I could see this being applied like the Skyrim example, except maybe the other way around for the time being: RTA first, loadless collumn next. That way I think it wouldn't alienate newer players so much when submitting their first runs, and if people still want to see the boards ordered by loadless times, the Filter options should work quite nicely as an alternative.

Also, top 5 does sound about right to me.

Personally, so as long as the programs/tools are quick and easy to use, I wouldn't have many quarrels switching to this system. Time is definitely something I've been lacking as of late, so I feel like the aide of programs would be very much welcome to help accomplish this. Well, as long as the loads are removed in a consistent manner among multiple players, that is!

The setup you mentioned seems pretty solid! Personally, and from a statistical standpoint (I don't play with inward bikes very often, haha), the only thing I'd swap out is the Leaf tires for Rollers, just to have that extra little bit of Handling and Mini-Turbo (MT) charge rate. It's up to preference whether you want that or sacrificing a tiny bit of MT for a slight advantage while driving through Anti-Gravity via Leaf tires, though, so experiment with both if needed!

Character-wise, I feel Rosalina is better than Waluigi since inward-drifting bikes can't provide as much MT power and handling as some karts do, therefore lighter characters can help make mini-turbos and corners more achievable, especially in 200cc.

No clue on the 2nd question though. I think that it's just a "feel different, yet technically the same" kind of scenario. I've seen players asking a similar question about the Biddybuggy kart and the Mr. Scooty outward drift bike: two vehicles with the exact same stats, yet they "handle differently" even though they're pretty much the same thing. :P

Hello!

Since yesterday, the ability to add milliseconds to your time is now available on this game's run submission page. The main motivator for this change was the ever-rising trend of runners of Cup categories facing ties among each other, showing that the current comparison tools and the timing details weren't good enough anymore.

Before anything, I should mention that submitting a time down to milliseconds is, in most cases, optional. It will still be fine to submit a time ending in seconds, and to do that, simply ignore the milliseconds field, or ensure "000" stays on it.

The sole exception to "most cases" is if the time in question is in a Cup category and it takes the current top spot. In this scenario, milliseconds will be edited to the submission after retiming the run to ensure future WR ties are avoided.

I encourage the use of this tool for Cup runs due to their short nature. It is not necessary at all for 16/32/48 track runs. At least for now, until we start seeing ties going rampant there, lol.

Either way, I hope this helps!

I think that aside of denoting v1.0.1 for the major track skips, the off-road changes in v1.0.3 (IIRC) might also warrant its own denotation in the future. Being unable to charge MTs while boosting over off-road has changed my driving outcome slightly in a few tracks compared to older versions, namely Hill Top, Egg Zeppelin, Vanilla Hotel and Ancient Tomb to name a few cases. It might not be too necessary, though, it's arguably a minor change, but it's a change I felt I had to point out nonetheless, in case it might've gone unnoticed. :P

Also, a bit off-topic here, but when it comes to characters in general, I think it would be easier to optimize the leaderboards if characters are displayed as a variable (same as how Version is currently a variable). Having characters as a variable could allow for easier updating of character lists while minimally affecting and cluttering the leaderboard (especially useful if additional characters like bonuschars.kart are going to be used). It would also make comparison easier by having the runs all displayed in a fewer amount of tables, regardless of character.

While each character has an unique feel to them, I don't think they change the racing categories in a meaningful way to warrant 5 copies of said racing category, one per character... so instead, flexibility via variables is encouraged.

Just some thoughts about it. I don't really mind the outcome too much since I'll be doing runs that fit and don't fit the established mold either way, but since I'm at this, I figure I would at the very least try suggesting about putting characters into a leaderboard variable. I think it's more important to give room for race categories first, followed by defining whether it's Skips/No Skips. Anything else feels like it'd be a bit too much clutter, and character tabs make it so that implementing runs with additional characters in the future will become a lot harder and messier.

But yeah, wall of text aside, I'm really glad that a SRB2Kart leaderboard page is in place here. Thanks for all the hard work so far!

If you think it'd be fun to try out, you should give it a try!

One thing to note regarding speedruns that revolve around online features is that, in the distant future, it's possible that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (or any game for that matter, just setting an example) will lose access to its online service as the matchmaking server gets shut down. Because of this, it is hard to give consideration to any category that utilizes online, at least for the leaderboards here.

That aside, the fun of speedrunning is coming up with your own rules. Don't be discouraged of trying new ideas out yourself, regardless of if the category is worth giving a leaderboard for or not!

