So what I think this means is that we need to look at options for making weapons good to use at range when playing Tails.
This is the reasoning behind giving Tails a global projectile speed increase. The original design for Knuckles in 2.0 involved similar weapon-specific changes, but we decided against it because it was incredibly complicated, instead going with his firing rate increase because it was easier to code and understand as a player. Match-specific changes should be simple enough to explain in a single, simple sentence.
I think we need to consider making it so dropped items can not be picked up by anybody until the player who dropped them can pick them up. This would remove some of the luck factor and balance issues with close-vs-distant combat. If we have a need to convey this, we could make dropped items translucent until the player is back to a state where he can pick them up again.
I think we should change the method of dropping everything and instead have a tiered structure of what gets dropped to try to deal with this issue. Being in close combat comes with its own set of risks, and the reward of having a better shot at stealing things seems reasonable to me. Your suggestion would also nerf the most fun part of invincibility, ramming someone and getting all their drops instantly.
How about forcing a maximum bounce height on dropped rings/wheepons/etc? Something like 200 units (14ish fracunits thrust), maybe. Do it in all game modes so it's consistent, since it's not a thing that's going to really affect balance in other modes, but will make it easier to pick up dropped weapons. That along with changing the spilled ring pickups' collectability like Rob said would probably solve the issue of Tails and Knuckles having a hard time getting spilled pickups.
This is a very reasonable idea and I support it.
What if we made players solid to their enemies in match gametypes? (I know you can already do that with the tailspickup cvar, but I'm talking as a default.) That'd help making it harder for Sonic to plow through people, at least.
We used to do this long ago, and it lead to weird situations where two players would collide and stick to each other, and the first person to realize what happened and fire got everything from the opponent. It was not a good mechanic. If we created proper player collision where players bounce off each other this could work, but otherwise it's a really bad idea.
Here's the real question, though: What happens if two Knuckles players run into each other?
Turns out, we had the idea of giving Knuckles melee attacks when we were designing 2.0, and we decided against it because of this very issue. The idea of changing the weapons and then later giving him a firing rate buff came later.
Actually to add on to this, why knuckles? What's stopping Sonic and his friends from spin jumping into each other to hurt them? That's what i think match should *REALLY* be, an actual brawl on against the players. I mean, if Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles can hurt each other like that in Sonic 3, why not here?
They sure can't in multiplayer Sonic 3, I'll remind you. The only encounter in the classics where they can hurt each other is the Knuckles joke of a boss fight in Sonic 3K, and I don't think I have to tell you how lame that fight is. You're also trying to hit players in melee with latency, and if you've ever used invincibility in SRB2 match to hit someone I shouldn't have to tell you how hard that is to do.