Hey all,

I am brand new to Mario Kart Time Trialing (have played the games since the SNES days, but never taken it too seriously or focused on time trials).

A bit of background
I picked up MK8 at the start of August, and played around online for a few weeks before eventually starting to time trial on MKS. I got addicted, and kept knocking a second off my time every other day until I got down to around the 1:45 mark, and at that point realised that the world record was still another 10 seconds quicker, which surprised me, and got me researching and learning the advanced techniques etc.

I found the players page around 3 weeks ago, and being the OCD person that I am I created an overly detailed spreadsheet and starting slowly working on a complete time sheet for all tracks. I am now infatuated with improving my times in every spare moment I find. I put in my first round of times last week, and a vast majority of them are only after a handful of attempts on each track due to time constraints, so I am a long way off the pace still.  

So I am just wondering how much time do you think you realistically need to practice/play to be at a top 25 or even top 50 level?  Given I have work commitments and family commitments, I I have nowhere near as much time to play as a lot of people do and understand I will never likely hold any WRs, but I am very keen to improve. I probably play maximum around 7-8 hours per week, so it is hard to really focus on a track and master it without neglecting all other tracks.

Any tips on improving across the board with limited time to focus on particular tracks?

Either way, I enjoy time trailing so much so even if I never crack the top 100 I will still play, but just wanted to get some thoughts on this topic.

Cheers, Ben

I find myself messing up a lot (see: rSL)
I understand fire hopping enough to do it, but not enough to get even a top150 on the PP.
Also, you're pretty close to me. New rivalry

Thanks for the replies everyone. Completely understand that having played previous games would help the learning curve, and given the time I have available am not expecting to do anything spectacular, but will just keep setting myself mini-goals, and slowly cut seconds off my time. Got 9 PRs last night, so obviously a lot of improvement left (still at the point where I can comfortably beat times on most tracks).

Still have to learn Hop-sliding/Demon Slides etc, but have got fire hops nailed and have starting perfecting Soft drifts this week as well which is helping to drop my times faster.

jak didnt pass 1000 yet

only twi did

Number of drifts would mean more than the hours with MK8 on, but yeah for people competitive enough, some don't even drift.

1430 hours or something, but only 200k drifts, JaK has almost 600k drifts. The jap with +30k VRs has probably 1 million drifts or something.

7Alvin wrote on 09/29/14 at 05:39:45:

wtf you let the console on or something?

Marc474R wrote on 09/29/14 at 07:53:20:


Some days I only watch tops + updating + talking so it's easy to let the console on.

Does the game count drifts of restarted runs? If it doesn't, the number of drifts would be pretty meaningless for someone who plays TT the most. Iirc that was the main problem with the MKW ingame-statistics.

I probably played about 100 hours so far, mostly TTs and am currently #119 on the page (dropped from a solid top80 in the last 6 weeks). That's fine for me at the moment, I will start another little comeback in November, when the first DLC pack will be available.

MK8 ist rather time consuming compared to other karts imo - but in a good way as you are steadily improving your score while you play. There are way more strats to learn than e.g. in MKW where everything came down to completing the single successful run of a session without a major fail to PR

MH wrote on 09/30/14 at 02:40:41:


Yeah, I find it very time consuming compared to MKW, but I thought that might just be because I'm not a natural at this game..

Everything in MKW was a bit more in front of you, with this game I could clutter up the forum with questions/follow up questions for so many things
It also takes ages to learn some hop strats, especially when it involves stuff like timing the hops at the start of rRR to keep up the speed