Rollerbeetle Racing Top Score Analysis

One could also say: remove Blast and Ram's undocumented speed boost. Anyone for a Trackmania Nations match? (I want to drive a beetle upside down and jump accross a bridge )

PvP doesn't mean players have to fight directly. It's exactly like in AB, where players compete with each other through the point counter. Here it's the top100 score. Actually now that I think about it, AB and RBR are very similar, apart from the positioning aspect (roll along the line, versus run in circles).

The more I hear the arguments of "both sides" the more I think RBR cannot be changed without stopping it being RBR. What this thread, like the one Yuris created years ago, does is to allow players to learn and decide how they want to play.

Haha tell that to the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints, they both got spanked in the last 4 games of the season, both were headed to big games. Both of them were beat by teams with NO chance of getting to the playoffs. Analogy does work.

It's only sensible to judge this proposition on the basis of outcomes. The only time when using the KD changes your outcome is when it enables you to finish and collect Gamer points when you otherwise would not. But that's shortsighted, because you're going to make a bad enemy by doing it. That'll cost you more Gamer points in the long run. You're going to run into that player again, and it's not very costly for that player to retaliate every time they see you and do not combo.

On the face of it, you'd think this would help. But in reality, this would just change the race to revolving around who can acquire Echo from boxes at the right times. If you strip Echo as well, then the top 100 will be filled with players that sync no-KD runs. Neither is a desirable outcome.

Hehe, I'd love to play RBR without echo and srb :]

That means more identical players keep the top100 spots

I suppose your prisoner's dilemna concerns really only apply to those who have a reasonable chance of making it to the top 100. It makes sense you'd collude with your peers and form an understanding which would allow you all to maximize your profits (ie. winning multiple beetles on alt accts).

The threats of making enemies and mutual assured destruction usually will fall short on the majority of the players who don't have a realisitic shot of getting a mini. It seems rather hollow, even if a good portion of the top 100 players are running multiple accounts and have more opportunities to retaliate against an incompetent noob who ruined your time. If anything, if I've made an "enemy" of one of the top time posters, and now he's worrying about little ol' me and going out of his way to make a point that we're now feuding, perhaps I'm distracting him from concentrating on the race and getting a great score.

To extend that a bit further, I'll assume (possibly incorrectly, but failing safe regardless) that the top 100 beetle winners are in fact only 10 guys running 10 accounts each and essentially c*ckblocking everyone else from a chance at the mini. With this in mind, I may as well dick up everyone's shot at a high score, in hopes that I am disallowing someone from scoring an additional mini. They'll only go home with 9 now instead of 10.

Ofc that strategy hoses people running only 1 account and ultimately my own chances at a mini. But if I wasn't going to have a shot at the mini in the first place, and rolling over to allow some pro rbr guy get another top score and nab another mini... /pfft to that. I'll take the griefer label if I can contribute to someone only scoring 2 or 3 minis (boo hoo) instead of 10.

See... I honestly think you and several other people take rollerbettle WAY to seriously. Most people who play it (99%) have no aspirations (or chance) of getting in the top 100. They simply play to win or get as good of a finish as they can in that particular race. To honestly think people are going "oh I better not tick him off if I want to finish in the top 100" is stupid. While many people do play rollerbettle very precisely to try to get top 100 and will have some sorta "gentleman's agreement", most people do not (and won't even have any idea what the heck you are talking about when they "ruin" your time)

Edit: Eh, actually you seem to acknowledge that in some of your posts. But its important to keep in mind the percentages of just how many players are actually going for top times out of the total number of players.

@ Yuri: It'd be bad. KD-lotto would be no fun at all, and it'd make syncing make sense.

@ Cluebag: The noobs aren't the ones you have to worry about. They won't get into range to disrupt you; even if they get a super, they'll waste the momentum. It's the people just off the board that max in the 475-480 range that you have to worry about if you get a spectacular run going. Those players don't even need a super or echo to reach the top of the large hill between checkpoints 4 and 5 before you can clear the spiral. All they need to do is avoid knockdown spam in order to arrive in time.

