I just played an online race against 8 extremely high-ranked players (of which I was the lowest at around 7100) on Toad's Factory. Everybody was getting slammed blue turtle shells the entire race!! In fact, it was so bad, that all of us kept moving as a tight group through all three laps, because nobody could stay ahead for longer than 5 seconds. I even got hit three times in a row by blue shells without even getting a chance to starting moving again.

Is this supposed to happen when high-rank racers are pitted against each other, or was somebody somehow screwing with the race?

lol. thats just awesome :)

My guess would be that one of these players was a hacker because spamming blue shells is not normal..

mario kart is hard to predict, last time i got a guy who got a bullet in second place and around 4 lightings in first place, much of the time you get pumeled like that you ought to be sure its a hacker

someone hacked. I really wished they would modify the servers to take care of this issue. Since the user has to fire a weapon, all they have to do is watch for items being used faster than you can collect them.

I've been hit by 6 blue shells in a race, but that was over a long race with 12 people, and they were all spaced out.

Yeah, must probably a hacker.

This reminds me, I haven't played Mario Kart online in a while...!

It's a hacker.

I've seen videos of stuff like that, from the prospective of the hacker. It looks like everything is normal, but they always have a blue shell as their item. They don't even need to collect item boxes.

Like everyone said its a hack cause i get pummeld so bad i get extremely frustrated. Im in 4 place for a few seconds and i bam somone gets me with a star then another guy comes and hits me who also had a star then when i thought things couldnt get any worse i get hit by a bullet bill.

the hackers think it is fun, but everyone just leaves the game once it is obvious someone is cheating.