Our mission at Mario Kart Unlimited (MKUnlimited/MKUL) is to provide an environment in which Mario Kart Wii (MKW) players are not forced into the established conventions of the current community. There are no limitations here except for not reinforcing the limitations of the current community. If people want to play a different format, we find a way (within reason) to make it happen and make it accessible. This concept of removing limitations for players is precisely why we chose the name Mario Kart Unlimited.
Some examples of what we champion here versus what the current community has been rallying around for years include the following:
- Multi-Platform: Instead of forcing everyone who joins MKUnlimited to have a Discord account, we will provide spaces for multiple different chat programs (once they have all the features we need). We respect autonomy, privacy, and personal preference when it comes to the applications people put on their computer. We have created a thread that lists multiple different chat programs members can utilize. If a program you use is not listed and becomes popular with our community, we may consider creating a MKUnlimited space there.
- Multi-Format: Instead of forcing everyone into a small selection of popular formats, we provide a way for players to participate in formats they would normally never get a chance to play in, unless they go through content creator paywalls (ex: playing distributions other than CTGP Revolution [CTGP-R] and non-meta character/vehicle combinations). We are strongly against any form of a paywall behind a preferred way of playing the game. In addition, we believe that the current conventional formats create a situation in which there is a barrier to entry for new players (needing a bagger to have a clan) as well as hindering a player's potential (slave bagging instead of learning how to run). One way we believe this can be solved is through the normalization of No Lapping (Japanese style) and All Run.
- Expanded Demographics: Instead of forcing everyone to pick one side of the community (ex: Lounge and Grand Star Cup for competitive and Troy's and Bean's servers for casual), we provide ways in which both types of players can participate in MKUnlimited. For example, Mario Kart Boards (the deprecated base for the current community) had League Teams and Clans. Both of these types of clans are tailored around competitive formats. Here at MKUnlimited we are bringing back the concept of Communities. MarioKartWii.com (the vBulletin forum, not Vega's code repository) had this before it went down under. Communities are groups that do not play wars, but instead play funrooms and worldwides. Our goal with Communities is for casual players to find friends to play with without having to subscribe to content creators (going through paywalls).
- Return to Form: We know that plenty of the community has moved on from forums and we respect that. However, we also acknowledge that there are still members who might still want a forum to be available. These members might have hailed from the age-old vBulletin version of MarioKartWii.com and miss those days. While we absolutely cannot recreate the atmosphere that site had (mainly regarding the very large userbase), we can provide something similar. Our site has nearly every single feature from MarioKartWii.com, just executed in a different way. In addition to that, we also have features from old versions of Mario Kart Boards that members might be familiar with. Four examples of such are Item Ranks for Post Count, the Reputation System, GFX Shops, and Forum Games.
- Completely Revamping How Clans Work: The current way the community handles clans allows for priority being on individualism of clan members instead of a focus on collectivism as a whole clan, leading to clans dying much faster and having less value than in the past. In addition, another negative effect is a lot of clans do not persist with activity during league off-seasons. We plan on restructuring clan definitions and rules in order to fix this. We have created a separate thread detailing our entire stance and plan regarding clans. Please read it if you are going to be involved with clans within MKUnlimited.
- Prioritizing Trust and Accessibility over Security: While cheat-free MKW is amazing, it has limited the amount of options for players who cannot run CTGP-R. We are looking to put our focus on a distribution that is accessible for all players. For this reason, we are putting our resources and attention into our own distribution that utilizes the modding framework Pulsar. In addition to this, we will be resetting all lists regarding cheating and starting a new leaf. Our majority of competitions will be based moreso around the Trust System instead of Anti-Cheat Security. We will still have prominent events with Anti-Cheat Security but we are not going to make that an end-all, be-all for players who join MKUnlimited.
- Innovation: With unlimited ways to play also comes various forms of shaking the mold, and here is where MKUnlimited will focus its attention to innovate. Instead of forcing everyone to adapt to lag, we are going to provide a way for players to have an environment with less latency, through the use of HDR, LAN, and other methods in which to reduce lag (such as pushing the development of server-client infrastructure). Other ways in which we plan to innovate include crowdfunding development of key game features and changes (for primarily our distrubtion but also CTGP-R) and curating our own custom track distribution for improved competitive play. We are also going to use a more air-tight security method against alternate profiles and consoles. Lastly, as stated previously we will have a focus on being a multi-format and multi-platform community.
