What you may be forgetting is that we have some unfinished stages where ducking as a player action could be relevant to gameplay.
Beyond that, I've been reading this topic and I like this discussion, but I'm not convinced that we're looking at balance the right way. Remember that the controls for the characters are balanced for Single Player. That means that, to some degree, the characters are already set to be useful in some way for multiplayer.
Now, before going onto my proposal, I'm going to go out on a limb and voice what is probably an unpopular opinion on Race mode, but I am totally fine with it as is. As far as I am concerned, without a specific set of characteristics put into a stage and without specific variables on the characters tweaked for a specific set of checks and balances, it will be near impossible to balance characters out and there will almost always be a more efficient character to use on any given stage. Because of that, I think having people use FORCESKIN for race is just about the best option to ensure a level of fairness, because having as much variance as we do with character abilities just doesn't make for easy balancing, and that balancing would come at the cost of stage design. I don't think it's worth it there. Match and other combat modes are where the focus of this discussion should be.
Now, onto the real meat of this. We have characters with distinct abilities that lend themselves to some interesting styles of play. In order to have a topic regarding balance, I think it's important to at least abstractly define the roles of characters in the game. Given that, I would say that Sonic is fast and able to quickly get from one place to another with ease. Knuckles is slower, but has the ability to fire weapons more effectively than the others, making him more suited for close combat. Tails can fly and snipe from the air, giving him prowess in the sky.
So now we've loosely defined the characters and what they do. We also know that the characters are not balanced. Obviously, as otherwise we wouldn't be having this topic. I think it's safe to say that Sonic is currently the best. But why, exactly? Well, I would say that it simply means that Tails and Knuckles are not doing their jobs as effectively as Sonic. Which probably means that we need to work on that aspect of their gameplay, rather than look directly at stats and abilities.
So, to that end, I think we should be concerned with enabling Tails to be more effective from the sky. Well, to do that we really have to look at the issues with Tails being used in the first place. As established, Tails has some issues when he flies. Well, I can see why some people would take issue with that, but what if we were to take a second look at what flying actually
could do for Tails? While also giving him prime shots in a battle, it allows him to quickly escape melee combat and set himself up at a distance to do his thing. He doesn't need to be flying in order for flight to be useful as a mechanic. So we know the ability isn't the problem, as we have multiple applications for it. The problem, it would seem to me, is that he lacks the ability to use distance to his advantage. In fact, the further away, the more narrow his options in weapons become, eventually narrowing down all useful weapons to just the rail, and I think that's the problem. Rail takes a specific skillset to use, and eventually becomes Tails' only weapon, offering him no variety in gameplay. 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. Some ideas:
- Auto Ring: Increase speed of ring as it goes, making it hit a higher cap speed than Sonic or Knuckles get. This will allow Tails to adequately fire into an area from a distance. This allows him some forms of area denial and doesn't necessarily require total precision to hit, and doesn't need total luck either.
- Grenade Ring: This one is trickier because it's been overpowered before. But it might be a good idea to go back to using trigger on contact, and only on contact, specifically for Tails. In order to keep this fair, it might be wise to have it so you can only have, say, 5 grenades on the ground at a time, and can't fire more until at least one has been triggered. This would allow Tails to at least attempt to manipulate combat for his benefit.
- Bomb Ring: I'd suggest increasing the blast radius as the ring flies in the air. The longer it goes, the bigger the blast radius is, capping it at a certain radius, but one that is definitely bigger than Sonic or Knuckles. Maybe increase cooldown of fire as a counterbalance if necessary. Gives Tails a decent shot at getting some major points out of other players fighting out in the open.
- Rail Ring: This is already Tails' most potent option and I'm not certain it needs to change much, if at all. Maybe make the radius of the actual spray a little bigger, but I'm not sold that that's necessary.
- Bounce Ring: The issue here is that this is great for close combat, which Tails is pretty diametrically opposed to. In order to make it anything like useful in the air, we'd have to eliminate its vertical momentum for Tails when it hits ground. I don't know if this is a good idea though.
I think this is a good starting point for Tails. It strengthens his ability to fight aerially and he gets rewards for doing what he does best already.
So that brings us to Knuckles. We've already seen his boosts in action and I think they were a great benefit to him. They lend themselves to close-combat fights. But he also distinctly lacks Sonic's mobility and is sorely lacking in usability in comparison. The solution here is to make his existance a problem for Sonic. To that end, I think it might be worth considering making him hurt an opponent on touch. This would make close-combat really interesting for Knuckles, as he currently has few means of denying escape from combat for Sonic and Tails. With him causing pain, all of a sudden Sonic players can't just run by him, and Tails players are forced to react to his presence. In order to balance this out, it might be worth considering adding only 10 points per contact hit instead of 50. This would allow Knuckles to break close ties but would otherwise not be the only factor to him winning games. The obvious benefit here is that he has a new way to harm other players.
But there's another problem with this, and I think this needs to be addressed for general balance purposes regardless. The issue with the proposal for Knuckles is that obviously Knuckles is going to have a fantastic party running around snagging peoples' shit and obviously that's a big problem. But this isn't just a Knuckles balance issue anyways. People are rewarded for being lucky enough to be closest to a hit person, or otherwise can just snag all someone's shit right from under them and get ridiculous advantage beyond the point structure. Given what was described earlier, Tails suffers the most from this because of his aerial and distance tactics and that's just not fair at all.
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. This would keep Knuckles from going on ridiculous theft sprees and allow Tails at least a shot to reap some rewards for his kills, and would also give a hurt player a fair chance at recovery, while not taking away from the benefits the player who scored the hit would have of getting some loot out of the deal.
I think that might be enough to fix the balance issues, but these ideas would need significant testing. I think these are reasonable enough starting points in order to resolve the balance issues and I think this might be where the topic really needs to start heading.
