"Ram" in Rollerbeetle Racing got "fixed".

Top 100 is and always has been about upgrades at the right time, and the luck to not get KD'd at inopportune times. I win 60-70% of my races, but am still a full 3 seconds short of the top 100 (468k) as my high score. The guys who make top 100 know all the tricks of the trade, while I am still lacking.

The things that really need to be fixed are dishonour after resigning and multiples in the top 100. Roughly 8/10 slots in the top 10 are occupied by the same two people and that is retarded. More chances for the mini pl0x. As for dishonourable, it is just stupid. I get owned at the beginning of the race, why should I spend the next 2-3 minutes of my life playing catchup? 3-5 victory tokens? Not a chance. I don't play to win small races, I play to win BIG!

That being said, I need to take a break from the beetles for a bit. I am starting to rage every time I get knocked down. If you need me, I'll be fraggin noobs in CS:S.

Screenie or it's a baseless accusation. There's no excuse for slander.

I've heard the same via PMs...but it's all hearsay until you prove your case.

Martin I hate to say it but I think I say the same guild doing it. [BAR] i believe was there tag.

And yea I saw you there also in korean district. Im not saying you was but that you was just happen to be there also.

How was anyone to know that that wasn't how the skill was intended to be used?

If I gather what has been said by the racers here, it's a combination of knowing exactly where to go when you race, and getting lucky in the boxes.

Not all the box skills are equal. I know I always looked for Superbeetle, and had significantly better times if I got one.

Of course, I wanted to race because it looked like fun. Actually getting points for it is just a bonus.

Pffft. You're making stuff up. I play out of International sometimes, and American sometimes.

Go crawl back under your bridge.

screen 1:








screen 2:






5 hours ago

P.D. thnx a lot Bobrath :d

It could have been me trying to sync with someone who wanted to show me something on the track, he started counting down in local chat. It didn't work though, we tried several times but there seems to be some kind of anti-sync code now which prevents players from entering the same race.

In legal terms:

If you're trying to prove 'cheating' the pics would likely stand up as probable cause. It's suspicious, all right.

It ain't proof. Who are you accusing of syncing with whom here? I have no idea who the [Bar] guys are. Neither does the top 100 list. Same for Chilling Memento.

TBH, if they can't post a top time, I don't care if [Bar] syncs as a guild. So they win more matches than they should and screw me out of 2 gamer points once every four or five hours when I run across them. Big deal.

If you're accusing all of these people of taking a dive for Roflcopter (or Mr Fantanastic), that annoys me a little more if it's true. Since there's nothing on the line but pride this weekend for posting a top time, it still doesn't annoy me all that much.

Other people may feel differently, but that's the way I see it.

Out of internationals tonight, it seemed to be the case that if you matched up against a player, you'd be very likely to see that player again for four or five matches (probably due to a shortage of players). So this may be (marginally) more effective than you'd think. If several syncers managed to get into the same match, they would be likely to be able to keep it going for three or four matches.

Remember the duping exploit and that players got banned for buying armbraces cheap? Why did they do that? Right: "They should have known!" That was the explaination ANet/Gaile Gray used. Tom Swift and strcpy both gave a good explaination, why that reasoning is bullshit.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...5&postcount=59

and

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...5&postcount=73

The same with the 50000XP bug! It is very easy to never realize and be confronted with the fact that the XP bonus for completing a mission is only given to you once!
Even worse that bug had no influence on the game! You get enough skill points anyway, the levels are capped at 20 and a cheap survivor title is not that important. Still they banned people!

So basically in the past it didn´t matter to ANet, if you knew about the bug when you exploited it or if it had any effect on the game. So why should they care now?? ANet should be consistent. So either ban the Ram exploiters or unban all those that got banned for similar things in the past.

I haven't got anywhere near the top 100 this time. Put it this way I have earned 1000 gamer points and haven't got the SRB/Echo combination once! LOL My best time is only around 465K.

