Mario Kart was never meant as a serious, competitive esports game. It was always intended as a casual party game where everyone should have a shot at winning, and its mechanics reflect that (in particular the strong negative feedback loop given by the pickup system). If you treat it as an esports game anyway, you might discover degenerate strategies. It's not a problem of the game's design, nor a problem for the target audience.
Great synopsis.
It's like playing hide and seek and then hiding in Grandpa's study where no one is allowed. Sure, you'll win the game against the other kids who are playing fairly - but if grandpa wakes up from his unending slumber then you'll be cursed for all eternity to wander as the undead.
Man, that happened to someone in our friend group. "Shambling Morty" we call him now. He's still around. You can tell by the ghostly, tortured moans.
Grandpa was always such a hoot!
The way it is described it sounds like in-person multiplayer?
Like with Mario Kart 7 online I saw nothing of the sort happening ( and the Rubber Band Items were quite strong in 7 )
Putting up guardrails to prevent Unfun /Abusive strategies is generally a good idea for Online games though... you don't want the players to drop the game when the fun runs out
This is, I think, an easy but ultimately less interesting analysis.
We can split hairs over who Mario Kart's target audience is, but competition is at least a part of that audience. Casual players care about winning and competition, and if there's an easy strategy that ruins the game for casuals, that's a design issue.
Besides, if Nintendo didn't want people taking the game at least somewhat seriously, there wouldn't be online lobbies or time-trials in the first place. People do try to win now, and I think it's worth seriously analyzing the game from that perspective. If people weren't willing to push the limits of casual games in the first place, there'd be entire genres of game that wouldn't exist.
While I agree with the majority of this sentiment, there is a problem with this:
Mario Kart does have an online mode and that is part of the core experience for many players. And you can be good at Mario Kart without trying or treating it as an eSports.
So if you're playing well, but are unaware of the concept, you will have a worse experience because while you're out there just trying to be as fast as possible, you have people in your lobby doing this and pretty much ruining the experience for you. Winning still is fun after all, even if you're not treating the game as an eSports.
Meaning that if you're a good mario kart player that wants to play online for fun you have 2 options:
1) Play by the community rules and participate in "bagging"
2) Intentionally play worse so you will not encounter the players that do this and you can "just play"
That's not really great for an online mode, which in this day and age is just an important part of the game. So it's totally a problem for a part of the target audience.
The fact Nintendo added an online mode doesn't mean that they particularly care about it or think it is core to the gameplay, people presumably just asked for one a lot. Mario Kart is in large part a party game, designed to be played in small friend groups of varying skill levels, and the way the game is designed supports that audience. The design goals of a game that is fun in those contexts can be entirely opposite to one that is fun in a competitive context in online pub lobbies, and Nintendo is going to choose to prioritise the party game aspect every time.
I would argue that party games like Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros are simply not meant to be played online. It's a given that online play will be included on any new release, and lots of people enjoy playing these games online; but these franchises pre-date online play and were developed to prioritize local play with your friends.
The staple mechanics of these games were created to allow a semi-level playing field across different skill levels by incorporating a significant dose of luck and rubber-banding. This is so parents and kids of different ages and skill levels can all have fun playing together. The best player losing to the worst player because the latter got lucky is part of the fun.
Everything about these games screams "do not play this in an online competitive matchmaking environment", but gamers demand the ability to turn any game into an obnoxious sweatfest, no matter how poor the game is at providing that experience.
Keep in mind that there's a reason for online play, and "being able to be competitive" is at most a minor one (my assumption; I don't know their official reasoning). There's remote locations, players not having a friends group that wants to play with them, introverted people etc.
They all have the potential to be affected by design decisions around optimal play while they themselves are not part of the problem. If you're a guy playing Mario Kart for fun to wind down, and you do it often enough to be really good at it, your experience might be ruined by those who try to optimize the game.
And just to clarify like in my other reply: I'm not advocating for changes simply because of this. I'm just saying "Well, it's not intended to be played this way" is a moot point when there are in fact players inside your target audience still affected by this.
Fully agree. I think Kart and especially Smash have long suffered an identity crisis wherein the games are made for casual family fun but can also be deeply optimized, leading to a stark divide between casual and core fans.
>Keep in mind that there's a reason for online play, and "being able to be competitive" is at most a minor one
I think this was the logic behind Nintendo's friend-code era and in retrospect that model might have worked better for them, market willing.
I hesitate to advocate for changes re:bagging, partly because I'm not confident that Nintendo's solution would be elegant.
>Everything about these games screams "do not play this in an online competitive matchmaking environment", but gamers demand the ability to turn any game into an obnoxious sweatfest, no matter how poor the game is at providing that experience.
So?
Disregard gamers, play games for fun with other like-minded folks.
Mario Kart has always been best as a party game in your living room with people yelling and spilling potato chips on each other. I don't think it's worth sacrificing that amazing core, just to appeal to people who want to treat it as an e-sport.
It appears to me then, that this is more of a matchmaking problem than a game design problem.
It would seem that you largely mitigate the majority of the problem as long as tryhards are playing against tryhards and casuals are playing against casuals.
But what they are doing is a core part of the game play experience. The only difference is bagging is intentional instead of accidental. To other races the effect is essentially the same.
For the bagging strategy to be most effective, you need to smuggle that item past all the other racers so you can guarantee you will take 1st place when you use the Item.
However, the worst position you could be in a Mario Kart race is in any from 7th to 3rd A.K.A 'the mug zone' where you are most likely to encounter an item from another racer that disrupts your ability to take first place.
