Mana Games

[Ambience]

Hello community,

I think one of the biggest issues with the current XKT Tour gameplay is how strong the Speed stat and Slider Talent are, especially when combined with ball preview.

Characters are simply too fast, which makes defending extremely forgiving and makes other aspects of the game, like net play, much harder to justify. You can technically build your character however you want, but in practice there is a strong incentive to put points into baseline and physical stats because being extremely fast and having 2-star Slider makes defending so effective.

I also think the 772 point revamp made this situation worse. With more points available for character development, there is even more room to stack the attributes that already make baseline defense so effective.

The goal wouldn't be to remove build freedom, but to make the choices more meaningful. With a lower Speed cap, positioning and anticipation would matter more, while limiting Slider Talent would make attacking and approaching the net more viable.
I would also consider removing ball preview, at least from Masters 1000 and Grand Slam events. Preview combined with very high Speed and 2-star Slider makes defending particularly forgiving. Having no preview at the highest-level events could create a much bigger distinction between defensive and attacking play without changing the entire Tour system.

I also think this could help with the long-standing clay issue that the playerbase complains about every year. Clay already produces longer rallies, and combining that with extremely fast characters, 2-star Slider and preview makes it very difficult to hit through someone. Reducing those defensive advantages could make clay points more varied instead of constantly turning into extended baseline exchanges.

I don't think Speed or Slider should disappear. They should still be useful, just not so strong that they become almost mandatory for competitive builds.

For next year's Tour, I'd like to see the Speed stat capped and Slider Talent capped at 1 star, with no ball preview at least in Masters 1000 and Grand Slam events, and see how that affects gameplay variety, net play and especially clay.

[Dani21]

To be fair i agree with like all the changes here. Especially the speed/slider capping would be useful. Right now hitting passing shots against net play is just super easy to execute against 99% of the players because of how easy it is to run left right.

[HSM88]

I totally agree, players are too fast right now, but i think to fix the gameplay, instead of capping Speed or Slider only, what about capping total points per category? Like Rally limited to 480 out of 600 possible points (before remapping), with similar caps on serve and Physique, Volley & Special categories.

Right now almost all builds look identical: 100% everywhere in Rally, 100% serve, maxed physique, 0% Volley, lob and dropshot. I think a category cap forces trade offs, it’s something.. idk 🤷🏻‍♂️ anyway any change is better than current gameplay state

[Madferit]

I agree with all these changes. All these conecerns and similar suggestions I've brought myself in the past on this forum as well.
Though to your point of capping slide talent to one star, which I fully agree with, on top of that'd say slice talent should also be capped at one star, at the very least for clay surface.

[Rambobear]

Absolutely agree. We need to allow for more variety for players so it is worth it to invest more points in other stats than baseline/serve/physcial, which is at the moment way too good compared to anything else. Whether Ambience idea or HSM88 idea is the way to go i dont know, but i think we should to try something.

[Jirafalox]

I think changing all 3 things at once is just too much and not needed.

As I shared in the past on discord I believe that a speed nerf is needed, for example making that speed at 90% ingame after a nerf would be like speed at 84% ingame (just like the speed players in WTSL have since that seems to be the perfect golden standard of gameplay by those insisting in removing preview here on MG tour)
This way when players max out speed that 100% in the character sheet would be basically the exact same speed as the WTSL players from that mod and tour have as of right now.

The slider talent is also problematic in my opinion, since everyone uses 2 stars (I never used that talent personally but I understand I’m outlier in this meta things/ways).
This talent makes hitting perfect defensive shots way too easy specially while hitting slices while on full stretch + sliding, basically allowing you to perma reset the rally as long as you read correctly the direction of the opponent shot.

Hard capping the talent to only 1 star in online or making the effect of 2 stars be the same as having 1 now and 1 star being less effective would help a lot to make defense a bit more difficult, because now it’s just way too easy.

Slice talent I don’t really agree because the problem with the slices on clay is that since the players are so fast and people play with too much topspin you can “cut” the slice from high to low and even without slice talent you can hit 100 km/h and 80-90 rps of downspin pretty consistently, so imo lowering a bit the speed will help avoid those situations happen that often, even tho I don’t think nerfing the 2 star talents effectiveness to like an in between 2 and 1 stars now would be bad either.

Also as we’ve discussed and agreed with Dani21, we believe (and Im taking the liberty of adding you to this part Dani) that also when your breath start to go below 50% the acceleration (of movement, not the shots) of the players should be a little bit more slow and when breath is below 25% it should be more slower and when players fully gas out with 5% or less breath the acceleration of their movement should be greatly lowered.
Top speed can remain as it is since pro players in long rallies when maintaining momentum can still keep up their top speed even after tired, is just changing direction and starting a full speed run that becomes way more difficult when you’re in a long rally and out of breath.
This ofc should help with the 30+ shot rallies happening 1-2 times per game in every clay match between similar level players, and wouldn’t impact much other surfaces because of the short and medium rallies being the more common ones on those.

I’m against the removal of the preview for the reasons shared in the 772 thread and I really don’t think that adding that virtual extra difficulty will change much, specially if we consider implementing all the mentioned above, or some of mix of what I proposed and HSM/Marco did.