Anyway, the point of this post is to say that over the weekend I was randomly grouped with Yuri a few times and with Lain a couple of times.

I these races neither Yuri or Lain posted particularly good times and in fact didn't even win all the races. However in these races I saw NO evidence of cheating or sync-ing or any other suspicious play.

I must say though that Lain is BLINDINGLY fast over the second half of the course. In one race I must have been 10+ seconds ahead of him and he infact seemed to wait until everyone was way out of sight. He then won the race beating me by a fraction of a second. I guess he was practising his skills for that part of the course.

I really wish I knew how they did it.

I know I am not slow, but I really can't compete with those guys.

Personally I would like the Roller Beetle arena left in the game permanently. After all, we are just killing time now until GW2, and having the arenas and the games etc would help people work on their titles and give you something else to do.

Well I can't sync with anyone at least, tried it four or five times and then gave up because one of our timers would always restart after 0.

Counterargument:

Rollerbeetle racing is a RACING game. The idea is to post the best time possible given the course design. The general objective is to keep the RRPM bar as full as possible at all times. There are guidelines for good play. Example: you try not to hit Dash when the RRPM bar is less than half full, because of the way Dash works.

However, there are no big red flashing "FEATURE" and "BUG" signs at the different points on the course where it is possible to gain speed. Nobody fully understands the mechanics of the RRPM bar. Arguably, if the mechanics were a known quantity then the race becomes trivial, as it becomes a simple math problem.

The RRPM bar is just plain glitchy. Why is it that it stutters up and down a bit as you go down the first hill from the starting gate? The whole thing is a downslope; generally on downslopes you do not lose RRPM. Sometimes you gain it going down, sometimes you don't (eg: hill right before checkpoint 3).

Explain to me how I am supposed to tell whether an unexpected increase in the RRPM bar due to the use of a speed buff at a specific point/place is unambiguously an exploit. If the RRPM bar were a nice, consistent function, I would know. But it isn't. More importantly, if it were that predictable, Rollerbeetle Racing would become boring quickly, because there wouldn't be that extra half-second of hidden time in the course design still out there for racers to uncover.

These examples have clear reference points for expectations. In the case of armbraces, they were worth X yesterday, and today they become worth Y, where Y < X by a wide margin. It's suspicious that today they are worth Y, when yesterday they were worth X.

Similarly, the "you should have known" argument works with the Doppelganger. It should be "obvious" that you should only get XP from mission completion once, since you only get XP once from completing all other missions in the game.

It doesn't work that way in Rollerbeetle Racing, as discussed above. Further, this demonstrates clearly how the ANet "you should have known" policy relies on the unstated assumption that there is a clear reference point for expectations. I can quote a long list of borderline "exploits" in this game where such reference points did not exist. These situations did not result in bans. Nor should they have.

Your argument doesn't hold water.

Further, the policy you quote is just flawed. It implicitly assumes that subjectivity does not exist. But clearly it does. Otherwise, we would not need civil courts to tell us what the law says about a given contract; different parties can reasonably hold different interpretations of what the law says.

ANet's use of this policy is rooted in classical deterrence theory. They like the policy because it creates uncertainty in players' minds about the outcome of doing "bad" things they don't like, which should (at the margin) deter "bad" behavior. But it also decreases players' enjoyment of the game, because the black-and-white "IF WE DECIDE IT IS AN EXPLOIT, WE SHALL SMITE YOU" policy creates uncertainty about engaging in what would likely be interpreted as perfectly legitimate actions.

Example: Tons of threads about transferring money between different accounts and such are out there. If I want to take $20 out of my pocket and give it to my wife, I should be able to do that without worrying about whether a regulatory agency will get upset about the transfer, right? Yet I know that every time I do that in the game, some probability greater than zero exists that ANet's automated ban hammer will ban and/or destroy the cash that was transferred. This makes me unhappy. It deters me from making legitimate transfers of funds between accounts we bought and paid for.