Even for a player with no shot at top 100, though, there's no reason to use your knockdowns early in the race. They're much more effective late in the race, and burning an early KD on better players than yourself only invites more efficient retaliation later in that race when it counts. If the problem is that you use the KD because you expect to replace that Spit Rocks/Blast from the first box, then you're bad. Open fewer boxes and you'll go faster.

If I had to guess, I'd say that 35-50 distinct people won beetles this year. The majority of those players won one. To my knowledge, only two players won 10+ this year. The first year was the only year when a decent number of distinct people won minis (+/- 65).

If you have no shot at winning the mini and you're playing just to KD people and make people mad, you're just a jealous griefer. If you were smarter, you might try swallowing your pride and asking for help. I help people that ask nicely; there's always a couple of people each year that owe their mini to tips I provide. But I tell people that have screwed me over in the past where they can go.

@ Hawk: I'm not saying that most players cooperate. I'm just saying that it's dumb not to, up to a point. This is true irrespective of your goals for the race.

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martins tips and tricks both on the forums and ingame pms turned me from last year's 450 with 3 SRBs in a row player to a 470-480 player that squeezed out a high score this year.

Hawk hits the nail on the head. I would add fun also as a reason to play, but it all meshes together in the end.

ROFL...Guy selling 15 RBR minis. No problem with that other than the whining/name calling by "racers" if you KD them while playing, but with so many ectos on the line I guess I can understand it.

Was he racing for fun or the mini? I think I will go out on a limb and say the mini. He proves my point the quest for the mini has removed the fun, racing is all about greed.

"One guy raced to win fifteen beetle minis. He seems like a pretty greedy guy to me. It must be true that ALL racers are greedy like this, and only want to win as many of those minis as they can!"

lol

Not everyone. But everyone that will adhere to the prisoner's dilemma and thus not use any KD skills ever, yeah just described all of those people.

All I can say is LAWL to the guy who bought 15 accounts, and has absolutely no life. Really, he can have those 15 minis because its probably the only real accomplishment he has ever had. At the end of the day GW will give way to GW2 and all those ectos and minis will be pointless.

If you play RBR to win one mini to add to your HoM then I can empathize with ya. Its always great to achieve that rare item to add to a collection. But if you're doing it simply out of greed, to the point you buy 15 accounts (maybe less assuming he has some left over from previous events), then I wouldn't trade my lot in life with yours for all the ecto in the world.

The point of logic that you keep missing is that your motivations don't matter. You are made strictly better off by not using the KD skills early and by not interfering with top runs unless you just plain like making people mad at you.

This does assume that you find winning more fun than not winning, but if that isn't the case then why would you be playing a competitive game?

The above logic is why you get ripped. Ruining top runs is stupid and not in your own best interest, unless it's late in the event and you're protecting a marginal time. So if you make the choice to wreck someone else's run under any other conditions, you're either bad, griefing or both. It's annoying to have bad players or griefers waste your time. Surely you've done a run in UW with someone who sucked and wasted your time? It's the same basic problem, even though it doesn't look like it on the surface.

Clearly Tanniz finds it fun to win huge numbers of beetles. Otherwise he wouldn't do it, as GW is a voluntary activity you carry out in your spare time. You act as though dominating isn't more fun than winning.

You obviously have a very different definition of griefing than most people I know. Most people would consider "dominating" to be griefing. He knows alot of people are after those minis and he proceeds to take up 15 out of 100. By your own logic he is marking himself to be stopped next year by people who are sick of seeing his good fortune. You cause others grief then you get marked by top players right? I'd say the people who were in the bottom 14 spots until he beat them out with his multiple accounts are feeling that have a grievance with him right now.

I don't RBR often, but when I did do it I didn't shoot for top times. I knew off the start that is was going to be one of those things that you had to intimately learn the map and know how to react perfectly to others for a top 100 time (something I really have no interest in). However, I did try to take first place; good time or bad. Taking others out at any point in the race because I wanted the tokens and gamer points. Typically there are so many people playing that I honestly can't recall ever having an issue with someone "getting revenge".

Even if I'm losing I'd rather only lose by 1-2 seconds than 5-10. Might not make the slightest difference in score and tokens but at least I felt that I gave it a good shot.

Well, I'll put it this way: if I were Tanniz, I wouldn't be running character names with Tanniz in them the next time I set foot in RBR.

