Good job, you're practically already there! There's a lot of risk balancing that can be juggled with on the track, starting a boost a little earlier or barely hitting the checkpoints, as most of them are pretty generous with their hitboxes. You can see it on this video too, the longer it goes on the more risks i start to take and the faster times i get, but i think the key is in not holding the S key until you slow down to a crawl, but just before that. A lot of people underestimate a low speed beetle, when even with a low speed it's actually similar or faster compared to the other ground mounts.

If you're talking about skipping past checkpoints in these videos, the visual indicators (the bubbles) are much smaller than their actual hitboxes which are very wide, but unlike the bubbles the hitboxes are invisible, so the only way to know where the true edge of a checkpoint goes is through trial and error. So your observation is correct, but it's not my beetle that has a gigantic/inconsistent hitbox, but rather the checkpoints themselves. They actually increased the radius of the bubbles this year to better match the real hitboxes, which made them more consistent visually, but even then some leeway still remains, where you can seemingly pass outside of the checkpoints and still trigger some of them. And yea i've taken every pumpkin on this track to the face dozens of times, whizzing so closely by them at such a high speed is really risky.

@@RACEReaperOfficial I checked the hitbox on the raceway yesterday around the chicane before the middle hill and for me it's almost touching the bubble, just a fraction of the beetle width left. I'm wondering now if speed factors into how anet read your hitbox.

imgur.com/a/ZuCJ0bF Here you can see how the new bubbles from this year compare to the previous years. The circular domes are scaled up, but the inner circle in the middle still remains the same size, but even then some of the visuals still don't fully align with the real hitboxes. And this is pretty much the same for most time trials with checkpoints, players with the fastest times tend to search for any hidden leeway left behind by the designers.

You can but the current beetles can no longer perform this smoothly. There was a stealth-update on last week's patch on the 10th that was datamined, where the developers changed something with the terrain *_everywhere_* and i mean that in the most literal sense, it was a global change based on this new behavior persisting everywhere you go in the game. www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1fh1ysz/comment/ln8121u/? My interpretation based on the brief explanation and my own experiences from the feedback i receive from controlling the mounts now compared to the past, is that before the hitbox of the ground/terrain used to consist of these "tiles" that are spread out everywhere, unlike the visual ground texture that looks smoother but you can't actually see these invisible tiles. These tiles probably keep track of your movement in the game and adjust the physics accordingly, so the fewer tiles there are the more lenient the terrain is with things like allowing you to pass over some sharp edges or launching your mount upwards erratically, or just calculating the speed of mounts like beetle that are heavily impacted by acceleration and deceleration based on the curvature of the terrain. Basically, you might say that the accuracy of the terrain was a little bit lazier, giving you more leeway with how much you can get away with when traversing a terrain. So from what it sounds like and more importantly what it feels like now is like they increased the amount of those tiles within a single chunk, which means that as an example an edge that used to have like 4 tiles overlaid on it now has 8 or more, meaning that the terrain is much more accurate with the small intricacies of the terrain, being much more accurate with when a beetle impacts the smallest edge, where before it had less tiles and allowed the mount to pass over it, it now has more tiles to detect the point of impact along with the abrupt change in the curvature and launch the beetle into the air. So it's not like the curvature of the terrain has changed, or somehow has more spikes or edges on it than before, it just measures WAY more accurately whenever you pass over such an edge, though it's currently so extreme that you don't even need to pass over a very sharp edge, even a very gradual bend is enough now, since those bends will have the same amount of tiles on them. This also seems to have changed how quickly the beetle slows down going uphill now. You also tend to lift off of downhills very easily now, no longer being able to ride the downhill all the way to gain back speed, you instead go airborne very easily. I don't know if it's 100% accurate but the only comparison i can think of would be Minecraft or another block-type game where there are visual indicators to see the outlines of the terrain, now imagine that a single large cube got split into 4 or 8 smaller cubes, and each of those smaller cubes would track your movement in the exact same way as a single large one, just way more accurately. Sure it's more accurate, but it's also more messy. All in all, it really feels to me like the beetle along with all the other mounts were designed and tested with the "old" terrain in mind, and now some genius decided to push a seemingly mundane terrain change through that has since invalidated years worth of muscle memory and practice for everyone that has ever laid their hands on the mounts. And they never officially announced any change, this was just sneakily slipped in there, but the players are way too sensitive to these kinds of changes for it to go unnoticed. Forget being hesitant about altering the way a single mount functions years after their release in fear of it breaking something or angering the players, they straight up changed the very foundation they stand on, ultimately altering how the mounts interact with the terrain. Beetle itself being so intimately tied to the ground and having to deal with the smallest intricacies and deviations is especially affected by this, so it really isn't an upgrade but a straight-up downgrade. So much for that hesitation.

