Dev Blog - Season 3 and Future Plans

We on the KartRider: Drift team have been listening to your feedback and suggestions over the course of Season 1 and Season 2. We apologize that we haven't been able to fully review all of the suggestions we received from our players, as well as provide a detailed response to each Racer. Going forward, we will work to provide Racers with a clearer understanding of our current situation and our future plans in various ways, including through these Dev Blogs, and we will continue to listen to your feedback.

In today's Dev Blog, we will address the network/ping issue that many of you have reported, and the update intervals. Then we will talk about the key points of the Season 3 update, as well as our future plans.

Ongoing Network/Ping Issue

Your comments and feedback on the network/ping issue, and the length of the update intervals, have been the two most mentioned criteria over the past two seasons. Both of these have been ongoing subjects that the development team is investigating and improving.

These issues occur due to a wide variety of reasons, including different network environments and device specifications in different parts of the world. Because the issues occur in a variety of forms, and unfortunately do not have one single cause, we have been closely investigating and working on improvements.

As a result of the global nature of the game and the number of potential causes of these issues, we've found that our efforts have had minimal effect or are only effective in certain regions.

We wanted to have a clear, tangible result before addressing this topic with you, but it seems the lack of a timely explanation may have caused more confusion, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Since the Mid-Season 2 update on June 7, we've been working on improving the network/ping optimizations and deploying some country-specific fixes. As a result, we've been able to provide a noticeably improved experience in specific regions, such as North America.

However, the effects of these improvements are not yet having the desired impact in other regions, including Taiwan, so we are dispatching personnel directly to those regions to assess local network conditions and the regional influence on the development team's work. Moving forward, we will do our best to be transparent with you about these issues.

We are also aware that many of you feel that KartRider: Drift's update interval is too long. As we support world-wide cross-platform play with cross-platform progression support across consoles, PC, and mobile, we've had to deal with unexpected challenges, including platform-specific regulations and disparate laws and policies in different regions of the world.

The complexity of considering multiple platforms and jurisdictions has prevented us from responding as quickly as we would like. We apologize for having not been able to provide updates at the frequency you've come to expect, and for any frustration you may have felt at the lack of communication. We will work on being more responsive and proactive with our information and updates going forward.

Season 3: Catch Me If You Can!

Now we'd like to talk about the major features of Season 3: Catch Me If You Can, which goes live with next week's maintenance.

The Infinite Boost Mode that was introduced in the Season 2 Mode Lab will be promoted to an official mode in Season 3, allowing you to play Infinite Boost regardless of the season.

Season 3 will also come with a new addition to the Mode Lab: "Flag Mode". This is a special 4v4 game mode, where your team of four players will earn points by acquiring the flags that appear on the track and bringing them to their side of the map.

Like in Item Mode, item boxes will appear on the track containing various items that can be used to attack the other team and defend yourselves. The team that captures the most flags to gain the highest score wins.

As the goal of this mode is to work with your team to take the flag and compete for the victory, instead of simply racing for the fastest time, you will be able to experience a new kind of fun that's different from the existing racing modes.

Season 3 will also have a number of improvements as well.

You will now be able to toggle the voice chat On/Off during the race, and use Emojis mid-race. A new Quick Chat system will be added that allows you to use Quick Chat, Emojis, and Emotes in lobbies and custom race rooms.

Daily and Weekly Challenges will be expanded so that both Premium and Normal Racing Passes can utilize the Daily/Weekly Challenges. The daily Lucci limit will also be changed to be a weekly limit, to make it easier for you to collect Lucci. Additionally, we may have a chance to elaborate more on the chat system in the future, once we have better explored the unique challenges of each region, platform policy, language, etc., which is difficult to implement right now. We will continue to work on improving inconveniences within the game by reflecting your feedback about in-game communication (such as Quick Chat and more).

Future Plans

We have been reviewing the feedback that we've received from Racers since KartRider: Drift went live in January, and we are reviewing options on how to address those issues, what changes to make, and how to improve KartRider: Drift overall.

The improvements include UX/UI changes and other convenience issues that Racers have been telling us about, and we're looking forward to introducing and discussing them with you when we have specific changes that are ready to show.

And if there's something you've told us about that we are unable to implement or improve, we will try our best to fully explain why.

Most importantly, instead of only showcasing things we've prepared in its completed state, we want to be honest about the state of the game and what we are working on.

Racers, we hope that you'll stay tuned for the news to come, and we hope that you enjoy the Season 3: Catch Me If You Can update when it's released next week.

See you on the tracks.

Thank you,
-JL and the KartRider: Drift Team-