Griefing is making other people miserable at no gain to oneself other than the pleasure of irritating people. Tanniz clearly got a net positive benefit out of winning all of those beetles. Now, I'll agree with you that posting a thread selling 15 beetles wasn't the brightest idea in the world.

If you play a few races a year then your wish to not get blown out is reasonable. But you're also not the problem here. If you're a 450s player, you're never going to come into contact with someone that's going to hang a 481+ after they take off.

I can only think of one or two times in the last four years where I wasn't able to later exact vengeance on someone that burned a time of mine. If the races were as packed as they were during the first year, it might not be an issue. But I see everyone multiple times over the course of a weekend these days.

I suppose one could argue that Mr. 15 Greased Lightnings is griefing the entire community, by trying to win all the mini's. What's to stop him from buying/appropriating 85 more accounts next year and winning all 100 beetles. Ofc he finds it fun winning mini's and selling them to rmt's or deleting them or whatever he feels like doing with them. It's all about having fun right?

And as long as Anet has no beef with one or two individuals winning a large percentage of the available prizes, well shit, all those haters can just go pound sand... nooobs. Let a playa play!

For the record, to my knowledge, any other Anet contest, be it the holiday art contests or whatever, entrants are limited to one entry per contest. I suppose then it should all be good in the hood if the talented people in nolani were to submit 20 odd entries on their alt accounts, and scarfing up all those prizes as well. I'm sure they'll find winning all those contests fun, not to mention profitable since they'll also be taking the bulk of those available rewards as well.

Cant really blame people for getting a little annoyed about being booted out of the top 100 with several people using multiple accounts etc.

I agree Martin with one thing, Tanniz made a huge blunder in my opinon selling all his beetles in one thread. Just made him a target now for some people in future events.

Pol

He isn't that good.

But to address the core issue of social justice in your post - it's all in how we define it. You can make an argument that it's unfair for players to have the ability to purchase more than one lottery ticket for this game. You can also argue that everyone has an equal ability to purchase multiple lottery tickets, and that the outcome is just and efficient because the best players are winning the minis.

There's nothing that makes either argument inherently more right than the other. You can argue philosophical principles that defend your case until you're blue in the face, but at the end of the day those principles depend on axioms whose validity cannot be proven or disproven. If I disagree with those axioms, then I am free to reach a different conclusion as long as the path that gets me to that conclusion is logically consistent.

I guess this is one of those inconsistencies which can lead to chapped asses. For any other event which has a reward of limited minis, there are protections in place to prevent abuse of the system and monopolizing the rewards. Clearly this isn't the case with the rbr rewards.

Given that Anet basically condones this "multiple prizes per household" exception in their rbr event, as with any other oversight/loophole/exploit/broken mechanic that can be abused while the devs stand idly by and allow it to happen, well, everyone may as well just go for it balls deep and take advantage of it while it lasts. Obviously the consequences of abusing the system in the rbr event are nonexistent, and since Anet aren't telling you that you can't win the lions share of the prizes, I guess logically that means that they are telling you that you can... until otherwise noted...

Why are you trying to tell people how to play the game? i.e. don't kd here, don't mess some guy up, etc.

If I went and told you to only play the Factions campaign for the rest of your time on GW, you really wouldn't care would you? You would just want to enjoy your time. Atleast this is the view from the casual player. If pissing people off with skills is what they want to do, then so be it.

I'm telling people how to win more. Since this is PvP, presumably people want to win. It really is that simple.

You are better off saving your KDs for late in the match if you want to win races. Using them early on is just bad play. You waste more of your opponent's time by using them when the opponent cannot replenish the RRPMs lost to the KD naturally, and all of those spots are later in the course. Further, there is no guarantee that the player you knock down early will be in contention late. Players can suddenly charge into contention with a Super at the right time. and it is especially important to kill those players' RRPMs late if you want to win.

Using KDs when they provide no benefit other than making other people mad is poor strategy. Doing so invites retribution. It's not very costly for a top 100 player to spend a match griefing you to retaliate if they fail to get Echo/Super, and that happens far more often than not. If you were never going to see them again, then it would make sense to wreck their runs. But in practice, you're going to see anyone you shaft with a KD or Lunge later on that weekend.