What we are NOT setting out to do:
- Competing with Current Community Platforms: MKUnlimited does not champion the conventions of the current community (such as mogi and suicide bagging wars being the only options for competitive, and content creators or worldwides being the only options for casual play). Thus, any platform the current community decides to rally around (such as Mario Kart Central) is of no concern to us. They have different goals from us, and should members of our community want to participate in these conventions, they are more than welcome to.
- Policing the Community: The staff at MKUnlimited do not believe in strong intervention for drama between members to save face. Instead, we believe in a safe environment for members. The only time MKUnlimited staff will take action is if the behavior compromises the integrity of our website, servers, and events. We do not believe in members acting on another member's behalf unless the matter is of extreme importance. We will, however, take reports from any directly targeted member of the community very seriously. In addition, players who have been caught in extremely serious actions against someone in the community (predatory behavior, pedo/hebephilia, doxing, DDoS'ing, distributing viruses, etc.) will still be banned from participating on our platform.
- Taking a Huge Financial Hit for No Tangible Benefit: Other sites have purchased forum software packages, web hosting, domain names, and server infrastructure that has costed several hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and inability to maintain it has caused the community to lose extremely valuable treasure troves of history and content. Whether it's over greed, lack of motivation to keep a site alive, errors in code or databases, or financial concerns, it has all ended in the same way: history is lost. We are tired of this recurring trend, and that is precisely why we chose a free forum host. The only things that would be at a premium for us are removing advertisements, a custom domain name, and some additional features. Should we fail to renew the domain, the forum is not lost. It just goes back to its free URL. We chose a platform that has been around for 20 years with a plethora of features that are recognizable from MKW websites of old. We're setting out to build something that will last regardless.
- Acquiring Monetary Gains: Previous sites used premium forum software packages and infrastructure, relied on analytics such as clicks and web traffic for a site's worth, and donations and subscription packages for a revenue stream to either keep the site going or provide new things for the community. While we cannot expand on our feature-set, we still can provide events and content for the community with the tools we already have at our disposal. We are not looking for any financial gain at all from this. We will never ask our members for donations but they are more than welcome to donate to MKUnlimited if they feel obliged. We are simply providing a space for players to escape the restrictive conventions of the current community. That's all there is to it.
Some examples of what we champion here versus what the current community has been rallying around for years include the following:
- Multi-Platform: Instead of forcing everyone who joins MKUnlimited to have a Discord account, we will provide spaces for multiple different chat programs (once they have all the features we need). We respect autonomy, privacy, and personal preference when it comes to the applications people put on their computer. We have created a thread that lists multiple different chat programs members can utilize. If a program you use is not listed and becomes popular with our community, we may consider creating a MKUnlimited space there.
- Multi-Format: Instead of forcing everyone into a small selection of popular formats, we provide a way for players to participate in formats they would normally never get a chance to play in, unless they go through content creator paywalls (ex: playing distributions other than CTGP Revolution [CTGP-R] and non-meta character/vehicle combinations). We are strongly against any form of a paywall behind a preferred way of playing the game. In addition, we believe that the current conventional formats create a situation in which there is a barrier to entry for new players (needing a bagger to have a clan) as well as hindering a player's potential (slave bagging instead of learning how to run). One way we believe this can be solved is through the normalization of No Lapping (Japanese style) and All Run.
- Expanded Demographics: Instead of forcing everyone to pick one side of the community (ex: Lounge and Grand Star Cup for competitive and Troy's and Bean's servers for casual), we provide ways in which both types of players can participate in MKUnlimited. For example, Mario Kart Boards (the deprecated base for the current community) had League Teams and Clans. Both of these types of clans are tailored around competitive formats. Here at MKUnlimited we are bringing back the concept of Communities. MarioKartWii.com (the vBulletin forum, not Vega's code repository) had this before it went down under. Communities are groups that do not play wars, but instead play funrooms and worldwides. Our goal with Communities is for casual players to find friends to play with without having to subscribe to content creators (going through paywalls).
