A harder difficulty AI in story mode?

[SilverNexus]

So, I ran through the "Off the Beaten Track" Grand Prix on Expert difficulty through Story Mode (I have already beaten it, but I find that I run the preconfigured story-mode races more than set up my own races). Since Zen Garden does not like my graphics driver (already in another topic), I skipped that race and did not even finish the race, and earned zero points for the race. Yet, I still beat the computers by eleven points despite only participating in four of the five races.

These were the final results:
Konqi (me) - 44 pts.
Beastie - 33 pts.
Emule - 24 pts.
Wilbur - 23 pts.
Hexley - 15 pts.

Long story short, I think that Ironman difficulty should be ported into Story Mode, for people who want more of a challenge from the AI while doing Story Mode (even when I was legitimately going through these, most of them were a cakewalk) than Expert difficulty.

Also, if I'm thinking correctly, wasn't Ironman previously a rubber-band-less Expert? If this is still the case, then perhaps some AI tweaking could be done to make Ironman a little bigger of a step over Expert in the process.

[Auria]

I agree, and this might come in the future. Adding a new difficulty to story mode however involves a very large amount of playtesting and tweaking so it may take a little while before we tackle this, if we decide to

[bonifarz]

Also, if I'm thinking correctly, wasn't Ironman previously a rubber-band-less Expert? If this is still the case, then perhaps some AI tweaking could be done to make Ironman a little bigger of a step over Expert in the process.

Usually it is very difficult in fun racing games to implement an AI that poses a challenge to skilled players. In some games, this is compensated by unequal stat caps on the player's and the AI karts, but that may feel unfair. Personally, I think there are two nice challenges for advanced players: a) time-trial (see below) and b) races with custom settings in stk_config.cfg and as many AI karts as your CPU can handle

[Arthur]

Don't worry guys, once we have online multiplayer with lag compensation you can challenge each other as much as you want.