@@RACEReaperOfficial Thank you for the detailed reply! I'm newer to this game. I was able to get silver but can't even get close to gold. I go flying around all over the place and the drifting doesn't help me at all. I would be very curious to see you try this with the beetle provided and with this new terrain update! Thanks again for the detailed reply!

I actually do have an account with 0 masteries unlocked, and in other words no mounts unlocked, so i could give it a try running the track on a rental beetle with the current settings. And if it makes you feel any better, even the most experienced racers in the game go flying around all over the place right now, no small thanks to the recent changes. Also, Jormag's Fang in Snowden Drifts has always been notoriously difficult because of its small margin of error with the 32 second barrier, there's some potential for saving additional time through advanced drifting tricks to go somewhere as low as under 26 seconds, but i'm not so sure how easy or possible that is anymore.

Update: Good news, it seems that whatever got broken on the beetle was fixed in yesterday's patch, though like there wasn't any mention of any changes anywhere before, there also isn't any official mention of any fix either. But the beetle handles like normal again, the skiff no longer floats in the air, all that weird behavior is gone now.

It really is good to hear from you again. Though you left the guild early in the journey, your influence ran deep and parts of it still remain within the community and the values we've held on to, like friendship and sportsmanship which were also the standard back in the day. It's no overstatement to say that this channel wouldn't have come about without your encouragement all those years ago, apart from a couple of other guildmates asking me to show them how i was doing certain things, you were among the first to ever recommend i go for it. It's also likely that without the guild you started, and racing itself, i might not have kept playing the game past the 2nd expansion. The mechanics of the mounts are curiously complex, their mastery a constant learning process, and infinitely rewarding if chosen so, but it is also the sense of belonging we created as a community that has kept me invested all these years. I regret that our last memories together might've been short, or that we might've made it seem or sound as if we wanted you to go away. Frustrated as we might've been with the situation, with the guild stuck in a constant limbo, making you leave was not our intention. What we wanted was just that you pass on the leadership or alternatively an equivalent authority for decision-making so that somebody else could move the guild with the same confidence and no hesitation, but you never *_had to_* leave the guild or the discord, all of us back then still considered you our friend despite the circumstances, frustrated we were but we never hated you. In the end it's just a game, a whole lot of pixels on the screen, but you were real and so were we. That's why your departure came as a shock to those of us that were paying attention. You passing on the mantle was definitely the correct decision to make when you did, as that allowed us to move the guild freely again, but you surprised us all by how abruptly you did it and how quickly you were gone. Both us as a community, but Garfried as well as the one upon whose shoulders the entire community collapsed, though he was already in effect taking care of things and holding a similar authority as the only remaining actively playing co-leader, it was just then that it became real and official. You were also not the only one of the original leaders to have had to leave and prioritize your personal life, or some simply grew bored of their role, so all of the old co-leaders eventually followed behind you in leaving the guild to its fate, save for Garfried whom managed to stay invested both with the game and the guild while balancing his other interests inside and outside of the game. As the last remaining active co-leader from the old days, he stood his ground and kept the guild somewhat alive during the guild's darkest periods, so him inheriting the mantle of the official guild leader could not have been more appropriate, the role could not have been given to a more suitable candidate. But you did make that change very sudden and drastic since i believe you didn't ask him if he wanted to accept such a responsibility or give him any warning before, and for that i believe he's the one who most deserves to hear an apology. The guild itself of today is different from the one you left behind back then, many of the people who either left around that time or stuck around for a few years after have already moved on, so beyond the sentimental value of it there aren't many people left to apologize to, as you might've noticed many of those who already reacted to your message were people whom had never met you. The tragedy in your situation from back then is both how commonplace it is, a leader becoming increasingly busy with other things, prioritizing real life just as anyone else would, but at the cost of the guild losing its leader, it has since happened a lot and i've watched it destroy other guilds and communities over the years, even among fellow mount communities. The way that you chose to handle it in the end might've been the least destructive way that i've seen, but you did do it at the cost of your own presence, which itself was still too much. But you prioritizing your personal life is to be expected, it makes sense that you'd become busy and naturally conflicted with