My time diving into Mario kart balance really surprised me but what did you think? Lets discuss down below :D If you enjoy our content consider supporting us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup
Thinking about it now, giving first place coins for free also kinda boosts them ahead too, since more coins = higher top speed. Even if they get hit once, they can earn the coins back almost instantly. That's why the "mug zone" hits so much harder too, as you drop so many more coins than you earn. I guess that's a crossroads they tried to implement: either take the ideal racing line, or take a slightly offset course with the benefit of slightly more speed. Or at least that's how I'd interpret it
So a thing about MK8's shift into two items in MK8DX is because in most older Mario Kart games, that was kinda the system that was always in play. Grab an item, and hold it behind you. This frees the Slot to roll a 2nd item to bank, effectively granting 2 items at a time. If a Red Shell hits you, you can immediately pull out the 2nd without worry. MK8 WiiU's initial release did away with this mechanic. You only have the 1 Item Slot. Once you have that item, you have it till you use the item and can't hold onto a 2nd item, even if you Hold it behind you. This effectively ruins the standard "Defense" play in that more often, Players are subject to more Red Shells that could have been dealt with if they had a 2nd Banana Peel or Shell. Or screw you over entirely if you rolled a Coin, which means no defense at all. So MK8DX's release "Restores" the old system by full-on granting a second Item Slot and the Double Item Box that fills both slots, enabling more Offense and Defense plays. In MK8 WiiU, I believe the Coin was added to the Item Pool offset the "Aggressive Defense" style in the aforementioned Two-Item system that prevailed older MK games. The older style had a major issue in and of itself in that good play ensures a Player *Always* has defense against anything that isn't a Blue Shell, which can make 2nd Place and lower struggle to catch up to 1st outside of a Blue Shell. In MK8WiiU, this more likely reveals the massive flaw in the One-Item system in that the Coin can be seen as a **Punishment** for doing well; you won't be able to defend yourself easily, if at all if you can hold 1st. Which ironically can also mean holding onto 1st is more trouble than it's worth. So MK8DX's Two-Item system incidentally buffs Coins in that they also act as Boo Deterrents. Likewise, while I see your point on how holding the Coin ensures that the 2nd item is always a Shell, Bananna, or Super Horn, I think it's that Necessary Evil in order to ensure that Players don't have a repeat of the original "Only Coins and No Defense" problem that WiiU suffered.
I always thought there were systems like this in mario kart... but I just thought it was a skill issue on my part. Now I have a convenient excuse for whenever I lose a race, thanks!
I feel most of what you're discussing in the video is the result of this balance system being used when players have widely varying skill levels, and/or AI involvement behaving wildly different than human players. That "mug" spot always exists, of course, but the way AIs and players with less overall awareness spam out their items makes it all the more chaotic. If everyone's bad, they all have an equal chance to get stuck there, but a skilled player able to hold the front gets away from it all unless others know how to catch up and keep up. When the players falling behind are doing so because they are less skilled, it's also less likely they have the track knowledge to make use of all of the item-based shortcuts available and make the comeback that the game tries to offer to them, landing them back in that zone instead of pulling ahead of it, getting hit again, and making a frontrunning breakaway that much more extreme. Yes, the front is always safer than that middle ground of chaos, but there's the extra risk of being passed by players who do know what they're doing, target shocked, red sniped at an item set, or just plain blue shelled, so the more even the skill levels are the more luck can come into play keeping things less predictable. There are techniques to mitigate all of this, but nothing completely reliable, which keeps the game interesting. Then there's the back. 9th and worse, behind the chaos zone. You're safer here to re-gather your coins, and you have the best item pool to pull from for comeback items. With knowledge and a little luck, skilled players can use these items to bridge amazing distances and even pull ahead. Part of being a skilled player is knowing how to use the advantages the game is giving you. Whether you got karted early and need to recover or are sandbagging on a track with many heavily exploitable shortcuts to try and pull a sneaky come-from-behind, it's an equally important skill as knowing the time trial lines to drive when trying to stay ahead. The real issue is that this core balance needs a full game of semi-evenly skilled players. Because of the 4 player local multi limit, local wireless and online matches are the only place to see this, and many players will never have the opportunity for big local wireless games or the willingness go online to try it (not to mention online has its own frustrations like the janky hit detection of trail items), and it takes a lot of time for the VR system to get you into the right group where you start feeling the balance behave more reasonably. Single player and local multi games just remove a big chunk of that element from the game, and you're left with the chaos that springs from what a minimum of 8 AIs choose to do with it.
FYI the terms positive/negative feedback loops come from engineering. The reason it may be confusing is because the "positive/negative" is not referring to the goodness/badness of the feedback, but rather the numerical sign of the feedback gain. Positive feedback means the feedback quantity has the same sign as the input (because of the positive gain), and thus it reinforces the input instead of resisting.
It's actually much broader than engineering. I first learned of them when studying chemistry and physics. Good examples are thermal runaway and climate change. As you mention, the terms don't refer to good or bad outcomes, but the direction of the change. In fact in both these examples positive feedback is what you want to avoid.
@@Tatman2TheResQ Yeah! Screw this guy for trying to clarify the nomenclature behind feedback loops! And thank you for contributing by introducing the concept of a null function by contributing a sum total of nada to the discussion!
To my knowledge, the chosen one is based on your character. The game has a nemesis system where each character has a list of enemies to choose from to be the main enemy. That’s why it’s pretty common for someone to have only one or two chosen ones over the majority of their time with the game.
Do you know if Peach and Daisy are rivals? Mario Kart made my sister _hate_ Daisy, and I believe she usually picked Peach in the Double Dash and Wii era. She’s a shy guy main now, but she still side-eyes Daisy every time she sees her.
@@hyperon_ion9423 in DD it's determined by cc and vehicle weight, of all things. In other games CPU Peach is a rival of player Daisy, not the other way around.
@@hyperon_ion9423 As someone who plays only Daisy because of the immense schadenfreude I get from beating people with her, I love that your sister hates Daisy. I just miss the obnoxious "HI I'M DAISY" when you pass someone. I think MK Wii was the last one to use that sound clip. *sigh* Good times.
I think the worst aspect of Mario Kart balance, that you briefly touched on, is kart creation. Its fun to build your own little cart, but you can easily end up building something thats just bad, and the stats are not well explained. Its not like items which have a chaotic but fun back and forth and effect on the race, instead its just a decision you make before and you hope you didnt screw yourself over
The lack of a visible mini turbo stat despite that being one of not the most important stat is the worst offender. Like I can understand maybe not showing off the differing speed and handling stats for all the different states a kart can be in (as in some karts are comparatively faster and handle better underwater or in anti gravity), I can understand not showing off which karts give you the best invincibility frames (even if that's important to) but mini turbos are so important if you want to get better at the game and nintendo not sowing those off is just another barrier for newbies that want to compete online and have a reasonable chance of winning.
i have seen someone that used what was potentially the worst Kart they could beat people using better combos did show skill does still play a factor, but i do agree sometimes a bad Kart Combo does play a heavy factor. would be nice if we could see a more detailed breakdown(or at least have an option for it).
As a very casual player I have no idea what the different parts do. Better grip or power sliding? Less slowdown from grass? Do the different gliders do anything?
i just wish there was an option when hosting a race to make all carts have set stats, like all maxxed, all minimiums, or all average i want to build an absolute monstrosity of a vehicle so ugly my friends can't look at their screens when i'm on it but if i do that i never get to be on their screens because of some hidden stat being left so low that it means i'm instead somehow in 7th place when there's only 5 players
it seems that the intent of the blue shell is to drag a hypothetical solo elite player into "the mug zone" where the items and chaos are flying, resulting in an unpredictable outcome, much like a bullet bill is inversely designed to bring stragglers up into it. It feels like Nintendo's goal is for 1-12 to *all* be The Mug Zone, at all times, and that personal skill will only determine how well you can recover from and handle the chaos, rather than to let you pull away from it. I'm not sure how true that is, and I don't think they've ever completely succeeded, but that's what the design feels like from my perspective.
Problem is that if they get dragged into "the mug zone" or "the vortex" as some call it, that player guaranteed to not have any items to defend themselves anymore, and almost always will get combo'd by more attack items even further back. If this happens late in the race, there's virtually no chance for that player to do anything about it. Essentially, Ideal place to be is second place but away from the vortex.
@@HaibaneKuu Either that or to be in first and have a big enough breakaway from the rest of the pack that you don't end up in the mug zone. because a funny thing to note about the (mario kart 8 version off the) blue shell is that it doesn't target the person that's in first when it was thrown it only decides who to target when it gets close enough to the person currently in first. this means that online if you're close enough to first a good player will slow down just a tiny bit to make the blue shell target you. You can also avoid the blue shell with a super horn or a mushroom and can mitigate the effects by intentionally running into a hazard like a banana to avoid the blue shell with the invincibility frames doing that gets you because the blue shell stuns you more than a banana does.
@@appelofdoom8211 Well, running into banana still slows you down, and you risk getting comboed anyway if you weren't far enough ahead. Mushroom you have to smuggle into first place as you can't roll them normally, and they also don't protect you from red shells. Super horn is the only thing that you can actually get in first place and protects you from both red and blue shells, but it's low chance to roll it so if both are coming you are getting hit regardless. And second place can roll triple red shell. My problem is just that being in the first place seems like a dice roll - you need to get enough defense items, you need them to not be stolen by boo/destroyed by shock, you need second place to not get too many red shells, and others not get too many blue shells - and all of that is something you have essentially no control over. Sure being in a vortex sucks as well, but at least you get to roll better items, and not to mention that the problem of the vortex itself is created by the attack item design in the first place.
Yep. Like Mario Party, Mario Kart is, at heart, a party game, with two main design goals: Allow anyone, even people who rarely, if ever, play video games to have at least some chance of victory, and ensure funny stuff happens to amuse the players. The Blue Shell helps make dure no one escapes unschated.
It really doesn't work unless you got a race full of relatively capable players. The better players will always lead the pack and the worst will, at best get a lucky break and be able to get 1st or 2nd sometimes. I'm the best player in my family and it's gotten to the point that if someone is able to come in first instead of me in a single race of a cup, they say they "beat me". The item balance is just really annoying for a really good player. And yes, my family is a bunch of scrublords and use the Deluxe driving aids, and now have trouble doing drifts because of their over reliance on them.
After having it pointed out to me, the thing that has stuck in my head about the blue shell is that it does absolutely nothing to help you if you're in, like, eighth. It ruins first place's day and possibly lets second place pass them, but _you're_ still where you were before!
It also does nothing at all if the 1st place is competent enough to snowball past other players. I play with family members who aren't as experienced, and if I don't intentionally throw I get so far ahead that I can take two or three blue shells to the face without even coming close to losing my position. So, what? Someone gained an item that was supposed to help them catch up, but it was less useful than a COIN? Doesn't seem ideal.
@@fearingalma1550 In Double Dash there was the bowser shell that was basically a green shell that wouldn’t stop until it slid off the course or reached a certain amount of impacts, maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?
@@bugjamsIn Mario kart 64 the blue shell was ground-traveling, so it technically could hit anyone that got in it's way, but it only ever tracked 1st place, so you usually wouldn't be hit by it unless you were the target.
@@fearingalma1550pretty sure this is a conflation of multiple things. It’s mentioned 64 blue shell was ground travelling so it could hit anybody; DD had the giant bowser shell; I seem to recall DS also had ground-travelling blue shells. But I’m pretty sure there’s no version where it’s giant AND hits people en route to 1st place. Though it’s hitbox was larger than a normal shell in 64.
In my house, I'm "that guy" in 90% of the games I play, and if I'm not careful about pulling punches then I can completely ruin any hope of playing games with my family and friends. As such, the chaos of Mario Kart and Mario Party are a blessing. When I was younger and obsessed with winning, I hated that chaos factor. Now, middle aged and more just wanting a touch of my nostalgia and time with loved ones, I want the game to reach up and slap me in the back of the head, if only so it's exciting and everyone has a chance.
My partner is "that guy" in our household too and while I would say I generally prefer the challenge that comes with facing him with skill/knowledge alone (my Juri vs his JP for example) there's absolutely a type of fun that comes from playing more chaotic games that make good victory less certain. The win is far less enjoyable for me on a "I earned this" level but the sheer comedy of "bad luck" hounding him is good for laughs.
@@torreykat I like that way of putting it. Real satisfaction in the victory comes when you really earn it though skill, but the moments that random chaos filled games create are good fun.
When I’m playing Mariokart with my kid I make it a self imposed challenge to get them in as high a placement as I can. This means dipping back into the mugzone to grab items then torpedoing the racers in front of them. It’s usually on 50cc so it’s not a challenge to win but it is a challenge to keep an 8 year old in first place.
Mario kart is exactly this for me with anyone I play with even if they think that their good I will always give them a run for their money. Not to sound cocky but Mario kart is legit the only game I enjoy being beaten down because it happens so rarely for me and thus gives me the challenge I seek.
@@SamWulfign We are of the same ilk. In my friend group I'm "that guy" that everyone hopes they can beat but rarely do. I didn't have a Switch for the longest time (and never owned a Wii U), so my friends who had been playing MK8 for a while thought they had a leg up on me with practicing the new courses I hadn't raced on yet. Nope. Gold medal in nearly all of them. 😅
My thing with Mario Kart is that 1st place only has to worry about the blue shell and attacks from second place while second place needs to do double duty fighting for first but also defending from the utter chaos attempting to drag them back in behind them. Ironically, even the blue shell can become a problem for them. Knowing this, my family used to deliberately play "co-op" back in Double Dash where the pair would go for first place and the third person would play body guard in second, so we could get perfect wins and unlock everything. First place would practically go for a cruise and second place (if they even managed it) would go through constant hell.