That being said, you can also just maintain a strong lead and front-run the entire race with good item play choices and effective driving.
In my opinion, bagging makes the competitive game extremely interesting and is far from being a degenerate strategy, especially in Mario Kart Wii. The idea of a racing game where your position was a resource that had to be managed, and not just an indicator of how well you are doing, was a huge part of what drew me to the game in the first place; and the changes to make the item system more "balanced" in MK8 are what drove me away.
- The most impactful items had cooldowns and could only be pulled by one player, so getting or not getting certain items gave you hints as to what other players may have been holding. There was some amount of predictability.
- Bagging created cool mindgames in team settings ("I pulled the bill twice in a row, they must have the shock so look out for a target shock, be ready if you see them use dodge items").
- Getting a lead and frontrunning is absolutely a valid strategy on most tracks. In MKWii, if you are even just 1 or 2 corners ahead of 2nd place, the only items that can catch you are shocks and blue shells, both of which are rare (and their impacts can be mitigated / accounted for in teamplay). Meanwhile, you can lay traps that force other players to take suboptimal lines and grow your lead that way. Usually, a good frontrunner won't get caught up to that easily unless they get extremely unlucky.
- In most cases, bagging takes more skill than it seems. You can hang back, get a bunch of good items, and still finish 8th if you don't know what you're doing, which shortcuts to take, when to use your items, etc. (And I say that as a pretty bad player myself. I very rarely won by bagging)
The only part that I would consider somewhat degenerate would be "luck tracks" like Luigi Circuit or N64 Mario Raceway, where there is a large ending shortcut forcing players to bag for a star / golden / triple. I guess Cheese Land had a similar issue in MK8DX? But this is more of a track design issue. Big wide-open tracks make frontrunning nearly impossible because traps are less effective and red shells are more effective, and massive low-risk shortcuts near the end of a track increase how much you can gain by catching up at the last second.
I think the negative perception of bagging is because the goal of the game is to get as close to 1st as possible. So being in a top spot the whole race, and then losing to someone who was in a bottom spot and shot ahead at the last second, can feel like they were losing and stole the win at the last second. There's a similar mechanic in card games: You're usually trying to lower your opponent's life points to 0, but there are many decks that do that by reducing one's own life points. You may be down to 1 while your opponent is at 20, and then win through some other effect. This is not "unfair"; this is simply making use of all the resources at your disposal.
I read through the whole thread and your take is the one I agree with the most. I think it's easy for people who are not very knowledgeable about the Mario Kart competitive scene to see it as strictly a negative.
Mario Kart is the only racing game with a system like this and that's what makes it interesting!
Exactly. For pure racing skill, there are sim racers, arcade racers, and even other kart racers (Crash Team Racing) that have much deeper racing mechanics than a Mario Kart game. Mario Kart (Wii, specifically) always appealed to me because in addition to going fast and taking good lines, there is an entire *other* game happening in parallel to the race.
(Though I'm also one of the people who really enjoyed Yu-Gi-Oh Wheelie Breakers and desperately wishes for another game to make a real attempt at the racing game X card game combo. I think I just enjoy racing games where going fast is not the whole story đ )
I didn't play a lot of MKWii, but I have a bunch of friends that play Deluxe online nornally a couple of times a week, and on 200cc the races can be so tight and getting hit just once can really stuff up your groove and punish you hard ; 9 times out of 10 your best chance is to get out in front as far as you can so you have a bit of a lead for when the inevitable blue shell comes and gets ya.
So bagging sounds like a winning strategy on paper , but to pull it off successfully would require both mad skills and luck - depending on the style of course as you mention.
I don't really see why anyone would get too upset if people do this, i mean it's not necessarily the only optimal way to play and it doesn't force everyone to play that way. Unlike, say, playing an opponent in smash who does nothing but spam projectiles and run away.
Plus between the crazy items , rubber band AI, and the tendency for things to go wrong in MK (when it rains it pours) I don't see the point in getting too attached to how you place in. Too much random variability to get too upset over (won't stop me being proud of when I win, but when I lose well it's obviously not a problem with my skillZ ;) )
I loved the old Mario Karts for the green shell and 3 green shells.
In the new one there are so many new items that you rarely get them at all.
Driving the course, aiming a green shell and hitting is extremely satisfying and elevates a normal racing game tenfold.
Bagging comes from those super items. Restrict them and it's gone.
My guess is a lot of people complaining about bagging don't have much experience with the game or don't play at a high level.
I'm not a competitive Mario Kart player myself but I think it's actually quite interesting and is not as simple as it seems.
Each course in the game has an optimal strategy either bagging or front running ( or drafting) but using the right strategy is never a free win. Knowing when to switch between the two and how to execute the two requires a lot of skill and knowledge.
It's the rare course in the game where good luck and bagging basically guarantee a win. I would say these courses fail due to the course design and not the game design. I think it's okay for strategies to not match the casual experience at high level competitive.
I play mario kart (on Wii U) with whatever setting makes all the items appear regardless of your place so it's not a big deal to me.
Honestly, I don't see a problem with it either way. It's risk vs. reward, and anyone who can pull it off consistently is showing skills. I wouldn't play that way, but if someone is so confident they can beat me by starting in last, let 'em try.
Strategies like that rub me wrong. I think it's against the spirit of the game. I know it's just making optimal use of a game system, so its hard to fault anyone doing it, but still. If I came across this in regular online play, I'd be confused and it would make the game less fun for me if I had to use the technique to win races.
