So here is my take on this. Keep in mind for context that I'm currently #1 in the online rankings, with tough and close fights with Andet and Gnu889. There is a gap between the three of us and the rest of the field, we are able to beat other good drivers like slocooked and theodorepringle with high reliability, and will always win against drivers another notch weaker. Even with handicap on, we can reliably beat the average online racer. Despite the luck element, skill matters a lot in STK racing.
(For an idea about what our races look like, I've posted many videos on my youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/user/AlayanT/videos)the advantage you get from getting in the lead of the pack is too great. You get all the speedups, all the boxes and nobody can shoot you in the face. In most races, the one who manages to get in front withing the first 10 seconds usually wins the race.
Andet, Gnu889 and I clearly noticed how much a good start matter. Arguably, it's in our races that it matters the most : an average player will still benefit from the 1st place advantage but will do some mistakes helping to catch up, while in our races such mistakes are rarer and you need to drive really well and/or have some luck to still win after losing a few seconds at the start.
Being destroyed by a bowling ball a few seconds in the race is quite random between closely matched players and matters a lot for the final result.
The start position also matters a lot. In a 3 players race, the difference is tiny, but in a 8 players race, being behind a few slow karts whose drivers don't know how to accelerate properly is a big disadvantage.
I think it would be helpful to have more basketballs to pester the lead kart and get it back in the fray.
No, this wouldn't be a proper solution in my opinion.
It addresses the issue that the lead kart is much safer on average that karts "in the pack", but it does so by adding another layer of randomness. If the basket ball manages to make the leader get 2nd or 3rd, there is another player who will now benefit from first place advantage and catching up will be extremely hard.
Also, it doesn't work so well at higher levels, because top players can avoid the basket ball long enough to often (but not always) find a protection (this is an intended mechanic : the basket ball goes very fast when far from the kart, but slows down when getting closer so high level racing with nitro, skidding and no crash can protect).
The key advantages of being first are :
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Nitro denial. A player in the first place can get all the useful nitro cans, and it can also deny them to another driver behind. This mostly matters when there is a single big nitro can to get, as being denied it makes a big difference. Smart driving take into account nitro denial (from both side : trying to deny it and trying to not be denied) but ultimately the respawn time of nitro is long enough that it can be very hard to overcome in some tracks.
Nitro denial is as much if not more applicable to time-trial races. In a track like Northern Resort, being first at the good time and being able to pick up the big nitro cans while a driver close behind can't is a winning advantage at close enough skill levels.
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Relative safety from attacks. A player in the lead can (in typical races) only be attacked from behind and can prepare for it, a player chasing may be at the risk of an attack from behind, and from ahead if he is about to catch up. In races between Andet, Gnu889 and me, it is common that the 2nd and 3rd place driver attack each other several times and thus lose any hope of getting first. An extremely powerful defensive item for the 1st player is the bowling ball. At short ranges, the bowling ball is very powerful, and to get ahead you need to get close to the leader kart at some point. On longer distances, aiming well enough to get a strike when attacking ahead is really hard, as you need to take into account the time for your ball to get to the kart ahead and what its trajectory will be in the meantime. When I sometimes manage to get a strike from well behind, I feel like I really deserve to have won some time because the aiming and the timing required real skill. As a defensive item, the story is different. The optimal trajectories are more narrow than the road length, and you can just spam bowling balls behind you. Even if most of these do not hit, they still force the player behind to avoid them and increase mistake rate in trying to do so. And some other balls will definitely hit, especially when it's not possible to see them ahead of time enough and they are just in the middle of the optimal path.
I think the problem that leads to a player that broke away early having an easy time at the front though is that the rest of the field is getting bogged down because this game has a lot of item pickups and very powerful items. The fly swatter in particular for example has an enormous radius and can block almost the entire track sometimes. If the second place player gets one early the first place will easily open the gap.
Absolutely, players behind attacking each other is a key factor of the first place advantage, along with nitro denial.
The swatter is indeed quite powerful. It not only has great range, but it can squash quickly in succession so several karts close will all get squashed and a bubble shield don't help much.
The distribution of items in 0.10 has actually been changed to make the "players in bad spot destroy each other" issue smaller.
However :
- The previous situations, with common triple cakes for bad places, was much worse. The improvements looked very good compared to the baseline.
- This was tested against the AI. While the AI has top reflexes to use items and its item usage behavior has been enhanced, the overall racing skills are quite different.
- The rate of offensive items is at its peak around the first quarter (say you have 12 players, it will top for players 3 and 4). So while the change make the player in last position less likely to be destroyed repeatedly when making a comeback, the situation for players just behind the 1st place hasn't improved much.
- There is only so far you can go by tweaking the existing items. What can you add for the players in position 2 or 3 ? More basketballs ? Nay. More parachutes ? Nay. More cakes, bowling balls, swatters ? Nay, that's what we're trying to avoid in the first place. More zippers ? It can quickly become unfair in the hand of good players. More plungers ? You can have only so much before it becomes annoying. More bubble gums ? A bit maybe, but not that much, as the gum placed strategically can also be a big hindrance to players behind and there is already often a lot of gums on the ground in a multiplayer race.
In the end, you would need new items to solve this.
I think reducing the amount of item pickups and nerfing some items would help compressing the field and ultimately also make the game less frustrating.
I don't think this would really compress the field. Skill matters a lot in STK. You'd get less space between 1st and 2nd that is now usually the case, but also more between 2nd and last, etc.
Buffing the parachute to hit players with a large time advantage harder might help as well, but this is again adding penalties in the form of items instead of reducing them, which I believe is the better approach.
STK could do with a few more boosting items for karts in bad positions too, I think.
They explain that it's a good to have an item like the blue shell/basketball in these types of arcade-y kart racers because it helps to level the playing field and it's more fun to have a "close" race that keeps you on the edge of your seat than to have a brutal fight in the back while the person in 1st place gets to have a peaceful, boring stroll.
The issue is skill level.
The races between me, Andet and Gnu889 are often tense and exciting, because our skill level is close enough. But take any of us and put against us the average STK player, and even with three times more parachutes and basketballs we'd still crush him because the skill gap is too big. I often put handicap on when playing against less skilled players, but at least it's a conscious choice, not some RNG punition.
You just can't make a bad player beat a good player without making the game downright unfair, and frustrating for the good player, period. And while there are more bad players than good players, good players are those which are the more invested into the game, so just crossing them out is a terrible idea in my opinion. Ideally, STK would be so popular you would be able to sort people by skill level and pit them against other of similar level, but this isn't realistic so far.
The whole idea of making the speed of the player in front artificially slower as a catch up mechanic like the GTA one is terrible from my point of view. In novice, intermediate and expert, the AI is coded to slow down depending on distance to player, but extending this by force to human players, no.
That said, I do think that STK needs at least one, maybe two, items boosting speed for players in bad position. In practice, casual players find big speed boosts items fun, but they have often trouble handling them well without crashing, so this lessen the fairness issue.