Sirlin had an article on this back in the day. He called it "slippery slope". I've also heard people refer to it as "snowballing". Basically, if a game rewards whoever's in the lead with a further advantage, you might as well end it right there because you're forcing people to play through a game with a foregone conclusion. Just being in the lead is already an advantage because you don't have to worry about catching up, only not falling behind. There's no tension, just waiting for the inevitable, and that's not fun whether you're winning or losing. If you want a longer game, you need catchup mechanics to keep the whole match dynamic throughout. If you don't think that's fair, keep the game short so nobody's playing through a scripted outcome. Would you rather the game be "fair" or fun? Because if it's the former, your reward for being good at the game is that you won't have anyone to play with. HOWEVER there still needs to be *some* advantage to being in the lead, or there's no reason to play well. Just being in the lead is already an advantage. It just doesn't need to be an insurmountable advantage, so the trailing player has some hope of catching up if he plays better. Catchup mechanics should never be so powerful that the losing position is more desireable, or else it just becomes the new winning position and being good at the game is just a matter of knowing when it's time to lose, and when it's time to start winning. Which isn't an invalid design decision if that's the kind of strategy you want to build a game around, but a lot of players may find that unintuitive/unfair.
MOBAs may breed toxicity, but the innate catchup mechanics are pretty cool. Destroying enemy structures gives your team more freedom to roam the map, and safe access to more neutral camps. The defending team still gets a small advantage though, because all the objectives they need to defend are closer together. This has a secondary effect in casual play- defending teams are forced to group up, while attacking teams are encouraged to spread out. It's common for casual games to end when a "winning" team spreads themselves too thin and die one or two at a time, leaving their base undefended. Given the choice you always want to control that extra territory, BUT just the dynamics of moving around the map mean that a comeback is almost always possible.
@@Ninjat126 I hadn't thought about it because I'm not a MOBA guy, but that does sound like a good balance of rewarding progress without leaving the defenders completely hopeless. In an FPS I would award "death streaks" or some such.
F-Zero 99 is great regarding combatting the snowballing Plenty of people can pull way out in front in that game (I've done it several times myself) but the game will spawn plenty of bumpers to hinder their lead The bumpers only get even more dangerous as the race nears the end too as it eventually turns into just spawning red bumpers instead of the relatively safer gray ones Red bumpers take a rather sizeable chunk out of your power/health on contact, which can be especially dangerous if you're one of those people who main Golden Fox (super low health pool and top speed, but its absurdly fast regeneration makes it easy to spam boosts the whole race), so it becomes a game of "be at your skill peak or get _d e s t r o y e d_ and plopped somewhere in the 80s range after crashing out" On the flipside, for the not-gods that we are, there's the skyway, an extra layer to a track that allows people to pull ahead and away from the chaos of the middle pack, if they can collect enough super sparks for it - which usually generate when players collide or someone just came back down from the skyway The duration of a skyway boost shortens substantially the closer to first you are so you still gotta show some skill to get allllllllllllllllll the way in front
The Dirt Rally series has my favorite progression system of any racing game I've played. It is almost impossible to win races, but that doesn't matter, because the game doesn't expect you to win every race. Getting 5th place, for example, still rewards enough money and xp to continue progressing through the game. This is also more true to the careers of actual racing drivers.
Good rubberbanding that's actually a game mechanic and not just an obscured numbers tweak would fix a lot of games, especially in the strategy genre. I don't get how so many game designers still implement snowballing mechanics that will make 20+h playthroughs completely trivial after the first hour or two (or unwinnable if you're bad)
Well I mean, seems clear that in those cases they're appealing to a different audience. Power fantasy is an incredibly common tool in the toolkit. Positive feedback loops, even in competitive multiplayer, works for a lot of people. CoD didn't accidentally get popular. If you aren't having fun with a game, a lot of the time, it isn't a game design problem. The game just wasn't made for you. There are a lot of very successful games out there that I find deeply frustrating or boring. That's life.
It's surprising that drafting isn't a more common mechanic (or maybe it is, I dunno). Rubber banding in that folks behind go faster, but also still skill based 'cause you need to follow the line of the person in front of you to get that boost.
@@anthonybowman3423 There's a big difference between a 3 minute killstreak and a 30h campaign snowball. After a while the power fantasy stops working because it becomes the new norm (something about hedonistic adaption yadda yadda). It doesn't help that the worst offenders are usually slow point and click games devoid of action where making hard decisions is the main focus. So yes, still bad design. Also something like Frostpunk couldn't be further from a power fantasy, and yet you still snowball and the game gets easier the more mouths you have to feed. It's obviously something the developers didn't even think about because there are very few good examples to follow within the genre.
@@majorfallacy5926 Power fantasy is A way that designers use positive feedback loops, not THE way. And you picked a great example of a game that uses them a different way. Now to be clear here, are you now going to say that Frost Punk has bad game design? The overwhelmingly beloved game with millions of sales and incredibly positive reviews? Look. It's fine to not like a thing. Nobody says you have to. But calling it bad game design because it doesn't appeal to you, especially when you're gonna pick out examples where it very obviously appealed to A LOT of people, seems pretty silly.
@@anthonybowman3423 If you look at the steam stats, less then half the people who played Frostpunk even finished the first scenario, i.e. they quit before it got boring. There is a lot to love about the game, but when an average gaming veteran level of skill invalidates your main gimmick (being pushed into morally questionable decisions) and lets you end your first scenario with more resources than you have room to build warehouses for, I consider that bad design. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying they don't also have a ton of good design in there. It's just that when the bad design hits in this game, it ruins the good. They have awesome theming and would've had all the tools for a good difficulty curve. Their policies would make for a *great* rubberbanding mechanic (selling ethics for a 2nd chance is a great motivator imo), but they simply utterly failed to consider feedback loops in their design. The larger your city grows, the easier it is to heat, the more refugees you have to feed the cheaper food becomes, not using child labor is more powerful than doing so etc. There is no way this was intentional or fits with the theme in any way, it simply wasn't considered. The same thing is true for another game of theirs, This War of Mine btw. Skill is not rewarding, it's gamebreaking.
I love the mug zone - it's where the game actually occurs. When you're out in front, you're just cruising by yourself, hoping not to get shot. Being in the thick of it with other racers is when you get to use fun and powerful items, but you also have to suffer an appropriate amount of BS.
Racing games in general seem to struggle with balance, shooting for this impractical ideal of every race being a photo finish. The Burnout series was one that burned me twice before I effectively gave up on it. In one of them (I want to say 3, but I'm not entirely sure anymore), I caught the AI in the act of having infinite Burnout Boost, and even if I was playing by the rules and actually managing to pull off prolonged Burnout Boosts with "dangerous" driving for nearly the entire race, it seemed I was somehow always finishing races at the back of the pack because I wasn't finding the correct shortcuts or something. And the demo of Burnout Paradise turned me off completely from that game. For the small selection of races (there might have only been one), I would be in the lead the entire race, but in the closing stretch every...single...time, I'd be passed by multiple cars down the straightaway and finish the race anywhere between 4th and 6th place. Every time, reach the final straight in first place, pedal to the metal, and just helplessly watch as 4 cars zoom past me. I could not find anything fun in that demo.
Burnout 3's AI can get to insane speeds if you use the boost too effectively in some of the later races with much faster cars. Ex. the last race in the entire game is everyone in a Formula/Indie car (not sure which is the main influence) which reach 209MPH regardless of if you are using boost or not. Said race is insanely hard if you boost, and becomes infinitely easier if you don't. That being said, beyond the later races, it shouldn't rubber band the AI particularly bad in either the Xbox or PS2 version, neither when either is run in the emulators on the Xbox 360 nor PCSX2 respectively. I've played the game in all 4 methods. Burnout 3 has no shortcuts. At best a track can be split by a tunnel divider or other obstruction for a short section. Neither Burnout 3 nor Revenge feature boost chaining - takedowns earned an enlarged boost bar up to 4x size. Burnout Revenge has shortcuts marked with teal blue lights (sometimes only alternate paths in some circuits, which are used as the main path in reverse), and Burnout Dominator saw the return of boost chaining and shortcuts which had to be unlocked. Burnout 2 has boost chaining but it's a very punishing point to start playing the series as it expects you to learn how to play or suffer - it offers no handouts beyond the driving training tutorial, and allowing you to pass with bronzes. Cars are only unlocked with all first place podiums in GPs, and only gold medals in other races. Burnout Paradise is in general an awful game, the map is very poorly matched with the expectations of the Burnout name. It's by far the worst game in the entire series by a few miles.
The problem is defining balance for a racing game - is this the sort of balance that means that anybody vaugely able to operate a controller and understand the object of the game is able to win sometimes or the sort of balance where everyone in on a level playing field - for me the latter is what racing games should usually be about, the skill of the player often in car setup and driving both being what matters. But for something like MarioKart clearly different goal, and that sort of game demands the sort of 'balance' that is always going to be noticeable as interference/benifit to the players that need it. I have to say I remember enjoying Burnout Paradise, and don't remember running into issues like that. If anything I'd have said the game felt too easy to win, but as it was still satisfying really nailing the move you wanted...
I remember duel races in particular in Burnout 3 having absolutely obvious and awful balancing loops in play. I could continually take the AI opponent out, be boosted almost constantly, and somehow it was still always right on my tail. But the second I screwed up, they were gone 5ever and I had no hope of being in the same zip code as them anymore.
I like some chaos in my party games but sometimes Mario Kart feels like its too much. Whenever I played Crash Team Racing I really loved how it still had the chaotic elements but placed more emphasis on skill like with triple boosting, maining drift boost and finding shortcuts which can be used just about whenever as long as you had the speed and knowledge. Hell you could even out paced the blue shell of the game if you really know what your doing. But items were also really cool cause wumpa fruit (coins of the game) upgraded your items to either be faster, last longer or give a new effect such as turning TNT crates into Nitro crates. That game was so satisfying to master
If you've seen enough Shortcat videos, you know the answer to the mug zone is to cheese items in 10-12th, (respecting the new balance changes that make only the first two boxes useful when cheesing) until you get two massive place movement items, then wait until timing is right and move from last to top three in two items or less.
My wife and I play Mario Kart 8 together and have a longrunning goal to S-rank every cup, that is, to get a perfect score on every cup; this means not only coming first on points at the end of the cup but in every race that makes up each cup. You would think with two possible players this would be easy, but what it ends up being is one of us - usually my wife - tearing off into first and then the other - usually me - running interference and playing keep away with the rest of the pack as they try to snipe the leader. On the lower CC cups this is pretty straightforward, but gets harder as you go higher in the difficulty levels, and starting over on race 1 has a very different feel from getting bulldozed at the last second four races in.
Survival mode in a racing game called BlazeRush presents an interesting way to sidestep the runaway leader problem altogether. There's a huge steamroller chasing the cars. As soon as a car lags too far behind the leader, that car is crushed by the steamroller and is out of the round. All but the leader are eventually crushed, and then everybody respawns, continuing from the same spot on the track. The later you're crushed in the round, the more points you get. The rounds are very fast, and they are always tense, as the game state where the leader breaks from the pack is not possible.
Ironically one of the strategies more competitive mario kart players use, bagging, is intentionally slowing down. Essentially the idea is to avoid the mug zone by intentionally slowing down to get great items and using those to make shortcuts and get back to number 1. On some tracks bagging is a strategy you decide on from the begging of the race (because those tracks have mad shortcuts or incredibly broken bullet bill extensions) but usually it's just done when they can't get in first and don't want to get absolutely dogpiled by items.
One thing that annoys me to no end with an otherwise fun franchise like Mario Kart, is that the AI can catch up to you no matter how well you drive or use the items against the AI. It just wore me down in the end. With that written as a party game with family and loved ones it has its moments.
I recently tried playing Mariokart 64 as a pacifist and it's amazing how it completely destroys the challenge, the AI just falls back for no reason after a while and you always have items left to defend yourself..
The bots are fuckin' _snipers_ with the Green Shells too. I swear they're all programmed to draft you and then shoot you with a Green Shell the moment they get the speed boost off of you.
"Perfected balance as an end goal for non-esports is not only practically impossible, it's just bad design - it would create bland and predictable games with all the fun sucked out" - great quote and something I would love more games to take to heart.
Perfect balance, probably not... but there is an argument for seeking something "close" to balance in any class/role based multiplayer experience. If you allow one class or role to fall behind the power curve in something like an MMO then the people who have committed time and energy learning that class are going to feel left out at high-end content as they'll generally be passed over in favor of the most powerful classes available. You also want everyone, regardless of class, to feel like they're *contributing* to the activity in some way and having their own little moments of glory. It's the same in TRPGs: Nobody wants to feel consistently overshadowed at the thing their character is supposed to be good at, You wind up feeling like a 5th wheel, that you're not necessary to the party, and being committed as long as a TRPG tends to make you means that you're going to be spending a lot of time feeling let down by your character if you picked a class that underperforms.
Yes, this is imho a very much needed game design perspective: As a player I want to have fun - especially while playing a party game; game balance can be a tool to achieve this goal but it should never stand in the way.
This is such a blanket statement though. Why would balance make bland and predictable games? What are we balancing for to begin with? I can also argue that unbalanced games create bland and predictable games where _the unbalanced thing_ wins. Many people in comment section say "fun > balance" but "fun" is a subjective thing to begin with.
@@kevingriffith6011 I have to say MMOs were something I was thinking about a lot with that quote, honestly, they're one of my favorite genres. But we've moved from a time where there were classes with very different ability sets with all sorts of buffs, debuffs, crowd controls, strengths, weaknesses, etc. to one where 99% of your buttons on any given class just do damage or heal. Because of how narrow they made that scope, the only meaningful way to balance classes is by making them perfectly comparable in most situations to their peers, rather than giving them all niches they do well in a variety of different encounters that happen in group, raid or solo content.