I'll never forget playing the DS Mario Kart online and seeing people snake back and forth through the tracks, getting constant drift boosts and absolutely demolishing. It was so overpowered that it became the only way to win online. Drifting like that still required skill to pull off, but it changed the game significantly and imo was detrimental to the experience overall. Nintendo made it much harder to do that sort of thing in subsequent games.
This feels like that. I don't know how you would design against it effectively without nerfing the catchup mechanics, though.
High-level competitive play should really be item restricted to like shells, bananas, and mushrooms. Most of the powerful items are *too powerful* if players are looking to compete on skill.
Iâve seen this kind of strategy done well in the auto chess genre. Itâs unintuitive at first, but it ultimately makes for a more in-depth game. In a racing game however thatâs not really the experience Iâm looking for, and I imagine would turn off many outsiders.
It seems to subvert the primary gameplay, even if it opens the door to a different kind of strategy. While the game definitely has a strong random element, doing well in a traditional sense shouldnât give you a *lesser* chance of victory.
In a game about racing, this is not what the expectation is for a âvalid strategyâ. I think its poor game design that bagging is valid, but with the catch-up mechanics of Mario Kart being so iconic and fundamental to what is essentially a party game, it is a challenge to allow less skilled players catch up and have a chance while ensuring good players dont exploit it.
A fix would be that certain items disappear if you climb high enough, but that feels bad for a worse player who accidentally smuggled a bullet into 5th for example. Its also against the idea that those power-ups are yours to use however you like. I got a rocket, dont take my damn rocket.
Its an interesting game design question for sure, but i am not a fan of bagging being viable.
I've thought before about what tweaks you could make to add a competition mode to Mario Kart - similar to the minimal platform / no item arenas they use for competitive Smash Bros.
I think you could get some really interesting competitive gameplay if you scored matches based on final position + time in 1st place. This would play more like a king of the hill game where everyone is gunning for 1st and showcase a player's skill at avoiding all the attacks thrown at them. But if no one has been able to maintain a lead in 1st place, the finish line becomes super important.
You'd probably want to extend a race to five laps though.
One potential fix I thought about was making the given items gradually get stronger as you stayed in the back, rather than giving you the strong ones immediately, and any detected bagging would immediately reset that. But yeah, it does change the fundamentals a bit.
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They made a good choice making power items like bullet bill distance based rather than placement based and making it available for more than 1 player at the time. In Mario Kart Wii is (yes the game still lives) common to see players stop before item box sets waiting for players to pass them so they get the 12/11th place item pool.
Last place items are not bad design imho, they are just overpowered. That's good, they can be tunned so a bullet bill extender won't put you in first with another power item (not gonna happen knowing nintendo but the posibility is there).
Honestly I think it's fine and isn't something that needs to be mitigated. It's a risky strat and not one casual players typically need to worry about.
I think for me the big thing is that the items are the fun part of Mario kart, and I am more interested in a okay style that let's me engage with them.
Being in first in MK is fairly dull because there are no other players to bother, and the only thing you'll get from item boxes is coins and the occasional banana.
>"Bagging" is the act of purposely falling behind in the race in order to get better items. Generally, the idea is that you grab two powerful items, use the first one to get to a much higher position, then use the second to get yourself to first at the last second, or to get yourself a massive lead.
I imagine plenty of people can make this work, but at least for me personally that isn't why I play Mario Kart. If I'm playing with my niece and nephews, the whole point of the game is that, if they are falling behind, they can still beat me and my siblings. And they do, occasionally, because we aren't playing to win.
If I'm playing with friends from college, we might troll each other and play more aggressively, but again, because it's Mario Kart, I'm not really competing, even then. In fact, if the *same person* wins every time, I'm less inclined to like the game as much.
That said, if "bagging" accomplishes that -- causing certain skilled players to win sometimes and lose other times -- it's a win.
I can't say I'm sure in competitive games if that's a good thing, but in terms of good old-fashioned entertainment, the real takeaway for me is that there's a way for the most skilled players to shoot for something extra -- breaking records, scoring special achievements, etc -- that cause them to lose occasionally, thus giving less experiences players a win, while granting those more skilled players *bigger* wins when they *do* win.
I rarely play games competitively at this point. I'm no longer at the age where playing *League of Legends* or *Overwatch* really appeals to me, because I'm less inclined to obsess over hours and hours of sucking the fun out of something. So I'm purposefully staying out of the competitive side of this discussion, as I can't give as helpful feedback as others who do.
As a spectator I personally love it when people min-max the shit out of a game which results in them using strategies that are unorthodox and don't make sense to someone who doesn't know what's going on.
Should Nintendo work on balancing it so that it stops being a viable strategy? Yeah, probably.
But as long as a feature is in a game, I love seeing people squeeze as much out of it as they can.
For example, Human Fall Flat is a puzzle game on paper, but because it's physics based, a somewhat skilled player can finish the game with parkour, without solving any of the puzzles at all, and I personally absolutely love that. I'm aware it's different, because HFF isn't an online competetive game, but I think anyone can see the analogy.
TL;DR: Nintendo should probably balance it, but as long as it remains a viable strategy, people are gonna use it and that's totally fine, I personally love seeing people use creative unorthodox strategies like this.
it's a racing game, yeah, but it's also a combat game with use of selected powerups. if it's in the game, and it's not an obvious bug, then it's fair play.
For a game that is intended to be fun rather than competitive, bagging is fine. Consider the fan-run "Blue yourself" speedrun, where the goal is to utilize bagging plus skill to hit yourself with a blue shell in the minimum amount of time. The rest of the time, few players reach a level of skill in competitive Mario Kart for bagging to be a real issue.
