonating rockets on himself lol most wouldn't understand why your able to do that either (it's a useful feature for flying through the air).
Rock/Paper/Scissors balance of weapons, he was probably expecting a more tiered system like Quake 3 where certain weapons are "better" than others, not UT99's style of balance where weapon effectiveness is based strictly on preference and situation.
Map variety may throw some off as well, most of the maps people have seen in Xonotic were mostly semi-open and cramped arenas with a lot of Quake conversions existing on the public and GIT servers. Quite the opposite style of map exists as well. When Nexuiz 2.4 and 2.4.2 had it's hayday (LOADED servers all over the damn place) we weren't looking at these kinds of maps all the time, we had a lot of outdoor Tribes-sized maps and freakishly huge tunnel maps where you would fling yourself LITERALLY AT 300 MPH TO 500+ MPH WHILE CHASING AND GUNNING DOWN PLAYERS with a grappling hook (I couldn't handle any more than 3 hours of this usually without passing out lol fun times, I miss those days). It wouldn't surprise me if this ended up happening with Xonotic if we start finding CTF servers packed. While Xonotic seems to for the most part be a bit slower, I can still see similar things happening if it becomes popular.
Those are just a few things, I'm sure there's more. In my opinion this game actually can be fairly easy to pick up, IF you understand the mechanics, problem is there aren't any in-game tutorials that explain these.
ECKZBAWKZ HUGE LIST OF ACHIEVEMENTS GOES HERE....
Oh wait.