your priorities in real life, what happened back then was unfortunate but it's not something we ever held against you, nor something i need an apology for, we understood it back then as well as we still understand it. We just didn't like how it affected the guild and the community that we'd grown to care for. You were absent when your real life required it, and we in turn kept holding on for a hope of a better tomorrow for the guild, and while in your absence people began to lose interest following the initial hype and boom after the release of the Roller Beetle and the official race tracks around half a year later, and thus many people began leaving the guild that had since become increasingly inactive, it's unfair to push the blame for all of that onto you, because it may have gone that way even with you there. I've since observed that a person joining the community, running with it for a while and then slowly bleeding out of it is a pretty natural phenomena for any community. Our presence in the game during that time where the playerbase began to lose interest could've maybe been able to make some small difference in the greater scheme of things, but i doubt we could've changed things even if we were active at the time. It was still a critical time for us to be inactive, as it further made us vanish off the radar, for a while [RACE] became like a phantom guild, no one on the outside knew if it had died off or not, but we managed to bounce back in the end. We never got a chance to really talk to you back in those days, as even when we still had some ways to contact you you were not often available, but even in the end we never got the chance to say a proper goodbye. I interpreted your quick exit as a result of some urgency, or maybe guilt, or maybe you yourself were frustrated with the way of things. There were a lot of things we would've wanted to talk about with you then, but you seemed set with your decision to go, seeing as you left the guild without a word and then deleted your old discord account in its entirety, leaving us with next to no ways to contact you with, you made it seem like you were serious. I remembered this YT account of yours a while later, from those videos on Deroir's channel that had us sign up for his and bootts's race events through the comments section, and that's where i found your account name and left a short goodbye message of my own. I thought about writing something more, but i also thought that perhaps you simply wished to be left alone and i didn't want to unintentionally push you even further away, so i chose to not press the matter. We'd talk about your departure occasionally, and everyone agreed that we'd see if you'd someday contact us again of your own volition, but otherwise we'd just leave it be. And so the community moved on, many from the older generations of racers dropped out over the years and new generations came in, became infatuated with the concept and depth of mount racing, experienced many things and made many discoveries, some went through a whole journey of self-discovery until slowly losing interest and also falling out of it, while there were and still are some members that remember the legend of Acnologia/Sunless The Reaper of [RACE], there were also many generations that came and achieved a lot and then went away as fast as they appeared all without knowing your story. Suffice to say that a lot has happened in your absence, and we have many stories to tell if you're ever interested to hear about them. The guild underwent many changes in its direction, and areas of interest, expanding from the humble beginnings that we shared with NA's Tyria Drift [DRFT] racing guild whom we also later made friends with as communities. In the very beginning [RACE] also started out as us making our own tracks and racing on them out in the deserts of Amnoon as well as many other random maps out in the open world, then we moved on to the at the time newly added time trial adventures, and then on to the custom built guild hall tracks, where RACE would go on to participate in most of the tournaments, and win a lot of them in the process. But it was during that time of uncertainty and inactivity in the guild where we lost that "open world rally" casual aspect of the old guild, we stopped gathering in groups to race across some random maps, which is the polar opposite of [DRFT] who continued doing just that for many years afterwards, even to this very day it's their main activity. As a result we gravitated more towards the other aspects, time trial tracks and guild hall tracks, and hyper-focused on them instead, which in turn made us more competition-oriented as a community. In the process of competing and pushing the limits of our control, we slowly made steady progress in cultivating our understanding over the more obscure mechanics until we'd reach breakthrough points, eventually learning to force the beetle to drift through air itself, something which we used to consider as obviously impossible, and gain various properties from doing so. And even after that, people just kept finding more and more new stuff, new things others hadn't thought of before. And i often find myself thinking about this, but you are the one who set us on this path. There's no guarantee that we'd have gotten this far if we never changed our ways, if the guild remained the same throughout the years akin to how [DRFT] did. As one of the few remaining OG's from back in the day, it really is comforting to hear from you again. This time, you don't have to stress out over the little things. You're welcome to come back whenever you want, you always have.