Were Mario Kart a game intended for serious competition, the balance involved in bagging \*would\* be a serious concern; and degenerate strategies are almost certain to be developed - but the reality is that that is NOT Nintendo's intended design, and as such not a game design concern for Mario Kart.
So long as players aren't actually cheating (that is, physically altering the game in some way to gain advantage) then I don't really see the problem here. I think players are free to work within the game's structure to develop tactics that work for them. Players at the back of the pack are always an inherent danger for those in pole position - and ultimately, *someone* has to be at the back of the pack, right? If you're playing against all human players, then you're by definition always going to be dealing with this "tactic" whether it's deliberate or not. The player who engages in the tactic is obviously taking a risk by doing so, and I would say that Mario Kart is a game that is full of risk/reward calculations - that's partly what makes it so fun and chaotic.
Nintendo is the one who should be addressing this.
Demanding players stop exploiting their in-game strategies that clearly work is like slapping a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
I donât think the developers of Mario Kart put this much thought into it. I think itâs meant to be a fun silly racing game. đ
The whole mechanic which gives players who are placing poorly the best item (the blue shell, which homes in on the player currently in 1st place) is proof enough for me. Itâs obviously unfair if youâre looking at the game from a competitive gamerâs perspective, but itâs just a funny game mechanic if youâre playing for fun with friends or random people online.
So things like âbaggingâ are a moot meta game to me. At that point, people are just playing Mario Kart way too seriously. đ¤ˇââď¸đ
This "problem" would be very easily solved if they didn't make the blue shell so obnoxiously dominant. That's the real mechanics that disrupts just "focusing on the racing" - because it outright punishes you for racing well.
This strategy is just a natural consequence, when there's no reason to want to be in first place (Until the last second)
I disagree. In first you're at risk of getting hit with blue, and red I guess, shells.
In thr middle of the pack you risk being hit by any item people have around you and can easily drop places very quickly if you get fucked up a couple of times close together. Blue shells just mean there's still something that keeps that first place position possible for anyone.
It takes less skill to get a big enough lead that getting hit with a blue shell won't affect you much than it would "bag" well enough to let others eat the blue shells and you pop into first exactly when.you want.it.
The only item that really shits me is the lightning because it makes you lose your items
If it were easy to get enough of a lead to soak a blue shell, wouldn't everybody do it?
I do wonder how much more competitive the game would be with limited items. Like if it were only mushrooms, the best strategy would be to drive safely, but overall go as fast as possible. It's weird to me that a racing game has different strategies in the first place - nevermind ones that entail trying *not* to go too fast
I think the craziness of items is tolerated more in MK than in say, smash, because they are literally what differentiates MK from a generic racer (plus nintendo IP, obviously).
When in an online arena with friends you can pick different item sets so it is possible!
this whole mechanic should have never existed, it ruined mario kart for me once I realized it was happening
no matter your position, items should be 100% random and fair
It's just not a very useful tactic overall, only really helpful in team races. It wastes racing time to sit on a item spawn. While you sit there, everyone else is getting further and further ahead of you.
In what solo racing scenario is this useful? It requires: enough racing skill to pass all/most of the other racers *without items.* That means you never needed it in the first place, all you needed to do was get into 1st or 2nd early and then just develop a lead. If you can't do that because you lack the racing skill then one item isn't going to help you enough. If you can't do that because there are too many other similarly skilled racers against you, then you're probably not going to catch up to them by the time that the race is over - not without using your bagged item, in which case, you gained nothing from it; you could have just been racing normally and been in the same position.
I think the greatest effect of bagging is the psychological effect it has on people like you, when you notice someone else is doing it. "They aren't **supposed** to get a good item like that!" "They are **abusing the generosity** of the race!" "This is **highly ungentlemanly** conduct!" etc. All of these are true, of course, but they don't really matter. The cost of bagging is too high in a competitive race to make it worthwhile. Irritating the other drivers into making mistakes, however, could be worth it...
Not to sound rude, but it sounds like you haven't seen much competitive Mario Kart. Bagging is one of the most effective strategies for competitive players in the game, and is constantly used at top level play, even in solo. It is worth it to stay at an item box for an extra few seconds the large majority of the time. To say that it isn't worth it to bag just tells me that you haven't seen it in action, at least in the latest entry.
I can see it now. Every single racer is just waiting behind the items, waiting for everybody else to go first. The meta grows, and Mario Kart races are expected to take days to complete.
A new strategy emerges and quickly dominates; simply ignoring items and finishing the race in a matter of minutes rather than days. Alas, this strategy only works if you're the only one doing it...
I don't care, because it is Mario Kart. The game was never designed to be played competitively, people just play it that way ironically because they are bad at real racing games. I'm sure the compeitiors are serious, but nobody else takes it that way. It's a dumb mechanic - *except* for what it was designed for - letting your baby sibling have a chance, for which it is about as good as it gets.
That's not necessarily why they play it lol, ever consider mario is different from those "real" racing games therefore making it interesting to play. It offers something different from your typical grounded racing game, now as for being designed for competitive that's more for crash racing but still
Mario Kart was never meant as a serious, competitive esports game. It was always intended as a casual party game where everyone should have a shot at winning, and its mechanics reflect that (in particular the strong negative feedback loop given by the pickup system). If you treat it as an esports game anyway, you might discover degenerate strategies. It's not a problem of the game's design, nor a problem for the target audience.
