Five and a half years after release, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe got its first update with changes aimed to balance characters and karts. That fact alone is… weird. Never before has Nintendo seemed particularly interested in Mario Kart metagames, and halfway through 8D’s DLC expansions, when it had been doing just fine for years, is an odd place to begin caring. The Wave 3 patch shook out to be trivial; the meta builds just had to suffer shorter invincibility periods than the rest, which didn’t matter nearly enough to offset one’s stat superiority. In wake of that ‘failure,’ players are now faced with Wave 4’s tweaks, which I suspect had innocent intentions but has upended the metagame entirely. While most semi-competitive online fans are celebrating the death of Waluigi Wild Wiggler, the face of online tryhards, I expect the joy won’t last long. The update sets a precedent that discourages players from perfecting the game and ultimately cannot solve the issues intrinsic to 8D as it currently exists.
Wave 4’s balance idea was sound, but made a critical oversight. In short, the vast majority of characters lighter than Waluigi and kart parts worse than the best handful had their mini-turbo stats slightly improved, and some characters got a small speed boost as well. My guess is that they weren’t trying to outclass Waluigi Wiggler and friends, instead just bringing the other options’ power level up a little bit to compete. This is a great balance philosophy in general game design: don’t take toys away, just improve the bad ones so suboptimal choices aren’t as harsh. There’s a big problem with this in the context of 8D, however: the best builds are better by inches, not miles. Players settled on certain builds because they offer the best balance of the most important stats while sacrificing only the smallest increments one way or the other. Because of this, improving options by just a single point has massive implications for stat optimization. Players immediately deduced that the weight class just below Waluigi (Rosalina, King Boo, and Link) now had better overall stats, and the same applied for the Teddy Buggy and Cat Cruiser (they’re statistically identical) compared to Wild Wiggler. By giving a flat increase to everything ‘worse’ than Waluigi and friends without considering the implications for options already in the meta’s vicinity, Nintendo has only transferred the wealth when their goal was to spread it.
The primary motive for rebalancing 8D is greater diversity in what online players use, but the game’s nature means monotony in lobbies is inevitable. As stated above, meta builds are better by a little, not a lot. While that makes the difference in time trials between master players, so much can go wrong in a casual multiplayer race; being slightly more efficient isn’t likely to matter if you fall off the track or get bombarded with items. If that’s the case, why do so many people make the optimal choice? It’s the simple psychology of leaving advantages on the table; why shouldn’t I take any bonus I can get? If you’re racing online, you’re probably most concerned with winning, and 1% higher odds of winning is still something. While there have always been options that can keep up with the best like Waluigi Wiggler, you have to go out of your way to learn about them, and even then you might not like how they look any better. Thus, you might as well use the same kart as everyone else. Even if there were ten viable options, if one is slightly superior, it’s the one people will get world records with and therefore be the one blindly copied. You can only solve the Waluigi Army problem if you make cosmetics completely independent from mechanics. If it’s possible to be horribly suboptimal by experimenting like in 8D, I would argue this decoupling is a simple necessity. Overhauling the mechanics is the other choice, but it’s obviously far too late for that.
Creating a ‘new best’ for a near-six-year-old-game is devastating to its time trial history. Players are beating records that have stood for years in a matter of hours after the update. While those former record holders are ultimately a fraction of a fraction of 8D’s playerbase, they are the ones who pushed the game to the limit, putting months upon months into claiming that top spot. Ripping that away from them without the least bit of acknowledgment is cold at best. Now, the possibility of anyone’s work being undone as Nintendo wills it is out there, and 8D’s future as a collection of dozens of speedrunning epics will be kneecapped by the players turned away by that uncertainty. Small blows of betrayed trust to fanbases are how even the greatest of franchises can fall.
The Wave 4 patch feels like putting some extra brushstrokes onto a painting or dropping a new decoration into a landscape. Things will feel different, but the whole is still the whole, with all of its beauties and faults. Walugi on a caterpillar is now a space princess on a teddy bear; different, but still ridiculous to behold and sure to get old fast. 8D is the same game; you master drifting, laugh and weep at the whims of items, and roll your eyes at how many people are tryharding this time. If Nintendo hates what they’ve created, they should move on to a new canvas already, not try to ‘fix’ the choices they committed to long ago.
One response to “Waluigi Died for This: The Folly of Balance Patching Mario Kart”
I think there’s a real problem with nintendo’s customer engagement as a whole. They create fine products, but they just….have absolutely zero interaction or idea of what a community would actually _want_. Why make these changes? Who benefits from this?
It’s one of my least favorite things about their entire business strategy. When the games work they work, but there are so many missteps along the way.