@@Drunkencrono Ultimately the problem with that approach is that you have to make the margins of error so wide on content that the challenge is basically non-existent if you want every class to have a place in the content you're making. You can't have a class that excels in doing something niche like mitigating elemental damage and then have a raid where there is no elemental damage... but by the same token you can't also then make a raid with so much elemental damage that said class is mandatory. Damage, healing and mitigation are universally useful mechanics which is why everyone has them. Do I think we've hit a point where we've strayed too far into the homogenization of classes? Eh...... depends on the game. I just think that a character's niche shouldn't be something that prevents them from participating in content, particularly if said character took multiple weeks of gaming to reach the endgame. Ask anyone who played a Paladin in Vanilla WoW, Getting a raid spot with that class was basically impossible. You weren't as beefy as a warrior, so you couldn't tank, you didn't do as much damage as a rogue, hunter, mage or warlock so you couldn't DPS, you couldn't heal as well as a priest or a druid so healing was out too... and unlike a shaman you didn't have Bloodlust until Heroism was added in The Burning Crusade.
The idea of 'the golden one' makes for an interesting idea to me about the match picking a random bot and tags them in the UI as your nemesis, letting you know that particular bot will be your challenger to get to first place adding a sorta simulated rivalry.
As a side note, I think the reason 8 Deluxe has 2 item slots is to compensate for the original 8's item system where, unlike most other Mario karts, you couldn't "chamber" items like shells and bananas. I'm not entirely sure if 8 Deluxe still has that system but they were making a pretty deliberate effort to fix issues people had with the Wii U version so its my best guess.
Having played way too much Mario Kart over the years, I think that MK7 actually had the best balance for one main reason: the bottom screen giving players more information. By seeing where other karts are AND what items they hold, all players get more strategic opportunities. This makes it an inherently better game, in same way that Texas Hold 'Em is a better game than Five Card Stud. In a game that's heavily random, giving players extra information about the state of play allows meta tactics to evolve and thrive. And I can attest, MK7 had some insane metas, especially revolving around blue shells. It was *tactical,* and more skill-based. You could actually plan out lines of attack or how to maximize use of your current items. That made it way more entertaining for me than MK8D. (And yes, I know MKDS also had two screens, but it was ruined by snaking. And MK8 on WiiU was terrible because only the player with the tablet got more info. Which is the opposite of balanced. Whoever had the tablet got an extra advantage.)
Fun fact: Something a lot of players aren't aware of is that "snaking" has actually been a part of the mario kart series since MK64, though the MK64 community called them "SSMTs," short for "Straight Stretch Mini Turbo." As the name suggests, it was a technique to eke out some extra speed even along straightaways. SSMTs were made easier in MKDD, and time trials in that game actually look very similar to time trials in MKDS; players maintain a near constant MT throughout the race, and even the staff ghost in baby park uses what would later come to be known as "snaking." The reason MKDS gets so much hate for it is that it was the first time the series had online, and as such, it was the first time the general playerbase got put in the same lobby as good players. Significant portions of the playerbase would rather complain that they're losing than learn how to get better, and thus we got MKWii, which effectively completely killed snaking, by not just hard nerfing MTs, but replacing the entire *reason* SSMTs were used in the first place with the wheelie mechanic. Come MK8D, we've gone full circle. Wheelies are gone, and MT is once again the most important stat, with SSMTs still an important part of time trials and racing even today. As for your point about the second screen, I actually think there would be room on the HUD to show enemy items even on a single screen, and I agree the game would be dramatically improved if you could see this information. Even if it was limited to only a few characters around your current position, it would be a significant improvement to what we have today. And for items like lightning or the blue shell, you could provide a notification to all players when someone obtains it at the top of the screen. Basically telling players "use your star now or else" for the former, and "first/second place, plan your move now" for the latter.
The mug zone is ther perfect bucket of crabs situation. Because items there primarily aim at the person right in front of you, rather than catching back up with the lead, you just drag each other further and further away from victory, while the leaders remain largely unbothered. If the items for 4th and 5th place were more aimed at disrupting the lead, like boos which would constantly snag their defensive items then you'd hopefully see a lot more action towards the front rather than the sheer disruptive energy of the midfield
I gotta say I really like this series. It's not just insights into what makes a game but all the data and information that is shown to you is given to us in a way that is easy for even an idiot like me to understand. Keep up the good work!
One of the biggest flaws to mario kart is that you only get the most fun items in front pack. Instead the front pack should get access to more offensive items which allows them to duke things out but makes it hard to defend against various opponents. The middle packs should get more boosting items as a sort of equalizer. They should also be the ones receiving blue shells most of all, and a stronger emphasis on tracking weapons like red shells at least when the race is relatively more neck and neck. The back pack should get the most powerful boosting items and only the most powerful boosting items unless the race is fairly close. If the race is fairly close then they should get the sort of items that targets all the other racers more and stars. The goal of the design should be that the racers are fighting it out with first place actually being contested as much as possible.
I'm glad you brought up the mug zone. I've been looking for a kid friendly description for it as soon as i hit 3rd it feels like all ai are ready to drop everything on me.
"Negative loops aren't even loops" As someone with an engineering background, I have to say you have that exactly backwards. Positive loops explode (stop looping) because eventually you reach the limit of what the loop can handle. Microphone/speaker feedback loops are a good example. Negative feedback loops are stable loops (if they're done right), because the pushback on the input keeps things from going out of control.
The best example of bad balancing is the blue shell: You are most likely to get it in the last place, but since it hits the first driver it does not help you to improve your position. It only really helps the person in second place.
This is true for every mario kart except 64, 7, and 8* In those games, the blue shell stays grounded when thrown and has a chance to hit other racers while on its way to the front. It becomes useful no matter where you are. *(8 sort of breaks its balance by making the horn capable of destroying the blue shell. A player can stop it from reaching the front or 1st place can avoid getting hit. The coin was supposed to reduce the frequency of people in front getting a horn, but as pointed out in this video that got ruined in Deluxe)
No? Blue shell odds drop off HARD by about the lower part of the mug zone. Last place is most likely to get bullets, stars, golden mushrooms, and most importantly, lightning
It's extremely refreshing to see analytic content that examines and challenges the basics of how we use words - poor terminology causes so many headaches and confusions, and I've learned how many struggle to see past the terms they know and fear re-penning new items into the dictionary. As someone who's been on a one-man crusade to clarify the confusion around "randomness" and "luck", it's a pleasure to see forward thinking with regards to feedback loops in action. o7
Extra post - what matters in the engineering context is that positive and negative loops, as so defined, can be both good AND bad depending on circumstances. Sometimes you want a given phenomena to strengthen and grow larger over the background noise of the system's chaos (think Taleb's concept of "anti-fragility") and other times you want traits to dim and disappear, like in most anti-resonance systems. The feedback loop that's good in one case is bad in the other. But most people would never use positive and negative in this fashion nor in the fashion used in electromagnetics, so it's bound to cause confusion when applied elsewhere.
Something not mentioned is that in multilayer rounds, if one person is significantly better than the other players it significantly increases the difficulty of the race for everyone else. So even people who handily get first place on single player will struggle to even be on the podium if there's a big enough skill gap likely due to the "mug zone" being pulled up by the first place player.
I think an interesting contrast to bring to mario kart (with its own set of upsides and downsides) is the fan game “sonic robo blast 2 kart” (a mod of a fan game built on an old doom engine). SRB2K features items that fill a lot of the same roles as mario kart items, but changed such that the use of them is “more skillful.” Going down the list, the green shell replacement doesn’t stick on the players back when deployed, and instead orbits around them, meaning that to deflect approaching red shells the player has to manually fire it backwards to intercept the incoming shell. Likewise said red shells will not path around walls, and have a noticeable turning radius and so can be ran into walls using sharp turns. There’s a lot more affected items, like the golden mushroom having a timer more akin to the MK8 fire flower, bobombs having an arm time when dropped which is nullified if thrown forward (along with being proximity mines instead of time bombs), but I think the most significant change is the blue shell replacement. The “self propelled bomb” or SPB has hitstun that would put mario kart wii blue shells to shame, but a key weakness; after getting near the first place player, it slows down to match their top speed, and if first place races perfectly, will never hit them, it requires great track knowledge to take every turn fast and consistently and you can’t ever get hit by an item, but it IS possible. This is enough of a wall of text already, but I wish I could go on more about the dynamics and knock on effects of these changes
I am so glad this confirms many of my suspicions about this game lol. Will say, people talk about the blue shell all the time but nobody mentions why I dislike it: if sucks to get. If I get spit out of the blender in 10th place a blue shell does absolutely nothing to help me. I wasted what could have been a game saving item on one that only really helps 2nd and 3rd place. Honestly really sucks. Also I hate how the bullet bill is just an item version of your older brother ripping the controller away to show you how it's done.
One thing I'm kinda surprised you didn't mention is that the double item slots means that 2nd place can get multiple red shells from one Double Item Box, which not only means that 1st is practically guaranteed to get hit due to almost never having two defensive items, but also that 2nd place can effectively get Triple Red Shells if they know how to chain items.
That "hot butter-knife through a baby seal" bit was golden. Also, I kinda want to see a Mario Kart version of Road Rash, where drivers can bash one-another over the head with comedy items. Mario would have a hammer, of course, but Waluigi would absolutely have that tennis racket of his.
I absolutely love the concept of "the Chosen One". My family and I have been going crazy over this for years. For us, it's almost always been Toad. The moment Toad is in a race, I have to brace myself for some absolute nonsense lol.
The ai chosen to be the one is based on the characters you choose iirc, each have a set list of potential rivals. A long streak of lemmy or two and a mental pattern recognition later and you only see lemmy.
I will always support the continued licensed use of Hollow Knight's magnificent OST by Second Wind's creators. You guys knock it out of the park and definitely know your audience.
The mug zone as you put it is clearly a deliberate function Nintendo perfected over time; I've mostly played the original on SNES and the first sequel on N64 and the differece was clear; on the SNES a skilled player could end up laps ahead of all the NPCs; Mario Kart 64 made certain this was impossible and the times I've played a friend's copy of newer games up to 8 I could feel the zone just behind first become more and more of a madhouse. As a kid i played to deliberately get second place to help my younger sister get first on Mario 64; staying in second myself with the ai rubber banding back as i fired shells and dropped bananas was a wild wacky challenge; but i doubt it would be possible to live there all race in MK 8. You'd get nuked from orbit.
I always assumed the chosen one was a real thing! I always called it a "rival" but I noticed it back on the Wii. After the first race I could just tell who my rival for the cup was going to be. I'm glad I'm not crazy for noticing it
The reason I like Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart so much is because it is much better in its item balance and how it functions as an actual racing game. For starters, you go so fast that you REALLY need to use the brake through hairpin turns. The biggest thing, however, is how blue-shells work in SRB2K. The blue shell will never catch up to you by design if you are going at a full speed, and it can also be destroyed by the electrical field powerup which can be aquired in first place. So good racers CAN steamroll races if they play their cards right, which is honestly how it should be.
My brother and I picked up on the “chosen by god” thing when we played 8 as a kid, (for us it was always Morton) and it honestly created some really fun stories where our brotherly rivalries were set aside to take down the tyrant of the track.
The mug zone feels like the ideal place to be as far as engagement goes. I know in Sonic Riders, which doesn't really have items, I found the most fun part to be when you're in the middle, attacking or getting attacked, then needing to use slipstreams to catch up. But once you're out in front, there's not much engagement beyond navigating the course. Same as in Mario Kart. In the middle, you're thinking of things like "They have a shell behind them so I won't waste mine" or "There's a jump coming up so I'll try to use my lightning to screw someone mid-jump", while in front it's as you described, you sit on your defensive item and just do the course with maybe avoiding bananas as your only added engagement. Not that driving alone can't be enjoyable for its own sake, but I think the "meat" of the game is in the mug zone.
Maybe courses could be set up so navigating them just innately is engaging, and the obstacles up front "stay dealt with" for about ten to thirty secods after they're handled so 1st has to fight the track but 2nd and a few places down can rely on 1st to clear the way and focus more on overtaking?
I’d love to see what Mario Kart would look like if all items had equal rates and all racers were going for first place. The sheer and utter chaos could be fun as a bonus mode.
A lot of weirdness of the game’s bots makes a lot more sense now for me, but when you go online the game becomes really addicting. Also with the AI having to be in certain places, the size of “the mug zone” is way larger than in online, where everyone is going the same speed mostly and you’re just trying to eek out fractions of a second in your driving while there’s an item war going on. It actually feels quite balanced when everyone is packed together, but because of how the AI is coded, the “mug zone” feels awful in local multiplayer
For me balancing in Mario Kart means pushing the players in front torwards riskier strategies and the players behind on more reliable ones. That means dividing the items in two groups: items with a risk vs reward factor (green shells, thunder cloud, bombs) and items that are always useful (red shells, bananas, phirana plant, etc). A good example of an "always useful" item is the bullet bill because its use consistently results in advancing by some positions, makes the player invincible and give them some time to rest. Defensive items on the contrary aren't really useful because they allow players in front to keep their advantage without risking anything. At least in Mario Kart Wii I found a component of skill in the fact that if you can hold the item button to hold a defensive item behind and free the item slot, but that ability was removed in 8 Deluxe (or in earlier games, I only played these two).
"[Perfect balance] would create bland, and predictable games, with all of the fun sucked out of them." This gave me, 'Final Destination, Fox only, no items' flashbacks.