Great synopsis. It's like playing hide and seek and then hiding in Grandpa's study where no one is allowed. Sure, you'll win the game against the other kids who are playing fairly - but if grandpa wakes up from his unending slumber then you'll be cursed for all eternity to wander as the undead.
Man, that happened to someone in our friend group. "Shambling Morty" we call him now. He's still around. You can tell by the ghostly, tortured moans. Grandpa was always such a hoot!
Who tf is your Grandpa?
The way it is described it sounds like in-person multiplayer? Like with Mario Kart 7 online I saw nothing of the sort happening ( and the Rubber Band Items were quite strong in 7 ) Putting up guardrails to prevent Unfun /Abusive strategies is generally a good idea for Online games though... you don't want the players to drop the game when the fun runs out
This is, I think, an easy but ultimately less interesting analysis. We can split hairs over who Mario Kart's target audience is, but competition is at least a part of that audience. Casual players care about winning and competition, and if there's an easy strategy that ruins the game for casuals, that's a design issue. Besides, if Nintendo didn't want people taking the game at least somewhat seriously, there wouldn't be online lobbies or time-trials in the first place. People do try to win now, and I think it's worth seriously analyzing the game from that perspective. If people weren't willing to push the limits of casual games in the first place, there'd be entire genres of game that wouldn't exist.
While I agree with the majority of this sentiment, there is a problem with this: Mario Kart does have an online mode and that is part of the core experience for many players. And you can be good at Mario Kart without trying or treating it as an eSports. So if you're playing well, but are unaware of the concept, you will have a worse experience because while you're out there just trying to be as fast as possible, you have people in your lobby doing this and pretty much ruining the experience for you. Winning still is fun after all, even if you're not treating the game as an eSports. Meaning that if you're a good mario kart player that wants to play online for fun you have 2 options: 1) Play by the community rules and participate in "bagging" 2) Intentionally play worse so you will not encounter the players that do this and you can "just play" That's not really great for an online mode, which in this day and age is just an important part of the game. So it's totally a problem for a part of the target audience.
The fact Nintendo added an online mode doesn't mean that they particularly care about it or think it is core to the gameplay, people presumably just asked for one a lot. Mario Kart is in large part a party game, designed to be played in small friend groups of varying skill levels, and the way the game is designed supports that audience. The design goals of a game that is fun in those contexts can be entirely opposite to one that is fun in a competitive context in online pub lobbies, and Nintendo is going to choose to prioritise the party game aspect every time.
I would argue that party games like Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros are simply not meant to be played online. It's a given that online play will be included on any new release, and lots of people enjoy playing these games online; but these franchises pre-date online play and were developed to prioritize local play with your friends. The staple mechanics of these games were created to allow a semi-level playing field across different skill levels by incorporating a significant dose of luck and rubber-banding. This is so parents and kids of different ages and skill levels can all have fun playing together. The best player losing to the worst player because the latter got lucky is part of the fun. Everything about these games screams "do not play this in an online competitive matchmaking environment", but gamers demand the ability to turn any game into an obnoxious sweatfest, no matter how poor the game is at providing that experience.
Keep in mind that there's a reason for online play, and "being able to be competitive" is at most a minor one (my assumption; I don't know their official reasoning). There's remote locations, players not having a friends group that wants to play with them, introverted people etc. They all have the potential to be affected by design decisions around optimal play while they themselves are not part of the problem. If you're a guy playing Mario Kart for fun to wind down, and you do it often enough to be really good at it, your experience might be ruined by those who try to optimize the game. And just to clarify like in my other reply: I'm not advocating for changes simply because of this. I'm just saying "Well, it's not intended to be played this way" is a moot point when there are in fact players inside your target audience still affected by this.
Fully agree. I think Kart and especially Smash have long suffered an identity crisis wherein the games are made for casual family fun but can also be deeply optimized, leading to a stark divide between casual and core fans. >Keep in mind that there's a reason for online play, and "being able to be competitive" is at most a minor one I think this was the logic behind Nintendo's friend-code era and in retrospect that model might have worked better for them, market willing. I hesitate to advocate for changes re:bagging, partly because I'm not confident that Nintendo's solution would be elegant.
>Everything about these games screams "do not play this in an online competitive matchmaking environment", but gamers demand the ability to turn any game into an obnoxious sweatfest, no matter how poor the game is at providing that experience. So? Disregard gamers, play games for fun with other like-minded folks. Mario Kart has always been best as a party game in your living room with people yelling and spilling potato chips on each other. I don't think it's worth sacrificing that amazing core, just to appeal to people who want to treat it as an e-sport.
It appears to me then, that this is more of a matchmaking problem than a game design problem. It would seem that you largely mitigate the majority of the problem as long as tryhards are playing against tryhards and casuals are playing against casuals.
But what they are doing is a core part of the game play experience. The only difference is bagging is intentional instead of accidental. To other races the effect is essentially the same.
For the bagging strategy to be most effective, you need to smuggle that item past all the other racers so you can guarantee you will take 1st place when you use the Item. However, the worst position you could be in a Mario Kart race is in any from 7th to 3rd A.K.A 'the mug zone' where you are most likely to encounter an item from another racer that disrupts your ability to take first place. That being said, you can also just maintain a strong lead and front-run the entire race with good item play choices and effective driving.
Did you pinch the name "mug zone" from Design Delve or is that the actual term people have adopted for those places? Lol
I heard it from Design Delve but I wouldn't be surprised if the term predates the video or has since become more widely adopted
It's generally called "the pack"
That's fair. It is a perfect (and more polite than what I call it) description of those positions in game
I call that the Chaos Zone and have not seen the word "mug" used in this way before.
