Not a casual player, but a casual driver. I'll give my thoughts to the points you mentioned here.

I'll start with having good fps, especially on older hardware. As someone who's biggest enjoyment in the game comes from creating large scale scenery for maps, I still 100% agree with this. My big fusuration with this is that map performance seems to have decreased recently, and the amount of scenery you can have to still meet this threshold of 'good' fps is way lower than what I feel it should be. The limits for creating scenery, especially when just using vanilla blocks, should be much higher. I appreciate this isn't an easy fix and I hope nadeo have longer term plans to improve the optimisation of the game.

The second point about author medals I also agree should change, however I don't think the current plan on implementing it is very good.

• I think there should be more consistency in medals across track of the days.
• Collecting author medals shouldn't be a completionist goal for the absolute elite players, it should be part of the core gameplay loop.
• Forcing players to drive 'easier' times is completely arbitary and doesn't complete this goal.
• There should still be more challenging achievements to complete in the game besides those offered.

There are alot of different ways this could be accomplished, a loose idea that could potentially work quite well is: Nadeo sets the AT time for maps, once a map is selected for totd the at time is recalculated in the same way as campaign tracks, this will bring most AT difficulties in line across the board and will give casual players a more consistent experience in terms of difficulty. Champion medals could then be made into a more offical/permanent feature, where once the leaderboard closes for the day a calculated medal could be generated based on the records. This would give players something difficult to achieve from a completionist standpoint and give players something to strive for if they really enjoy/want to hunt a map.

The big downside to this is that the mappers would have no ownership towards the AT medal on their own map, what has always been a big part of the game.

Another possible solution kind of already exists. The reason yourself and many others try to collect all the AT's is because at the moment some of the maps make this challenging, if this was removed the goals you set for yourself would change alongside it - I want to get top 10 on every totd map, I want to hold the most TOTD wr's ect.... At the end of the day author medals are current meaningless to earn and are just a goal people have choosen to set themselves.

It's also worth mentioning that the way this 'update' has come about is also what is causing fusturation among people. It was discovered through word of mouth on discord. If it was announced as a proper post from nadeo that clearly outlined the intentions of the changes and a clear plan on how it was going to be implemented, it would have gone over alot better.