- Return to Form: We know that plenty of the community has moved on from forums and we respect that. However, we also acknowledge that there are still members who might still want a forum to be available. These members might have hailed from the age-old vBulletin version of MarioKartWii.com and miss those days. While we absolutely cannot recreate the atmosphere that site had (mainly regarding the very large userbase), we can provide something similar. Our site has nearly every single feature from MarioKartWii.com, just executed in a different way. In addition to that, we also have features from old versions of Mario Kart Boards that members might be familiar with. Four examples of such are Item Ranks for Post Count, the Reputation System, GFX Shops, and Forum Games.
- Completely Revamping How Clans Work: The current way the community handles clans allows for priority being on individualism of clan members instead of a focus on collectivism as a whole clan, leading to clans dying much faster and having less value than in the past. In addition, another negative effect is a lot of clans do not persist with activity during league off-seasons. We plan on restructuring clan definitions and rules in order to fix this. We have created a separate thread detailing our entire stance and plan regarding clans. Please read it if you are going to be involved with clans within MKUnlimited.
- Prioritizing Trust and Accessibility over Security: While cheat-free MKW is amazing, it has limited the amount of options for players who cannot run CTGP-R. We are looking to put our focus on a distribution that is accessible for all players. For this reason, we are putting our resources and attention into our own distribution that utilizes the modding framework Pulsar. In addition to this, we will be resetting all lists regarding cheating and starting a new leaf. Our majority of competitions will be based moreso around the Trust System instead of Anti-Cheat Security. We will still have prominent events with Anti-Cheat Security but we are not going to make that an end-all, be-all for players who join MKUnlimited.
- Innovation: With unlimited ways to play also comes various forms of shaking the mold, and here is where MKUnlimited will focus its attention to innovate. Instead of forcing everyone to adapt to lag, we are going to provide a way for players to have an environment with less latency, through the use of HDR, LAN, and other methods in which to reduce lag (such as pushing the development of server-client infrastructure). Other ways in which we plan to innovate include crowdfunding development of key game features and changes (for primarily our distrubtion but also CTGP-R) and curating our own custom track distribution for improved competitive play. We are also going to use a more air-tight security method against alternate profiles and consoles. Lastly, as stated previously we will have a focus on being a multi-format and multi-platform community.
What we are NOT setting out to do:
- Competing with Current Community Platforms: MKUnlimited does not champion the conventions of the current community (such as mogi and suicide bagging wars being the only options for competitive, and content creators or worldwides being the only options for casual play). Thus, any platform the current community decides to rally around (such as Mario Kart Central) is of no concern to us. They have different goals from us, and should members of our community want to participate in these conventions, they are more than welcome to.
- Policing the Community: The staff at MKUnlimited do not believe in strong intervention for drama between members to save face. Instead, we believe in a safe environment for members. The only time MKUnlimited staff will take action is if the behavior compromises the integrity of our website, servers, and events. We do not believe in members acting on another member's behalf unless the matter is of extreme importance. We will, however, take reports from any directly targeted member of the community very seriously. In addition, players who have been caught in extremely serious actions against someone in the community (predatory behavior, pedo/hebephilia, doxing, DDoS'ing, distributing viruses, etc.) will still be banned from participating on our platform.
- Taking a Huge Financial Hit for No Tangible Benefit: Other sites have purchased forum software packages, web hosting, domain names, and server infrastructure that has costed several hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and inability to maintain it has caused the community to lose extremely valuable treasure troves of history and content. Whether it's over greed, lack of motivation to keep a site alive, errors in code or databases, or financial concerns, it has all ended in the same way: history is lost. We are tired of this recurring trend, and that is precisely why we chose a free forum host. The only things that would be at a premium for us are removing advertisements, a custom domain name, and some additional features. Should we fail to renew the domain, the forum is not lost. It just goes back to its free URL. We chose a platform that has been around for 20 years with a plethora of features that are recognizable from MKW websites of old. We're setting out to build something that will last regardless.
- Acquiring Monetary Gains: Previous sites used premium forum software packages and infrastructure, relied on analytics such as clicks and web traffic for a site's worth, and donations and subscription packages for a revenue stream to either keep the site going or provide new things for the community. While we cannot expand on our feature-set, we still can provide events and content for the community with the tools we already have at our disposal. We are not looking for any financial gain at all from this. We will never ask our members for donations but they are more than welcome to donate to MKUnlimited if they feel obliged. We are simply providing a space for players to escape the restrictive conventions of the current community. That's all there is to it.