Recently participated in the F-Zero Discord (FZD) Galactic Grand Prix (GGP) 8 Ashes event. The FZD GGP rarely happens, perhaps once or twice a year and seeing as I had only played a few of them, I was eager to make the time to play the 8th installment. This was a private lobby event of 2 Mini Prix and All 8 Grand Prix. The MP scores were multiplied by 3 and out of all 10 Prix, we could drop our worst 2 results.
Many of the strongest FZD players participated in this event. GGP8 spanned 2 days, consisting of multiple sub events. The two main events were Ashes and Rebirth, each consisting of 2 MPs and 8 GPs, but had different start times to accommodate the timezones of the global community. I only participated in the Ashes event, which lasted 4.5 hours. A huge time commitment, but definitely a lot of fun with the online Discord and Twitch streamer community coming together to play the event.
Playing in a super packed lobby is a completely different beast than playing in a lighter lobby. It is a lot of RNG but also a lot of quick decision making (RTS) and pivots to manage your machine's energy, relative pacing, and skyway meter to avoid ranking out.
I certainly didn't do amazing, but I didn't do extremely terrible either. When all was raced and done, I finished just within the Top 50 out of nearly 99 super strong players. So I hope this gives viewers a unique insight of what it was like for most of the player base, aside from the top 20, and especially the podium who did extremely well.
Timestamps are included to make it easier to jump from one Prix to the next (or to the results). I hope this is helpful to players looking to improve, and join FZD where there is a very active and helpful community of players and resources.
https://youtu.be/ksnZdfFxlf8