Comment by davemp

I don't think we're on the same page.

> It depends on why you play though; the "combinatorial explosion of overhead" is only a problem if you're trying to min/max, if you play for fun it's more "What character do I like" or "What wings do I find pretty".

Exactly. These choices don't affect players in the same way.

> The most important thing: Don't tell others how to play. Don't tell them "you should pick X because it's the best" unless they explicitly ask for it. Let people play their own way, and don't push how you play games onto others.

I definitely agree with you here.

As a designer, you're defacto telling people how to play by designing choices like this. You're punishing casual, competitively natured players with >700,000 options because they care about performance.

If you don't derive fun from winning the trade-offs are mostly irrelevant and you can simply ignore most of the problem, choose a configuration based on fewer/simpler dimensions (I'm going to pick yoshi and the egg kart because that's awesome), and avoid most of the decision space. This type of player probably wouldn't care if all the configurations performed the same or more likely could be annoyed that their desired configuration performs strictly worse. (If the choices meaningfully affected gameplay, like having an ability to lay eggs or something, that's different).

On the other hand if the dedicated, competitive players are going to solve the optimization problem and coalesce configurations down ~10 choices. The problem space is also irrelevant to this type of player.

But posing this problem negatively affects competitive people who aren't dedicated to the game. Now they have to consider an intractable problem while their friends are waiting on them so they can actually play the game. I know this because I've sat there plenty of times while friends scroll through all the different options wheels/karts/gliders/characters for minutes until they gave up and said something like "Whatever, I just want to race".

So why not just give 10 performance profiles and the same combination of cosmetic choices as before?