Changing Gears on K-Drives

[Zectico]

TL;DR: Allow K-Drives to shift gears to higher speeds to make them the fast but skilled mode of transportation.

Currently, a K-Drive with maxed all speed mods is slower than any unranked, unmodded Archwing. Their only advantage is the ability to do tricks... which isn't very useful.

The K-Drive is meant to be a tool for transportation, so why not just make it better at its job?

Allow K-Drives to shift gears with number keys.

• With enough of a speed buff, K-Drives could become the faster but more skilled way to travel
  • K-Drives are much more interesting than a straight line from A to B.
  • Archwings are boring as there are very few obstacles in the sky.
• Giving more player control over speed allows for fast transportation when needed, without making tricks harder to do
• Many areas are hard to navigate at high speeds, making slower gears even more valuable.
• Best of all, it doesn't nerf existing ways of travel!

 

Currently, unmodded Archwings are about 2.5 times faster than unmodded K-Drives. Maybe 1/2/3/4 for 100%/200%/300%/400% speed?

[BL4CKN0ISE]

I think they're just for fun. I'm down for more speed, but I don't think they're supposed to ever be faster than an Archwing, in the same way a land vehicle IRL is not faster than an aircraft. This is especially true for any land vehicle used for tricks. The trick version is typically the slowest version. 

For K-Drives to be faster, I think we should lose the ability to do tricks as easily. Maybe slower spins and/or less tricks in general. Just have different types of K-Drives. A trick version and a speed version. 

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

2 hours ago, BL4CKN0ISE said:

I think they're just for fun. I'm down for more speed, but I don't think they're supposed to ever be faster than an Archwing, in the same way a land vehicle IRL is not faster than an aircraft. This is especially true for any land vehicle used for tricks. The trick version is typically the slowest version. 

For K-Drives to be faster, I think we should lose the ability to do tricks as easily. Maybe slower spins and/or less tricks in general. Just have different types of K-Drives. A trick version and a speed version. 

Fun should not immediately justify being impractical.

[(XBOX)RPColten]

Mmm yes, let me just switch gears on this rocket.

5 hours ago, Zectico said:

The K-Drive is meant to be a tool for transportation, so why not just make it better at its job?

The point of the K-Drive is transportation and style. Making it "better at its job" would more likely involve updating the tricks and styling feature as opposed to the basic straight-forward speed.

Could it do with some more speed or means of gaining more speed? Yeah sure, but arguing for it from a stance of saying it needs speed 'because that's the point' is somewhat flawed.

[Steel_Rook]

8 hours ago, Zectico said:

The K-Drive is meant to be a tool for transportation, so why not just make it better at its job?

Is it, though? I've yet to see any evidence that this was ever in the cards. It was pretty obvious right from the get-go that K-Drives would be poor transportation tools, which is why DE tried (and failed) to sell the "cool skater kid" vibe to justify their existence. And now it looks like the Duviri Paradox might be introducing equally pointless mounts, if my random guess at the trailer is any indication. To me, this looks like another example of DE throwing something into the game because they thought it was "kewl" with no real plan on what to do with it, what role it serves or why people would care about it beyond it being a new toy.

K-Drives are never going to compete with Archwings for travel, period. Plenty of games have tried to balance Super Speed against Flight, all of them eventually gave up on the former. If you want K-drives to be more useful, then give them a purpose that Archwings can't serve. Let us use them indoors, maybe with reduced regular speed and hovering lower to the ground. There are plenty of tilesets where simple lateral speed would be preferable for traversal over fish-flopping bullet jumps, both for style and utility.

 

3 hours ago, (XB1)RPColten said:

The point of the K-Drive is transportation and style. Making it "better at its job" would more likely involve updating the tricks and styling feature as opposed to the basic straight-forward speed.

At the risk of offending, there's no "style" involved with K-Drives. They're a gimmick wearing the clothes of a 90s Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game. In fact, the facade of "style" is probably the K-Drives' biggest problem. Because despite what I said above, they're not bad for transportation... Once you have a custom, fully-upgraded board. If you want to travel point-to-point, a well-built K-Drive can get you there about as fast as an Archwing, Itzal Blink notwithstanding. The problem is that to GET a custom, fully-upgraded board, you have to do tricks, which makes every single trip take substantially longer. In short, you need to use a transportation tool BADLY in order to make it good at transportation. Either that, or waste hours of your life doing doughnuts at the Pearly, which is arguably even worse as that's an evil, soul-sucking grind.

K-Drives themselves are not the issue. At worst they're "fine." The issue is their utter farce of a progression system. If one could progress their K-Drive by using it SENSIBLY on top of wating time flipping around, I'd argue a lot more people would use them. As it stands, you're saddled with a garbage board and asked to waste hours upon days to get a board which doesn't suck, so you can then waste more hours upon days making that actually useful. It's as if DE learned nothing from Focus. Just drop the pretence and let people gain affinity just for distance travelled on the K-Drive.

[BL4CKN0ISE]

6 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

Fun should not immediately justify being impractical.

And an explanation isn't a justification. 

I agree with you, but we already know what K-Drive is. We can equip up to 4 weapons and we have 4 abilities. DE decided to make K-Drives slower than Archwings and disallow us to use weapons and abilities. It is what it is unless they change their philosophy on what K-Drives should be. Right now they are literally just for fun. I can bullet jump faster than K-Drives.

Too many things in this game could be considered impractical if we're only talking about how it helps us do other stuff in this game, but Frame Fighter, Shawzin, and Pedestal Prime all exist. Warframe is weird and many think Fashion Frame is endgame. 

Simple fun is a huge part of this game. I honestly wish everything was practical but even this mod still exists...

and this...

Edited September 13, 2019 by BL4CKN0ISE

[Zectico]

On 2019-09-13 at 5:59 AM, BL4CKN0ISE said:

Simple fun is a huge part of this game. I honestly wish everything was practical but even this mod still exists...

The problem is that mods don't have their own game mode, syndicate, arsenal + gear slot, achievements, and specific mods.

[Sharkgoblin]

wow your post reminded about the existence of k drives...i even mastered all of them got all the mods and even built one custom with 3 formas 

but they're (((fun))) so they are not allowed to be useful. Too bad

*blinks away with itzal*