Why isn't Race a free and standard game mode?

[Antolin_Æverflow]

Hear me out. What if we kept the normal race mode we have now, BUT we also added another one that didnt have those rewards and whatever, just so we can spice the game up a bit.

The bigger criticism i have for the game is how 'slow' everything tends to feel at a certain point. Race mode has really put a fresh take on BTD6.

So, keep the current Race mode we have, with the time limit and cost and leaderboards.

But, adding some sort of 'no rewards' race where you compete with your own times on all the maps, is the idea i have in mind.

Ah whatever, the idea might be stupid, and i understand why hte devs made the race mode the way it is right now. just wanted to speak my mind about this

[NerdigerNerd]

Yup, Races as a mode, available for every map, always would be super cool idea

[DarkMatter]

Originally posted by YUBI YUBI:

Hear me out. What if we kept the normal race mode we have now, BUT we also added another one that didnt have those rewards and whatever, just so we can spice the game up a bit.

The bigger criticism i have for the game is how 'slow' everything tends to feel at a certain point. Race mode has really put a fresh take on BTD6.

So, keep the current Race mode we have, with the time limit and cost and leaderboards.

But, adding some sort of 'no rewards' race where you compete with your own times on all the maps, is the idea i have in mind.

Ah whatever, the idea might be stupid, and i understand why hte devs made the race mode the way it is right now. just wanted to speak my mind about this

:lunar2019piginablanket:

I like your idea, but this should be implemented on past races, not the current one.

Replaying old race seems fun and a fresh experience.

[PichuYang]

Originally posted by DarkMatter:

I like your idea, but this should be implemented on past races, not the current one.
Replaying old race seems fun and a fresh experience.

I only agree on implementing on old race.
Implementing this on new race will make it less challenging, due to how everyone can abuse free training after watching the footage on Youtube. This would not solve the issue of floating sea of Monkey Money and any reasons to replay old hard maps with different/better strategy.

Keep in mind that we have new Knowledge that reduce the cost of participation, and doing this "informal Race" mode should not count towards current "500 Race" Achievements.

[daikunshuu]

would be nice to have custom races in the challenge editor so we can practice.

[battlezoby]

I totally agree that free races would be pretty awesome, but I'm unfortinately not going to get my hopes up just yet.

Update: I wrote the following when a race wasn't live to check the duration.  Looks like they last 3 days rather than 5, although that might really mean 4 days with a "fencepost error."  Adjust the following math accordingly; maybe I'll edit it later myself.

I suspect that the races are a noticable source of the microtransaction revenue for Ninja Kiwi - it is a form of "planned obsolence" - a way to make the product worse so we pay to have something better. Actually, even if they don't represent a significant percentage of money Ninja Kiwi makes on BTD6, the money it does produce does help the individuals who thought-up and continue to impliment the races a chance to try to show NK that they're "earning their saleries."

The recent update has a Monkey Knowledge to reduce the cost of races by 10%. That "skill" costs not just 1-point of monkey knowledge, but also $1000 MM as well, so you need to spend $10,000 of MM entering races just to save the $1000 MM you spent (while still costing you the knowledge point.)

If someone uses up their Monkey Monkey on other things, buying $10,000 MM is about $14.97 full price, or around $10 on sale (I don't remember what the sale prices are.)

If you consider that the best race times are under 3-minutes, and that failed race attempts can fail even faster than that, serious racers can easily play 15 times or 20 times or even more per hour.

With people staying at home due to the pandemic, playing for 10 hours a day doesn't sound particularly ubsurd. As a "semi-extreme" case (but not the most extreme case) if a race last 5 days, that's 50 hours playtime... 50 hours times 20 tries per hour is 1000 tries per race. 1000 tries times 100 MM entry fee is $100,000 MM. That US $99.98 at full price or, I think, around $70 on sale.

That's $70 per race... obviously there are many races over the course of several months.

Keep in mind that people trying to compete for the top 100 places can go up or down the leaderboard by shaving just a fraction of one second off their time. Last time I checked, the difference between 1st and 2nd place was much less than one second.

I''m not saying or implying that many people do that or spend that, (so please don't respond to this to as if I was saying that,) but it should give a reasonable idea of why Ninja Kiwi might be motivated to keep this as a pay-to-play feature. I also know the Monkey Money can come easily to the casual player, and most people won't spend real money on Races. If you're not in the top 25% of racers, then the races will likely last for 8-10 minutes or more and be far less expensive per hour even in terms of your "free" Monkey Money.

But for people who might be addicted to the races, it could rack up a lot of money quickly.

As far as marketing, I'm not really sure why game providers want you to spend a lot of time playing their games, (since playing longer doesn't make them more money directly) but letting people race whenever they wanted could make the game more exciting for a while, but end up reducing the overall amount of time you play the game and move on to something else.

Given how interesting races are for every minute you play them, they could also make you more bored with primary content of the game. Conversely, free races would be "lower stakes" than the paid races, and might make them less exciting. As is, top racers seem to agree that the prizes for races are pretty lame so simply leaving the prizes on only the paid-races probably wouldn't be a big motivator for them to keep paying to race.

So, again, I totally agree that free races would be pretty awesome, but I'm not going to get my hopes up just yet.