Glad to see others who notice the horror of places 3-8, it's a land of pure glorious chaos and destruction. I honestly feel like I'm missing out when I'm the most skilled racer because the most crazy times are had in the Mug Zone. Also there is a functional use for coins, you move faster when you have 10, so 1st place wants to always have 10 coins and a defensive item.
I am currently trying to get 3 stars on all 200cc mario kart 8 delux tracks. That description of "the mug zone" was so accurate I experienced catharsis and PTSD at the same time. Well done friend. Stay awesome.
One problem is that the definition of "balance" varies. To people who _talk_ about games, "balanced" means "rewarding skill with victory". To a lot of people who _play_ games, regardless of their skill level, "balanced" means "I should always be able to win".
"Be able to" even has some wiggle. Is it "It should, in theory, be potentially achievable, so long as I play perfectly"? Is it "A. I.s should be slightly worse than a newcomer"? Is it "I should just straight up always win"?
@@youtubeuniversity3638 I think you might be making it more complicated than it is, as even your first question is the same as the first definition presented, i.e. rewarding skill with victory. The options are ultimately thus: 1) The better player should always win 2) Even if you play perfectly, you have a chance to lose The wiggle room for the latter at most would just be to not take it super literally and require some effort on the worst player's part to have a chance at victory. Like for Mario Kart, you can't press no buttons and expect to be able to win. You still gotta press gas and use items to get a chance at first. But such should be a given expectation and not need to be part of the discussion.
The simple way to tell which category someone falls into is to look at how they respond to patch notes: if they whine about something that was blatantly overpowered being nerfed and complain that the "clueless devs" are "ruining the game", they're in the second category and are just bitching about their favourite unfair toy being taken away so now they have to actually learn to play properly if they want to win.
And then competitive video game designers take "balance" to mean that every player, regardless of their skill and effort, should always experience a 50/50 of wins and losses which makes for an incredibly frustrating experience (and downright infuriating once you notice the game purposefully putting you up against much more skilled enemies just to "balance" your win/lose ratio.
At least in my bubble, balance means that an item/weapon/character isn't so strong that a less skilled player can easily win against a more skilled player while just the lower skilled player uses the item etc. If both use the same, the more skilled player will win most of the time. That is an unbalanced item/weapon/character.
10:30 I feel like we shouldn't throw the baby with the bathwater. "Balance is Bad Design" isn't the lesson you should be taking, it oughta be "We need to figure better ways of balancing." If we make balance the enemy of fun instead of a means to achieve it, then we're shooting all of ourselves in the foot. There's such a thing as "making better systems and designs." Yes, it's prolly gonna be hard and take a lotta work and even trial and error, but that doesn't mean we give up and fully fundamentally tell our understanding of good design to screw off just so we don't have to deal with it anymore.
Yea, that statement rubs me the wrong way. Even not straying too far from Mario Kart 8DX - cart building. Does it make marika a better game when you load into the game and see most of the players on Waluigi Wiggler with rollers (or Yoshi Teddybuggy with rollers)? I don't think so.
There's different degrees I think. On one hand, if everything's a mess it can feel like nothing you do matters and there's no fulfillment. On the other, if you try for perfect balance, you'll never finish that journey. Even stuff like chess and Go where things are perfectly balanced as far as abilities go are still imbalanced because they're turnbased and whoever goes first has a notably increased chance of winning. So while I can agree that some attempt should be made at balancing, I also think it's fine that, after an attempt, for a designer to go "good enough" because perfect balance is near impossible to achieve.
While I sort of agree with the spirit of what you said, and in general trying to fix a design system instead of just ditching it if it doesn't seem to work out is the way to go, I personally feel like striving for perfect balance is something that should be abandoned. My reason is that I'm a big RTS fan, and because of the starcraft e-sport craze, the last decade of RTS have been a bland and boring landscape of e-sport chasers that stayed away from anything vaguely innovative or creative for the fear it might be unbalanced. I feel that balance is always going to limit creativity and in the end, the fun of games because while not necessarily mutually exclusive what's fun, creative or exciting is often unbalanced. Even starcraft designers knew that, which is why some of the most fun and innovative units and mechanics are only available in the campaign, where the designers didn't have to worry about PvP competitive balance and could just let loose their creativity and come up with whatever would be the most fun to play with.
@@Tuss36 It's probably also the fact that 'balance' is a nebulous word to a designer; rather then the Thanos meme, balance ultimately serves the design not the other way around. An asymmetrical game is balanced around being asymmetrical, there is an ocean of difference between a balanced spectacle fighter and a balanced multiplayer shooter.
Anyone remember Sonic Rivals for the PSP? That was a two player racing game where rubber banding was present both in single player and multiplayer. The speed would simply change depending on how far ahead or behind you were, allowing both players an equal chance of winning. Additionally, both players are given the same item chance with the only exception being the character specific special abilities.
There is one solution to this that will always work for all parties and I've been barking about it since mario kart 64, it's so stupidly obvious people feel dumb every time I bring it up in this argument. The option to toggle settings. Mind blowing.
I remember discovering how the rubber band works, or rather not in Need for speed hot persuit 3. In slower cars, the effect is so pronounced its almost impossible to properly compete with the choosen one. But in high tier super car categories, its reversed making the lap into a time trial rather than a race as you can leave the AI way way behind. Unless you stay behind and the AI will be so stupid slow that it extremely noticable Ultimately making the game less fun.
I remember watching speedrunners talk about strats in this game and I do believe that game gives 1st place enough tools to make it difficult spot to lose if you know how to manage your items. Because you get 2 items slots and both can't be coins first place is always guaranteed to have at least one defensive item. Even the coin itself can be used defensively since the more coins you have the faster you go, and since coin items provide 2 coins and you lose 3 on hit that means theres not as much of a speed loss overall. On top of this the coin can be used to trick boos. Since boos always steal from the first item slot if the player keeps the coin in the first slot they'll always have access to a defensive item even if boos steal from you. 1st place also has access to the mega horn in their item pool, which is the best defensive item in the game because it can destroy blue shells. So if a player in first place has any item in their first slot with a mega horn in the second slot they'll be extremely difficult to punish. Granted 1st place can still take hits if enough shells are thrown at them or someone uses lightning, but the likelihood is that 1st place will go a while without getting hit.
It's so validating to hear out loud someone describing, what you refer to as the mug zone, what I've called for many years "the riff-raff" i.e. "oh god I'm stuck with the riff-raff!".
When referring to balance, I think its important to separate imbalance from variance, comeback mechanics, and pre-game decisions (character selection) since each exists because of/for different reasons. As for Mario Kart, the huge variance is especially important as one player being a significantly better racer doesn't just result in predictable games, but uninteractive ones. Unlike in other competitive games, racers that are far apart have no way to interact with one another, so it effectively becomes two single-player games.
Positive feedback is where the output is added to the input so that the output gets larger. Typically examples are exponential increAse. Negative feedback systems is where the output is subtracted from the input, which typically gives asymptotically stable systems.
I personally have a LOT of problems with MK8's item play specifically. I feel like changing the item distribution to be distance-based rather than ranking-based makes it way easier for first place to keep a lead and the "danger zone" of 3-8th place even greater. They also modified the shells to give way more endlag which makes the danger zone even more dangerous and the coin system honestly makes it even worse. 1st place will easily get full coins fast and will stay that way while the rest of the players will struggle to catch up back to first with a lower speed because of their lack of coins. But great video, I personally love the item balance in Wii. It's chaotic but it always feel like you always have a shot to catch up! Maybe you can use a golden shroom for a wonderfully thought-of shortcut, maybe you can save yourself from a last second blue shell with a mushroom or maybe you just save up your bullet bill just enough to avoid the lighting and steal the goal, so many cool strategies and makes races way more interesting than if they were purely racing games, I love kart racers!! Also, need to know your opinions on Mario Party! I know it's controversial, but I love the balance of 9 because it's very similarly done to mkwii!
The mug zone has created 2 distinct playstyles, Frontrunning and Sandbagging, as there is no point in staying in the mug zone the better option is to let yourself drop to the back and get great items to allow you to skip the mug zone. its weird and stupid and fun and all of that stuff
Used to skip school and play OG Mario Kart on the SNES with my best friend. He was best competition by far. But I always wondered why on single player you'd always have one nemesis (chosen one in your vernacular) who you could never shake, no matter how kick butt a lap you were having. But in OG Kart, it was always a character who could be considered an "adversary" to yours, so it was obvious you were being targeted by the game.
My favorite racing game of all time was Split/Second. It was a game that penalized you for not knowing how to play, but kept tension at all times because of the Power Play and Route Change mechanics that could potentially upset the entire field if fired off at the right times.
I know at least in Mario Kart 64, there are actually 2 AIs chosen by the game to be your "Rival/Nemesis," which is what this video refers to as the "Chosen One." One of the two rivals is considered the "Main Rival," and another, the "Secondary Rival." While all NPCs cheat off camera, the rivals are allowed to cheat much more than the rest, since they're meant to be second and first place respectively. And it's also relevant to mention that the pool of characters who can be your rival and secondary rival are dictated by what character you choose. All of the above is based on MK64, I don't know how much of that applies to MK8, but I'm almost positive that there is some sort of "rival" system still in place, and if the pool of rivals is still dictated by your character choice, that would explain why J always winds up getting Lemmy...
I do enjoy that getting a blue shell is satisfying, even if you're doomed to the Mug Zone. Because when playing with friends, even just getting a runaway 1st place opponent to exclaim "oh f--- you!" is just spiritually fulfilling.
Re: loop naming, I would use the terms "convergent feedback", or "divergent feedback". Convergent feedback being the negative loops, whereby the feedback causes your variable to Converge towards some stable point. And Divergent feedback being the positive loops, whereby the feedback causes your variable to Diverge to positive or negative infinity. I think there's also interesting things to be said about how you can compose these together, or to think more broadly about gradients in a pure mathematical function, to see stronger / weaker feedback systems, multiple stable points, and composition with other functions to see what sort of skill level is needed to break out of the Convergence behaviour.
I’ve been thinking about the concept of balance recently, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of balance. The first is ‘Perfectly Balanced,’ where everything is so well balanced that no one can complain that it isn’t balanced. Of course, such balance is nearly impossible and even if you can manage it, it often can make the end product boring as a result. The second is ‘A Balance,’ which is where there is some sort of balance, and while it isn’t perfect, it at least isn’t so broken that it isn’t fun. So while you might want to strive for ‘Perfect Balance,’ it’s often best to simply find ‘A Balance’ that works, and at best keep pushing closer to perfection while not striving for it at the cost of fun and innovation.
Quick shout-out to Diddy Kong Racing. Items are deterministic, while being upgradable and there is no rubber banding. The vehicles and stage design still make it fun. DKR was huge for what it was.
If I had say in Mario Kart 9's design, I'd make the 9 shape represent the Item selection. In 3rd through 1st you lose the ability to pick up a second item and in 1st your second item is dropped on the ground, this would extend the "Mog Zone" to first without completely killing player skill, add a new layer of strategy and be a fancy number gimmick as every game since 7 has had. Also remove Kart stats and instead replace them with kart types similar to Diddy Kong racing or something. Have all vehicles get unique shortcuts, some viable to all via Mushroom, others not, throw in some unique item interactions and call it a day.
So what you're saying is that slowed metabolism in hungry humans is a balancing loop? That your water reserve in your toilet is managed by a balancing loop? That your thermostaat is designed to drive a balancing loop? It doesn't make all that much sense to take a term that exists outside a field and rename it based on that field...
I always noticed the mug zone. Most races online I get ahead and can keep my lead due to defensive items. But then there's those wheee I fall into the mug zone and it's just constantly being hit until it's no longer possible to keep up
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My time diving into Mario kart balance really surprised me but what did you think? Lets discuss down below :D
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Thinking about it now, giving first place coins for free also kinda boosts them ahead too, since more coins = higher top speed. Even if they get hit once, they can earn the coins back almost instantly. That's why the "mug zone" hits so much harder too, as you drop so many more coins than you earn. I guess that's a crossroads they tried to implement: either take the ideal racing line, or take a slightly offset course with the benefit of slightly more speed. Or at least that's how I'd interpret it
So a thing about MK8's shift into two items in MK8DX is because in most older Mario Kart games, that was kinda the system that was always in play. Grab an item, and hold it behind you. This frees the Slot to roll a 2nd item to bank, effectively granting 2 items at a time. If a Red Shell hits you, you can immediately pull out the 2nd without worry.
MK8 WiiU's initial release did away with this mechanic. You only have the 1 Item Slot. Once you have that item, you have it till you use the item and can't hold onto a 2nd item, even if you Hold it behind you. This effectively ruins the standard "Defense" play in that more often, Players are subject to more Red Shells that could have been dealt with if they had a 2nd Banana Peel or Shell. Or screw you over entirely if you rolled a Coin, which means no defense at all.
So MK8DX's release "Restores" the old system by full-on granting a second Item Slot and the Double Item Box that fills both slots, enabling more Offense and Defense plays.
In MK8 WiiU, I believe the Coin was added to the Item Pool offset the "Aggressive Defense" style in the aforementioned Two-Item system that prevailed older MK games. The older style had a major issue in and of itself in that good play ensures a Player *Always* has defense against anything that isn't a Blue Shell, which can make 2nd Place and lower struggle to catch up to 1st outside of a Blue Shell. In MK8WiiU, this more likely reveals the massive flaw in the One-Item system in that the Coin can be seen as a **Punishment** for doing well; you won't be able to defend yourself easily, if at all if you can hold 1st. Which ironically can also mean holding onto 1st is more trouble than it's worth. So MK8DX's Two-Item system incidentally buffs Coins in that they also act as Boo Deterrents. Likewise, while I see your point on how holding the Coin ensures that the 2nd item is always a Shell, Bananna, or Super Horn, I think it's that Necessary Evil in order to ensure that Players don't have a repeat of the original "Only Coins and No Defense" problem that WiiU suffered.