In Mario Kart 8, characters are placed in several groups, and the characters in each group have their own set of stats. Sorted from highest base Speed to lowest base Speed, the character groups in Deluxe are as follows:

• Bowser, Morton, Mii (Heavy)

• Wario, Dry Bowser

• DK, Waluigi, Roy

• Metal/Gold Mario, Pink Gold Peach

• Link, King Boo, Rosalina

• Luigi, Iggy

• Mario, Ludwig, Mii (Medium)

• Tanooki Mario, Inkling Boy, Villager (M)

• Yoshi, Peach, Daisy

• Cat Peach, Inkling Girl, Villager (F)

• Toad, Shy Guy, Larry

• Koopa Troopa, Bowser Jr., Lakitu

• Toadette, Wendy, Isabelle

• Baby Mario, Baby Luigi, Dry Bones, Mii (Light)

• Baby Rosalina, Lemmy

• Baby Peach, Baby Daisy

Any characters that are listed in the same line share the same base stats with each other. If there's a gap/line break, that means the group below has 0.25 less speed than the group directly above it.

If you want to more the stats of each character group in more detail, you can either use this website to select and compare vehicle builds, or check out this stat sheet. The numbers here follow the 0 to 6 metric used in-game!

With that said, Waluigi shares stats with DK and Roy. This character group is often used in 200cc for having a good balance of Speed, Handling and Mini-Turbo power (MT is an hidden stat, just follow the Acceleration stat if you're confused!) when using builds that optimize mini-turbos like Biddybuggy + Rollers. It's one of the more common used setups for 200cc out there.

It would make more sense to ask this on the Mario Kart Players website, yes.

Obsidiaus, I'm sure that what I said about keeping things civil applied to everyone involved in this thread, not just you in particular. I talked with Hifi about this as well, don't worry. Lets put a stop to this nonsense and keep the forums a nicer place for everyone interested in the game.

Hifi, that's what I meant by uninterrupted runs. So as long as the player doesn't restart VS Race over and over to abuse first load + 5 coin advantage, it'd be OK to go for a hypothetical IGT, right? That's something that could be enforced if IGT were ever to become a thing, but again, that's just a theoretical scenario at the moment.

As for the topic at hand, I'm not sure what to say besides me hoping that Nintendo would kindly remember to bring the race timer back in future games. All racing games use a timer to determine standings, so I'm not sure why Nintendo would think that's too much information for the average player to handle if player positions at the end of a race are determined by their final time. We can't really have a true IGT measurement for speedruns otherwise!

That's as far as I can go, I think. "Loadless" has the issue with loading times being inconsistent, and there's not a lot of loading samples yet to determine a solid average to deduct times from (for runs that would not end in 1st place at least). Plus, I don't see people going through the trouble of spending effort to determine the loading times for each run they do, further subtracting from the accessibility this game currently benefits.

As I mentioned before, it is a really complicated issue. Without an accurate IGT from the game itself, it becomes hard to move away from the RTA method. The best course of action I see is having Nintendo realize that mistake and at the very least re-implement the timer back in future Mario Kart games.

By the way, Hifi, you said that even if Nintendo would add a IGT to races then you'd still prefer it to not be the main method. However you didn't elaborate further on that. I'm curious, why would you think an official IGT would be unwise to use in, say, a full uninterrupted In Order run?

Alright, enough.

For chatroom smack-talking nonsense use a chatroom (Discord, Skype, IRC, etc), not this forum. Same goes with the insults and the jabs. I'm tired of this trend of threads and posts derailing towards garbage discussion, it's a waste of people's time and a complete lack of respect for those who are legitimately interested in following MK8DX content. Again, this is a message board, not a public chatroom. Is it too much to ask if I could open the forums for game discussion for once, rather than seeing the same typical self-centered drama that one user seems to be part of almost all the time? I'm fed up of this, and whoever's guilty of these should be ashamed for belittling a public environment that was kindly conceded to us.

If you want to argue shit, use the #off-topic channel on the Discord server to set up a private DM/group chat or something. Just keep things civil here for once, OK?

TheGamerDoug's comment pretty much summarizes it, 50cc and 100cc add more of the same to the game but slower. I really doubt those categories will see use in Speedrun.com. Gameplay variants of 150cc or 200cc, on the other hand...

But yeah, this subject feels overdone by now. There's a few other threads that discussed this subject before, please give them a look as well. Thanks. :P

It's a fair assessment. Currently there's a few cases in 200cc categories where the best Cartridge time is technically triumphing over the best Digital (and current #1) time on the leaderboard. And while some players acknowledge that the Cartridge run is leading the fray, others are content with the #1 run on the leaderboard despite the run having room of improvement over the Cartridge run. Not saying one mindset is better than the other, but I have noticed this divide a few times before. So yeah, it'd definitely be helpful among top runs.

I don't see IGT/Loadless replacing RTA as the main timing method anytime soon, with some of the reasons being hinted in my previous post, but I wouldn't mind adding a Loadless time for top X Cartridge/Digital runs for each category at some point (these could be edited into the runs' descriptions or so). It could be a fun community project at the very least, and could definitely help with gathering data for loading times if people are willing to research further into it. :P

So you're saying that having 140 categories is better than a Digital/Cartridge filter? As if the game isn't already swimming in a plethora of categories, lets duplicate them all and make things even more of a mess. Sure.