In sum: bad argument and the policy you quote is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Yeah the second part of the race I got pretty much under control, it's the first part where my weakness lies. Sayuri told me he could get to the first two boxes in the water at 36.5 seconds, and during my best times I got there at about 38-39 so that's where I'm currently trying to improve myself. Problem is that it takes some time to adjust and change your strategy, so you will be doing worse for a while until you got your new strat under control.

sorry Martin but all what u say is bla bla bla.

I cant believe that only 10 persons, or 20, between ALL THE WHOLE GUILWARS players, discover how to win these races and to gain these 10-12 seconds.
i cant, seriously.

dont know is an exploit or bug or whatever cuz i cant prove, but my mind says its.

This was my second weekend racing and I didn't get as much chance this time as I would have liked but I was determined to make top 100. Alas I was a few seconds off it BUT my times have improved immeasurably. I had my best scores recorded from last time and I'd managed 456k back then. Bless.

I've had the pleasure of racing a few of the top racers this weekend and (when I could keep up) trying to learn from them and they are all astonishingly quick. I can absolutely believe that there are a select few of the elite that are just that good. A single run behind Aeris Sephira basically mimicking everything she did and I was up to 468k with room for improvement.

If double ram was not working as intended then I'm happy to see the fix but I know it's not necessary to post top times. The biggest problem I had was everyone ganking the leader early on (sound tactics if your racing mind you hehe). Especially if you stretch the field out early. The brief coverage of Harden Shell fails in the face of a sustained attack from everyone! An unluckily timed Distracting Lunge was also devastating to a good time.

I love Rollerbeetle racing regardless and I'm gonna come back next time ready to break into the 470k time bracket! FYI my IGN was Nightmare Strike for those I raced against

This is the best example of why people don't understand what's going on that I've seen. You make assumptions based on what you already believe you know about play in Guild Wars. Then you act surprised when those of us that know the actual facts tell you the world doesn't work the way you assumed it did.

Are you also unable to believe that there is a VERY limited group of monks out there that can keep a group alive to the standards of winning a monthly AT? That's definitely the case, and it's analagous to the races. Those monks get much better results with the same skills as everyone else. All of them play a lot and have a very specific skill set that is hard to define: the ability to miraculously keep people alive.

It's the last four or five seconds of extra time that define the quarterly high score list in the races. The range is something like 478k to 482k. Tons of people out there can toss up a 472+; all you have to do to verify that is look at the daily board. When you narrow it down to finding four or five extra seconds of time by playing just a LITTLE bit better in different spots all over the course, it starts to make sense that only a limited number of players have had the patience to put in the effort to find all those little spots.

Additionally, you have to have made the run a sufficient number of times to not choke and screw it up when all the pieces fall into place. I repeat: small mistakes get magnified a lot. Precision matters.

You know im looking at that screen shot a few post up and i noticed that guy in the pic mr fantastic. He was one of the ones i seen counting down in the dis, He was also in the top 100 3 times after i noticed this and checked the list. But like everyone said you cant prove shit, With out the actual proof. I also heard players like the more empty dis, Because they say there is less lag, That could be the case has well.

... said before, Games are for fun, Mini games are free games that are there for amusment!

I mean if they were giving away pets this time..

.. but still...

Having managed a 760,968 last night (suprised myself even) and had numerous races against Martin - I'd have to agree that its a combination of getting lucky on crate pops as well as the racers you've got going against you as well as skill in knowing how to use your beetle.

Its unfortunate that some folks out there resort to sync joining (even more unfortunate when they all rank emote at the end to show you their leetness). I would like to see only each racer's "best account time" be counted on the top 100 - if only to keep the hopes alive for the masses. Its discouraging to see a small set of people dominating the top 100. Yes, they did indeed have a bunch of fast times and I'm not taking away from that.