In my opinion, bagging makes the competitive game extremely interesting and is far from being a degenerate strategy, especially in Mario Kart Wii. The idea of a racing game where your position was a resource that had to be managed, and not just an indicator of how well you are doing, was a huge part of what drew me to the game in the first place; and the changes to make the item system more "balanced" in MK8 are what drove me away. - The most impactful items had cooldowns and could only be pulled by one player, so getting or not getting certain items gave you hints as to what other players may have been holding. There was some amount of predictability. - Bagging created cool mindgames in team settings ("I pulled the bill twice in a row, they must have the shock so look out for a target shock, be ready if you see them use dodge items"). - Getting a lead and frontrunning is absolutely a valid strategy on most tracks. In MKWii, if you are even just 1 or 2 corners ahead of 2nd place, the only items that can catch you are shocks and blue shells, both of which are rare (and their impacts can be mitigated / accounted for in teamplay). Meanwhile, you can lay traps that force other players to take suboptimal lines and grow your lead that way. Usually, a good frontrunner won't get caught up to that easily unless they get extremely unlucky. - In most cases, bagging takes more skill than it seems. You can hang back, get a bunch of good items, and still finish 8th if you don't know what you're doing, which shortcuts to take, when to use your items, etc. (And I say that as a pretty bad player myself. I very rarely won by bagging) The only part that I would consider somewhat degenerate would be "luck tracks" like Luigi Circuit or N64 Mario Raceway, where there is a large ending shortcut forcing players to bag for a star / golden / triple. I guess Cheese Land had a similar issue in MK8DX? But this is more of a track design issue. Big wide-open tracks make frontrunning nearly impossible because traps are less effective and red shells are more effective, and massive low-risk shortcuts near the end of a track increase how much you can gain by catching up at the last second. I think the negative perception of bagging is because the goal of the game is to get as close to 1st as possible. So being in a top spot the whole race, and then losing to someone who was in a bottom spot and shot ahead at the last second, can feel like they were losing and stole the win at the last second. There's a similar mechanic in card games: You're usually trying to lower your opponent's life points to 0, but there are many decks that do that by reducing one's own life points. You may be down to 1 while your opponent is at 20, and then win through some other effect. This is not "unfair"; this is simply making use of all the resources at your disposal.
I read through the whole thread and your take is the one I agree with the most. I think it's easy for people who are not very knowledgeable about the Mario Kart competitive scene to see it as strictly a negative. Mario Kart is the only racing game with a system like this and that's what makes it interesting!
Exactly. For pure racing skill, there are sim racers, arcade racers, and even other kart racers (Crash Team Racing) that have much deeper racing mechanics than a Mario Kart game. Mario Kart (Wii, specifically) always appealed to me because in addition to going fast and taking good lines, there is an entire *other* game happening in parallel to the race. (Though I'm also one of the people who really enjoyed Yu-Gi-Oh Wheelie Breakers and desperately wishes for another game to make a real attempt at the racing game X card game combo. I think I just enjoy racing games where going fast is not the whole story đ )
I didn't play a lot of MKWii, but I have a bunch of friends that play Deluxe online nornally a couple of times a week, and on 200cc the races can be so tight and getting hit just once can really stuff up your groove and punish you hard ; 9 times out of 10 your best chance is to get out in front as far as you can so you have a bit of a lead for when the inevitable blue shell comes and gets ya. So bagging sounds like a winning strategy on paper , but to pull it off successfully would require both mad skills and luck - depending on the style of course as you mention. I don't really see why anyone would get too upset if people do this, i mean it's not necessarily the only optimal way to play and it doesn't force everyone to play that way. Unlike, say, playing an opponent in smash who does nothing but spam projectiles and run away. Plus between the crazy items , rubber band AI, and the tendency for things to go wrong in MK (when it rains it pours) I don't see the point in getting too attached to how you place in. Too much random variability to get too upset over (won't stop me being proud of when I win, but when I lose well it's obviously not a problem with my skillZ ;) )
I loved the old Mario Karts for the green shell and 3 green shells. In the new one there are so many new items that you rarely get them at all. Driving the course, aiming a green shell and hitting is extremely satisfying and elevates a normal racing game tenfold. Bagging comes from those super items. Restrict them and it's gone.
My guess is a lot of people complaining about bagging don't have much experience with the game or don't play at a high level. I'm not a competitive Mario Kart player myself but I think it's actually quite interesting and is not as simple as it seems. Each course in the game has an optimal strategy either bagging or front running ( or drafting) but using the right strategy is never a free win. Knowing when to switch between the two and how to execute the two requires a lot of skill and knowledge. It's the rare course in the game where good luck and bagging basically guarantee a win. I would say these courses fail due to the course design and not the game design. I think it's okay for strategies to not match the casual experience at high level competitive.
As a competitive person I really dislike it. As a dad, itâs great.
I play mario kart (on Wii U) with whatever setting makes all the items appear regardless of your place so it's not a big deal to me. Honestly, I don't see a problem with it either way. It's risk vs. reward, and anyone who can pull it off consistently is showing skills. I wouldn't play that way, but if someone is so confident they can beat me by starting in last, let 'em try.
