Firehopping

Look at any popular, competitive video game and it's practically guaranteed that there will be a particular exploit that advanced players use to gain the edge over their opponents. Whether these exploits are "cheating" or not is very much debatable; it can certainly be argued that a glitch already in the game could just be seen as an advanced, difficult to master technique. After all, in the original Street Fighter II, the combo system that is now standard was originally a bug that allowed particularly dexterous players to cancel a move by inputting another move late in the initial move's animation. It was hard to do and not many knew how to pull it off, but it added a whole new layer to the game.

Shortly after the release of Mario Kart 8, a technique was discovered that is known as Firehopping. Some noticed that when drifting around corners, the usual boost that's given for a sharp turn could be greatly extended by spamming the drift button while moving the character rapidly left and right. Many called it Mario Kart 8's Snaking, which is a similar exploit found in previous Mario Kart games, and called for Nintendo to patch it out. The patch never came, but with the new 200cc mode it's been supposedly nerfed. While there's no video evidence to prove it yet, many competitive players have been remarking on message boards that the technique is greatly lessened or nonexistent in the new, faster mode. We'll update this story if and when videos turn up on Youtube to give a visual of just how much Firehopping has been lessened.

Have you noticed Firehopping being less effective in 200cc? What do you think of exploits like this, in gaming? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[source mkboards.com, via neogaf.com, kotaku.com]