The Biggest Cheating Scandal in Trackmania History

in every form of competition there will always be cheaters our innate competitive drive and desire to win often lead people to do irrational things and there will always be those who are willing to go to extreme lengths to become the best by cheating and playing unfairly trackmania is an extremely competitive racing game franchise in every trackmania game the goal is simply to drive as fast as you can to the finish line on any select track there are individual leaderboards for each track in every track mania game and on every leaderboard there's often not more than a few hundredths of a second separating good players from the very best players in such a competitive environment it's easy to develop thoughts of grandeur and contemplate cheating in order to win over the years there have been some players who attempted to cheat but most of them were quickly caught due to being reckless and using easily detectable cheating methods with the rise of things like tool assisted speedrunning perhaps the trackmania community should have been more aware that someone could have discovered more sophisticated cheating methods and successfully managed to pass off cheated runs as legitimate we were naive enough to think that it couldn't happen the trackmania community is mostly based on trust and respect and it was unimaginable to think that any of the top players would sink as low as the cheat records but early in 2021 the community member dunadigo discovered the biggest instance of suspected cheating in trackmania history this discovery required a big investigation spanning over several months with thousands of world record replays being analyzed and now the results of this cheating investigation are final before watching the video i highly recommend that you go and read the full report the link to it is in the top of the description i also want to be very clear that this video is not about hating on anyone or stirring up drama the purpose of this video is to document the events that have happened and to address the situation the drachmania community is now facing what i'm presenting here are solely my opinions about the report and those opinions are not reflective of the report in any way because of the scale and the severity of the events i will be calling players by their actual gamertags please be civil and do not harass or make any attempts to contact the players mentioned in this video first things first it's important to understand how the trackmania leaderboards work in order to claim a record in trackmania you must upload a replay file of your speedrun replay files are automatically created by the game when you complete a run and they store the exact inputs a player did in that run replay files can be easily shared and uploaded to the leaderboards to then be downloaded to be viewed or raced against by other players replay files are great because they create a very low barrier of entry to competition as players don't need to buy recording equipment in order to compete in track mania but it also makes trackmania leaderboards more susceptible to cheating as with no requirement for live video evidence it creates a possibility for cheating the replay files in trackmania also store a player's exact inputs this is something that dona digo discovered in 2019 de la digo developed a tool that could extract inputs from replays and then play them back with a script to perfectly recreate a player's run as in trackmania the physics are completely deterministic meaning that all physics happen as a direct result of a player's actions let's take press forward tracks as an example on press forward tracks all the player has to do is press forward and because the input is the exact same in every run the result will also be the exact same every time this same principle applies for any complex string of movements as well the exact same sequence of inputs in trackmania will always produce the exact same result domadigal later developed a tool that would display these inputs fetched from replays so that players could analyze in high detail what exact steering movements were done in a world record run and for a while this functioned as a great learning resource but early in 2021 a player requested dunadigo to display the inputs of a record set by the trackmania streamer and content creator riolu and compared to what other players inputs look like ryolu's inputs looked strange to say the least the steering movements were very erratic and jittery and they didn't seem to make any sense whatsoever with how one would normally play the game but a possible explanation was that maybe the input display was incorrectly showing the inputs while domadigo did several tests on this he extracted the inputs from ryola's replay on c05 endurance which is a record ryola drove live on stream then he compared his own display with inputs taken from the replay file to the input display ryolo uses on his live stream and he found that the movement on both matched very accurately several comparisons like this were done and it proved that the tool definitely wasn't at fault after all all the tool does is display the inputs the game received so it does make sense that it is accurate with the live movement but could there be any other logical explanation for these inputs like a broken controller high sensitivity playing on a joystick or perhaps a third-party tool could affect inputs such as dx tweak all these possibilities were rigorously tested for and they can be read about in the report but in none of the tests done with these settings the players get close to replicating the inputs in realist runs in terms of frequency or precision with these possibilities exhausted an investigation was launched with the goal of figuring out if ryolu and potentially other trackmania players were playing unfairly an early suspicion was that the inputs could be a result of slowing down the game speed using software like cheat engine the advantage of driving trackmania in slow motion is that you can be much more precise in turns and have superhuman reaction times to situations happening in a run and slowing down the game speed does not invalidate the physics of a run as the game doesn't check if a run was driven in real time or not but when played back in normal speed the inputs from such a run would obviously look insane a player called ogus was already banned from the trackmania community for this exact method of cheating and reoli's runs did show some similarities to august controller movement for the sake of fair competition we began looking into the idea of the runs being driven in slow motion i will be skipping over most technical details of the investigation in this video but they can be read about in the report since we knew that inputs and runs driven in slow motion would most likely be much more