@ubi-froggard Hello, can you please also reset the progress for my account?

I played it during the free test week before the release but I just rushed through the intro missions without reading anything because I wanted to use the 4 hours to try to qualify for the top 10 mass race challenge.
Therefore I would now also like to enjoy the introductions at the beginning that I kind of missed before due to the time pressure.

@phumelelesjose I absolutely agreed to the points you made there. Ubisoft really needs to fix some things here. The top five are usually all players with 900 equipment. They don't win because of skill but because they grinded their way to the superior equipment.

@edward4562022 A little chaos would be ok but the frustrating bit is when you get smacked around so much that you are thrown out of the track and miss checkpoints because of that and need to backtrack. Those collisions where you are smacked 15 meters to the side are just too random and not fun at all - even when the focus is not winning but having a nice and fun race.

I love the new warrior mass race!

I'm just writing to give you some positive feedback for this week's new special mass races.

As a frequent RR player I really love them. They add much more challenge to the races because everyone has the same gear (which you should have much more often in mass races)!
I also like the fact that you added the rocket skies to a quite tricky part of the race which let's you decide if you want to take the risk of activating the rocket in order to overtake someone which might also throw you off track - love it!

So congrats to the team for this week's special mass races! Keep up the good work!

Any news here?

Compliments to the new warrior mass race mode.
It's a lot of fun and adds a lot more exciteness to the map.
I'm at a level where one knows the tracks by heart and this new mode makes the races exciting again. Especially because perfect runs are now much harder.
I love it!

Please bring more tracks with the new obstacles, not just this one in Teton.

Keep up the good work!

I love the new warrior mass race!

There is a bug with how the game stores the equipped gear.
The equipped gear is used in the mass races. Therefore I set all my 900 gear as "equipped".

But sometimes I play with friends that are still new to the game.
So when I play with them online in a VS game I select some of my worst equipment (like 150) to keep the game fair.

The problem now is that this overwrites what I chose as "equipped gear". Meaning that if I play a mass race later on I all of a sudden start with my 150 gear instead of my elite 900 gear.
This obviously makes no sense and is either a bug in the game or a faulty design that needs to be fixed.

It's also an easy fix:
When you choose your equipment in the pause menu under the " select gear" submenu, it is marked as equipped (there it even says "equip" - so there it makes sense) and will be used for mass races or when you change the sport in free roam.
But when you choose a specific equipment at the start of an event this should NOT overwrite the equipped gear that you have for the rest of the game. It should only be for this one event.

This logic is much more plausible and you don't accidentally use really bad gear in mass races (which you cannot change anymore once the first race has started).
So please fix this. Because I don't want to visit the "select gear" menu after every time when I play with friends.

@edward4562022 A little chaos would be ok but the frustrating bit is when you get smacked around so much that you are thrown out of the track and miss checkpoints because of that and need to backtrack. Those collisions where you are smacked 15 meters to the side are just too random and not fun at all - even when the focus is not winning but having a nice and fun race.

I love this game and that's why I invest my time with a post like this hoping that the support team at Ubisoft seriously considers my suggestions and hopefully make this an even better game.


Executive summary:
As a new player you don't have any chances to finish a mass race with a top rank even if you are very skilled.
Solution: Provide a mode where everyone has the same gear (or at least the same level (elite, expert, ...) of gear).


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Longer version:
I know that the main goal of mass races are just to have fun. But still it is very frustrating that the whole thing is basically just a battle of gear.
On nearly every race the top 3 (sometimes even top 10) players are the ones that already have 900 gear.
And that's no surprise. This gear is so much faster than the normal stuff. This becomes painfully clear when you are in a rocket wing suit (663 for example) and you just need to go in a straight line. So you boost all the way but still those guys in the yellow 900 gear easily fly by you with much higher speed and you can do nothing but think of how unfair this whole thing is.
It would not be such a big problem if it were not too hard to get the equipment, but it takes an incredible amount of time (or work) to get them.
Take me as an example. I already have more than 3500 stars and I spent more than 100 (!) hours in this game. But still, my best rocket wingsuit is one with rating 663.
Of course you could now say: "You can quickly get a 900 rocket wing suit by grinding a specific level x times to get the XP up." (which might btw. be the reason the game has problems like this: https://discussions.ubisoft.com/topic/127511/wingsuit-event-last-subway-is-broken?lang=en-US) But griding XP is not what I want to do. I want to enjoy this game. I play it in my free time (which is limited because I work a full-time job, so grinding XP is no option).
And if after more than 100 of normal gameplay (I have my bike race career at level 50, my snow race at level 49, my wing suit at level 45) you still don't have the gear to compete for first place that in my opinion the game design is broken.
It's not just rocket wing suit. At level 49 in snow racing I still need to compete with 690 skiers.