(lastly, beren kat jollie if you host those images from imageshack, it has a resize option for you - it would make this page far more enjoyable to read)

Everyone knew double ram was an exploit because they flat-out refused to tell anyone else on these forums about it until after they had won ill-gotten rollerbeetles and become rich via using the exploit. None of the exploiters were willing to let the average joe know how to also use the exploit they were using to unfairly win constantly, because they knew if they made the exploit public, then everyone would be on an even playing field and they would have no longer have vastly unfair exploit advantage via which to win ill-gotten rollerbeetle gains.

How the exploit was kept secret like this to maintain the ridiculously unfair advantage by those who profited from said exploit is evidence enough that they knew it was an exploit.

Even if they shouldn't be banned, they should definitely be stripped of their rollerbeetle and/or everything they sold it to another player for. But Kashrlyyk is right. In the past players were banned for exploiting similar bugs, yet this time they get off scott-free from a ban and get rich too to boot. That's not right.

There one thing i would like too point out, I been doing this roller beetle stuff for over 2 yrs and i finish in the top 3 per race alot. But never got in the top 100. But this is not my point. Alot of people you talk too say its luck and skill combos correct. Well if thats what it is. Well if theres nothing going on Then some of them people that are on that top 100 list every yr more then 10 times. Must have some of the best luck around too be on there every yr more than once. Being sense its based on luck skill combos and the luck of power ups. After what i seen yesterday im starting too doubt that.

As you say it's luck and skill combined, if you lack one of these you just won't get a top 100 time. There is no exploit or syncing or whatever excuse you come up with in order to deny your own lack of skill.

It was a bug and you exploited it, so it was an exploit. You'd have to be pretty thick to think that an undocumented behavior which gave a considerable advantage and altered a core mechanic of the mini-game without any contextual reason for doing so was anything other than a bug. Arguing that you shouldn't be chastised for using that exploit because it "might have been a bug in the documentation" (or whatever lame excuse can be conjured up with a little bit of imagination and a ridiculous amount of intentional ignorance) is on par with arguing with a cop that you shouldn't get a ticket because your speeding MIGHT have been caused by aliens from Pluto testing a special anti-gravity device that removed all the air in front of your car and suddenly caused you to speed up do to a lack of air friction.

Yea. Maybe. Anything is technically possible.

But it's still a pretty stupid argument.

It was a bug that people with too much spare time sat and exploited so they could be proud of themselves for being at the top of a video game leaderboard, now it's fixed.

End of story.

Didn't use the double ram technique. I used good old Echo-SRB. Thanks for assuming. Many did use double Ram, I agree. However, I am speaking generally here, to show you how this argument falls flat on its face. The lack of an underlying standard for "fair play" in this context is the problem. See below.

So you wish to argue by analogy? Won't fly. There's a posted speed limit law. I know, and the police officer knows, what is defined as speeding. This is common knowledge.

You can't extend this argument to the topic under debate. By this logic, one of the two following conditions would have to satisfy:

a) There exists some observable level of speed gain which is an "exploit".

b) All methods of finding a quicker way to run the race are an "exploit".

Neither can possibly hold in the context of a racing game. Attempting to argue that they can is the worst sort of sophistry.

I've made this argument before. I don't tell you how to run the race because I gain nothing by doing so and stand to lose significantly. Again, why don't you ask me to play poker with you and show you my cards? No way.

Obviously people knew what thery were doing was wrong, During the last thread about this at the dragon festival they kept sayign that they were using just skill and knowledge of the coarse.

Me and others proberly gave them the benifit of the doubt, when it emerged that they did use it alot of respect and beleif in the argurments were lost.
Anet implemented the games for fun and they were, but some peopel seek and find ways to exploit, these succeded and ruined the idea of Beetle racing for me and proberly others.

