Multiple Speedrunners Caught Cheating In Trackmania!

hello you absolute legends something big is happening in the world of trackmania an event that will forever shift the landscape in all my years of speedrunning i've seen a lot of quote unquote cheating scandals before but i don't think i've ever seen anything as impactful or shocking than what we're seeing in the community of one of the most competitive racing games on the planet trackmania is huge it easily dwarfs almost every speedrunning community out there with thousands upon thousands of active races the records are unbelievably insane with record hunters spending hundreds or even thousands of hours on a single track up until recently my only experience of the games was watching youtube videos about its history and seeing the creative ways racers would break levels but it wasn't until i played one of them that i began to appreciate their appeal the games are nothing short of amazing to play and are perfectly designed for racers looking to compete for the fastest times but in may of 2021 the community would be shattered when a bombshell report accused multiple players of cheating for their records on the surface this doesn't seem too outrageous of a situation players get accused of cheating all the time but in this case one of the accused was particularly egregious with reports claiming he had cheated in literally hundreds maybe even thousands of records over a period of 10 years i've never heard of an instance that extreme and shockingly this was just the beginning once the report dropped many trackmania players would step forward and confess to cheating in some way or another so how does this happen why is this happening in 2021 when trackmania games have been heavily competed in for well over a decade and what are the implications for the future of the series in this video we will take a look at exactly what happened and why everything is exploding at this exact moment i hope you enjoy now legends you'll notice i have a new doom poster behind me and it comes courtesy of this video's sponsor displate diskplate offers epic metal posters that not only look awesome but are also extremely easy to mount requiring no tools and leaving no lasting marks this place has recently partnered with doom to release an amazing series of posters these look absolutely incredible so i had to get one but displayed offers posters from all of the most beloved gaming franchises like fallout elder scrolls and hitman i definitely suggest searching for your favorite game to pick up something awesome for your room display also plants a tree for every disc plate sold and have planted over 14 million trees so far now if you use my link in the description you will receive 25 of your order for the first three days i highly suggest grabbing a few i guarantee your walls will thank you trackmania just might be the perfect racing game when it comes to time trials on the surface many of its tracks are simple in nature and when you jump in and play everything seems to make intuitive sense the graphics are simple the tracks are clearly defined and most of them consist of a single short lap but as is the case with very well designed games these simple mechanics can often breed complex strategies take ao1 for instance it's the first track of trackmania nations forever and one of the most iconic in the entire series aside from some bends a small jump at the start and a big jump at the end there really isn't much to it it is however a perfect example of how slight changes to the terrain can create extremely deep and precise techniques after some slight turns at the beginning the racer encounters two downward slopes due to the speed that has been built up so far this causes the car to become airborne but this isn't ideal as in trackmania you don't build speed while in the air therefore we must try to figure out a way to minimize the amount of time we are airborne without of course simply slowing down too much this is achieved by performing an extremely precise diagonal jump and when i say precise i really do mean precise you need to hug the wall on the right as closely as possible turn sharply left to initiate the diagonal angle release the accelerator for a split second just before leaving contact with the ground to give you very slightly less speed while also readjusting the car's position while jumping so that the left wheel makes contact with the ground just beyond the crest of the second slope all while maintaining perfect alignment it's a small jump with a ton of importance and one of the reasons is because of how the top speed works the top speed in trackmania is 1000 kilometers per hour but this takes a very long time to reach around 90 seconds for a track that's only 24 seconds long you're obviously not going to reach speeds that high but this means that any speed loss incurred at the beginning of the race will negatively impact you for the rest of the entire run if the top speed was much lower and you could reach it fairly quickly a speed loss would only hurt until that top speed was reached slight inaccuracies magnify over the course of a race which is why at the top level times are differentiated by the tiniest of errors errors so slight they are essentially invisible to the naked eye but we haven't even scratched the surface the final turn of ao1 takes precision to the next level with a technique called speed drifting drifting can be done in a few different ways but the relatively low speeds on ao1 make this particular drift extremely difficult the turning angle needs to be perfect to achieve a noticeable increase in speed and if you don't do it right you'll only end up slower than if you hadn't even tried it at all i tried for hours and hours practicing that single corner over and over again and i just couldn't get anywhere near the kinds of speeds the record holders achieve in hours of play i couldn't do it a single time combining a perfect start with a well executed drift seems humanly impossible which is why the world record for this stage was held in such high regard the time was 23.83 seconds held by trabardia second place was a massive 0.03 seconds behind which might not seem like much but in this game that really is astonishing chabadia's ao1 record was the pinnacle of trackmania perfection one of the greatest records of all time the result of over a thousand hours spent on a single track and on the 27th of may 2021 trabardia confessed to cheating and then another player confessed and another player and even more cheaters everywhere knew they were about to be exposed and the man behind it all was a programmer known as donna diego anyone familiar with speedrunning would have heard the term tool assisted speedrun before it's the art of creating the best possible speed run by using external programs to craft inputs frame by frame most people take it for granted but the software required to create these tool assisted speed runs doesn't just spring out of nowhere dedicated programmers need to spend countless hours investigating a game's code so that they can create a unique piece of software that will allow them to interact with the game in a specific way even though the track mania games had been out for many years the tools that were available were still very primitive so donna diego took it upon himself to develop something new and improved but during his work he would uncover something that would blow the game wide open embedded deeply within replays was a very interesting piece of code to me it looks like gibberish but to a competent programmer it unlocks the hidden secrets of a ghost file this code describes inputs and what donadigo discovered was that every replay file has the exact set of inputs that were used to create the run up until this point no one even knew the inputs were there this might sound shocking but this is not intuitive racing games almost universally do not store inputs for their replays instead they simply record the position of the vehicle so when you race against a ghost you are just seeing a representation of where the vehicle was located at any moment it's not actually driving trackmania stores both the inputs and the position of the car this is a really important feature that feeds directly into this entire issue in fact the game itself makes use of this to verify runs when examining a replay trackmania provides an option to validate it it will