Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-32052843-20190917105324/@comment-39352489-20190918115919

We’ve all seen crazy, unrealistic times atop the WTTT leaderboards before — you know, the ones that are 20 seconds faster than the next best time and have no saved ghost. So it’s been clear enough that there are loopholes or outright hacks being exploited by some people.

Those more glaring cases are so obvious as to be readily dismissed (indeed, they’re typically scrubbed from the ranks at the end of the week). But as others have mentioned here before, it makes one wonder if there are more subtle cases in the mix that can’t be detected so easily.

Well, it looks to me like the time atop the leaderboard right now may be an existence proof for cases like that. The time is roughly .8 faster than the next best time, it DOES have a saved ghost, and if you watch the ghost and know the track and car, you see that the line taken and the top speeds reached just don’t match up with the reported lap time. The car doesn’t take the optimal line, makes multiple obvious mistakes, and the max speeds reached on key straights are too low — yet the time is the best by almost a second.

I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, given the presence of the more glaring examples. But I found it a little disheartening. Not having directly observed a case like this before (a case that wasn’t exactly subtle, per se, but subtle enough that I could imagine it escaping superficial scrutiny), I was able to pretend that it wasn’t an issue. But now I’ve seen it, so I can no longer pretend.

In WTTT, it’s annoying, given the zero sum nature of the percentile bin-based awards. Any reward going to a bogus time bumps somebody else down into the next rung.

I suspect that this may be old news to many. If so, pardon the rambling... I’m still learning the ropes, in some respects.