Playing Golf by yourself you still earn the same amount of units as you would with players, but in ballrace you cannot earn more than 400 with 1 player, with 2 players you can just earn 400 + 40 per melon. It takes 3 players to get a win bonus.
I suggest adding some sort of goal timer that determines what placement you get when you are 1 or 2 players (or just have the normal one for 2 players), and add melons depending on how many players are currently playing, this way you can still actually play ballrace alone, and get decent amount of units. especially since there’s usually never anyone playing it or just 15 people playing by themselves (woohoo fun )
Target times would be a good way to allow for Unit bonuses to replace the position ones. It still ensures Units are awarded for skill even if there aren’t other people to compete against. I’d say that multiple target times should be present; that way, even if you aren’t super fast you can still get some bonuses.
Kind of reminds me of my over a year old “Author Time” suggestion, in a way…
Actually, that’s a pretty good idea. It would make unit gains more standarized and fair (playing with a lot of people would be no longer detrimental due to the limited number of placement bonuses and getting the bonuses would require a set amount of skill, just being the best player in the group wouldn’t cut it anymore)
The problem with this idea is that with it, Ballrace maps would require ranking times for each course on each map. If ever there were some sort of variation with the maps, perhaps something like Odyssey, that limits the developers by requiring similar courses to be the same in length.
Secondly, the developers would need to playtest more to give the maps that extra information. They’ll need to figure out what times are worth the first place bracket, and so on. The problem comes with skips, very clearly everyone learning and practising skips will be getting the first place bracket together. The developers can’t adjust the first place bracket to account for skips, since they aren’t obviously intentional and ergo it would be bad game design to do this.
Thirdly, what’s the point of playing multiplayer Ballrace if more than one person can get the first place bracket? Ballrace is meant to be competetive, and this change would remove all competition against other players. Players might as well be playing singleplayer in that case, as there’s no motivation to play online and wait for the rest of the slow people to catch up. The only motivation to playing multiplayer would be to collect melons, which you don’t do anyway in a speedrun.
Ballrace has had a legacy of being a racing gamemode where players compete against one another. Gmod Tower Ballrace was so enticing because of this competitive aspect, with the leaderboards and the constant urge to improve. It may seem unfair to some, the difficult and competitive nature of the gamemode, but that’s exactly the way it’s been since the beginning. Rewards shouldn’t be given out just to make a game “fair” because of lack of ability and time invested.
The original idea definitely states that time-trial rewards are a one/two player thing only, since that’s where the positional bonuses aren’t present; if playing with enough players to get the positional bonuses, it defaults to that and doesn’t give out time bonuses at all. I meant to imply that in my response as well, but I see that I worded that poorly.
Your point on the extra work stands, for sure. It’s not easy figuring out what a “hard” time is versus an “easy” one, especially if you’ve built and tested the heck out of it (having built TrackMania maps before, I’ve had to try and figure out what would constitute as gold, silver, and bronze times before). There’s probably good ways to estimate this (mapmaker’s average time as gold/1st and Mac’s time as bronze/3rd kappa), which could make things easier if they were to go ahead and do this. Skips definitely make this more difficult, but I think it just comes down to making adjustments to the times once the map is in the field (or maybe having a super difficult time that requires finding these skips; a sort of diamond medal, if you will).
I’d imagine variations wouldn’t be a problem, though. If the times are linked to the particular map as opposed to the numbered level, then you just need to enter more times if you’ve got more variations.
Yeah, i wouldn’t mind the state the game is in if there was actually players playing it for most of the day, but sadly there isn’t so you can either just play and earn that shitty 400 units per round (which isn’t worth it) or wait for 15 minutes to find a game with 2 other people where you can earn 3-4 times more units per round (which isn’t worth it)
Working out the times might be done automatically - sorry poor wording here. Basically each 1/2 player game feeds back the times that were achieved and this could set the bonuses for other 1/2 player games using some kind of average.
However could this be open to abuse? If people just sit by the finish a lot and then enter it just before the end of the round the fed back time would be skewed to be too long. I’d hope that an averaging system would reduce this, or maybe a large cat/dog paw could squash a player from on high if they are just hanging around?
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