I always thought there were systems like this in mario kart... but I just thought it was a skill issue on my part. Now I have a convenient excuse for whenever I lose a race, thanks!
I feel most of what you're discussing in the video is the result of this balance system being used when players have widely varying skill levels, and/or AI involvement behaving wildly different than human players. That "mug" spot always exists, of course, but the way AIs and players with less overall awareness spam out their items makes it all the more chaotic. If everyone's bad, they all have an equal chance to get stuck there, but a skilled player able to hold the front gets away from it all unless others know how to catch up and keep up. When the players falling behind are doing so because they are less skilled, it's also less likely they have the track knowledge to make use of all of the item-based shortcuts available and make the comeback that the game tries to offer to them, landing them back in that zone instead of pulling ahead of it, getting hit again, and making a frontrunning breakaway that much more extreme.
Yes, the front is always safer than that middle ground of chaos, but there's the extra risk of being passed by players who do know what they're doing, target shocked, red sniped at an item set, or just plain blue shelled, so the more even the skill levels are the more luck can come into play keeping things less predictable. There are techniques to mitigate all of this, but nothing completely reliable, which keeps the game interesting. Then there's the back. 9th and worse, behind the chaos zone. You're safer here to re-gather your coins, and you have the best item pool to pull from for comeback items. With knowledge and a little luck, skilled players can use these items to bridge amazing distances and even pull ahead. Part of being a skilled player is knowing how to use the advantages the game is giving you. Whether you got karted early and need to recover or are sandbagging on a track with many heavily exploitable shortcuts to try and pull a sneaky come-from-behind, it's an equally important skill as knowing the time trial lines to drive when trying to stay ahead.
The real issue is that this core balance needs a full game of semi-evenly skilled players. Because of the 4 player local multi limit, local wireless and online matches are the only place to see this, and many players will never have the opportunity for big local wireless games or the willingness go online to try it (not to mention online has its own frustrations like the janky hit detection of trail items), and it takes a lot of time for the VR system to get you into the right group where you start feeling the balance behave more reasonably. Single player and local multi games just remove a big chunk of that element from the game, and you're left with the chaos that springs from what a minimum of 8 AIs choose to do with it.
FYI the terms positive/negative feedback loops come from engineering. The reason it may be confusing is because the "positive/negative" is not referring to the goodness/badness of the feedback, but rather the numerical sign of the feedback gain. Positive feedback means the feedback quantity has the same sign as the input (because of the positive gain), and thus it reinforces the input instead of resisting.
It's actually much broader than engineering. I first learned of them when studying chemistry and physics. Good examples are thermal runaway and climate change. As you mention, the terms don't refer to good or bad outcomes, but the direction of the change. In fact in both these examples positive feedback is what you want to avoid.
@@Tatman2TheResQ
Look ma, a random prick, in the binary!!!
@@Tatman2TheResQWhy do you care?
@@Tatman2TheResQ Yeah! Screw this guy for trying to clarify the nomenclature behind feedback loops! And thank you for contributing by introducing the concept of a null function by contributing a sum total of nada to the discussion!
I want to see a game that explicitly uses PDI (Proportional/Differential/Integral) controllers for balancing.
To my knowledge, the chosen one is based on your character. The game has a nemesis system where each character has a list of enemies to choose from to be the main enemy.
That’s why it’s pretty common for someone to have only one or two chosen ones over the majority of their time with the game.
Do you know if Peach and Daisy are rivals?
Mario Kart made my sister _hate_ Daisy, and I believe she usually picked Peach in the Double Dash and Wii era. She’s a shy guy main now, but she still side-eyes Daisy every time she sees her.
@@hyperon_ion9423 in DD it's determined by cc and vehicle weight, of all things. In other games CPU Peach is a rival of player Daisy, not the other way around.
They definitely use that system in the _F-Zero_ games.
@@hyperon_ion9423 As someone who plays only Daisy because of the immense schadenfreude I get from beating people with her, I love that your sister hates Daisy. I just miss the obnoxious "HI I'M DAISY" when you pass someone. I think MK Wii was the last one to use that sound clip. *sigh* Good times.
This would explain why the chosen one is almost always Bowser or Peach for me! I tend to pick Mario in single-player grand prix.
I think the worst aspect of Mario Kart balance, that you briefly touched on, is kart creation. Its fun to build your own little cart, but you can easily end up building something thats just bad, and the stats are not well explained. Its not like items which have a chaotic but fun back and forth and effect on the race, instead its just a decision you make before and you hope you didnt screw yourself over
The lack of a visible mini turbo stat despite that being one of not the most important stat is the worst offender.
Like I can understand maybe not showing off the differing speed and handling stats for all the different states a kart can be in (as in some karts are comparatively faster and handle better underwater or in anti gravity), I can understand not showing off which karts give you the best invincibility frames (even if that's important to) but mini turbos are so important if you want to get better at the game and nintendo not sowing those off is just another barrier for newbies that want to compete online and have a reasonable chance of winning.
100% agree. From past experience of trying custom carts I now just use the standard/default setup
i have seen someone that used what was potentially the worst Kart they could beat people using better combos did show skill does still play a factor, but i do agree sometimes a bad Kart Combo does play a heavy factor. would be nice if we could see a more detailed breakdown(or at least have an option for it).
As a very casual player I have no idea what the different parts do. Better grip or power sliding? Less slowdown from grass? Do the different gliders do anything?
i just wish there was an option when hosting a race to make all carts have set stats, like all maxxed, all minimiums, or all average
i want to build an absolute monstrosity of a vehicle so ugly my friends can't look at their screens when i'm on it
but if i do that i never get to be on their screens because of some hidden stat being left so low that it means i'm instead somehow in 7th place when there's only 5 players
it seems that the intent of the blue shell is to drag a hypothetical solo elite player into "the mug zone" where the items and chaos are flying, resulting in an unpredictable outcome, much like a bullet bill is inversely designed to bring stragglers up into it. It feels like Nintendo's goal is for 1-12 to *all* be The Mug Zone, at all times, and that personal skill will only determine how well you can recover from and handle the chaos, rather than to let you pull away from it. I'm not sure how true that is, and I don't think they've ever completely succeeded, but that's what the design feels like from my perspective.
Problem is that if they get dragged into "the mug zone" or "the vortex" as some call it, that player guaranteed to not have any items to defend themselves anymore, and almost always will get combo'd by more attack items even further back. If this happens late in the race, there's virtually no chance for that player to do anything about it.
Essentially, Ideal place to be is second place but away from the vortex.
@@HaibaneKuu Either that or to be in first and have a big enough breakaway from the rest of the pack that you don't end up in the mug zone. because a funny thing to note about the (mario kart 8 version off the) blue shell is that it doesn't target the person that's in first when it was thrown it only decides who to target when it gets close enough to the person currently in first. this means that online if you're close enough to first a good player will slow down just a tiny bit to make the blue shell target you.
You can also avoid the blue shell with a super horn or a mushroom and can mitigate the effects by intentionally running into a hazard like a banana to avoid the blue shell with the invincibility frames doing that gets you because the blue shell stuns you more than a banana does.
@@appelofdoom8211 Well, running into banana still slows you down, and you risk getting comboed anyway if you weren't far enough ahead. Mushroom you have to smuggle into first place as you can't roll them normally, and they also don't protect you from red shells. Super horn is the only thing that you can actually get in first place and protects you from both red and blue shells, but it's low chance to roll it so if both are coming you are getting hit regardless. And second place can roll triple red shell.
My problem is just that being in the first place seems like a dice roll - you need to get enough defense items, you need them to not be stolen by boo/destroyed by shock, you need second place to not get too many red shells, and others not get too many blue shells - and all of that is something you have essentially no control over.
Sure being in a vortex sucks as well, but at least you get to roll better items, and not to mention that the problem of the vortex itself is created by the attack item design in the first place.
Yep. Like Mario Party, Mario Kart is, at heart, a party game, with two main design goals: Allow anyone, even people who rarely, if ever, play video games to have at least some chance of victory, and ensure funny stuff happens to amuse the players. The Blue Shell helps make dure no one escapes unschated.
It really doesn't work unless you got a race full of relatively capable players. The better players will always lead the pack and the worst will, at best get a lucky break and be able to get 1st or 2nd sometimes. I'm the best player in my family and it's gotten to the point that if someone is able to come in first instead of me in a single race of a cup, they say they "beat me".
The item balance is just really annoying for a really good player.
And yes, my family is a bunch of scrublords and use the Deluxe driving aids, and now have trouble doing drifts because of their over reliance on them.
I prefer to call the mug zone "the crab bucket"
I picked up that term watching Yogscast GTA 5 races and it has stuck with me
Ooooh that's brutally good
That one NPC turning into the chosen one is so true. Although for me it always seems to be Larry instead of Lemmy.
I am pretty sure what character rivals you is dependent on who you play as
Yeah, theres a chart on the mario wiki. I always played luigi, so daisy was always the "chosen one"
Demon Lord strategy for the win... Find the Chosen One, DESTROY THEM!!!
I always had Rosalina as the God NPC that would ruin my races when I played MK on the Wii U.
For me in Double Dash, it was either Toad or DK.
After having it pointed out to me, the thing that has stuck in my head about the blue shell is that it does absolutely nothing to help you if you're in, like, eighth. It ruins first place's day and possibly lets second place pass them, but _you're_ still where you were before!
It also does nothing at all if the 1st place is competent enough to snowball past other players. I play with family members who aren't as experienced, and if I don't intentionally throw I get so far ahead that I can take two or three blue shells to the face without even coming close to losing my position.
So, what? Someone gained an item that was supposed to help them catch up, but it was less useful than a COIN? Doesn't seem ideal.
wasn't there a blue shell variant that got giant and hit everyone else in the way on the way to first? or am I high?
@@fearingalma1550 In Double Dash there was the bowser shell that was basically a green shell that wouldn’t stop until it slid off the course or reached a certain amount of impacts, maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?
@@bugjamsIn Mario kart 64 the blue shell was ground-traveling, so it technically could hit anyone that got in it's way, but it only ever tracked 1st place, so you usually wouldn't be hit by it unless you were the target.
@@fearingalma1550pretty sure this is a conflation of multiple things. It’s mentioned 64 blue shell was ground travelling so it could hit anybody; DD had the giant bowser shell; I seem to recall DS also had ground-travelling blue shells.
But I’m pretty sure there’s no version where it’s giant AND hits people en route to 1st place. Though it’s hitbox was larger than a normal shell in 64.
In my house, I'm "that guy" in 90% of the games I play, and if I'm not careful about pulling punches then I can completely ruin any hope of playing games with my family and friends. As such, the chaos of Mario Kart and Mario Party are a blessing. When I was younger and obsessed with winning, I hated that chaos factor. Now, middle aged and more just wanting a touch of my nostalgia and time with loved ones, I want the game to reach up and slap me in the back of the head, if only so it's exciting and everyone has a chance.
My partner is "that guy" in our household too and while I would say I generally prefer the challenge that comes with facing him with skill/knowledge alone (my Juri vs his JP for example) there's absolutely a type of fun that comes from playing more chaotic games that make good victory less certain. The win is far less enjoyable for me on a "I earned this" level but the sheer comedy of "bad luck" hounding him is good for laughs.
@@torreykat I like that way of putting it. Real satisfaction in the victory comes when you really earn it though skill, but the moments that random chaos filled games create are good fun.
When I’m playing Mariokart with my kid I make it a self imposed challenge to get them in as high a placement as I can. This means dipping back into the mugzone to grab items then torpedoing the racers in front of them. It’s usually on 50cc so it’s not a challenge to win but it is a challenge to keep an 8 year old in first place.
Mario kart is exactly this for me with anyone I play with even if they think that their good I will always give them a run for their money. Not to sound cocky but Mario kart is legit the only game I enjoy being beaten down because it happens so rarely for me and thus gives me the challenge I seek.
@@SamWulfign We are of the same ilk. In my friend group I'm "that guy" that everyone hopes they can beat but rarely do. I didn't have a Switch for the longest time (and never owned a Wii U), so my friends who had been playing MK8 for a while thought they had a leg up on me with practicing the new courses I hadn't raced on yet. Nope. Gold medal in nearly all of them. 😅
My thing with Mario Kart is that 1st place only has to worry about the blue shell and attacks from second place while second place needs to do double duty fighting for first but also defending from the utter chaos attempting to drag them back in behind them. Ironically, even the blue shell can become a problem for them.
Knowing this, my family used to deliberately play "co-op" back in Double Dash where the pair would go for first place and the third person would play body guard in second, so we could get perfect wins and unlock everything. First place would practically go for a cruise and second place (if they even managed it) would go through constant hell.
Reminds me of the plot to Afro Samurai, when you put it that way.
Sirlin had an article on this back in the day. He called it "slippery slope". I've also heard people refer to it as "snowballing". Basically, if a game rewards whoever's in the lead with a further advantage, you might as well end it right there because you're forcing people to play through a game with a foregone conclusion. Just being in the lead is already an advantage because you don't have to worry about catching up, only not falling behind. There's no tension, just waiting for the inevitable, and that's not fun whether you're winning or losing. If you want a longer game, you need catchup mechanics to keep the whole match dynamic throughout. If you don't think that's fair, keep the game short so nobody's playing through a scripted outcome. Would you rather the game be "fair" or fun? Because if it's the former, your reward for being good at the game is that you won't have anyone to play with.