So the rational thing to do is to save your KDs for late and only use them when they can decide the outcome of the match. Doing anything else will lose you matches that you otherwise would have won. This is why top 100 players tell you that you're terrible when you wreck a good run. If you were good, you'd understand that doing so is not in your own best interest.

Martin are you telling me what my best interests are? Quit assuming what my motives are, you are WAY off. The best races I have been in have been massive battles with horrible times and they were really fun.

Also, are you trying to tell us that Tanniz did not win those minis to sell them? He just won all those for fun...that is really funny. lol "otherwise he would not do it" lol!!! No way he would do it for an A$$load of ectos. Nah, that cant be the reason.

Core issue of social justice?

Cluebag's point is rock solid and may be closer to the truth. It could be we ALREADY have 6, 7 or 8 people with multiple accounts who are getting the top 100 scores to get the minis and sell them for ectos.

ANET remove the mini!!!

So keeping people from pulling out way ahead of the pack early is bad play. Check.

Letting somone run unimpeded is good play so I don't have the "Fear of Being Shot Later". Check.

Bad advice IF you don't care about the mini! Shoot early and often to keep the leader from making it a runaway game. If they get too far in front then noone can stop them. Battle it out. If you get a "racer" they will typically rage quit. HAHAHA one less whiner to battle! Retribution, Ohhhh I am so scared, blow the crap outta them if they want to play that game. PVP BATTLE BABY!!! BRING IT ON!!! GG!!!

I fail to see why we're arguing about Tanniz? It's in his full right to do such a thing, though as mentioned before it's borderline match/ladder manipulations.

Yet I would also like everyone to imagine what if there were no minis, but rather only a scoreboard, would you think he would have gone through all the trouble of multi-acounting, aswell as no-lifing (as I did ) an intire weekend for a mere 15 names on a top 100 list in a format that doesn't even represent true skill?

I wouldn't mind seeing the minis removed from now on, but I doubt that would change much, as who will really be playing RBR next year, aside from me ? (GW2 SHOULD be out by then, I think)


The only issue I have with him (Not to call out names, or individual people any further) is that he is knowingly taking other people's spots aswell, solely for individual profit. And those people do NOT have the same chances he does, as he's got way more acounts/leverage to work with.

In a way, it's no different than abusing an exploit, albeit it not being against the rules.

On top of that, I'm looking forward to the posts on infamous gold selling forums made by users clearly resembeling the names of the many top 100 multi-acounters, in which they're trying to sell the equivalent of XX mini rollerbeetles in ecto's for real money. (Not all of them do this, but only some do)

It reminds me why I never bothered with the highest end of Guild Wars PvP (In this case, somewhat including RBR), because I'm never going to be as motivated as people who have a couple of 100 bucks as reward in mind. (Or I gues with the current ecto prices, 15 minis (400E per) = +- 840 USD) Though I'm not inclining he WILL sell for real money, but you would have to be pretty ignorant not to realize it's a serious posibility, aswell as the fact it's been done a million times before. People competiting simply for real life rewards, look at the amount of top GvG'ers who have won a monthly sell their zkey rewards for real money.

But that's a completely different issue. Right now, we've come to the state where it doesn't matter anymore anyways, and this thread (the OP anyways) only serves informational uses *Which is why I created in anyways*, so people can aim for a top 100 score the next RBR event. (April I was told?)

You're still not getting it. Those races are fun. But you're much more likely to win them if you're the player that's armed with KDs at the end of the race. I get most of my wins by blowing past someone that has a healthy lead, and I don't need Echo or Super to do it. When I start cleanly, I win. But I don't start cleanly all that often.

To some people, winning lots of prizes for in-game rewards is fun. You're using an overly narrow definition of "fun" here.

I thought this was commonly known. About half of the minis go to a half dozen to dozen players every year. The remainder go to players that win one to three beetles. The upshot is that 40 to 50 distinct players actually get a prize.

This fact is obvious from a quick perusal of any year's top 100 list. Most of the Borat jokes belonged to a certain well-known racer. Ewok, Tanniz and Axel weren't exactly subtle about their alting.