then run a quick check and inform the user if the replay is valid but what exactly is it checking well given that the game is deterministic it is able to compare the inputs given with the data relating to the vehicle's position at any moment it happens immediately so you can't see it but it performs a test using the input stored in the replay if the test run produces the exact same positions as the replay it considers it valid you might ask yourself in what circumstance would the inputs not match with the recorded positions this would happen if someone had tweaked the physics of the game maybe they increased the rate at which the vehicle accelerated if they did do this the position of the vehicle would end up much further ahead than what the inputs would suggest therefore the game would instantly detect that something was changed and the replay would not be valid this means that any changes to the physics that would give someone an unfair advantage are easily identified and the website that hosts all of the records used this feature to verify runs essentially a player just needed to submit the replay and if it passed the in-game validation check it was accepted but there was a fatal flaw in this validation process there were other methods a person could use to cheat and it would be undetectable if you were to slow the game down and play at 50 speed this would give you a massive advantage but the inputs and physics would still be consistent according to the game's code sure the game would record the inputs at 50 speed but when the replays played back everything would appear normal at least according to the game slowing down the game is a fairly trivial task a program such as cheat engine can do it with relative ease and when you combine a simple method of cheating with a lack of detection you will almost always end up with abusers but in 2019 when donadigo found a way to extract inputs directly from a replay a way to detect slow motion abuse would emerge this isn't without precedent it happens all the time in the doom community players are exposed because it's so easy to check their inputs and when the inputs aren't humanly possible it becomes obvious that tools were used once the code was cracked players instantly saw the utility of examining inputs and 2020 saw the first example of a player being caught out in november tribatia highlighted a very suspicious replay by the player ogres the replays were incredible perhaps too incredible they were driving so close to the walls and executing turns with a level of precision that seemed inhuman when the replays were examined the inputs didn't make sense the speed and frequency of direction changes was much much higher than you would normally expect and not only were they incredibly fast faster than other players but they were also unbelievably precise top players know what is or isn't possible and the input speed just wasn't possible the only way it could be explained was if the game was slowed down if the game was running at fifty percent speed when inputs were entered they would appear twice as fast at normal speed donna diego's findings were presented to the track mania rankings moderators and ogres was banned ogres was a relatively unknown player so this incident went under the radar it was however a sign of things to come in late 2020 someone else wanted donna donadigo to examine the replays of top players in order to study their movements seeing imports isn't just used to find cheaters it's also an amazing tool to learn from the best one of those players was ryolu ryolu is one of the most well-known and successful track mania players ever one of the all-time greats he has set thousands of records over a career spanning more than a decade when his replays were examined they showed all of the hallmarks of slow motion play another player that showed highly unusual inputs was a racer known as techno this time the stakes were much higher ryolu and techno are far too established for this kind of accusation to be thrown around lightly so donna diego reached out to a respected figure of the trackmania community virtual he sent him a selection of anonymous replays and asked him for his input virtual immediately acknowledged that the replays were almost certainly performed using slow motion this was a problem and donna diego enlisted the help of virtual to scan through more replays the more they searched the more suspicious replays they found the problem was far bigger than they could have imagined the amount of replays submitted to the trackmania exchange numbers in the tens of thousands far too many to manually investigate so don diego created a script that would scour the database and detect suspicious inputs these filtered replays would then be examined and the final results were shocking on the 21st of may 2021 after several months of research donadigo and virtual released a very lengthy report outlining their findings their conclusion listed seven players they identified as having used slow motion within 24 hours three of the players had confessed including techno ryolu was adamant he was innocent however shortly before the report was released he chastised virtual for investigating him claiming it was a witch hunt and simply personal but the evidence in riolu's case was even more compelling ryolu has submitted thousands of runs in his long career and the extremely quick and inhuman inputs only ever appear in his offline runs runs that are streamed or performed while connected to a server appear completely normal but as soon as no one is watching the anomalies spontaneously manifest in the days following the report more runners would voluntarily confess to using tools to gain an unfair advantage so ultimately what can we learn from this is there some chronic issue that is specific only to trackmania is the game beyond repair certainly not the game has so many players that finding a handful of cheaters is a statistical certainty the real issue was simply the fact that cheating detection was lagging behind and when it finally caught up everything was exposed at once making it seem a lot worse than it would have if these things were discovered years ago the most important lesson that the trackmania community can take away from this is that proof standards need to be taken extremely seriously and cheating in general needs to be as difficult as possible to do undetected it does seem like they have already begun the process of trying to make the game cheat proof with the introduction of the competitive patch launched last december all future top runs will need to be performed through this patch which can detect many of the tools people were using in the week leading up to this video i spent a ton of hours grinding the first stage of trackmaniac nations forever trying to get a feel for the game i played this level specifically because i had heard so many stories about how amazing the record was and the struggles that the record holder trebartia had gone through in order to achieve perfection despite being new to the game i was in awe of how perfect the record was and when trebartio confessed it was shocking and i only knew about the record for a few days i can only imagine what the other players are feeling right now after so many of the players they idolized betrayed their trust and ruined something that was perceived to be so special now i want to end this video on a positive note i had an absolute blast grinding trackmania over the past week and i want to challenge you to beat my time my personal best for a01 in trackmania nations forever is 24.02 i really really wanted to get 23 seconds before the video came out but i just couldn't get there okay this is carl from the future the day i finished editing this video i ended up doing this wide [Music] oh my god this is hot this has to be it this is in a big way holy oh my god nailed it nailed it yes oh yes oh dude that was insane if you can beat my time put the video or replay in my discord and you will go into the running to win some steam vouchers winners will be announced in an upcoming video trackmania nations forever is completely free so everyone can give it a go you can find the competition rules and a download link for the game in the description as always thank you so much for watching you legend i hope you are having a fantastic day and i will see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Karl Jobst

