Theory: Is item RNG controllable with computers?
8 years ago
North Carolina, USA

So I was doing some runs to improve my times last night and after constantly getting bad RNG at Baby Park and Mario Kart Stadium, I figured there had to be some way around computers always pulling lightning/blue shells. I decided instead of holding your items throughout the race to throw every item before reaching the next item box. The salt that I was getting during my runs went down a LOT surprisingly.

Almost everybody can agree that once you get the super horn in 1st place, you want to hold it until blue right? But what if doing so actually increases your chance of cpu's getting lightning or even worse lightning/blue shell combo.

Though none of this has been tested to my knowledge, I'd like to know if anyone else has ever done this and came out with similar results. I would like to run some tests later either tonight or this weekend; do 100 races holding my 1st item the whole race and see what stops me before the finish line, and do 100 races while throwing every item (including horns) before reaching the next item box.

To me it would make sense that Nintendo would put in some sort of safeguard against holding your items throughout the entire race to punish the player in some way. It would come in handy for these speedruns to know whether this actually is controllable or even just decreases chances of computers getting lightning/blue shell.

I'll post back here once I get some sort of results.

Chicago, IL, USA

I actually thought about this. I might do some experimenting myself.

Baltimore, MD, USA

I did some tests on this. With normal play, Blue Shells have about a 60% chance of hitting you and Lightning a 30% chance. However, with this strat, Blue Shells had a 50% chance of hitting and Lightning a nearly 100% chance. So I think it doesn't really help that much.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
Rhodechill likes this
Rhode Island, USA

^How doesn't it help much if lightning went from 30 to 100%?!

Baltimore, MD, USA

It means lightning hit me every time ( and I don't think my results were accurate anyway because lightning is normally more likely than a blue shell)

Rhodechill likes this
Rhode Island, USA

you would help the comm. a lot doing more tests