HOWEVER there still needs to be *some* advantage to being in the lead, or there's no reason to play well. Just being in the lead is already an advantage. It just doesn't need to be an insurmountable advantage, so the trailing player has some hope of catching up if he plays better. Catchup mechanics should never be so powerful that the losing position is more desireable, or else it just becomes the new winning position and being good at the game is just a matter of knowing when it's time to lose, and when it's time to start winning. Which isn't an invalid design decision if that's the kind of strategy you want to build a game around, but a lot of players may find that unintuitive/unfair.
MOBAs may breed toxicity, but the innate catchup mechanics are pretty cool.
Destroying enemy structures gives your team more freedom to roam the map, and safe access to more neutral camps. The defending team still gets a small advantage though, because all the objectives they need to defend are closer together.
This has a secondary effect in casual play- defending teams are forced to group up, while attacking teams are encouraged to spread out. It's common for casual games to end when a "winning" team spreads themselves too thin and die one or two at a time, leaving their base undefended.
Given the choice you always want to control that extra territory, BUT just the dynamics of moving around the map mean that a comeback is almost always possible.
@@Ninjat126 I hadn't thought about it because I'm not a MOBA guy, but that does sound like a good balance of rewarding progress without leaving the defenders completely hopeless. In an FPS I would award "death streaks" or some such.
F-Zero 99 is great regarding combatting the snowballing
Plenty of people can pull way out in front in that game (I've done it several times myself) but the game will spawn plenty of bumpers to hinder their lead
The bumpers only get even more dangerous as the race nears the end too as it eventually turns into just spawning red bumpers instead of the relatively safer gray ones
Red bumpers take a rather sizeable chunk out of your power/health on contact, which can be especially dangerous if you're one of those people who main Golden Fox (super low health pool and top speed, but its absurdly fast regeneration makes it easy to spam boosts the whole race), so it becomes a game of "be at your skill peak or get _d e s t r o y e d_ and plopped somewhere in the 80s range after crashing out"
On the flipside, for the not-gods that we are, there's the skyway, an extra layer to a track that allows people to pull ahead and away from the chaos of the middle pack, if they can collect enough super sparks for it - which usually generate when players collide or someone just came back down from the skyway
The duration of a skyway boost shortens substantially the closer to first you are so you still gotta show some skill to get allllllllllllllllll the way in front
"the mug zone", you mean the crab bucket?
The metaphor switches from coffee to seafood. Alarmingly yummy either way!
also known as "spider jar"
@@shyflyf3772 Interesting! I get the crab bucket concept but what's a Spider Jar?
Fascinating creature the crab
The Dirt Rally series has my favorite progression system of any racing game I've played. It is almost impossible to win races, but that doesn't matter, because the game doesn't expect you to win every race. Getting 5th place, for example, still rewards enough money and xp to continue progressing through the game. This is also more true to the careers of actual racing drivers.
Good rubberbanding that's actually a game mechanic and not just an obscured numbers tweak would fix a lot of games, especially in the strategy genre. I don't get how so many game designers still implement snowballing mechanics that will make 20+h playthroughs completely trivial after the first hour or two (or unwinnable if you're bad)
Well I mean, seems clear that in those cases they're appealing to a different audience. Power fantasy is an incredibly common tool in the toolkit. Positive feedback loops, even in competitive multiplayer, works for a lot of people. CoD didn't accidentally get popular.
If you aren't having fun with a game, a lot of the time, it isn't a game design problem. The game just wasn't made for you. There are a lot of very successful games out there that I find deeply frustrating or boring. That's life.
It's surprising that drafting isn't a more common mechanic (or maybe it is, I dunno). Rubber banding in that folks behind go faster, but also still skill based 'cause you need to follow the line of the person in front of you to get that boost.
@@anthonybowman3423 There's a big difference between a 3 minute killstreak and a 30h campaign snowball. After a while the power fantasy stops working because it becomes the new norm (something about hedonistic adaption yadda yadda). It doesn't help that the worst offenders are usually slow point and click games devoid of action where making hard decisions is the main focus.
So yes, still bad design. Also something like Frostpunk couldn't be further from a power fantasy, and yet you still snowball and the game gets easier the more mouths you have to feed. It's obviously something the developers didn't even think about because there are very few good examples to follow within the genre.
@@majorfallacy5926 Power fantasy is A way that designers use positive feedback loops, not THE way. And you picked a great example of a game that uses them a different way.
Now to be clear here, are you now going to say that Frost Punk has bad game design? The overwhelmingly beloved game with millions of sales and incredibly positive reviews?
Look. It's fine to not like a thing. Nobody says you have to. But calling it bad game design because it doesn't appeal to you, especially when you're gonna pick out examples where it very obviously appealed to A LOT of people, seems pretty silly.
@@anthonybowman3423 If you look at the steam stats, less then half the people who played Frostpunk even finished the first scenario, i.e. they quit before it got boring.
There is a lot to love about the game, but when an average gaming veteran level of skill invalidates your main gimmick (being pushed into morally questionable decisions) and lets you end your first scenario with more resources than you have room to build warehouses for, I consider that bad design. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying they don't also have a ton of good design in there. It's just that when the bad design hits in this game, it ruins the good.
They have awesome theming and would've had all the tools for a good difficulty curve. Their policies would make for a *great* rubberbanding mechanic (selling ethics for a 2nd chance is a great motivator imo), but they simply utterly failed to consider feedback loops in their design. The larger your city grows, the easier it is to heat, the more refugees you have to feed the cheaper food becomes, not using child labor is more powerful than doing so etc. There is no way this was intentional or fits with the theme in any way, it simply wasn't considered.
The same thing is true for another game of theirs, This War of Mine btw. Skill is not rewarding, it's gamebreaking.
I love the mug zone - it's where the game actually occurs. When you're out in front, you're just cruising by yourself, hoping not to get shot. Being in the thick of it with other racers is when you get to use fun and powerful items, but you also have to suffer an appropriate amount of BS.
Racing games in general seem to struggle with balance, shooting for this impractical ideal of every race being a photo finish. The Burnout series was one that burned me twice before I effectively gave up on it. In one of them (I want to say 3, but I'm not entirely sure anymore), I caught the AI in the act of having infinite Burnout Boost, and even if I was playing by the rules and actually managing to pull off prolonged Burnout Boosts with "dangerous" driving for nearly the entire race, it seemed I was somehow always finishing races at the back of the pack because I wasn't finding the correct shortcuts or something. And the demo of Burnout Paradise turned me off completely from that game. For the small selection of races (there might have only been one), I would be in the lead the entire race, but in the closing stretch every...single...time, I'd be passed by multiple cars down the straightaway and finish the race anywhere between 4th and 6th place. Every time, reach the final straight in first place, pedal to the metal, and just helplessly watch as 4 cars zoom past me. I could not find anything fun in that demo.
I now can't stop remembering Chuggaaconroy's misfortune with the Dog Races in Majora's Mask
Burnout 3's AI can get to insane speeds if you use the boost too effectively in some of the later races with much faster cars. Ex. the last race in the entire game is everyone in a Formula/Indie car (not sure which is the main influence) which reach 209MPH regardless of if you are using boost or not. Said race is insanely hard if you boost, and becomes infinitely easier if you don't. That being said, beyond the later races, it shouldn't rubber band the AI particularly bad in either the Xbox or PS2 version, neither when either is run in the emulators on the Xbox 360 nor PCSX2 respectively. I've played the game in all 4 methods. Burnout 3 has no shortcuts. At best a track can be split by a tunnel divider or other obstruction for a short section.
Neither Burnout 3 nor Revenge feature boost chaining - takedowns earned an enlarged boost bar up to 4x size. Burnout Revenge has shortcuts marked with teal blue lights (sometimes only alternate paths in some circuits, which are used as the main path in reverse), and Burnout Dominator saw the return of boost chaining and shortcuts which had to be unlocked. Burnout 2 has boost chaining but it's a very punishing point to start playing the series as it expects you to learn how to play or suffer - it offers no handouts beyond the driving training tutorial, and allowing you to pass with bronzes. Cars are only unlocked with all first place podiums in GPs, and only gold medals in other races.
Burnout Paradise is in general an awful game, the map is very poorly matched with the expectations of the Burnout name. It's by far the worst game in the entire series by a few miles.
The problem is defining balance for a racing game - is this the sort of balance that means that anybody vaugely able to operate a controller and understand the object of the game is able to win sometimes or the sort of balance where everyone in on a level playing field - for me the latter is what racing games should usually be about, the skill of the player often in car setup and driving both being what matters. But for something like MarioKart clearly different goal, and that sort of game demands the sort of 'balance' that is always going to be noticeable as interference/benifit to the players that need it.
I have to say I remember enjoying Burnout Paradise, and don't remember running into issues like that. If anything I'd have said the game felt too easy to win, but as it was still satisfying really nailing the move you wanted...
I remember duel races in particular in Burnout 3 having absolutely obvious and awful balancing loops in play. I could continually take the AI opponent out, be boosted almost constantly, and somehow it was still always right on my tail. But the second I screwed up, they were gone 5ever and I had no hope of being in the same zip code as them anymore.
Burnout was always at its best in the Road Rage mode instead of the racing tbh
I like some chaos in my party games but sometimes Mario Kart feels like its too much. Whenever I played Crash Team Racing I really loved how it still had the chaotic elements but placed more emphasis on skill like with triple boosting, maining drift boost and finding shortcuts which can be used just about whenever as long as you had the speed and knowledge. Hell you could even out paced the blue shell of the game if you really know what your doing. But items were also really cool cause wumpa fruit (coins of the game) upgraded your items to either be faster, last longer or give a new effect such as turning TNT crates into Nitro crates. That game was so satisfying to master
This is becoming my favourite show on the channel, it genuniely feels like I'm learning something each week.
Cracking job
If you've seen enough Shortcat videos, you know the answer to the mug zone is to cheese items in 10-12th, (respecting the new balance changes that make only the first two boxes useful when cheesing) until you get two massive place movement items, then wait until timing is right and move from last to top three in two items or less.
My wife and I play Mario Kart 8 together and have a longrunning goal to S-rank every cup, that is, to get a perfect score on every cup; this means not only coming first on points at the end of the cup but in every race that makes up each cup. You would think with two possible players this would be easy, but what it ends up being is one of us - usually my wife - tearing off into first and then the other - usually me - running interference and playing keep away with the rest of the pack as they try to snipe the leader. On the lower CC cups this is pretty straightforward, but gets harder as you go higher in the difficulty levels, and starting over on race 1 has a very different feel from getting bulldozed at the last second four races in.
Survival mode in a racing game called BlazeRush presents an interesting way to sidestep the runaway leader problem altogether. There's a huge steamroller chasing the cars. As soon as a car lags too far behind the leader, that car is crushed by the steamroller and is out of the round. All but the leader are eventually crushed, and then everybody respawns, continuing from the same spot on the track. The later you're crushed in the round, the more points you get.
The rounds are very fast, and they are always tense, as the game state where the leader breaks from the pack is not possible.
Ironically one of the strategies more competitive mario kart players use, bagging, is intentionally slowing down. Essentially the idea is to avoid the mug zone by intentionally slowing down to get great items and using those to make shortcuts and get back to number 1. On some tracks bagging is a strategy you decide on from the begging of the race (because those tracks have mad shortcuts or incredibly broken bullet bill extensions) but usually it's just done when they can't get in first and don't want to get absolutely dogpiled by items.
One thing that annoys me to no end with an otherwise fun franchise like Mario Kart, is that the AI can catch up to you no matter how well you drive or use the items against the AI. It just wore me down in the end. With that written as a party game with family and loved ones it has its moments.
I recently tried playing Mariokart 64 as a pacifist and it's amazing how it completely destroys the challenge, the AI just falls back for no reason after a while and you always have items left to defend yourself..
The bots are fuckin' _snipers_ with the Green Shells too. I swear they're all programmed to draft you and then shoot you with a Green Shell the moment they get the speed boost off of you.
It's so glaring and in your face how much the AI wants to target you over when they throw a red shell BACKWARDS at you
Second wind is absolutely killing it
"Perfected balance as an end goal for non-esports is not only practically impossible, it's just bad design - it would create bland and predictable games with all the fun sucked out" - great quote and something I would love more games to take to heart.
Perfect balance, probably not... but there is an argument for seeking something "close" to balance in any class/role based multiplayer experience.
If you allow one class or role to fall behind the power curve in something like an MMO then the people who have committed time and energy learning that class are going to feel left out at high-end content as they'll generally be passed over in favor of the most powerful classes available. You also want everyone, regardless of class, to feel like they're *contributing* to the activity in some way and having their own little moments of glory.
It's the same in TRPGs: Nobody wants to feel consistently overshadowed at the thing their character is supposed to be good at, You wind up feeling like a 5th wheel, that you're not necessary to the party, and being committed as long as a TRPG tends to make you means that you're going to be spending a lot of time feeling let down by your character if you picked a class that underperforms.
Yes, this is imho a very much needed game design perspective: As a player I want to have fun - especially while playing a party game; game balance can be a tool to achieve this goal but it should never stand in the way.
This is such a blanket statement though. Why would balance make bland and predictable games? What are we balancing for to begin with? I can also argue that unbalanced games create bland and predictable games where _the unbalanced thing_ wins.
Many people in comment section say "fun > balance" but "fun" is a subjective thing to begin with.
@@kevingriffith6011 I have to say MMOs were something I was thinking about a lot with that quote, honestly, they're one of my favorite genres. But we've moved from a time where there were classes with very different ability sets with all sorts of buffs, debuffs, crowd controls, strengths, weaknesses, etc. to one where 99% of your buttons on any given class just do damage or heal. Because of how narrow they made that scope, the only meaningful way to balance classes is by making them perfectly comparable in most situations to their peers, rather than giving them all niches they do well in a variety of different encounters that happen in group, raid or solo content.
