Hi; I won't waste time with introductory crap, so:

There are a lot of differing opinions as to which MK is 'hardest' to master. I decided to give a go at comparing the PRSR's of each game, to construct a table outlining competitive skill concentrations, by which can be measured the difficulty of a game's chart ladder. I'll add comments to this post explaining extreme differences as you guys ask, or as you make your own comments, but most games' data is pretty easily explainable, so I'll assume y'all already know alot about why this is the way it is, and not waste words adding obvious information.
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There are a lot of potential uses for this data: For example, comparing PRSR and ARR, with a base ARR system as 'ideal', would allow more balanced standards to be created in the future. (I'm guessing MK64 is closest to being 'ideal', though you guys would know better than I, if there's a game with more solid standards.)

Here's the PRSR data as of 10-1-14.



Numbers on the graph correspond left-to-right with each MK on the spreadsheet.



Edit-- Here are the percentages by game.



The 15th column on this chart corresponds to the percentages of players at each level across all 8 games.



The only flaw I see in this data is in the total comparison, as some games are listed twice or even three times, to take into account every ranking system, which makes the total results weigh more heavily to those titles. If we could all agree which chart in each game is superior, I'd be happy to remove the inferior tables to rebalance the averaged results.  

It would be waaaaay easier to extract the PRSR data for all 8 games if the combined ranks ran off that system.

More to come maybe.
-L

Here's an alternative view of the prsrs:

• mk7 and mk8 are "easiest" here. This could be either because there's fewer techniques to master or because these games are newest and the top players haven't had enough time to stand out from the pack yet.
• mk64 (orange) seems 3rd "easiest" initially, but it also had the steepest drop after half-way down the ranking. Perhaps a large portion of dedicated karters near the top of the ranking have played this game for longer periods of time and improved their timesheets over the years. The steep drop off may also be all the players who never tried SSMTs.
• mkw (dark blue) starts off lowest because it has too many different WR holders. It also has some fairly low values in general because 1/3rd of the tracks have shortcuts.
• mksc seems quite hard since the drop-off is sharp, and few of the top players have above 0.9. However, it also has the smallest number of players.
• smk, at least PAL, seems quite challenging considering its curve is quite low and is lower than MKW (which has some tracks with shortcuts where PRSR scores are worse than average)

Some obvious caveats:
1. single exceptionally good players scoring the bulk of WRs can push whole curves down a few notches, so the slopes may be more meaningful than which curves are higher or lower.
2. you also need to consider the number of players on the charts, e.g. a popular game with many casuals is not the same landscape as a niche game where the bulk of players are serious and dedicated.

Nice graph Alex; is that a function of the database? Because it looks like every player's score is mapped, and I can hardly imagine the work of entering 3.5k scores into a spreadsheet

I'll post some PRSR/ARR comparisons in awhile, in the form of PRSR*|ARR|, where |ARR| ('absolute ARR') is each game's ARR adjusted to a set range of values between 0 and 1 (0 being god, 1 being newbie, and the other major divisions on the graphs being in the form of 'X ARR/Worst Possible ARR').

^ perhaps difficulty is not uniform and we can look at it from different viewpoints in each ranking. You're checking the improvement needed to go from 10th to 1st but we can pretend to be in any rank and ask "what would it take to halve my rank". So to move from last place to middle place (x=1 to 0.5) might be hardest in MK64 and easiest in MK8, since they have the steepest and gentlest slopes in that section. To go from 50% to 25% might be harder in MKSC and easier in MK7, perhaps due to some techniques that need to be learned? Likewise, for someone at 25% up the ladder to improve to top-10% seems hardest in MKSC and SMK-PAL.

But we gotta be a bit careful when comparing PRSR scores directly because some games have shorter tracks. Making half a second of errors in a five minute race is not as damaging to PRSR as making half a second of errors in a 50 second race.

Vinnie927 wrote on 10/07/14 at 15:15:15:


Total times weigh too heavily to long tracks; really not optimal

And AF curves heavily in games with a small no. of players. I doubt Andy'd have 1.1 AF in MKSC if there were as many players as on '64 or 'DD, for instance.

Hardest MK to optimize all around? MKW with sc since there are simply so many different strats which also require a lot of practice, hardest MK overall, I mean just look at MKSC sc numbers, but then again I think as already mentioned it also depends on the number of entries in a certain game.

Overall I think it's really hard to compare the games tho, since all require a lot of work to be optimized just to the standards we have as Top times now, the probably "easiest" MK is MK7 since there are no really hard techniques in terms of mechanics. Also I think it can't be said generally since for some players one game might be/feel easier and more fun than for others which is why they mostly stick to it.