Been thinking a lot about the arcade lately. I've also been having way too much fun with Swift Steps II and a merc set.

Anyway, here's the idea: speed zones on the floor of certain levels.

These could be indicated by lots of gel, flashing diamonds, power pulses, etc. You would go about as fast as a PvP striker, if not faster if you have MSI boosts, over these areas. You will keep going in the direction you were going when you enter the zone for the duration of the speed zone, you can move up/down or l/r, but not stop - can't turn to go the other direction either. You can attack, use pickups, dodge, and bash (that would be derpy...). These would be high-powered areas of the clockworks. Some might even need a bit of your energy to use. When in a speed zone, you get a woooosh effect behind you, like striker, but not as bright since you don't have striker equipment on you.

Enemies entering the zone will have the same limitations as the player.
If you die in the zone, your body slows down to normal speed but keeps going until the zone ends, or you are revived (revival brings you back up to zone speed).

Inb4 Lag issues. Sorry if this is posted elsewhere.

Not many levels would be able to have these because of the way the game is played. So I propose a change to treasure vaults, and a kind of puzzle zone for other levels.

There could be different styles to fit the levels - gooey acceleration slime (portal II much?) or ice (maybe, ice brings to mind slipping and derping without skates, imo, more so than speedy grace) for grassy/nature looking areas, power pulses for classic tunnels, and so on.

Treasure Vault:
These split into two pathways, which is annoying now that shiny things are instanced. (Mildly...annoying...) Let the entire intro to the vault be a Speed Zone, a single path littered with crowns - wooooosh blingblingblingbling. This would actually feel a little bit like sonic, wouldn't it? Appropriate. Zip around and round on the path and end happily in front of a bunch of boxes/minerals. That would be quite enjoyable (The path is narrow enough that you couldn't possibly miss the crowns).

Puzzles

"Constant Stream" : Have a very wide pathway of speed zone, the entire level is like this. It would simply be one of those Endless Runner type of games, with you moving w/e or n/s to catch crowns and avoid thorns/spike traps. To keep these intresting, have mandatory battle areas with party buttons. Picture classic arena but with less fight and more wooosh. The fights wouldn't have as many stages as the arenas, nor would they have caches after as rewards - they would reward you with allowing you to wooooosh more. The end of these zones would dump players right through a one-way force field barrier, since the speed zones are not one-way things themselves. This would prevent ppl from going back and getting crowns they missed, and to get on with the level. The end of the level is where the minerals are - a small cache next to the elevator.

Perhaps a pure "Endless Runner" (that ends at elevator) level for the heck of it...
These would probably be ??? levels to keep em super special.

Two different kinds: view changes to top-down or zooms in, for levels going east<-->west and south-->north (only S to N-view issues), respectively.

Roundabout Room
This is a sort of Danger Room. The outer perimeter is a zone, and can be activated with energy - it's a horse-shoe shape of speed zone. You can shield bump enemies into the zone to temporarily frustrate their attacks (they'll go around and be off of it at the other side of the zone - an ideal chokepoint), or get on yourself and try to have fun speed-targeting. Activating the zone could be part of the danger room gate (like, it gets turned on if you open the gate so you're not charged double), or be a totally new kind of zone.
Alternate version: floor simply constantly moves you, but doesn't speed you up.
This could show up in Scarlet Fortress. I'd love to see more SF levels.

Scenarios
Jump Gap: knights are vaulted over a gap with the zone speed. Good thing too, it's a long way down...No, this requires no button mashing of the knight, it just happens automatically as part of the Scenario of the speed zone. It's a wonder these things are still working!

Elevator Icon for special speed zone levels: shooting stars.

Edit: it would also be interesting to have layered, wrapped around levels. Like you walk over a bridge, and the path twists around to go under the bridge. Bridges could be rocky arches, rotted logs over ravines, fiend city roads, and so on. With a speed zone, this would be extra fun. Speed zone in the fiend city! Vroom vroom.

Alternative battle areas (not entire levels): slow zones. Could have some interesting battle tactics here - would these zones look like mud? Or perhaps slime...hehe. Imo, freeze/shock traps are "slow zones" that deal damage and well, make a knight so slow in the case of freeze, that they stop. These would be linear, wrap around zones (as mentioned above), and be something different (no damage dealt from the zone itself-also, it affects both players and monsters).

Thoughts? And other ideas for speed zone levels/rooms/scenarios?