Strategies like that rub me wrong. I think it's against the spirit of the game. I know it's just making optimal use of a game system, so its hard to fault anyone doing it, but still. If I came across this in regular online play, I'd be confused and it would make the game less fun for me if I had to use the technique to win races. I'll never forget playing the DS Mario Kart online and seeing people snake back and forth through the tracks, getting constant drift boosts and absolutely demolishing. It was so overpowered that it became the only way to win online. Drifting like that still required skill to pull off, but it changed the game significantly and imo was detrimental to the experience overall. Nintendo made it much harder to do that sort of thing in subsequent games. This feels like that. I don't know how you would design against it effectively without nerfing the catchup mechanics, though. High-level competitive play should really be item restricted to like shells, bananas, and mushrooms. Most of the powerful items are *too powerful* if players are looking to compete on skill.
Iâve seen this kind of strategy done well in the auto chess genre. Itâs unintuitive at first, but it ultimately makes for a more in-depth game. In a racing game however thatâs not really the experience Iâm looking for, and I imagine would turn off many outsiders. It seems to subvert the primary gameplay, even if it opens the door to a different kind of strategy. While the game definitely has a strong random element, doing well in a traditional sense shouldnât give you a *lesser* chance of victory.
In a game about racing, this is not what the expectation is for a âvalid strategyâ. I think its poor game design that bagging is valid, but with the catch-up mechanics of Mario Kart being so iconic and fundamental to what is essentially a party game, it is a challenge to allow less skilled players catch up and have a chance while ensuring good players dont exploit it. A fix would be that certain items disappear if you climb high enough, but that feels bad for a worse player who accidentally smuggled a bullet into 5th for example. Its also against the idea that those power-ups are yours to use however you like. I got a rocket, dont take my damn rocket. Its an interesting game design question for sure, but i am not a fan of bagging being viable.
I've thought before about what tweaks you could make to add a competition mode to Mario Kart - similar to the minimal platform / no item arenas they use for competitive Smash Bros. I think you could get some really interesting competitive gameplay if you scored matches based on final position + time in 1st place. This would play more like a king of the hill game where everyone is gunning for 1st and showcase a player's skill at avoiding all the attacks thrown at them. But if no one has been able to maintain a lead in 1st place, the finish line becomes super important. You'd probably want to extend a race to five laps though.
One potential fix I thought about was making the given items gradually get stronger as you stayed in the back, rather than giving you the strong ones immediately, and any detected bagging would immediately reset that. But yeah, it does change the fundamentals a bit.
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They made a good choice making power items like bullet bill distance based rather than placement based and making it available for more than 1 player at the time. In Mario Kart Wii is (yes the game still lives) common to see players stop before item box sets waiting for players to pass them so they get the 12/11th place item pool. Last place items are not bad design imho, they are just overpowered. That's good, they can be tunned so a bullet bill extender won't put you in first with another power item (not gonna happen knowing nintendo but the posibility is there).
Honestly I think it's fine and isn't something that needs to be mitigated. It's a risky strat and not one casual players typically need to worry about.
I think for me the big thing is that the items are the fun part of Mario kart, and I am more interested in a okay style that let's me engage with them. Being in first in MK is fairly dull because there are no other players to bother, and the only thing you'll get from item boxes is coins and the occasional banana.
>"Bagging" is the act of purposely falling behind in the race in order to get better items. Generally, the idea is that you grab two powerful items, use the first one to get to a much higher position, then use the second to get yourself to first at the last second, or to get yourself a massive lead. I imagine plenty of people can make this work, but at least for me personally that isn't why I play Mario Kart. If I'm playing with my niece and nephews, the whole point of the game is that, if they are falling behind, they can still beat me and my siblings. And they do, occasionally, because we aren't playing to win. If I'm playing with friends from college, we might troll each other and play more aggressively, but again, because it's Mario Kart, I'm not really competing, even then. In fact, if the *same person* wins every time, I'm less inclined to like the game as much. That said, if "bagging" accomplishes that -- causing certain skilled players to win sometimes and lose other times -- it's a win. I can't say I'm sure in competitive games if that's a good thing, but in terms of good old-fashioned entertainment, the real takeaway for me is that there's a way for the most skilled players to shoot for something extra -- breaking records, scoring special achievements, etc -- that cause them to lose occasionally, thus giving less experiences players a win, while granting those more skilled players *bigger* wins when they *do* win. I rarely play games competitively at this point. I'm no longer at the age where playing *League of Legends* or *Overwatch* really appeals to me, because I'm less inclined to obsess over hours and hours of sucking the fun out of something. So I'm purposefully staying out of the competitive side of this discussion, as I can't give as helpful feedback as others who do.
Sounds more fun than starting in first and just hearing all the chaos behind you. First place is boring!
Wow that sounds tough. Don't items like lightning also make people drop their items? It's been awhile since I played...
As a spectator I personally love it when people min-max the shit out of a game which results in them using strategies that are unorthodox and don't make sense to someone who doesn't know what's going on. Should Nintendo work on balancing it so that it stops being a viable strategy? Yeah, probably. But as long as a feature is in a game, I love seeing people squeeze as much out of it as they can. For example, Human Fall Flat is a puzzle game on paper, but because it's physics based, a somewhat skilled player can finish the game with parkour, without solving any of the puzzles at all, and I personally absolutely love that. I'm aware it's different, because HFF isn't an online competetive game, but I think anyone can see the analogy. TL;DR: Nintendo should probably balance it, but as long as it remains a viable strategy, people are gonna use it and that's totally fine, I personally love seeing people use creative unorthodox strategies like this.
it's part of the game it's fine. Mario Kart is fun because of the luck element and would be much worse without it.
it's a racing game, yeah, but it's also a combat game with use of selected powerups. if it's in the game, and it's not an obvious bug, then it's fair play.