With this Race weekend and the same people in the high scores some may think it was all skill knowledge of the coarse but this is the exact same thing they said before the last exploit was revealed, Trust has been lost.
Unless a Observer mode could be implemented like the HB rank (suggested by somone earlier) then peopel will know if its skill or not.

if your a fraid that you'd go down ranks wouldn't you still have the skill?
Skill> Impirsination

I would like to see somthing done to the exploiters tough, not a perma ban but maybe a 3 day suspension or somthing soft.
Anet really needs to clean up ( first critism i really have about anet)

btw this is only at people that used the exploit to get times, if you didn't then gratz on your score.
Anyone feels i've missed somthing or i am led on the wrong track feel free to guru pm me as this will proberly get locked adn i wont be on till the weekend.

Did it perhaps cross your mind that the ones who got top 100 scores last time and didn't know about double ram said those things? The ones actually knowing about the tactic ofcourse kept quiet about it, I would too if I had known about it. Like Martin already said, I'm not showing other people my cards when I play poker.

And there's a skill description that explains the skill's behavior.

Observer mode outside of special events (ie: championship tournaments) is the single worst thing that ever happened to competitive play. It discourages innovation by reducing the payoff to a ridiculously low level. Even if you have a good idea, everyone and their aunt has copied it within 48 hours.

Yes, it brings the relatively steep learning curve associated with competitive play down. But the price is simply too high, in my estimation.

The problem with Obs in rollerbeetle is a bit different: everyone and their mother would be running the same line within a day. I've played matches with six solid players, and they are AWFUL. No one can post a decent time under those conditions without getting insanely lucky at the start. You'd just make the luck factor in racing that much more prominent.

You're not paying attention.

As noted, the RRPM bar is silly glitchy. Further, who was to say that your "exploit" wasn't simply an undocumented "feature"?

The definition of "exploit" is fully in the eye of the beholder. It can only stick when there's a clear baseline expectation. And in this case, there just isn't one.

Just because the skill description reads one way doesn't mean the skill isn't functioning as intended. If you read the skill description of Ram, it says nothing whatsoever about a speed boost.

I only needed to be in a couple of races with one of the top racers (Yuris in my case), emulating his behaviour as much as possible, to see my own times increase tremendously. I can't do it consistently yet, but when I now hit 460k, I know that this wasn't purely luck, where before 440k would have been. And because of this experience, I now absolutely believe it's purely skill - and more importantly, knowledge - at work with these top racers. Sure, the boxes need to work out - but even when they don't, the knowledge of when exactly to use which skill makes such a tremendous difference that I have no trouble at all believing all these times are legit.

I do wish the top 100 would be on a per-character basis, though.

A suggestion for ANET, it would probably be prudent to remove the quarterly list and start with a clean slate since some if not most of those times were done using the double ram skill (pre-nerf).

Since all times are now based without the double ram skill, it isint a true reflection of times in general, look at the top 20 fastest times in the daily list and you will notice nobody underneath those players has a quicker time then the 100th placed man in the quarterly list.

Pol

I've already covered this line of "thinking" and won't debate it with you any further. It's an endless cycle since there's no limit to what "might have been". What is relevant is what was probable, and what was probable, given the extraordinary frequency of bugs in software, was that the behavior of the double ram cheat was unintended. Simply put, anybody who believes otherwise is either lying, intentionally ignorant, or plain stupid. End of debate.
No, it's not. Now my question becomes: are you lying, or just massively ignorant of basic information relevant to the topic?
If the Wikipedia definition is insufficient for you, I'd be happy to go find a dozen more sources that all say the same thing.

I also will not discuss this with you any further as there is no argument. It was an exploit by definition, end of debate.

I won't argue stupid and endless pedantics with you. If I wanted to bash my head on a brick wall for no particular reason, I'd go out on the sidewalk and do so.

The update page itself does that. It says: "Fixed a bug!" and it DOESN`T say "Fixed the description!"

Going by the description ram should not give a speed boost either, so everyone using ram is exploiting a bug now because it does not explain the speed boost?

