Frankenbike
Auditioning
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2010
- Messages
- 10
- Real Name
- Frank Ensoftail
Originally Posted by Jack Briggs
But I guess I am asking this: Is there any sort of advantage to a skater when she is on a classic banked track? How does it affect the playing of the game? Is there any sort of advantage to a banked track in terms of the players' abilities to navigate it? Is it easier or harder to skate on a banked track?
It's different. You can use gravity for an assist in the down direction, but you have to climb like a hill in the up direction. Flat track this is neutral. Inside or outside takes the same effort. Banked track is asymmetrical, flat track is symmetrical.
Banked track maintains your momentum through turns. A jammer can keep building speed around the turns better and the top speeds are much higher. Sometimes motor vehicle speed. Blockers trying to gauge the jammers speed when they're used to flat track speeds often time their hits too late or their positioning. If the jammer spots a hole in the defense, she can go low or high with her momentum and cut laterally. I'm told that banked track really tests your reaction time more than flat based on what some skaters have told me. Not all the time, but when the game is going its fastest, it's a challenge keep up on what is happening because you have to turn your head fast to see what's going on behind you while you still have opposing skaters trying to knock you over, you have to think fast, and get your teamwork on.
The challenges and differences are why you find top flat track skaters like DeRanged, Demanda Riot, Jackie Daniels, Psychobabble, Angela Death, Swede Hurt, ReAnimate-Her and others, repeatedly joining forces to play games on the banked track. Once you could attribute to curiosity, but a few times means its something they like doing.
It looks harder in this respect: banked track always has one foot higher than the other, so it looks like you're skating uphill all the time. It's easier in that you don't lose speed in the turns, so you're not always powering up. But I don't see them coasting much.