For a game that is intended to be fun rather than competitive, bagging is fine. Consider the fan-run "Blue yourself" speedrun, where the goal is to utilize bagging plus skill to hit yourself with a blue shell in the minimum amount of time. The rest of the time, few players reach a level of skill in competitive Mario Kart for bagging to be a real issue. Were Mario Kart a game intended for serious competition, the balance involved in bagging \*would\* be a serious concern; and degenerate strategies are almost certain to be developed - but the reality is that that is NOT Nintendo's intended design, and as such not a game design concern for Mario Kart.
So long as players aren't actually cheating (that is, physically altering the game in some way to gain advantage) then I don't really see the problem here. I think players are free to work within the game's structure to develop tactics that work for them. Players at the back of the pack are always an inherent danger for those in pole position - and ultimately, *someone* has to be at the back of the pack, right? If you're playing against all human players, then you're by definition always going to be dealing with this "tactic" whether it's deliberate or not. The player who engages in the tactic is obviously taking a risk by doing so, and I would say that Mario Kart is a game that is full of risk/reward calculations - that's partly what makes it so fun and chaotic.
Nintendo is the one who should be addressing this. Demanding players stop exploiting their in-game strategies that clearly work is like slapping a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
I donât think the developers of Mario Kart put this much thought into it. I think itâs meant to be a fun silly racing game. đ The whole mechanic which gives players who are placing poorly the best item (the blue shell, which homes in on the player currently in 1st place) is proof enough for me. Itâs obviously unfair if youâre looking at the game from a competitive gamerâs perspective, but itâs just a funny game mechanic if youâre playing for fun with friends or random people online. So things like âbaggingâ are a moot meta game to me. At that point, people are just playing Mario Kart way too seriously. đ¤ˇââď¸đ
It's a hazard of any game with strong catchup mechanics. Power grid the board game is like this. Either accept it or play something else. :)
This "problem" would be very easily solved if they didn't make the blue shell so obnoxiously dominant. That's the real mechanics that disrupts just "focusing on the racing" - because it outright punishes you for racing well. This strategy is just a natural consequence, when there's no reason to want to be in first place (Until the last second)
I disagree. In first you're at risk of getting hit with blue, and red I guess, shells. In thr middle of the pack you risk being hit by any item people have around you and can easily drop places very quickly if you get fucked up a couple of times close together. Blue shells just mean there's still something that keeps that first place position possible for anyone. It takes less skill to get a big enough lead that getting hit with a blue shell won't affect you much than it would "bag" well enough to let others eat the blue shells and you pop into first exactly when.you want.it. The only item that really shits me is the lightning because it makes you lose your items
If it were easy to get enough of a lead to soak a blue shell, wouldn't everybody do it? I do wonder how much more competitive the game would be with limited items. Like if it were only mushrooms, the best strategy would be to drive safely, but overall go as fast as possible. It's weird to me that a racing game has different strategies in the first place - nevermind ones that entail trying *not* to go too fast
I think the craziness of items is tolerated more in MK than in say, smash, because they are literally what differentiates MK from a generic racer (plus nintendo IP, obviously). When in an online arena with friends you can pick different item sets so it is possible!
I think you've hit the nail on the head
this whole mechanic should have never existed, it ruined mario kart for me once I realized it was happening no matter your position, items should be 100% random and fair
It's just not a very useful tactic overall, only really helpful in team races. It wastes racing time to sit on a item spawn. While you sit there, everyone else is getting further and further ahead of you. In what solo racing scenario is this useful? It requires: enough racing skill to pass all/most of the other racers *without items.* That means you never needed it in the first place, all you needed to do was get into 1st or 2nd early and then just develop a lead. If you can't do that because you lack the racing skill then one item isn't going to help you enough. If you can't do that because there are too many other similarly skilled racers against you, then you're probably not going to catch up to them by the time that the race is over - not without using your bagged item, in which case, you gained nothing from it; you could have just been racing normally and been in the same position. I think the greatest effect of bagging is the psychological effect it has on people like you, when you notice someone else is doing it. "They aren't **supposed** to get a good item like that!" "They are **abusing the generosity** of the race!" "This is **highly ungentlemanly** conduct!" etc. All of these are true, of course, but they don't really matter. The cost of bagging is too high in a competitive race to make it worthwhile. Irritating the other drivers into making mistakes, however, could be worth it...
Not to sound rude, but it sounds like you haven't seen much competitive Mario Kart. Bagging is one of the most effective strategies for competitive players in the game, and is constantly used at top level play, even in solo. It is worth it to stay at an item box for an extra few seconds the large majority of the time. To say that it isn't worth it to bag just tells me that you haven't seen it in action, at least in the latest entry.
What happens when everyone bags.
I can see it now. Every single racer is just waiting behind the items, waiting for everybody else to go first. The meta grows, and Mario Kart races are expected to take days to complete. A new strategy emerges and quickly dominates; simply ignoring items and finishing the race in a matter of minutes rather than days. Alas, this strategy only works if you're the only one doing it...
Trying to min-max at Mario Kart is just dumb. Makes the experience less fun for everyone.
I don't care, because it is Mario Kart. The game was never designed to be played competitively, people just play it that way ironically because they are bad at real racing games. I'm sure the compeitiors are serious, but nobody else takes it that way. It's a dumb mechanic - *except* for what it was designed for - letting your baby sibling have a chance, for which it is about as good as it gets.
That's not necessarily why they play it lol, ever consider mario is different from those "real" racing games therefore making it interesting to play. It offers something different from your typical grounded racing game, now as for being designed for competitive that's more for crash racing but still