Another issue i have realised is the computer's difficulty. I'm not entirely sure about the Wii's version, perhaps Thorn could enlighten us about this, but the DS version has numerous events in which you actions can be affected by the computer's actions. For example in Snowboard Cross a computer player may bump into you causing you to mess up your time. But it may also help you like, for instance, being in your opponent's slipstream and increasing your sprint gauge in Cross Country/Biathalon.
Have we met?Also I see Sonic the Fighters crying in the corner, and it's not because we've forgotten his localized name. Knuckles Chaotix and Sonic Battle are consoling him, as both Sonic Riders games and Sonic R cut themselves. The random attack patterns in bosses from newer games are causing no end of grief for...
...okay, that's getting out of hand. But there's *lots* of games where an AI opponent or a boss can screw you over by changing its movements, and we track those.
My suggestion would be to have it on the hardest difficulty due to me having all my stats on hard >.>, plus it makes competitors strive for faster and better times so they can win against the computer.
Whenever there's multiple ways to play, the usual rules here are to use default settings (as in Sonic the Fighters), or to allow anything (like in Sonic R). Forcing everybody to use the hardest rubber-band AI is essentially forcing everybody to randomly be pwned by items and overtaken. In hindsight, I should change the rules on "any settings" I'd established earlier for the Wii version, but I'm still torn over deliberately leaving out some lane configurations in Dream Curling just because the default setting plays a shorter game.
If you want to talk about difficulty, consider that you and Taillow both wanted Semifinals and Finals to be merged into one. I've generally found the second match to have more aggressive AI, although once you learn the event, you can still walk all over them and not notice the difference. I'm personally okay with merging them, though.
The score vs. score charts don't seem to be good :/
First off how would we rank them? Sort by Top Player score then to solve ties Opponent score?
* - These events have two teams playing simultaneously in a score competition. Theoretically score charts could be made based on margin of victory, but TSC's always been scared of charts where the player has to do basic subtraction to submit.
I'm unsure of how to work this myself, but it's not broken like Sonic Unleashed 360/PS3 Night scores, so it seems silly to throw four Wii events away before at least attempting to find a way to rank them. I am against just taking the player's score, though, since any idiot can play all offense and ignore defense.
Then there's the issue on how this would be added to the total charts (if there are any at all).
NO TOTALS - TIMES/SCORES ARE NOT PROPORTIONAL BETWEEN EVENTS
You could argue that scoring is rarely exactly the same between levels: I think only Sonic Rush Adventure has such a scoring system. But it's never differed quite like this. Time-wise, there are two events in the Wii version where the timer actually counts three or four times faster than normal to simulate a larger track without making you waggle your way down long straights. You've already mentioned that the AI can interfere drastically in some events and not at all in others. Score-wise, you could be the best Moguls player out there, but the fact that the score caps somewhere in the vicinity of 30 points means that somebody who's marginally better than you at Large Hill (which allows over 300 points) would take the Total chart with no effort.
