While I already answered to the PR around when it was made, I also had it on my todo list to answer here about the gameplay questions.
(31-12-2025, 09:00 PM)jvondrashek Wrote: I was playing with a few of my friends and family who haven't played before and I noticed a few things when playing online.
1. With skill, you can get VERY far ahead of the pack. If this were a pure racing game that would be fine, but with items this is more party oriented so ideally you want to have a higher turn over a players in various places.
2. If you are below average, you can easily lose the pack and it becomes pretty hopeless to catch up.
Skill is indeed very important in SuperTuxKart.
The experience of new players with the game is certainly an important consideration, and a number of changes were made for STK Evolution with this in mind and others are still planned, for example to reduce frustrations around collisions and rescues.
However, changes to core gameplay that would go far enough to give new players the feeling of a fighting chance against an experimented player would inevitably dramatically reduce the importance of skill in more balanced matchups. Degrading the game for its core player base in the hope to make it more suitable for casual players is not a good trade-off in my eyes.
The intended solution to skill differences in multiplayer is the use of the handicap system, which has been significantly improved for Evolution with 8 different levels from 4% to 32% speed penalty instead of a single level at 10% that was also disliked for how it affected timings.
Some thinking is still needed as to how to entice players to make use of this system to balance multiplayer games with friends, because while I would know to use it for example, I think it would be easy to skip over for more typical players. It may also not be obvious for people which level of handicap would work best for their skill differences.
I would also like to have a game mode where points are scored multiple times during the race based on position, which would allow a more imbalanced powerup distribution and wilder swings.
(31-12-2025, 09:00 PM)jvondrashek Wrote: The idea to solve the latter of these problems is the "Rocket Boost"
This "Rocket Boost" puts the player on auto-pilot and speeds them up to catch them. This would be for players really falling behind and would only be accessible to those in the lower half with those in last having more broad access to it.
This is basically the "bullet bill" from Mario Kart.
Beyond the issue of how it makes the early race less important and how it could interact with nitro stockpiling, that kind of powerup that aims to just bring back a kart within a given distance of the top kart irrespective of how well the top kart drives or how poorly the helped kart has driven is something I have a serious issue with, because it makes large swathes of gameplay functionally irrelevant. It doesn't matter anymore if you lost 5 seconds or 15 seconds with mistakes when you were already behind, because it will all be erased unless it happened right before the finish line.
If you have a good player and multiple weaker players of different skills playing together, this kind of powerup also erases most differences between the weaker players, even if they are significant.
I also have a philosophical issue with automating gameplay. It strips away at the interactivity of games. Player inputs should be important, otherwise we might as well pick an AI kart to bet on and watch the automated race unfold... It might be entertaining to some degree, but it wouldn't be a game.