To explain my alternate title (how to not lose new players):
For new players this is even more frustrating.
Here is an example from my experience:
Because I enjoy playing this game so much I convinced two of my friends to also buy the game so that we can play online together.
So they bought it and we did some mass races.
While for me it was fun (I already had 600 gear and could compete in the top 10), for them it was super frustrating.
They had bad gear and therefore always had to watch other players overtaking them all the time even if they were riding the better lines.
And what makes it worse is that with the bad collisions of the game they are thrown around the track all the time when players overtake them and cause a collision.
Hey had no fun at all even though they really enjoy racing games.
This is why after some races they never touched the game again. And this is also why I'm now super hesitant with recommending this game.

I'm sure that this happens to a lot of players that are new and it makes them not play it anymore.
They could have so much fun if the mass races were fairer.

This was for example the case in the public beta test of the game: Everyone had the same gear. It was so much fun because everyone could compete on the same level.
During that time I was even able to win mass races. That was really fun.
Noadays it's only the 900-gear-guys who win.

So as you can see the way it currently is, it's not fun for people who don't want to put hours and hours into grinding to get top gear.

But I think that also for the ones that have 900 gear it's not super nice.
Let me illustrate that:
In some free for all races I had the best gear and I won the race. But it didn't feel great. It didn't feel like I accomplished anything. It felt like I just won because I had the better gear. That really sucked.
If I win then I want to win because I played well not because I put x hours into the game to have the best gear.
It even felt a bit like cheating. How should the others stand a chance when their max speed is so much lower than mine?
I think that many other top players also have this unsatisfying feeling when they play mass races. They can only feel some accomplishments when they beat other 900 players.

So as a conclusion: Both sides lose. The new players or players with bad gear don't have fun and the top-gear players don't have as much fun as they could have.

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So what's the solution?
I don't just want to complain about the way it currently is. I also want to give you suggestions on how you could improve the game to make it more enjoyable for everyone.

Suggestion 1: Same gear mass races
Provide a option in the options menu (or when starting a mass race) where people can chose if they want to play the traditional mass races or a mass race where everyone has the same gear.
I'm sure that a lot more players would choose the "same gear option".

Suggestion 2: Same category mass races
This is a compromise of suggestion 1 and the traditional mass races. Group the game lobbies by the following gear categories: standard, pro, expert, elite. In an expert lobby everyone is allowed to select gear from the expert category. This way it's possible for players to still play with equipment that they unlocked and want to play with.

Suggestion 3: Easier gear gathering
Make it easier to get 900 gear. Or make 900 gear always available in mass races and i the normal events of the game you would still have to use the gear you unlocked.

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Please consider my suggestions. I would really love to bring my friends closer to this game again. And with fairer mass races I'm sure they will give it another shot.

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Note on Free For All:

For Free For All races this whole thing applies as well.
I would even say that it applies there even more, because while in mass races the focus is fun, in the FFA races the focus is actually racing. And what's more unfair to race someone who has the better gear?
So in FFA I would even go as far as saying that having races where everyone has different gear is even a bug.
Please also consider this.

@ubi-viral I'll try to create videos and then get back to you.
And yes, this only happens with bikes and in all events.

@phumelelesjose I absolutely agreed to the points you made there. Ubisoft really needs to fix some things here. The top five are usually all players with 900 equipment. They don't win because of skill but because they grinded their way to the superior equipment.

First off: I love this game. That's why all the little details that are totally messed up in this game hurt so much. There are many annoying bugs and poor design choises in this game and I will soon create an extra thread to talk about those, but today I want to write about the bike collisions.

The bike collisions were really annoying already since a long time and therefore I was super excited when I read that Ubisoft planned to fix this with the new update.

The update came about one week ago and I must say that I was feeling a mixture of sad and also angry.
Ubisoft made the bike collisions even worse!!!

Did you never play test your changes?
Now everytime you even come close to another bike you have to fear that you will be thrown out of the track completely.
I seems like it's not even dependant on angle or speed. It seems like the programmers just implemented that the two bikes will be pushed a fixed amount of space to the left and right. It feels so weird and is a total chaos (in the worst way possible).

I really don't understand why the collisions work OK in snow events but are super broken in bike events.

Multiplayer bike races currently are absolutely ZERO fun to play.

Ubisoft, please fix this as soon as possible, you are making it really hard to enjoy this game right now.