@@Drunkencrono Ultimately the problem with that approach is that you have to make the margins of error so wide on content that the challenge is basically non-existent if you want every class to have a place in the content you're making.
You can't have a class that excels in doing something niche like mitigating elemental damage and then have a raid where there is no elemental damage... but by the same token you can't also then make a raid with so much elemental damage that said class is mandatory. Damage, healing and mitigation are universally useful mechanics which is why everyone has them.
Do I think we've hit a point where we've strayed too far into the homogenization of classes? Eh...... depends on the game. I just think that a character's niche shouldn't be something that prevents them from participating in content, particularly if said character took multiple weeks of gaming to reach the endgame. Ask anyone who played a Paladin in Vanilla WoW, Getting a raid spot with that class was basically impossible. You weren't as beefy as a warrior, so you couldn't tank, you didn't do as much damage as a rogue, hunter, mage or warlock so you couldn't DPS, you couldn't heal as well as a priest or a druid so healing was out too... and unlike a shaman you didn't have Bloodlust until Heroism was added in The Burning Crusade.
The idea of 'the golden one' makes for an interesting idea to me about the match picking a random bot and tags them in the UI as your nemesis, letting you know that particular bot will be your challenger to get to first place adding a sorta simulated rivalry.
As a side note, I think the reason 8 Deluxe has 2 item slots is to compensate for the original 8's item system where, unlike most other Mario karts, you couldn't "chamber" items like shells and bananas. I'm not entirely sure if 8 Deluxe still has that system but they were making a pretty deliberate effort to fix issues people had with the Wii U version so its my best guess.
Having played way too much Mario Kart over the years, I think that MK7 actually had the best balance for one main reason: the bottom screen giving players more information. By seeing where other karts are AND what items they hold, all players get more strategic opportunities. This makes it an inherently better game, in same way that Texas Hold 'Em is a better game than Five Card Stud.
In a game that's heavily random, giving players extra information about the state of play allows meta tactics to evolve and thrive. And I can attest, MK7 had some insane metas, especially revolving around blue shells. It was *tactical,* and more skill-based. You could actually plan out lines of attack or how to maximize use of your current items. That made it way more entertaining for me than MK8D.
(And yes, I know MKDS also had two screens, but it was ruined by snaking. And MK8 on WiiU was terrible because only the player with the tablet got more info. Which is the opposite of balanced. Whoever had the tablet got an extra advantage.)
Fun fact: Something a lot of players aren't aware of is that "snaking" has actually been a part of the mario kart series since MK64, though the MK64 community called them "SSMTs," short for "Straight Stretch Mini Turbo." As the name suggests, it was a technique to eke out some extra speed even along straightaways. SSMTs were made easier in MKDD, and time trials in that game actually look very similar to time trials in MKDS; players maintain a near constant MT throughout the race, and even the staff ghost in baby park uses what would later come to be known as "snaking." The reason MKDS gets so much hate for it is that it was the first time the series had online, and as such, it was the first time the general playerbase got put in the same lobby as good players. Significant portions of the playerbase would rather complain that they're losing than learn how to get better, and thus we got MKWii, which effectively completely killed snaking, by not just hard nerfing MTs, but replacing the entire *reason* SSMTs were used in the first place with the wheelie mechanic. Come MK8D, we've gone full circle. Wheelies are gone, and MT is once again the most important stat, with SSMTs still an important part of time trials and racing even today.
As for your point about the second screen, I actually think there would be room on the HUD to show enemy items even on a single screen, and I agree the game would be dramatically improved if you could see this information. Even if it was limited to only a few characters around your current position, it would be a significant improvement to what we have today. And for items like lightning or the blue shell, you could provide a notification to all players when someone obtains it at the top of the screen. Basically telling players "use your star now or else" for the former, and "first/second place, plan your move now" for the latter.
Ooh, a James Stephanie cameo out in the wild! I love seeing everyone out here supporting each other.
The mug zone is ther perfect bucket of crabs situation. Because items there primarily aim at the person right in front of you, rather than catching back up with the lead, you just drag each other further and further away from victory, while the leaders remain largely unbothered. If the items for 4th and 5th place were more aimed at disrupting the lead, like boos which would constantly snag their defensive items then you'd hopefully see a lot more action towards the front rather than the sheer disruptive energy of the midfield
I gotta say I really like this series. It's not just insights into what makes a game but all the data and information that is shown to you is given to us in a way that is easy for even an idiot like me to understand. Keep up the good work!
One of the biggest flaws to mario kart is that you only get the most fun items in front pack.
Instead the front pack should get access to more offensive items which allows them to duke things out but makes it hard to defend against various opponents.
The middle packs should get more boosting items as a sort of equalizer.
They should also be the ones receiving blue shells most of all, and a stronger emphasis on tracking weapons like red shells at least when the race is relatively more neck and neck.
The back pack should get the most powerful boosting items and only the most powerful boosting items unless the race is fairly close. If the race is fairly close then they should get the sort of items that targets all the other racers more and stars.
The goal of the design should be that the racers are fighting it out with first place actually being contested as much as possible.
It was only a moment, and not important at all, but Seal's face morphing out of that seals face, singing "BABY!!" was the best thing ever.
I love how they gate items based on distance.
I'm glad you brought up the mug zone. I've been looking for a kid friendly description for it as soon as i hit 3rd it feels like all ai are ready to drop everything on me.
"Negative loops aren't even loops"
As someone with an engineering background, I have to say you have that exactly backwards. Positive loops explode (stop looping) because eventually you reach the limit of what the loop can handle. Microphone/speaker feedback loops are a good example. Negative feedback loops are stable loops (if they're done right), because the pushback on the input keeps things from going out of control.
The best example of bad balancing is the blue shell: You are most likely to get it in the last place, but since it hits the first driver it does not help you to improve your position. It only really helps the person in second place.
Hey, that's not true!
Sometimes it helps the person in third or fourth!
I think the bullet bill was the answer to that "balancing" and even that doesn't help that much. If anything, it puts you in the crab bucket.
This is true for every mario kart except 64, 7, and 8*
In those games, the blue shell stays grounded when thrown and has a chance to hit other racers while on its way to the front. It becomes useful no matter where you are.
*(8 sort of breaks its balance by making the horn capable of destroying the blue shell. A player can stop it from reaching the front or 1st place can avoid getting hit. The coin was supposed to reduce the frequency of people in front getting a horn, but as pointed out in this video that got ruined in Deluxe)
It's needed to get the first player in the mug zone though because otherwise the first place just keeps going.
No? Blue shell odds drop off HARD by about the lower part of the mug zone. Last place is most likely to get bullets, stars, golden mushrooms, and most importantly, lightning
It's extremely refreshing to see analytic content that examines and challenges the basics of how we use words - poor terminology causes so many headaches and confusions, and I've learned how many struggle to see past the terms they know and fear re-penning new items into the dictionary. As someone who's been on a one-man crusade to clarify the confusion around "randomness" and "luck", it's a pleasure to see forward thinking with regards to feedback loops in action. o7
Extra post - what matters in the engineering context is that positive and negative loops, as so defined, can be both good AND bad depending on circumstances. Sometimes you want a given phenomena to strengthen and grow larger over the background noise of the system's chaos (think Taleb's concept of "anti-fragility") and other times you want traits to dim and disappear, like in most anti-resonance systems.
The feedback loop that's good in one case is bad in the other. But most people would never use positive and negative in this fashion nor in the fashion used in electromagnetics, so it's bound to cause confusion when applied elsewhere.
Oh man, what a great episode. I really hope you do more episodes on other specific games.
Something not mentioned is that in multilayer rounds, if one person is significantly better than the other players it significantly increases the difficulty of the race for everyone else. So even people who handily get first place on single player will struggle to even be on the podium if there's a big enough skill gap likely due to the "mug zone" being pulled up by the first place player.
I think an interesting contrast to bring to mario kart (with its own set of upsides and downsides) is the fan game “sonic robo blast 2 kart” (a mod of a fan game built on an old doom engine).
SRB2K features items that fill a lot of the same roles as mario kart items, but changed such that the use of them is “more skillful.” Going down the list, the green shell replacement doesn’t stick on the players back when deployed, and instead orbits around them, meaning that to deflect approaching red shells the player has to manually fire it backwards to intercept the incoming shell. Likewise said red shells will not path around walls, and have a noticeable turning radius and so can be ran into walls using sharp turns.
There’s a lot more affected items, like the golden mushroom having a timer more akin to the MK8 fire flower, bobombs having an arm time when dropped which is nullified if thrown forward (along with being proximity mines instead of time bombs), but I think the most significant change is the blue shell replacement.
The “self propelled bomb” or SPB has hitstun that would put mario kart wii blue shells to shame, but a key weakness; after getting near the first place player, it slows down to match their top speed, and if first place races perfectly, will never hit them, it requires great track knowledge to take every turn fast and consistently and you can’t ever get hit by an item, but it IS possible.
This is enough of a wall of text already, but I wish I could go on more about the dynamics and knock on effects of these changes
For Ludos cheese fund!
She got some extra special cheese from this! She says THANK YOU!!
I am so glad this confirms many of my suspicions about this game lol.
Will say, people talk about the blue shell all the time but nobody mentions why I dislike it: if sucks to get. If I get spit out of the blender in 10th place a blue shell does absolutely nothing to help me. I wasted what could have been a game saving item on one that only really helps 2nd and 3rd place. Honestly really sucks.
Also I hate how the bullet bill is just an item version of your older brother ripping the controller away to show you how it's done.
One thing I'm kinda surprised you didn't mention is that the double item slots means that 2nd place can get multiple red shells from one Double Item Box, which not only means that 1st is practically guaranteed to get hit due to almost never having two defensive items, but also that 2nd place can effectively get Triple Red Shells if they know how to chain items.
That "hot butter-knife through a baby seal" bit was golden.
Also, I kinda want to see a Mario Kart version of Road Rash, where drivers can bash one-another over the head with comedy items. Mario would have a hammer, of course, but Waluigi would absolutely have that tennis racket of his.
I absolutely love the concept of "the Chosen One". My family and I have been going crazy over this for years. For us, it's almost always been Toad. The moment Toad is in a race, I have to brace myself for some absolute nonsense lol.
The ai chosen to be the one is based on the characters you choose iirc, each have a set list of potential rivals.
A long streak of lemmy or two and a mental pattern recognition later and you only see lemmy.
Love you guys and honestly Second Wind so far has been even better than the content made on the Escapist.
Glad you're enjoying! We're just getting started!
That image of Ludo in a cart is the cutest thing ever!
She uses it to go to the shops
I will always support the continued licensed use of Hollow Knight's magnificent OST by Second Wind's creators. You guys knock it out of the park and definitely know your audience.
I can not say enough how raw and hard hitting these videos feel when you can speak and swear without restraint.
The shackles have been removed
I love how emotive you got in this one. Let it out man we're here for it
notes taken. More POWERRRRRRRRRRRRR!
Great video, highly explicative. I adore Ludo more and more each vid. Those cute little eyes at the mention of cheese.
The mug zone as you put it is clearly a deliberate function Nintendo perfected over time; I've mostly played the original on SNES and the first sequel on N64 and the differece was clear; on the SNES a skilled player could end up laps ahead of all the NPCs; Mario Kart 64 made certain this was impossible and the times I've played a friend's copy of newer games up to 8 I could feel the zone just behind first become more and more of a madhouse. As a kid i played to deliberately get second place to help my younger sister get first on Mario 64; staying in second myself with the ai rubber banding back as i fired shells and dropped bananas was a wild wacky challenge; but i doubt it would be possible to live there all race in MK 8. You'd get nuked from orbit.
I always assumed the chosen one was a real thing! I always called it a "rival" but I noticed it back on the Wii. After the first race I could just tell who my rival for the cup was going to be.
I'm glad I'm not crazy for noticing it
The reason I like Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart so much is because it is much better in its item balance and how it functions as an actual racing game. For starters, you go so fast that you REALLY need to use the brake through hairpin turns. The biggest thing, however, is how blue-shells work in SRB2K. The blue shell will never catch up to you by design if you are going at a full speed, and it can also be destroyed by the electrical field powerup which can be aquired in first place. So good racers CAN steamroll races if they play their cards right, which is honestly how it should be.
My brother and I picked up on the “chosen by god” thing when we played 8 as a kid, (for us it was always Morton) and it honestly created some really fun stories where our brotherly rivalries were set aside to take down the tyrant of the track.
This series is so awesome, might actually be my favourite so far.
Lets. Go.
The mug zone feels like the ideal place to be as far as engagement goes. I know in Sonic Riders, which doesn't really have items, I found the most fun part to be when you're in the middle, attacking or getting attacked, then needing to use slipstreams to catch up. But once you're out in front, there's not much engagement beyond navigating the course. Same as in Mario Kart. In the middle, you're thinking of things like "They have a shell behind them so I won't waste mine" or "There's a jump coming up so I'll try to use my lightning to screw someone mid-jump", while in front it's as you described, you sit on your defensive item and just do the course with maybe avoiding bananas as your only added engagement. Not that driving alone can't be enjoyable for its own sake, but I think the "meat" of the game is in the mug zone.
Maybe courses could be set up so navigating them just innately is engaging, and the obstacles up front "stay dealt with" for about ten to thirty secods after they're handled so 1st has to fight the track but 2nd and a few places down can rely on 1st to clear the way and focus more on overtaking?
I’d love to see what Mario Kart would look like if all items had equal rates and all racers were going for first place. The sheer and utter chaos could be fun as a bonus mode.
