Pine Valley, the earliest, simplest, and shortest track in the game had it’s number of laps reduced to 4 at some point in the past. I don’t know why this was, maybe to make it consistent when it was paired with the much longer Criss Cross Rapids? In any case, while simply playing well, my average lap time comes to around 20 seconds long. This is absurdly short for the track, 4 laps or otherwise. Going back to 5 would be an improvement.
Meanwhile, Riptide Retreat clocks my average lap time as over twice that, usually between 40-45 seconds long, yet it has a full 5 laps. I feel like races on this map just drag on. If anything, this track could benefit from going down to 4.
Hmm… on one hand it’s kind of nice having Pine Valley being so short as a quick course for people to play on, can also serve as a warm-up track for the others. On the other, yes it is absurdly short, taking approximately half the time of every track except Sunrise Isles (which, when doing time trials, is actually a shorter track with 5 laps.) Though reverting the lap count to 5 on Pine Valley should warrant a leaderboard reset or else it will quite literally be impossible for people to compete for the fastest times.
Riptide Retreat desperately needs a lap count reduction. It’s the only track in the game where nobody has beaten it in less than 3 minutes (at the time of writing, theoretically a sub-3:00 time is possible.) The next longest track is Criss-Cross Rapids taking people around 2.5 minutes to beat. On top of this, it could probably do with some slight physics changes as quite often people will get caught on the surface changes causing them to lose a ton of speed at seemingly random.