Sorry, but it is. The incompetent boobs behind you are still going to shoot you rather than the leader. Even if they don't, you can waste ten to twelve seconds of someone's time with a couple of well placed KDs late. Using them early wastes two or three per KD, and running over extra boxes to get more KDs wastes about as much of your time as you gain from anything other than a Super. You would need a ton of help from the pack to impact the leader's race more than you can by trashing the leader at the end of the race.

You're a griefer. This proves it.

I lol @ this thread and it's replies....

No, you're not getting it. The point of Vidya games is to have fun. Yet we should actively avoid the fun matches because its in our best interest to win. That's right, we don't play games for the enjoyment of the game, its all about the carrot that is being dangled on a stick.

You are right about the most effective way to get that carrot on the stick, but if that is the end all, be all of MMO's then its at odds with the whole vidya games are for entertainment idea. However you are wrong if you think these people derive enjoyment from this type of winning. This type of winning exists only to be able to lord an achievement, whether the prizes themselves or the trade value of the prizes, over the rest of the population.


And seriously, RBR competitive? Really? That is an absolutely absurd statement.

You're being an elitist. Your continuous name calling, put downs and assumptions prove it. You are dictating to everyone what "proper and best" play should be. People should play the game how they want to and not be intimidated by racers constantly crying about KD. Not everyone plays for the same reasons you do. Racers need to quit whining about KD when it is used or petition ANET to remove it.

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@Killed, absolutely agree with your post above and your OP is great for people that want to try to get the mini. Nicely done. It also helps me to keep them from blowing out the whole field and not finishing a race at all. Bring on GW2!
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I just hope that everyone does not feel the need to approach RBR from a racer mentality. Racing is not the ONLY fun to be had from RBR. Noone should feel bad for using the skills provided them even when the rage quitters freak out and the name calling starts from those people who are strictly after the mini. Next time anyone gets a name caller, whining about KD, tell them it is a PVP BATTLE and shove mini where the sun don't shine. Bring on your retribution because now you are fighting like PVP should be!

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right on rev!

Winning is fun. I think that's what you're missing about highly competitive people - winning is fun and losing is not fun at all.

But irrespective of how competitive you are, I think we can all agree (since we decided to play a competitive game) that winning is more fun than losing. If that's the case, then you increase the level of enjoyment you get from the game by taking actions that enable you to win more.

The key point of logic in all of what I've said is that it doesn't matter whether you're playing to win this match or playing to win a beetle or playing to win a dozen beetles. Irrespective of your goals, saving your KDs for late and avoiding taking actions that will anger other players for no gain is in your best interest. You'll win more matches and therefore have more fun.

Now, if you enjoy making other people mad, you may have more fun by violating those guidelines. But if that's the case, you're a griefer.

This is the problem you can't quite get over. Vidya games are about entertainment. Entertainment is subjective and emotional, it is not logical. It really doesn't make a bit of sense to talk about what should logically be the most fun.

The point remains: if you derive entertainment from making someone else unhappy, you're a griefer. If you derive entertainment from winning, you should behave in the logical fashion because you will win more.

Maybe I have fun in very close and high competitive races, where we are so busy worrying about the other player that we cannot even begin to approach an optimum time?

The idea of either you like grief or you like to win is a false dilemma, you should be able to see that clearly.

Agreed completely, I tried to get top 100 times too. I thought it was fun to try to get there and trying to win. I was trying to get the best time I could and of course i wanted the mini. But it was more than just the mini, I wanted to do it for fun. I wouldnt have done it nearly as much as I did if I didnt have fun with it and a couple of times I got close and it felt good and I had a good time trying.

It all depends on your idea of fun. I find it fun to win/top 100. Obviously Reverand you dont think that it is fun to try to only get top 100. People are different.

You can't control the frequency of quality, competitive races. You can take actions that maximize your chances of winning.

You are acting as though items not under your control (quality of other players and closeness of the race) are under your control. You can take a quality line and use the skills you get from the boxes efficiently, given the power-ups your opponents get. You cannot force a dog-ugly, 430-440k slugfest with a close finish to obtain. That requires either bad players or more KDs on efficient players that know the proper line than a single player can dish out.

If it's just two of you racing to a 450+ time, then the outcome depends entirely on what each of you got from the boxes (assuming that both of you know what to do with the skills you get).

