First of all: Besides the high amount of crashes on the Switch version I am having a blast playing Trials Rising.

I gues you have already noticed that many players are not pleased with the multiplayer integration of this game.
I, on the other hand, realy love the inclusion of random Rivals for each Track.

But there is a big problem: I should not have to race against someone who is in the top 10 Worldwide rankings when I am only placed at like 5684.
And while I love watching replays of the top players, trying to beat them in a Stadium Event just is no fun.
It gets even worse when progression is locked behind Stadium Events that I just can't beat anymore because of the choosen rivals.

I realy hope that you change this with the highest priority, you can't expect "normal" players to visit the Trials subreddit / the official Support Forums to look for a "hotfix" (playing offline for that event) so they can progress in their game.

And I don't get it! Choosing the "right" ghosts should be the simplest thing to do!

Is it your first run of this event, meaning you have no best time set? Take some pre configured offline Ghosts.
Do you already have a time set? Take the next best players from the leaderboard as rivals, not some randomly selected top 100 player.

Not only would this fix any progression Problem but it would motivate me (and I gues others, too) sooooo much more to beat the ghosts, knowing that I have a good chance of beating them and climbing up the leaderboards.

Also, the "learning curve" would be much smoother. You can't expect a new player to know all the tricks you can do in this game that you might see a top 100 player do while you have absolutely no idea why they are so so much faster than you.

For example: You are off the gold medal by 2 Seconds in a stadium event? To bad, beat those ghosts that are about 14 seconds quicker than your best time if you want your gold medal!

Edit: After some thinking this might make things to easy if you are ranked realy low, so maybe include some additional rule like "player can't be better than 50 places, the best rival can't have a time quicker than 1 Second under your best time".
Basically, instead of "spiking" the difficulty with the top rivals make the difficulty curve a lot smoother.

Seriously, this game is great but the algorithm that is choosing rivals looks to be busted.

Sincerly,
a concerned player.