rapid than the inputs and runs played at normal speed we developed a metric called spikes per second in order to automatically detect replays containing fast steering movements any time a player would change from steering left to right or vice versa by more than 2000 units it would count as one spike we then did an automatic analysis of 25 000 available replays from the leaderboards searching for the ones with high spec per second values it's important to understand that high spike per second values does not mean that someone is automatically cheating as it can just as likely be the result of things like using a defect controller which would create a lot of noise in the analog input signal this analysis for replays containing high spec per second values was merely an indicator into which players should be investigated further for potential cheating and each detected player's case was carefully looked into in the report i will now focus on the case of ryolu as he is by far the most well-known track trackmania player in this investigation so we put great effort into ensuring that the case is robust and that we have considered all possibilities of how his records were achieved ryolu has uploaded 573 records to the leaderboards in nations and united forever in total his peak spikes per second averaged out at 11.73 which is a very high score considering the number of records upon closer inspection we found that only runs played offline except at very high spikes per second and unnatural fast tapping movements while his steering movements in runs played live on stream or on online servers is much smoother and the steering changes are less agile throughout the investigation we have tried to find one online record or one run driven on stream which would showcase ryola's ability to do these hand movements in a live setting but we have yet to see any evidence of ryolu being able to reach such high spikes per second while driving precise corners we have examined the possibilities of software such as dx tweak or joy to key potentially affecting inputs and we found that these tools do not modify a controller's behavior in a way that yields this movement and especially not only at times when he isn't live streaming the second most notable player that this investigation turned up is techno who together with ryolu occupied the top spots on the trackmania united solo mode rankings for years tekno reached out to us and admitted to having played many of his records in slow motion using cheat engine at anywhere from 40 to 80 percent of real game speed he also notes that he isn't proud of it and that it was something that he felt he had to do at the time to keep up with ryolu interestingly the inputs in runs that techno has admitted to playing in slow motion and the inputs in ryolu's suspected runs look very similar in their nature both players reaching incredibly fast tapping speeds and doing very sudden movements following this two more players among the 10 that deviated the furthest from the norm lonz and nico have also reached out to us and admitted that they drove their records in slow motion and when compared their replays also exhibit the same behavior as seen in riolu's offline records we invite ryolu to provide a logical explanation for why his inputs look this way in his offstream runs but after exhausting all other possible explanation we can only reach the conclusion that the incredibly fast input seen in real loose offline runs must be a result of using an external program to modify the speed of the game or to put it quite simply we argue that ryolu has cheated his records by driving in slow motion the extent of this goes beyond just records set in trackmania united forever and trackmania nations forever these same steering movements can also be seen and runs on mania 2 canyon track mania 2 valley track mania 2 stadium and also intra mania 2 lagoon these inputs also occur in trackmania turbo both in world record runs and also in the super trackmaster metal replays in 2015 rioli was invited by ubisoft nadeo to set strong target times that would be included in trackmania turbo as a tough challenge for players to try to beat and we argue that he cheated these stm replays as well the earliest suspected treated replays emerged in 2011 and we see a steady pattern all the way until 2020 the most recent run being uploaded on the 7th of december 2020. we would argue that he cheated the vast majority of records driven off stream during this period totaling up to potentially thousands of cheated records in the description there will be links to playlists with 200 of reulis records from various trackmania games so you can analyze the data yourself and reach your own conclusions but you might ask yourself ariel was such a good track mania player so why would he cheat this we don't know and it's something that we can only speculate about a youtuber called carl jobs deals a lot with cheaters in speedrunning and one of his famous quotes is that great players don't cheat to get a good time they cheat to get a good time faster nobody would deny that riolu is a good trackmania player he has demonstrated this in live competitions but ego and a desire to be the best can often get the best of great athletes and players and when chasing big goals like trying to get to the top of the solo mode ladder or simultaneously holding all world records in a game and getting tantis in the close to achieving them it might be easy to get lured by the temptation to cheat but we will never truly know why he might have done this until he himself comments about it a rioli recently went live on twitch to talk about this situation before the release of the report in the live stream he did not state any possible explanation for his inputs but instead spent most of the time attacking me for how i approached him in private these following things are only something that i wanted to address personally and this section is not in any way part of the actual investigation on the live stream he started by showing our private discord conversation at one point in this conversation when shown a suspected keyboard replay on the track stadium a3 he claimed to not have driven the record even though it was driven on his in-game account and uploaded to his trackmania exchange account we looked into this claim and found that his story did not add up the trackmania exchange website stores your login sessions and in this login session ryolu also uploaded several legitimate personal best records leading us to believe that he was lying and that the keyboard run on stadium a3 was indeed driven by him the same fast keytapping movements are also present in some of his trackmania 2 canyon runs that he would later drive on keyboard runs that he himself uploaded to his youtube channel also tying into the idea that this record was driven by him when we asked him to