Slalom

Slalom looks a pretty simple pony discipline, right? Well, it is, in principle : cross the start line, weave between the poles to the other end, loop around and weave your way back.

Manage to do it under 30 seconds? Not bad. Touch any poles? Want to do better?

Thought so. First thing to tell you is not to run, but walk. Running is considered cheating, plus the extra speed makes your weaving more erratic.

Some find it easier to keep closer to the poles using mouse-look. If this works, great. It doesn't work for me, and several ponies I know.

So here is a little trick I was taught which got my slalom times down from around 30 seconds to just a hair under 15.5 with just a little more practice.

Left click and hold the mouse button down on the name tag hovering above your head. Keeping it held, slide the mouse left or right. Notice how your avatar turns too?

Position your avatar just before the start board, either slightly left or right of center. Now, walking forwards, slide your mouse smoothly left and right to weave between the poles.

On your return to the start/finish, keep your avatar walking straight from clearing the last post to the finish line.

A straight line walk is slightly shorter than a diagonal and will have hundredths of a second from your time.

Still not a good enough time? Swap your best high prim tack for clothing layer harness and a low prim bridle. Low prim hooves, hair and tail too.

Turn off or remove any other unnecessary prims, including HUDS. Turn off streaming audio and video and those lovely clip clopping hoof sounds.

Hard to believe but that alone could shave quite a bit from your overall time. Reducing the quality of your graphics in the preferences by selecting a lower resolution helps too.

Most importantly, keep close to the poles on weaving between them, making the overall distance you need to cover significantly shorter. And practice.

Within about 30 minutes of slalom using this advice, i got my time down from 30 seconds to 17, and if lag is not too bad, even below 16 seconds.

I also recommend a slalom practice lasting no more than 10 minutes without a break.

You might get frustrated really quickly if things do not go as well as you would like. I did. And this made my mouse movements less controlled, leading to mistakes.

Hope you find this helpful, and good luck!