>>2046843
>relaxed is too easy
>intense is too sweaty
Intense/gear 2 felt really good to me before and I still had vicious for a real difficulty bump, I don't see the reasoning for making the AI harder when the exp systems seems to be very punishing in the GP environment.
If you get throttled early on in a track you now have to deal with much lower exp gains and restarting is a no-go because it is even more punishing for end point gain.

Now if I do bad early in a race it feels so much more anxiety inducing when before all I needed to do was push the lead by the end like any other racing game. I get the "consistent" racer argument when it comes to checkpoints, but that shit is moot when the AI easily outpaces you on extremely winding courses. Even if can you overtake them all by the end you've still missed all of those precious checkpoint exp bonuses. And I can't even restart to try for a better race because of lives.
>it's reasonable to make emeralds harder to reach because the special stages being harder to get to makes it less likely for someone unprepared to get turbofiltered
All that does is make them harder to learn and get better at, the more insurmountable you make reaching them the more annoying they'll be to actually complete when the emerald stages are an exercise in memorization anyway.
So now you have
>track exp
>ring bonus
>lives
>dynamic adjusting AI
>and the placement cutoff
which ALL work against you for ranking and the simple CHANCE of ATTEMPTING emerald. It's genuinely too much shit if you ask me.