Cant believe I managed to dig up my MB info.
Anyways~
"By the looks of it V2 is being designed as a sequel and the Kart Krew seem to be making the game a lot more mechanically in depth"
Have you considered that maybe, JUST MAYBE, people like v1's simplicity, and don't want to worry about some random guy Team-Rocketing them off the map with Grow or Invincibility? One man's trash is another man's treasure, I guess.
I've definitely considered that, and it's a completely sensible reason to like V1 exactly as it is
Though it is true that we are trying to make the game more mechanically in-depth, we're at the same time well aware of this making the game tougher to get into and grasp, so conveyance ends up being a priority when we decide how to do a lot of SFX and VFX.
The reason we
want to make it more mechanically in-depth (other than enjoying more stuff at play ourselves) is because the V1 meta is very solved, and it rewards time-trial lines to an extreme degree. I'm sure a lot of people would be like "why shouldn't it?" and that makes sense, too, but I can definitely speak for all of 'krew when I say "We'd like it to lean a bit more in the direction of "How well can you read/outplay your opponents?" than "How optimal are your lines on this particular course?"
"Some mechanics might look off at first when we don't fully know how they'll work"
Don't you see an issue here? On the MB page, back when v2 was announced, we used to get infodumps on all of the new mechanics, with lots of preview gifs and tidbits. Now, it's hard to even get any info on tethering. I'm surprised nobody's thought about the fact that they might be hiding something really bad, or might not be as finished as they claim.
What have we claimed about how finished it is? I can't remember anything of the sort LOL (but I could be wrong? I remember some talk about bots being mostly finished, but that's rather limited)
I'm not sure what you mean about "hiding something really bad" lmfao -- like some crippling bugs or something? Yeah, we've had our fair share of those, sometimes they stick around for a while as other stuff gets worked on and eventually they get fixed. Additionally, we've shown gifs of a lot of really ridiculous imbalanced and unfair or awful stuff. We're not even hiding the broken stuff that happens in dev.
(First example: The God-Awful crooked recovery camera here, which was never intended to be final and is fixed as of now)
(Second example: The ridiculous extended airtime and recovery fuckery of this gif, which was never intended to be final and is also fixed as of now)
So yeah, I'm afraid I don't really understand your concern here, I think that's a really paranoid sounding idea.
"I'm sure they're had friends and such play testing to see what works and what doesn't."
Friends who likely have biases and other factors making them sugarcoat their real perceptions on the product. A public beta would be a proper solution to that problem, but I bet we won't see anything like that any goddamn time soon.
There's a lot of work that goes into a public beta, and a lot of disadvantages of publishing such a beta, especially when key anti-frustration features are still missing and maps need heavy amounts of direction/conveyance work. I genuinely am not trying to be patronizing here, so please don't take it that way, but a serious question: Have you considered the disadvantages of such a beta? You have to have a pretty specific mutual understanding with someone to get valuable conversation on work that's incomplete in significant ways.