A lot of weirdness of the game’s bots makes a lot more sense now for me, but when you go online the game becomes really addicting. Also with the AI having to be in certain places, the size of “the mug zone” is way larger than in online, where everyone is going the same speed mostly and you’re just trying to eek out fractions of a second in your driving while there’s an item war going on. It actually feels quite balanced when everyone is packed together, but because of how the AI is coded, the “mug zone” feels awful in local multiplayer
Turkey Run was an old cart racer I used to play as a kid and I swear the snowman in that game always had that #1 racer effect activated
For me balancing in Mario Kart means pushing the players in front torwards riskier strategies and the players behind on more reliable ones. That means dividing the items in two groups: items with a risk vs reward factor (green shells, thunder cloud, bombs) and items that are always useful (red shells, bananas, phirana plant, etc).
A good example of an "always useful" item is the bullet bill because its use consistently results in advancing by some positions, makes the player invincible and give them some time to rest. Defensive items on the contrary aren't really useful because they allow players in front to keep their advantage without risking anything. At least in Mario Kart Wii I found a component of skill in the fact that if you can hold the item button to hold a defensive item behind and free the item slot, but that ability was removed in 8 Deluxe (or in earlier games, I only played these two).
"[Perfect balance] would create bland, and predictable games, with all of the fun sucked out of them."
This gave me, 'Final Destination, Fox only, no items' flashbacks.
Damn I only played Stray once but that Notebooks OST hits hard every time.
Glad to see others who notice the horror of places 3-8, it's a land of pure glorious chaos and destruction. I honestly feel like I'm missing out when I'm the most skilled racer because the most crazy times are had in the Mug Zone. Also there is a functional use for coins, you move faster when you have 10, so 1st place wants to always have 10 coins and a defensive item.
I am currently trying to get 3 stars on all 200cc mario kart 8 delux tracks. That description of "the mug zone" was so accurate I experienced catharsis and PTSD at the same time. Well done friend. Stay awesome.
I love his whole section on the mug zone! My friends and I have called this section of Mario Kart being stuck in Gotham!
One problem is that the definition of "balance" varies. To people who _talk_ about games, "balanced" means "rewarding skill with victory". To a lot of people who _play_ games, regardless of their skill level, "balanced" means "I should always be able to win".
"Be able to" even has some wiggle.
Is it "It should, in theory, be potentially achievable, so long as I play perfectly"? Is it "A. I.s should be slightly worse than a newcomer"? Is it "I should just straight up always win"?
@@youtubeuniversity3638 I think you might be making it more complicated than it is, as even your first question is the same as the first definition presented, i.e. rewarding skill with victory.
The options are ultimately thus:
1) The better player should always win
2) Even if you play perfectly, you have a chance to lose
The wiggle room for the latter at most would just be to not take it super literally and require some effort on the worst player's part to have a chance at victory. Like for Mario Kart, you can't press no buttons and expect to be able to win. You still gotta press gas and use items to get a chance at first. But such should be a given expectation and not need to be part of the discussion.
The simple way to tell which category someone falls into is to look at how they respond to patch notes: if they whine about something that was blatantly overpowered being nerfed and complain that the "clueless devs" are "ruining the game", they're in the second category and are just bitching about their favourite unfair toy being taken away so now they have to actually learn to play properly if they want to win.
And then competitive video game designers take "balance" to mean that every player, regardless of their skill and effort, should always experience a 50/50 of wins and losses which makes for an incredibly frustrating experience (and downright infuriating once you notice the game purposefully putting you up against much more skilled enemies just to "balance" your win/lose ratio.
At least in my bubble, balance means that an item/weapon/character isn't so strong that a less skilled player can easily win against a more skilled player while just the lower skilled player uses the item etc. If both use the same, the more skilled player will win most of the time. That is an unbalanced item/weapon/character.
10:30 I feel like we shouldn't throw the baby with the bathwater.
"Balance is Bad Design" isn't the lesson you should be taking, it oughta be "We need to figure better ways of balancing."
If we make balance the enemy of fun instead of a means to achieve it, then we're shooting all of ourselves in the foot.
There's such a thing as "making better systems and designs."
Yes, it's prolly gonna be hard and take a lotta work and even trial and error, but that doesn't mean we give up and fully fundamentally tell our understanding of good design to screw off just so we don't have to deal with it anymore.
Yea, that statement rubs me the wrong way. Even not straying too far from Mario Kart 8DX - cart building. Does it make marika a better game when you load into the game and see most of the players on Waluigi Wiggler with rollers (or Yoshi Teddybuggy with rollers)? I don't think so.
There's different degrees I think. On one hand, if everything's a mess it can feel like nothing you do matters and there's no fulfillment. On the other, if you try for perfect balance, you'll never finish that journey. Even stuff like chess and Go where things are perfectly balanced as far as abilities go are still imbalanced because they're turnbased and whoever goes first has a notably increased chance of winning. So while I can agree that some attempt should be made at balancing, I also think it's fine that, after an attempt, for a designer to go "good enough" because perfect balance is near impossible to achieve.
While I sort of agree with the spirit of what you said, and in general trying to fix a design system instead of just ditching it if it doesn't seem to work out is the way to go, I personally feel like striving for perfect balance is something that should be abandoned. My reason is that I'm a big RTS fan, and because of the starcraft e-sport craze, the last decade of RTS have been a bland and boring landscape of e-sport chasers that stayed away from anything vaguely innovative or creative for the fear it might be unbalanced. I feel that balance is always going to limit creativity and in the end, the fun of games because while not necessarily mutually exclusive what's fun, creative or exciting is often unbalanced. Even starcraft designers knew that, which is why some of the most fun and innovative units and mechanics are only available in the campaign, where the designers didn't have to worry about PvP competitive balance and could just let loose their creativity and come up with whatever would be the most fun to play with.
@@Tuss36 It's probably also the fact that 'balance' is a nebulous word to a designer; rather then the Thanos meme, balance ultimately serves the design not the other way around. An asymmetrical game is balanced around being asymmetrical, there is an ocean of difference between a balanced spectacle fighter and a balanced multiplayer shooter.
Anyone remember Sonic Rivals for the PSP? That was a two player racing game where rubber banding was present both in single player and multiplayer. The speed would simply change depending on how far ahead or behind you were, allowing both players an equal chance of winning. Additionally, both players are given the same item chance with the only exception being the character specific special abilities.
There is one solution to this that will always work for all parties and I've been barking about it since mario kart 64, it's so stupidly obvious people feel dumb every time I bring it up in this argument.
The option to toggle settings.
Mind blowing.
I always wondered why overall ai positions never changed in mario kart. Interesting to know its because they were preset.
I remember discovering how the rubber band works, or rather not in Need for speed hot persuit 3.
In slower cars, the effect is so pronounced its almost impossible to properly compete with the choosen one.
But in high tier super car categories, its reversed making the lap into a time trial rather than a race as you can leave the AI way way behind. Unless you stay behind and the AI will be so stupid slow that it extremely noticable
Ultimately making the game less fun.
I love the mug zone because I like causing the friction that drives the race.
Kudos for the baby seal gag, nearly choked on my food.
I remember watching speedrunners talk about strats in this game and I do believe that game gives 1st place enough tools to make it difficult spot to lose if you know how to manage your items.
Because you get 2 items slots and both can't be coins first place is always guaranteed to have at least one defensive item. Even the coin itself can be used defensively since the more coins you have the faster you go, and since coin items provide 2 coins and you lose 3 on hit that means theres not as much of a speed loss overall. On top of this the coin can be used to trick boos. Since boos always steal from the first item slot if the player keeps the coin in the first slot they'll always have access to a defensive item even if boos steal from you.
1st place also has access to the mega horn in their item pool, which is the best defensive item in the game because it can destroy blue shells. So if a player in first place has any item in their first slot with a mega horn in the second slot they'll be extremely difficult to punish. Granted 1st place can still take hits if enough shells are thrown at them or someone uses lightning, but the likelihood is that 1st place will go a while without getting hit.
It's so validating to hear out loud someone describing, what you refer to as the mug zone, what I've called for many years "the riff-raff" i.e. "oh god I'm stuck with the riff-raff!".
When referring to balance, I think its important to separate imbalance from variance, comeback mechanics, and pre-game decisions (character selection) since each exists because of/for different reasons.
As for Mario Kart, the huge variance is especially important as one player being a significantly better racer doesn't just result in predictable games, but uninteractive ones. Unlike in other competitive games, racers that are far apart have no way to interact with one another, so it effectively becomes two single-player games.
Absolutely living for the use of The Stanley Parable meeting room
I just imagined SRB2 Kart in the corner going full Gollum talking to himself about "balances is good yes NO BALANCES FOR THE EVIL"
Positive feedback is where the output is added to the input so that the output gets larger. Typically examples are exponential increAse. Negative feedback systems is where the output is subtracted from the input, which typically gives asymptotically stable systems.
Chef's kiss for the Kiss From A Rose sample 😂
I personally have a LOT of problems with MK8's item play specifically. I feel like changing the item distribution to be distance-based rather than ranking-based makes it way easier for first place to keep a lead and the "danger zone" of 3-8th place even greater. They also modified the shells to give way more endlag which makes the danger zone even more dangerous and the coin system honestly makes it even worse. 1st place will easily get full coins fast and will stay that way while the rest of the players will struggle to catch up back to first with a lower speed because of their lack of coins.
But great video, I personally love the item balance in Wii. It's chaotic but it always feel like you always have a shot to catch up! Maybe you can use a golden shroom for a wonderfully thought-of shortcut, maybe you can save yourself from a last second blue shell with a mushroom or maybe you just save up your bullet bill just enough to avoid the lighting and steal the goal, so many cool strategies and makes races way more interesting than if they were purely racing games, I love kart racers!!
Also, need to know your opinions on Mario Party! I know it's controversial, but I love the balance of 9 because it's very similarly done to mkwii!
The mug zone has created 2 distinct playstyles, Frontrunning and Sandbagging, as there is no point in staying in the mug zone the better option is to let yourself drop to the back and get great items to allow you to skip the mug zone. its weird and stupid and fun and all of that stuff
Used to skip school and play OG Mario Kart on the SNES with my best friend. He was best competition by far. But I always wondered why on single player you'd always have one nemesis (chosen one in your vernacular) who you could never shake, no matter how kick butt a lap you were having. But in OG Kart, it was always a character who could be considered an "adversary" to yours, so it was obvious you were being targeted by the game.
My favorite racing game of all time was Split/Second. It was a game that penalized you for not knowing how to play, but kept tension at all times because of the Power Play and Route Change mechanics that could potentially upset the entire field if fired off at the right times.
I know at least in Mario Kart 64, there are actually 2 AIs chosen by the game to be your "Rival/Nemesis," which is what this video refers to as the "Chosen One." One of the two rivals is considered the "Main Rival," and another, the "Secondary Rival." While all NPCs cheat off camera, the rivals are allowed to cheat much more than the rest, since they're meant to be second and first place respectively. And it's also relevant to mention that the pool of characters who can be your rival and secondary rival are dictated by what character you choose.
All of the above is based on MK64, I don't know how much of that applies to MK8, but I'm almost positive that there is some sort of "rival" system still in place, and if the pool of rivals is still dictated by your character choice, that would explain why J always winds up getting Lemmy...
"Fuck you, Lemmy!" made me laugh harder than it probably should have.
5:31 it does manage to create a rivalry between certain COMs and a player during a cup
I do enjoy that getting a blue shell is satisfying, even if you're doomed to the Mug Zone. Because when playing with friends, even just getting a runaway 1st place opponent to exclaim "oh f--- you!" is just spiritually fulfilling.
3:10 "reinforcment"
My Favourite series from Second Wind :D love this
Re: loop naming, I would use the terms "convergent feedback", or "divergent feedback".
Convergent feedback being the negative loops, whereby the feedback causes your variable to Converge towards some stable point.
And Divergent feedback being the positive loops, whereby the feedback causes your variable to Diverge to positive or negative infinity.
I think there's also interesting things to be said about how you can compose these together, or to think more broadly about gradients in a pure mathematical function, to see stronger / weaker feedback systems, multiple stable points, and composition with other functions to see what sort of skill level is needed to break out of the Convergence behaviour.
I’ve been thinking about the concept of balance recently, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of balance.
The first is ‘Perfectly Balanced,’ where everything is so well balanced that no one can complain that it isn’t balanced. Of course, such balance is nearly impossible and even if you can manage it, it often can make the end product boring as a result.
The second is ‘A Balance,’ which is where there is some sort of balance, and while it isn’t perfect, it at least isn’t so broken that it isn’t fun.
So while you might want to strive for ‘Perfect Balance,’ it’s often best to simply find ‘A Balance’ that works, and at best keep pushing closer to perfection while not striving for it at the cost of fun and innovation.
Quick shout-out to Diddy Kong Racing. Items are deterministic, while being upgradable and there is no rubber banding. The vehicles and stage design still make it fun. DKR was huge for what it was.
If I had say in Mario Kart 9's design, I'd make the 9 shape represent the Item selection. In 3rd through 1st you lose the ability to pick up a second item and in 1st your second item is dropped on the ground, this would extend the "Mog Zone" to first without completely killing player skill, add a new layer of strategy and be a fancy number gimmick as every game since 7 has had. Also remove Kart stats and instead replace them with kart types similar to Diddy Kong racing or something. Have all vehicles get unique shortcuts, some viable to all via Mushroom, others not, throw in some unique item interactions and call it a day.
So what you're saying is that slowed metabolism in hungry humans is a balancing loop? That your water reserve in your toilet is managed by a balancing loop? That your thermostaat is designed to drive a balancing loop?
It doesn't make all that much sense to take a term that exists outside a field and rename it based on that field...
Gotta be honest. I watch this just for Ludo.
I always noticed the mug zone. Most races online I get ahead and can keep my lead due to defensive items. But then there's those wheee I fall into the mug zone and it's just constantly being hit until it's no longer possible to keep up