Top 5 video validation not being properly applied to Cartridge runs is an interesting concern though. I can say that at least.

Anyway, for loading times, recently I've read that a few Speedrun.com game communities do something along the likes of allowing submission of IGT/Loadless times based on average loading differences between mediums. For example, once we were to obtain more load timings and determine the average, we'd assume first track as a difference of 3 seconds, each subsequent track as 1 to 1.5 seconds, and so on.

Naturally, if the submitted run falls within top X or becomes the record, the user or staff would have to manually time the loads out of their runs to determine the final IGT/Loadless time.

The question is, would a system like this be ever worth it? It'd do at least two things:

• The verification process would slow down. Runs will take longer to get verified since another factor is thrown in.
• Users would have to fill in more requirements to submit their runs to the leaderboard, hampering down MK8's quality as a simple to pick speedrun for everybody.

Should note that I'm just adding to the discussion. What other game communities do may not work well enough here, but I feel like the idea fits the topic somewhat and could hopefully share some insight as to why some changes aren't as easy as it might seem to be.

If only Nintendo added IGT to the game by themselves, or alternatively, if more players gained the habit of inputting their loadless times in the run's description, then comparison between Cartridge and Digital would become a whole lot easier.

Stop stirring drama and SPAM content across this board, Obsidiaus. This is your last warning.

I don't see the issue with making one run cover multiple categories. There's an inherent timer disadvantage to this, as Pianist described, so if the player wants to optimize their times they'd still want to do each of the 69 categories individually at some point.

Not sure how other Mario Kart boards handle this, but as long as there's no timer advantage (for example, it'd would be really silly to be forced to play a specific cup via a 16 track run), including smaller categories from within the same run is perfectly fine here.

While the Statistics page on the left definitely has seen better days, you can still retrieve results from it if you deselect all the categories (click on the category names to enable or them) and let the chart show one category at a time.

»» Link to the Statistics page ««

A small addendum: the Traction stat shows how well the vehicle's grasp is. The lower the stat, the more slippery your vehicle becomes while riding over rough terrain, and the more speed you lose while performing most turns. Examples of tracks with a lot of rough terrain include: GCN Sherbet Land, GCN Dry Dry Desert, Cheese Land and Ice Ice Outpost (weak effect). In most other tracks, especially paved roads, Traction is fairly insignificant.

For combos, the basis of combo building is knowing that, in Deluxe, Kart parts that offer Speed have been nerfed a fair bit while Mini-Turbos got buffed. Because of that, heavyweights, who have among the highest natural Speed stat at no major costs, when coupled with parts that increase their acceleration, handling and MT power (their weakest stats), end up being the dominant force in most tracks.

It doesn't mean you can't experiment around with stuff, though! A lot of things work fairly well in the Switch version. The trend tends to change in 200cc every now and then.

I think it'd be hard to implement a kart combo selector in the run submission page, much less applying a filter that recognizes the hundreds or even thousands of different combos this game allows you to pick...

The easiest way to go with this is to simply type out the combo used at the start of your run description. I used to do that some time ago and it felt like a nice way to let people know right away what combo I used during that particular run.

Hey everyone.

Just typing in a quick post informing about some stuff that have been going around here.

--- Leaderboard Optimization

First off, a few days ago we went ahead and condensed the 48 Tracks and 32 Tracks categories, from 4 tabs to 2. The main intent of this was to reduce clutter as well as to help keep leaderboard interaction consistent by including the Item selector that was present in all other categories.

This was accomplished by moving all runs within those categories into a new leaderboard, so if you saw any notifications related to old runs being verified, this was likely the cause of it.

--- 32 Tracks "changes"

Recently, 32 Tracks briefly underwent an odd name change that was caught on the radar by some users. The main idea was to help create some clarification on the current category, which originally came from the Wii U version as a means for non-DLC users to compete on.

Such information, like the run's start and end point, as well as the Wii U origin tidbit, have now been added to the category's rules instead, preserving the category name as it was before.

Additionally, all categories have received minor revisions to their Rules sections for a little extra clarity.

--- New Misc. Leaderboards

As of today, a Shine Thief leaderboard has been added to the Misc. tab.

Yes, the 150cc/200cc selector makes no sense, but sadly it can't be removed for the time being. Weirdness aside, I hope this serves as a nice enough alternative for players out there!

There might be other experimental Misc categories coming up soon(tm), so stay tuned for those. :P

--- Other Stuff

The Discord server link has also been added to the sidebar menu. Easier access now.

That's all from me now. Thanks for reading!

Nah, the tagline has simply been removed. Instead the rules for 32 tracks have been slightly revised to add some more clarity into the category. It's still the same category as before.