As for skill usage: either you use your skills to maximize your order of finish, you use them to efficiently grief, or you are incompetent and do neither. There are no other possibilities. There is a single efficient point to use every possible combination of skills, and if your opponent will use Harden Shell at that point then you should just substitute to starting your chain a fraction of a section before they use Harden.

Likewise you can't force people to agree not to use KD and to ignore other players. All you can do, and all you have done in this thread is get on your high horse:

And talk down to everyone that isn't playing exactly like you want.

All you can say is logical, logical, logical, logical, when human beings, particularly what they enjoy and how they want to enjoy it, do not necessarily follow logical patters. So logically: applying pure logic to this, is a guaranteed way to be wrong.

The only thing else you have said is "When you fully analyze the arena. . .", but when you fully analyze the arena you will see that it is a terrible format. You do not arrive at the conclusion of "we should all race nice and all just focus on our individual bests", you arrive at the conclusion of "This should have never been implemented, Anet please remove this abortion, it is catering only to the lowest common denominator of player (as you've said, either the ultra farmers or the griefers, because clearly once you've analyze the arena, there is no place for the casual player)."


EDIT:

Actually, this was the very point I, and others, have been trying to make.

Bad play is bad play. Bad players play badly. They use their skills inefficiently, take bad lines and make bad decisions. Bad play can be evaluated objectively, because RBR is a linear optimization problem with some strategic components at the start. But since it's basically a math problem in disguise (as is any computer racing game), we can logic to assess whether or not you are playing optimally, and then assess precisely how suboptimally you are playing.

Playing well is a choice. It's not that hard to play well; it seems to be a good bit harder to make the leap into being a top 100 player. Resources to tell you how to do both are easily available. You can be a casual player and use those resources. Plenty of casual players do this in RA and AB and play well despite being casual players.

If you enjoy playing poorly, that's your right. But you're still objectively a bad player. That doesn't make you a bad person. Griefing makes you a bad person.

You're approximating the problem Martin, although most of what you say make a lot of sense (as I said earlier). "Sense" is multivalued logic statement here, where the "fullspeed" mode of RBR is only one value. People do win with a very inefficient use of their skills. RBR is much more than whatever the prisonner's dilemna is, it's like having 7 prisoners and 7^3 possible outcomes, without the ability to have a function to rank them (lattice structure for a partial order).

Furthermore "good" or "bad" is not measured solely by the top100, you could also measure the percentage of win, or loss, relative ratios, win given worse box pickups, etc. Nevertheless you're right to say that many players who enjoy the "PvP" mode of RBR would get better at this mode by learning how "fullspeeders" use their skills.

tl;dr: RBR is a fundamentally irrational game, it's fun in a variety of ways.

While it is correct to assert that players can win with suboptimal skill usage, this results for one of two reasons:

1) Luck - a player that gets Supers can defeat a more skilled player without. Sometimes you just lose at ping wars in trying to defend against knockdowns. Sometimes you happen to get knocked down in a bad spot that results in further knockdowns by Ram that you cannot defend against.

(Yes, under certain circumstances it makes sense to use knockdowns to force chains like this. An example of such a spot is the lower bridge in the spiral. Since most players use Ram to cross the top bridge, you can paralyze a player with chain KDs if a series of other players is about to cross. In this instance, you are sometimes better off using your KDs here rather than on the beach; this is a situational judgment call. But doing this early in the race is always a bad idea; you simultaneously increase that opponent's odds of getting a Super and risk not having the KDs to stop another player that acquires a Super from beating you.)

2) Poor opponent play - all other things equal, the player that uses skills most optimally and takes the best line wins.

I'm not saying that we should measure good/bad by top 100 alone. That's a useful metric, but it's not the only metric. What I am saying is that the general principles of good play remain the same whether or not you're trying to place on the top 100 board (or able to do so on this particular run).

Long story short, your KDs are most potent at the end of the race because you can influence the target's overall time most greatly and because you can target the proper opponent. If you're burning KDs and Lunges early, you're playing badly and decreasing your chances of winning.

Good lord. Reading Martin's posts reminds me of that movie Rain Man.

You are a bad player.
You are a griefer.
You play bad.
A bad player is you.
You are a jealous griefer.
Did I mention you are a bad player.
Gotta watch Wapner.