send us his replay folder for analysis something that could help prove his innocence he declined this is a very easy process and it only takes a few clicks to do trackmania replays are a few kilobytes in size each so even thousands of replays across several years of play would only amount to a few gigabytes at most he also accused me of blackmailing him when i wrote to him that i'd urge you to think carefully about the tone you speak in as it might just make things worse when the report comes out if you'd like to speak about this privately instead then i'm open for it brother jesus christ that's blackmailing if i've ever seen one like i'd urge you to think carefully about this tone you're speaking is he my dad i mean that guy is a [ __ ] tart already so i don't know man holy [ __ ] many people found this comment to be too pushy and rude and i can own up to it and say that the way i wrote it wasn't perfect me and ryolu have been friends for several years and my intention with this comment was to warn him of the potential backlash that big public comments could have if the report found him to be cheating as once things are public it's much harder to walk back statements you've made this is also why i wish the matter could be resolved privately before reaching the public in that very same message he also admitted the playlist of runs that we sent him making many people believe that we were witch-hunting him over things that happened 10 years ago i personally wouldn't be talking about this if it was only about records that old everyone makes mistakes when they're young and everyone can learn from these mistakes there's plenty of examples from other games of players cheating when they were young and growing up and becoming good at the game but what we're dealing with now is more than just a single mistake this is several hundred unique instances where ryolu has sat down and potentially cheated records from the time he was 15 years old until he turned 25 what we are observing is not the result of a few mistakes made as a teenager but habitual cheating behavior spanning nearly a decade during the live stream ryolu said there's more at stake than just records who cares about the records what matters more is actual human beings and right now human beings are not being treated very nicely which to me is a weird thing to say after 10 years of supposedly cheating when he in those years did not treat the human beings that he competed against very nicely lacking any respect or decency for them at all he mentions how his livelihood is at stake but not once after becoming a trackmania streamer in 2016 did he stop to think that this is something he should come clean about instead we argue he continued to cheat records behind the scenes for many years after becoming a streamer lying to the entire trackmania community his fans his friends and even lying to himself if i sound a bit harsh in my tone when talking to and about ryolu that is because i am because this is a serious topic as someone who is competing for world records in dragmania fair and square i find all forms of cheating to be absolutely appalling those who cheat play only for their own game with complete disregard for the effort and feelings of those who are competing fairly and they ruin the spirit of the competition for everyone and i believe that cheaters rightfully deserve to get called out on their actions when caught no matter if they are a content creator or not and if they are a content creator then perhaps they should have thought better of starting a career on top of such shaky ground after this live stream many people have said that i'm only doing this for content for fame and for money and that i'm willing to backstab my friends but i want people to know that the one thing i personally care most about is competitive integrity for many years i have been strongly against cheating and helped and cover cases where it has happened in trackmania in 2017 i detected the player's stroll bar cheating in the trackmania tournament i created a video documenting the findings and compiled all the available evidence against him and uploaded this video unlisted to youtube the video was sent to tournament organizers and it has stayed unlisted ever since then in 2019 when the players gallagher and yoktar cheated on track mania exchange i was part of the team that detected how they cheated i was planning to make a video about the event but after they confessed to it i dropped the video to avoid unnecessary drama and late in 2020 i approached to not eagle and asked him to make an anti-cheat patch for trackmania nations forever which is a product that he has now finished and from now on all world records on official and classic tracks will have to be played on the trackmania competitive patch this patch prevents players from being able to play in slow motion undetected among a few other things and hopefully this will lead to less instances of cheating in the future my intention has never been to needlessly create drama i just want clean competitive environments in a perfect world the cheating investigation report would simply be published and the cheaters would receive their punishment and then we would move on but this case sadly completely ruins the trust people have towards the legitimacy of leaderboards and we as a community now have to confront a very harsh reality about the game and about our history many current world records and thousands of records from the past have not been achieved legitimately i hope people will think about this with an open mindset instead of pretending that these things haven't happened it is the only way we can move forward i once again urge you to read the report for yourself do your own analysis you can even fetch the inputs from the replays and create your own input display tool if you'd like the tools for this are all openly available and all of this wouldn't have been possible without donating without him and his effort it could have been several years until this situation was detected and dealt with and maybe by then the situation would have been even worse if you would like to show him a few sense of appreciation for his effort there will be a direct donation link in the description below i personally can thank him for making sure that my videos in the future won't put the spotlight on players who've lied and cheated to gain an unfair advantage but instead focus on those who embody the spirit of trackmania speedrunning in the dedication and effort they are willing to put in to achieving their records legitimately and luckily there are many more of those players than actual cheaters thank you all for watching this video i will take a short break from content creation now that this project is concluded but i will be back soon with more track mania videos and documentaries until then have a good one [Music] you