Edit: Also I truly believe the counter stat is OP, it shouldn’t be as effective as it is now AND it should be a weighted skills just like any other main skill like physical and rally skills. It being so cheap to max out also contributes to the heavy baseline meta. Ofc doing that will change the total amount of points but the standard for realistic mode should be whatever amount of points left you would have with counter at 60 right now and proportionally adjusted with the added in points (idk if that made sense xD hard to explain)

I can explain further on anything I’ve mentioned if necessary and ofc this is a suggestion thread so if someone has something more interesting to propose I would love to read it and comment further on it

[Dani21]

Yeah no I actually agree with your points here Jira. Except the preview stance, you know i also think that should be gone. But the speed and slider and slowing down on low breath make sense to me, a lot

[gifu]

I’m not really in favor of removing preview. There are definitely some people who choose xkt tour specifically because they struggle without preview, and I wouldn’t want to remove that unique characteristic and reduce the player base.

As for rallies being too long, I think that’s somewhat common among stronger players. They should be able to adapt to no preview relatively quickly, so I’m not sure the rally length would actually change that much.

I agree about the slider talent, though. It makes rallies longer and feels too unrealistic.

Regarding build diversity, I mentioned this before, but what about increasing the cost of points? For skills that people tend to max out at 100, such as Rally, Serve, Speed, and Counter, the penalty could increase from 90 onward—for example, 3 points per level from 90, and 5 points per level from 95. It’s just an idea off the top of my head, though, so it would need to be tested and validated

[Rambobear]

I think anything above 85 or atleast 90 should cost alot more points, because then you are truly getting into the specialisation territory where you are picking what type of player you want to be. Slider talent needs to be toned down for sure like people suggested . Ball preview i think is good because its hard to read the ball depth as we lack the depth perception in the game, but maybe we can play on elite controls so positioning when striking the ball becomes more important?

Also i like the idea of stamina being more impactful, the amount of stamina you lose when you hit an acceleration shot could be higher so you really have to choose your moment when you go for it instead of being able to go a whole rally/match spamming acceleration shots and simply ignoring regular strikes. Ofcourse you can still do that if you want but then you make more mistakes as you would in real life.

But just brainstorming and changing too many things at once wouldnt be a good idea

[Ruze]

Quick idea I had: Reduce overall speed AND more importantly reduce minimum scaling. It's currently set 30-90 but perhaps it could be 15-90 or even 0-90 (no idea what number would make sense, would need testing). The idea is to increase the penalty for not putting points into attributes. It could incentivize broader point spread and wider build diversity.

[Jirafalox]

Ruze: It’s the other way around if you do that actually people would play a very one dimensional playstyle even more than now

[Jirafalox]

Another idea and I think easier to adjust for our WTLS mods would be to add a special remap for the speed and muscle tone of realistic mode so those 2 skills in particular go from 30-90 to idk maybe 25-85 would be nice (and also the counter stat but that’s just me), that way they don’t have to edit the whole roster to compensate to the old speed they were used to

[Rambobear]

Another thing to change for next year would be to make it harder to hit first serves with crazy accuracy combined with velocity. The faster serve you go for the harder it should be to hit the line. Its too over the top now and the most important shot in tennis shouldnt be just another regular strike you can hit in your sleep. Maybe its not a problem for the high ELO players but for the rest of us its Wimbledon 96 QF Krajicek vs Sampras every match.

[manutoo]

Oops, I had forgotten to answer here. So I've read everything (as usual), and for the last update I changed 2 things :
1) I checked the run acceleration loss when getting tired and it was much smaller than intended (ie: max was ~5% of loss), so now it's 25% as intended at 1st.
2) I lowered the precision bonus on the sliding strike from +20% to +15% ; this is the main bonus of the sliding (in addition to having an auto-stop), so I guess it shouldn't be much lower than this

I won't change anything else. (ie: coz they require too much tuning or new stuff)

[Jirafalox]

Just a little feedback on the 1st point, in my opinion at least even the 25% is not enough. imo could be around 35-40% at 0 breath. Because I tested on clay and it doesn't feel like my character runs "slower" until it's literally 5% or less breath and I think it could start to happen a little earlier and when you're at 0 or very close to 0 be even more noticeable, like feeling your legs are very "heavy" to get up and running again.
Does the run acceleration loss start at around what point and it escalates linearly or it's like step by step? (ie. 5% at 50%, 15% at 25% and 25% at 5%)

And on the second point I think the precision bonus is fine getting a little nerf, but what I was trying to say or point out that it was given an "OP" feeling about the slider talent was how often it was happening and how easy it was to trigger with 2 stars so for example every time you are in "control" of a cross court exchange, if you decide to take the risk of going down the line, if you don't hit an accel to the line or very close to it, the other player will 100% get there and will always be while sliding (because every time you take more than 3 full steps to get to the ball you're mostly able to slide into the shot) so they only have to bother to aim because the sliding will make the "positioning" a non factor, so you get this dynamic of changing direction taking the risk and if you don't hit the perfect winner opponent will just get there and hit a perfect sliding shot back, even being able of hitting it back down the line with such depth and precision that it feels pointless to even take risks and just wait for the absolute easiest of balls to actually go for a "garanteed" winner, and also I think from those sliding positions out wide I see some shots with super low RPS (20-30) landing in everytime and having such depth and also skidding through the court because of the low spin and also the high speed granted by very high counter stat.

I think that going down the line with the normal shot at least, which is by default flatter, shouldn't be so easy specially from full stretch while sliding and off some somewhat low balls, you never hit the net doing that while sliding and I think you should hit it more often with the normal shot while going for the highest part of the net. At least the player should have the thought process of "ok I'm hitting from a defensive position while sliding on an already falling ball and I want to hit it over the highest part of the net, I should probably use the topspin strike for net clearance while giving up on some raw speed and penetration" and not just be able to hit a flatter shot off the slide from deep position and have it land deep and fast every time and barely hitting the net if at all.

That's my feedback on the 2 changes, which are highly appreciated btw!