You know, sometimes, when I play beach volleyball, I'm just playing to play the game. I am not aspiring to emulate Misty May-Treanor or Kerri Walsh (even tho I'm a dude, but still, they're awesome). I'm not out to win gold medals. I don't practice my jump serves every waking moment. I don't analyze every single minute aspect of every possible situation on the court. I just go out there, knock the ball around, win some and lose some, and still manage to have fun.

I remember having played beach volleyball with a bunch of buddies quite a few times one summer, and we used only one hand because the other was busy holding a beer. And guess what? It was fun. By your definition ofc we would have been bad volleyball players, but you know what? Who cares? Sorry to disappoint you by not following the optimum tactics to ensure the best possible percentage of winning the game and having your type of fun. We had plenty of fun w/our own style of play, and I could give 2 shits about anyone's assessment of my calibre of one-handed-beer-drinking-beach-volleyball play.

You keep insisting that everyone is bad if they don't play to win, and win per your outlined tips, tricks and tactics. If they deviate from your strategy, they're bad. And if they do the unthinkable and fire off their KD too early... oh.... mah... gawd... /megabad. As has been mentioned before, not everyone is playing with the same goal as you, so get over yourself already and realize that not everyone is out there trying to take home the gold, so you can knock it off with the "ure all bad" bs because odds are, the only person that cares is you.

As much as you think you may be doing a public service by offering strategies to win and have fun by your definition, which I'm sure is of value to people that are aspiring to score minis, you come off more sounding like a broken record hung up on other people's bad play and their griefy ways. We get it, we're all bad unless we follow your approved guide to winning and fun. Noted. /circular file

Well, that's a bunch of bull. That's like saying that, since GvG basically boils down to doing more damage to the Lord than the other team, you can mathematically optimize your strategy, right down to your positioning, when you should split, etc.

You're not playing solataire here. You cannot "optimize" for other players, how often they get certain powerups, how often they will target the leader, how often they will target the person next to them, which paths they take (and therefore how badly you can screw them up with a KD on a stretch of water or flat ground), how effectively they can evade your body blocks and KDs. You of course need to go into the match with the best strategy in mind, but skill comes from being able to adapt that strategy to the situation, not merely say, "No, I get an extra fraction of a second from this KD if I use it later, so under no circumstances will I use it before then." Skilled players are better at reacting, or even predicting, what their opponents are going to do, and when.

Once you've thrown out the idea of running a perfect race, your "optimization" to get a top 100 score goes out the window. The strategy to get in the top 100 is not the same as an effective strategy to get lots of gamer points and tokens. The proof? It very often does pay off to go out of your way slightly to get a powerup, even though it's off the "optimized path" that you should take if you want to get a top 100 score, because doing so allows you to make up for all those other factors that I listed above, factors that would normally preclude you from getting a top 100 score.

I'd even go so far as to say that it's harder to consistently come in first than it is to get in the top 100, just because the former requires some amount of skill, whereas the latter requires just luck, time, and the ability to memorize a path, as this thread has demonstrated.

Lastly, if you're in second and the guy in front of you is getting too far ahead, it is much better to use your KDs on him earlier. If he gets too far in front of you, the people behind you won't be able to target or even see him soon, which means that they'll just end up targetting you instead in the hopes of pulling out a second place victory. Second is worth more than third, it's not all about who comes in first.

Oh, and might I mention that the guy who gets a Rollerbeetle Blast from the first box he opened and uses it in the tunnel, and then gets one later on and saves it for the final stretch, was able to use twice as many Blasts as the guy who got one early on and saved it because it'd be more influential later. You don't save up boxes, so if all you're doing is hoarding powerups for their most effective time, you're going to be worse off than the guy who managed to snag two or more by hitting a few more boxes that were a half second out of the way.

NEWSFLASH

If you're still discussing/arguing what's "fun" in RBR, please refer to the OP. We don't care. Our concern in this thread is about how to get the fastest time, and how to do it reliably. Any other playstyle is inferior and warrants zero discussion in a thread such as this.

But if the rest of you would like to continue bickering over nothing, I'll be glad to further ignore you and keep winning races in the future.