Views: 900,502

Keywords: karl jobst, speedrun cheaters, cheater caught, fake speedrun, fake speedrun exposed, nintendo speedrun, speedrun, speedrun news, retro gaming, classic gaming, gaming documentary, trackmania, trackmania nations forever, riolu, trackmania cheaters

Id: Ww7x5elophk

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheOnlyFallenCookie]

I definitely recommend watching Wirtual's video on this as well. It goes into more detail on how the stuff was cheated

[u/msklss]

Has riolu said anything yet?

[u/TheWheatOne]

Glad he covered this. It goes to show just how committed cheaters are in staying under the radar. I'm glad most speedrunning games have strict standards so big revelations like this are rare.

[u/Cyanide_kcn]

for context

[u/gazzawhite]

Is he a full-time Trackmania YouTuber now?

[u/AlexAshpool]

Just echoing my YouTube comment, but they're going to have to start requiring video proof I think.

Also just got into Trackmania myself and it is the best! Try it out today.

[u/noodle-face]

At least there are people in this video coming clean to the accusations. Yeah, it's dumb after you've already been caught, but there's a little integrity left. With Dream it was like 'welp it was an accident ok, maybe, i think'

[u/three29]

This subreddit is turning into Speedrunning Cheaters EXPOSED and I love it.

[u/Ladnil]

Kind of amazing that they took the in-game validation as proof of record for so long when the tools to play in slow motion and produce a validatable replay were so readily available for so long. Don't most games ask for streams these days to confirm a record?