Chocobo racing suggestions! :)

So, a lot of complaining posts about this and that... whaa whaa. Lets try a different approach and offer up some ideas.

1) "Level Sync" or "Rating Sync". So, when your Chocobo gets higher and higher rating, you very quickly outpace your friends... having to Race in Open is kinda whack, cuz you never know what your gonna get and lower rated birds gonna lose bad usually. So, try a Rating Sync system. It compresses your stats and stuff a bit and restricts your rating to the limits of the Bracket you want to race in.

2) MGP feels a bit unbalanced for winning and cost of food and other items... It feels like you gotta race FOREVER to be able to afford food or any other prizes. ESPECIALLY the Training manuals. Holy crap those are beyond expensive. Common. Balance the costs a bit better compared to the means of winning.

3) Serious item balancing. Ok, Briarthorns is SUPER harsh. O_O That should be balanced. I think Choco Meteor is ok to be super ROUGH, however, I speculate that the system of "whoever is in first is way ahead, spawn meteors" isn't the best way to do that. Should be low chance of getting it any box, regardless of how far ahead 1st is. I've seen a few races were 1st runs ahead, and then there's like 4 meteors on everyones head. O_O Terrifying. Choco Aether... should do more than JUST restore an ability. maybe give it a tiny bit of Stamina boost. Some people like double-passives... or others active ability is garbage... so this makes the entire item entirely useless. I think Sprint, Stamina Tablet, Hero Tonic are fine. As for Bacchus Water and the Slow down one... I think we can do a bit better. The Slow down one is ok, but falls off to quick and feels like it does nothing. As for Bacchus water, i think it's duration should be a little bit short, and instead of "in front", it should be everyone around you. Would be more fun and at least if you're in first, you can potentially mess with someone behind you.

4) So unless I don't know all the details about Cunning, it sure feels like a pretty useless ability to most people. So maybe we can work this up a bit more... make it do more than just "my bird doesn't ride like a retard anymore". An idea, would be that Cunning gives you a small chance at resisting Negative effects and/or bonus of extending/increasing a positive effect. I dunno. it just feels like a useless ability...

5) CROSS SERVER QUEUES! Common! You did it for Duty Finder. <_< Racing with people is way more exciting and fun than just boring ass NPCs.

6) Tournaments? Maybe Cross server, based on win/lose ratio etc. Still an idea to make Choco racing more fun!

7) Allow the ability to feed chocobo coloring food. The fact that color can ONLY be attained by breeding, and that is strictly RNG... is quite annoying. <_<

8) Chocobo and player "racing" outfits. Make some cool official racing outfit type items for both players and chocobo bardings. Can cost some MGP or whatever, something to work towards and pseudo shows you "status" as a l33t racer! lol

Aside from the very obvious "more tracks, and more items" comments I think thats about it. Hope maybe some of these can come true in the future! ^_^

So, on Abilities, these are mostly my opinion and experience with them, and their explanations....

Choco Dash - Seems fine to me. >_>
Choco Cure - Would like to see more stamina cure'd, but it's not bad right now.
Choco Esuna - Fine
Choco Ease - Wtf does it mean by "restore stamina by 50". It's def NOT 50%.. and there's not values for Stamina. Clarify and fix it.
Choco Calm - See above.
Choco Reflect - Seems fairly weak tbh. Should prevent AoE effects, like Briars and Choco Meteor.
Choco Steal - This is MASSIVELY underwhelming....Sure, a good player with some luck can snag a few good items, but otherwise, this is one of the weakest abilities.
Choco Silence/Shock - The duration feels LONG. The AoE effect is huge, but thats fine. Either huge AoE, short timer, or smaller AoE and longer time (like, how it is now..)
Head Start - Nearly mandatory if you want to compete. :S
Inceased Stamina - Okay.... maybe increase it's effects a bit more, so it's actually noticeable.
Heavy Resist/Level Head - borederline useless as well. I have Level Head III, and I still got Frenzied a lot. No one keeps these abilities, no reason not to.
Speedy Recover - "ability induced" stamina recover... wow. how.... narrow. Seriously, this is garbage! Fix it. <_<
Dessage - Ok.

So yeah, most things are relatively okay but it's obvious where some abilities are straight up the best choices, and others will never be used intentionally. :S

1) Completely agree.
2) Completely agree.
3) Agree but only about briars. There are too many of them and they decide races too early. This is very discouraging and makes head start and choco dash even more overpowered than they already are. Rest of items seem fine to me.
4) Yes, Cunning is probably the most useless stat atm..thing is, acceleration and endurance do not seem to make much difference either. Stamina and Maximum speed seem the only relevant ones atm.
5) That would be cool yeah, but I wouldn't approve this if we were going to have longer queues.
6) Completely agree, there are tournaments in TT, we should have tournaments in chocobo racing too! (pretty sure this will happen sooner or later).
7) Agree with this one too, though it doesn't concern me much personally.
8) Same as point 7.

Surprised this hasn't be mentioned. The controls need a twice over! I push left or right and the daft bird stutters as it changes lane... It's like a car where the steering cuts out every other second! People keep saying it was like that in VII... the hell it was! I played VII, did damn good at it too! I think a big part of the problem is the 'autorun' trying to force the bird straight. Just make it where the bird can only turn so far, is that so hard?!

3) Yeah, the amount of item balancing needs to be tweaked for sure. Saw WAY to many Briors....
4) Agreed abotu Cunning, I disagree about Accell and Endurance. I've notice Endurance a fair bit since my recent bird has a TON of it. I can run a long time accelerating without burning out. As for Accell, it feels less noticeable, but it's a facter. It determines how quickly you can get back up to your max speed. So high accel without high max speed is TOTALLY pointless.

Gil, the drunk-ass bird driving is generally attributed to Cunning. It's easy to mitigate the lack of cunning with some experience and patience, but if your bird auto-drives into the wall, give it a bit more cunning. I also played VII, and until I got my Gold Chocobo to boot (which just takes forever...) and it was like VII. You may not remember how bad the first bird drove but it was bad. Frankly though, after you reach around 35-40+ Cunning, it's far less of a problem and becomes nearly unnoticeable. That's why Cunning feels so useless.