There are a lot of additions in 1.09, and almost all of them are overwhelmingly positive, however there are two specific removals that are creating a little public outcry, and I'd like to address them.
The first is the big one: Chaos mode was removed.
Frankly, I'm kinda surprised at the reaction from Chaos's removal. No one played it in multiplayer, the way it was designed to be played. A few people did play with it in single player looking for high scores, but even those people (myself included) generally stopped playing. The main thing Chaos was used for was amusement, like bouncing on Crawlas until one hits the sky, or to get to billion points or some other ridiculous point total. The reality is that it was used mostly for random amusement and trying to crash the game, not competition. Chaos had broken gameplay in general, and the fact that even the people that miss it didn't play it in multiplayer sorta put the nail on the coffin for it.
The second is a smaller one, but important none-the-less: Knuckles was NERFED.
The reason for the nerf may not seem obvious, but it's to avoid the EXPLOIT where the player bounces off an object, glides to gain height, and then at the top of the arc, lets go of the glide, and lands on another object. They bounce, glide, and repeat the process. This allows people to get VERY high into the air with relative ease. Why do we care? Because Knuckles traditional weakness is his inability to go straight up. He can climb walls, but he can't reach the air above the player without a wall to climb. The multi-glide ignored that balance, and allowed Knuckles to 'fly' better than Tails. The second part of it, the slowdown, is to more accurately mimic the classic games. I don't know if that will have a negative effect on match, but it appears not to be causing many problems, but only time will tell on that front.
It may turn out in the future that we NERFED Knuckles too much, and we may have to provide more BUFFS for him. However, if that does occur, we will not be returning the ability to glide more than once per jump. EXPLOITS of that nature just ruin gameplay and break the balance between the characters. No matter how amusing they are to play with, they're still deterimental to gameplay in the long run.
