Story mode balancing

[Wuzzy]

I think some bronze or silver challenges in the story mode are trivial. I suggest to make some balancing here.

There are many races, but some of them don’t have any place requirement whatsoever. Which makes the challenge basically just a time trial. You can finish last and still win the challenge. This feels just wrong. I think pure time trial challenges should not have any AI karts. Otherwise stick to normal race. I think it is also OK to mix time-trial with normal race. But I think it is just weird to make a time trial with AI karts and then completely ignoring the place. In a race against other karts, I (and probably many others) would expect that I don’t win anything if I finish last.

I have the impression that the bronze cups are not only easy, they are sometimes trivial. I think bronze cups should be easy but not trivial.

I would add a place requirement for all race challenges. I have looked into all challenges and think that the only place requirement which makes sense for all races in all difficulties is rank 1. There are only 2-5 karts per race challenge, also the AI difficulty drops significantly in the lower difficulties.

Here are my concrete suggestions for challenges:

1st: Add the requirement “rank 1” for all difficulties of the following challenges:
Bovine Barnyard, Northern Resort, Snow Peak, Subsea, The Island, Scotland, Around the Lighthouse, Amazonian Journey, Old Mine



Random notes:
The bronze challenge on the Island is trivial: It just requires a rank of 3 but there are only 3 karts in the challenge. Which means you always win the challenge, no matter how bad you are.
Hacienda has rank 2 requirement for GOLD. Oh, come on … xD


If you too have comments about the balancing in Story mode, please write it here, in this thread. Do you too think that some of the challenges are trivial?

[Anon]

Personally, I think it's probably best to leave things mostly the way they are right now. The entire point of the novice and intermediate challenges is to make the game more approachable to beginners, and that would be lost if they were made harder. You might find them trivial, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be the case if you were completely new to the game/genre. Also, I don't see a problem with not all the challenges requiring first place. Sure, it would be counterintuitive if you could win a race without getting first place, but the challenge and the race itself are distinct from each other, at least in my mind. IMO, it also adds a bit of variety to have each challenge require different things (rank, time, etc).

The only exceptions are the Island challenge and the new Lighthouse challenge. I'm a fairly experienced player, so I was able to beat the game without redoing too many races. But since 0.8.1 came out, I haven't yet been able to beat the new Lighthouse challenge on expert mode. I'm not against having hard challenges, but I think that there should be some more consistency between the difficulty of the Lighthouse challenge and the rest of the challenges.

[Wuzzy]

Yeah. It may be possible to push the rank up by 1 or 2. Maybe the last place should always lose, otherwise it is just a time-trial with enemy karts, which is a bit weird. Because what’s the point of having other karts if all which counts is just the time?
But I am open to discussion here, and I certainly want to hear the input of otheres.

But this challenge needs to be fixed for sure, no matter how this discussion goes on:
The Island, bronze: The worst allowed rank should be 2 or 1, but certainly not 3, otherwise you always win.

[Arthur]

Some challenges probably need some re-balancing indeed. But we do need to let beginners/kids finish story mode quite easily at beginner difficulty, or it will be frustrating to have all those tracks locked.

When it comes to challenges which are time based, but have other karts, the reasoning behind those if I remember correctly was that having AI use various weapons against you will slow you down compared to a time trial race, so while it can seem pointless it does add more difficulty and randomness into the mix. But yeah, the Island challenge should most likely be changed in any case.

And just like you, we certainly welcome discussion and suggestions, especially when it comes to balancing of the game - it's not perfect now, and might never be, but let's do our best.

[hiker]

I agree with Arthur, we have many kids playing, and we don't want them to get too frustrated. Saying that, a trivial challenge like 3 out of 3 is indeed not really intended (ticket time please ).

In the future we hope to be able to ship some ghost races, i.e. time trail against pre-recorded ghosts. That should add some variety as well.

Cheers,
Joerg