I kinda prefer the ground. What I mean by that is I kinda wanna run this game without the flying, aka no glitches and just racing normally. Can we create a category for that (btw can we also please include a difficulty option for when we submit times because I'm trash at this game atm.
You're free to run the game without flying. We're not going to create a glitchless category though. It's impossible to define it anyway. Staff ghosts slide. Staff ghosts also do double taps on the half pipe to gain speed, which is just the ground version of a DTD (the big dives that give you crazy speeds). The half pipe technique was even mentioned in an interview with the developers. They knew about it, but kept it in, so you can't really say it's a glitch. And AGG is only applicable in a few tracks, but it's super risky so not many people would do it anyway.
As for the difficulty, there is already Novice and Master, you don't really need anything else. I could just combine all difficulties into a single leaderboard, with the difficulty as an extra value, so you can do it in whatever difficulty you want. Guess that would look a bit cleaner aswell.
I understand the concern over how to frame the category but I agree that something should be done to distinguish edge boosters from standard racers. 10 years later and every category is dominated by Blood Falcon runners. There are 30 unique machines to pick from and the current system hard-pushes people to race one - two machines in a very particular type of way.
EDIT: Actually, let me do a little more research. I'm discovering more machines are capable of doing this technique; BF just happens to be a machine of choice here.
Here’s the million-dollar question: what about players who don't want to fly but would use the turbo on the Sector B track right before the finish line? If you use the turbo and end up flying, you're doing the exact same thing as the pro players at the top of the leaderboard (the top 5); therefore, it’s obvious that the idea doesn't work. The same thing inevitably happens on the Port Town 1 ramp when there are multiple speed boosts—you take off at high speeds anyway, so the result is the same.
