Misc. thoughts.
Normal races and time-trials
- Reduce the respawn time for nitros. When getting "close" to the kart ahead, the chasing kart can't take an important nitro bottle in many places. To bridge a 2-3s gap, going significantly faster for 20-30s is often required, assuming no zipper. During this time, the amount of lost nitro can amount to 2-3s lost. In some ways, this is similar to the "dirty air" crap that made F1 so boring. There should still be a respawn delay, so that just stopping the kart to fill the nitro gauge would be a bad strategy.
- Reduce the steering bonus from the skid "hop". This would make a number of curves more technical. It could also help making acceleration a more consistently useful stat.
- Ensure that having worse steering doesn't mean easier skids in straights
- Remove the "slow down to remove the parachute" trick. It's not as if it requires much skill, and online it does more to help those with a lower ping than the stronger players. However, the duration of parachutes should go down.
- Try and make collisions less destructive. Pushing out a rival into a wall or off a cliff should remain an interesting strategy sometimes, but unlucky collisions that make the kart violently rebound away don't fit in a kart racer. It's unrealistic to expect people to avoid collisions, especially considering online latency issues and that even sim racers have crazy people causing crashes, so their results should be less random.
- Make skidding less one-dimensional. Pulling off a yellow skid is somewhat too easy, pulling off a red skid somewhat too hard. The delay without skid bonus when going from a yellow to a red is especially punitive in conditions where chaining multiple red skids is too unreliable outside of time-trial record attack.
Normal races only
- Nerf the swatter. Less range, no "fast-fire swatting", lower active duration (so it doesn't force to wait a loooong time before attempting an overtake), higher reduced speed during a squash.
- Basket-balls exploding half-way through the track should be avoided.
- Basket-balls exploding on track items (e.g. Gran Paradisio baloons) should be avoided.
- Basket-balls should be even faster at catching up, but time should be reserved to allow defensive moves.
- Get rid of the "cover screen" backward plunger effect, to ensure online fairness.
- Make backward bowling balls less effective (forward requires to be rather close to the target and/or a great shot ; backward can be spammed to create more obstacles to avoid even for someone several seconds behind). When the target is very close, the change should be minimal, this is more about delayed effects.
- Get rid of cakes ? When far behind someone, they are not a threat at all, but at close range in the hands of someone that knows how to time them (not just right in the skid that may make them miss), they are very destructive with only the gum as a defense. Much easier to handle than bowling balls, they cause a lot of slowdown for people in middle positions and contribute to the issue of runaway victories.
- Add some new powerups as discussed in a previous thread.
Follow-the-Leader
There are a few very rare people out there who enjoy the mode, but I question the point of a game mode where slowing down can be mandatory, where there is a much lower skill ceiling, and that gives a poor playing experience for most people. Dragging it along "because it has been there for a long time" is just prolonging the suffering. Multiple attempts where done to try and make it more enjoyable, but it never was enough. There are still some bugs/issues with the mode, too, but fixing them wouldn't make this a great game mode.
Alternative game modes involving points handed out to karts at regular intervals based on their current race position could be considered, but I think FTL should be removed first and anything new eventually would come later, with a clean-sheet concept.