In the colloquial use the word "Ram" always involves a certain amount of speed. You can drive your car into another at the speed of a pedestrian, but people would not say you "rammed"(?) the car. Just remember all those movies where car ram each others.

Secondly the bug was not the velocity, but the fact that after "Ram" was over it went back to the last velocity before its usage. With double "Ram" that would mean you go back to 100% RPM, which was clearly not intended.

Here is an explaination of the bug: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...&postcount=272

DIdn't help anything, top 30 positions is the same guy at least 15 times.

I'm glad you brought this up! I said it in the last thread, and Lain said it in this thread, but it bears repeating. Ram makes NO MENTION of its speed boost mechanic. Period.

Then is it exploiting to use it (for example) to go through water while maintaining your speed? This is certainly an extremely non-obvious use for ram (and one that very few players seem to know about).

Does it also involve traveling through brief patches of deep water without slowing down? What about going up steep hills without slowing down? Saying that what it does should be obvious from the name is disingenuous with a skill mechanic as odd and precise as ram's is.

Now for another line of attack.

Kashrlyyk, you've been complaining that people that used double ram don't get banned. Lets work from the assumption that the Ram trick was obviously an exploit, and a very very bad one (it was neither in my opinion, it adds very little to a top time as this weekend has demonstrated, and only helps bring more consistency to certain areas). There is more then enough recent precedent as to whether or not ANet will issue bans. Consider this build: Cultist's Spike. Does insane amounts of AoE DPS, orders of a magnitude more then what anything else in the game is capable of. Fixed shortly after it was found in this update. This is the height of obviousness in skill-combo bug exploitation. Where were the bans? I don't recall one single ban being handed out over this.

*Edit*ed for grammatical correctness

Seems to me like everyone thinks they themselves are pro and the sight of someone consistently being "better" is unacceptable. The result is a bunch of whiners trying to find any which way to come up with an argument or reason to justify why they think the top leaders should not be where they are.

Judging by the top scores you all can rest your case. These people atop the ladder are "STILL BETTER THEN YOU" with or without said exploit. Get this over your heads people. There is no more argument. The best of the best have shown once again they are still "better then you" after the bug fix.

It's not our fault you (and other people) prefer to live with eyecaps over their eyes...

Look, there is SKILL involved. This skill, however, is no more than knowing when to activate Ram and Dash.
Now, according to both descriptions (assuming you take the Ram speed buff into concideration), this would mean than when you are at ANY given RRPM, Ram should get you to 100%, no matter what, and Dash would up your speed by 25%...

Now logic, which is the one thing we got, tells us 2 obvious things:
-Ram is most effective at low speeds. Because the netto gain is higher than if you were to be at an initial higher speed.
-Dash is best used BELOW 80% and above 60% (whatever the natural rrpm is) RRPM.

From these 2 gives bits of information (and You can't proove either wrong), it isn't rocket science to figure out on WHEN to use your skills.

However, because there is no explanation on the effects of Hills and such other, Anet found it necessary NOT to give us the "idea" behind the RRPM meter, what exactly affects it, and eventually what is needed to keep it a high rate.

The fact that these people in top 100 get these monsterous scores (480K+) shows it isn't just a "small" effect the terrain has on the beetle. (Or stacking with skills)
This is 100% Anet's fault(The fact there is sucha small "elite"-lucky-few), and as far as I'm concerned, I concider the people in top 100 no more than lucky people who found an "exploit/glitch" that's on the thin line between acceptable and not acceptable, BUT in NO WAY I'm convinced that these people have more "skill" than I do...
If I had 1 match with ANY of these players at their best (assuming I could keep up with them), I would start getting these consistent 470K+ times aswell.

NO, it's NOT skill, it's mere luck and balancing the thin line between exploiting and "not-knowing-better"...

*This intire post is focused on the current top 100 aswell, as far as Dual Ram goes, that was glitched, heck it even shows on official Wiki, and thus these people deserve to get banned (temp or perm) and their prices (rollerbeetles) retracted...