Channel: Wirtual

Views: 2,298,273

Keywords: Speedrun, Speedrunning, Cheater, Cheating, Cheats, Trackmania, Pro, Player, History, Trackmania History, World Record, Fake, Spliced, Hack, Biggest Cheater, Gaming, Wirtual, Karl Jobst, Dream, Cheat

Id: yDUdGvgmKIw

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/GothicFighter]

It's easy, riolu used his King Donkey Kong bongos controller for the offline runs, would explain the fast taps.

[u/[deleted]]

The fact that wonky inputs only occur in offline runs makes this so much harder for Riolu to disprove. He tries to double down in order to keep his livelihood, I get that, but I just don't see how he can go on pretending it didn't happen.

[u/Rivarr]

This thread from last week is an interesting read now. Do any of these arguments still stand up? https://www.reddit.com/r/TrackMania/comments/neqp0x/earthquake_in_tm_pro_league_wirtual_accuses_riolu/

[u/Jaterkin]

Not gonna lie, I got carried away by Riolu's stream before this report came out. I was 100% on his side and wondering why Wirtual would betray his friend like that. Now that the full report has come out it is clear that Riolu lied to me and other subscribers to his stream, and tried to manipulate us. I didn't know the whole story and made a judgement call too quickly. Sorry Wirtual.

[u/DrNSQTR]

Going back and reading the comments in the thread from five days ago after Riolu's livestream is a real eye-opener in terms of how quickly the court of public opinion can go the other way.

A lot of people in that thread said things that have aged pretty poorly now.

[u/Junior-Bookkeeper-24]

Very convincing and detailed analysis from Wirtual. Wonder how ryolu will rebutal

[u/palomageorge]

The most important thing from this video that i didn’t already know is that Wirtual has been way more active in combatting cheating in TM behind the scenes than at least i was aware of. The fact that in each of those cases he resolved the issue quietly without putting the suspects under public pressure disproves any theory of Wirtual going for attention/money/drama on this one.

[u/DjTrololo]

It's so sad to see this happen

[u/BarryGB]

so he cheated while setting the trackmaster records for TM Turbo? if thats true this must be the dumbest thing ever