It might be, i couldn't get it to work with my boost patterns and in other attempts either the height differences in the uphill interrupted my boost, i missed the timing with the boost orbs, or was unable to retain my speed up top while drifting. It's possible but all my attempts were messy or didn't lead to a consistent gain and most ended up fumbling my runs, but then again hyperboosts are generally my biggest weakness, i'm much more comfortable and proficient with drifting in general, but hyperboosts have never been my strength.

tl;dr: i've been racing on my beetle and grinding the time trials since 2018, and i've seen a lot of things in that time, but i've never seen Anet address or make any kind of actions with the time trials they've added, or the numerous issues within them, in essence they've just sprinkled time trials across the game for people to get distracted in and never touched or looked at them since. A very good question, but it's a tough one to answer since there's a lot of misinformation and ignorance surrounding the subject, after all it's one thing to watch a video from me that happens to showcase some very hard to belief records on the leaderboards, and another to run the track by yourself and only see your own time with absolutely no other indication besides your own time and ranking and maybe some from your friends. There is no "public" version of these leaderboards, they were designed to be semi-anonymous, you can see yourself and your contacts/guildmates but you can't see all other players or like "top 10, 100 etc." because that's how they were made, sloppy design at best and malicious negligence at worst. Nothing like what you'd expect from a leaderboard that in itself suggests a certain sense of competitive integrity and moderation, and that is the general illusion that's sold to the players that run the time trials, but if you manage to get a peek underneath that shroud of anonymity you'll find that there isn't a shred of integrity or moderation in the time trials, the initial impression that people get is misleading and inaccurate. Many dream of climbing their way "to the high ranks" but even the fastest racers in the game are currently stuck outside of the first couple of hundreds. Anet barely ever publicly recognizes the existence of accounts using the notorious teleport-hacks, though some rumors say that they have done some work in the background over the years to actually go after some of the people behind that operation, there's a whole black market for cheats out there but most players would be hesitant to risk their main accounts with thousands of hours of gameplay and all the achievements, items, basically their whole history in the game from the past decade for some superficial advantage that has a high risk of leading to a ban. Which is precisely why i believe most accounts running these cheats are automated bot programs ran through "throwaway" burner accounts, whether they're all free to play accounts or maybe some of them are stolen is hard to tell, i think the main reason for any bot activity in the game is simple resource gathering, whether it's in the form of unidentified gear, crafting material or even something like racing medallions, anything that can either be sold forward of profited off of in some other way. They're rarer and harder to spot on EU and NA where the cheaters are relatively cautious of their activities and put some minimal effort into trying not to get caught, a lot of them seem to run their scripts during the night time/early morning hours or whenever there's generally the least amount of players in the game, i can only imagine to lower the chances of being caught in the act by players or any roaming moderators, but it's much more prominent in the chinese region where there isn't even any effort to hide any of it, it seems to actually have become rather normalized in their community space since so many players are doing it, but that might have something to do with how the chinese launcher is under a different jurisdiction entirely (not Anet). Typically i think they'll teleport along a pre-set path, similar to how the game itself has certain skills, abilities and items that teleport you to a pre-set location, they're just doing it automatically and across vast distances and i think a near infinite amount of locations, i do know that for the time trials they set their own "checkpoints" for their teleports to line up with each time trial checkpoints so that by the end they can teleport through the whole track in a matter of seconds. Though i think most of them target things like resource nodes and i guess chests or anything that gives the player free resources and items by simply interacting with it, and usually they move underneath the map layer itself so that even if you happen to be at the right place at the right time, the most you might see is their nameplate briefly peeking out from underground before vanishing off to the next location. I've seen a ton of those flashing nameplates that make you second-guess yourself whether you just imagined the whole thing, they're just that fast. I've also seen them in action in person, i watched someone running their own little operation in Brisban and the other beetle time trials a couple of years ago by now, i observed around 10-15 individual accounts log in to the game one at a time, interact with the time trial NPC to start the trial, then teleport to the first checkpoint and onwards to the second one, and complete the full loop of the over 2 minute track within about 10 seconds, that's around how long it takes to just teleport through at lightning speed for one account, after that the account would log off and the next one log in soon after and repeat the same process. I assume this was just one person running several accounts by themselves, but there's no telling how many individual cheaters there are out there so you can imagine what that implies for the leaderboards, since just those 15 accounts pushed my personal ranking back by 15 along with everyone else that's ever run that time trial. In 2018 when the trial was added, me and my guild members used to be in the top 10 or so of the time trials and back then we were still running barely below the limit to receive the gold chests. 2 years ago we were in the 90-100 rankings in Brisban, today we've been pushed back to the 180-200 range. Bear in mind that the racing community has recently made some incredible improvements in general knowledge on the beetle and drifting, and cultivated techniques that allow the beetle to rival or even temporarily surpass the top speed of a griffon, and maintain that kind of a pace for nearly the whole length of any given track. It's a very demanding and intricate process of timing the drift inputs just right and maintaining a delicate balance with the keyboard and mouse inputs, every movement is planned out and then over a course of countless attempts maybe 1 out of hundreds of attempts will finally be a full clean execution with minimal mistakes, optimal paths and movements and a monstrous speed that just a couple of years ago wasn't possible to achieve, and we're still stuck in the 200 range of the lifetime rankings. What do you think that implies to anyone with a slower pace who are stuck even further back at 600 or 800? Well it just implies that they're not good enough to make it to whatever goal they'd set for themselves, the only time and ranking they can see is that of their own, and it's honestly a big shame that the ranking they see isn't the legitimate ranking that they should have. The reality of the state of the leaderboards of all time trials in the game is that regardless of if it's for the beetles, griffons, skiffs, gliders, raptors, or even just jumping around on your own character or trying to defeat some boss with the fastest time, any adventure that features a timer based ranking has either been utterly conquered by some losers running their network of bot accounts, or if not then they're in a very high risk to join that club. All of the leaderboards seem functional and fair from the outside, but are utterly rotten and ruined on the inside. We're not competing against other players, we're competing against glitches, bots and individual cheaters. And the best part is that none of this is obvious to the average player, all thanks to the semi-anonymity of the leaderboards. I can confidently claim that if the time trial leaderboards were made globally visible, in other words completely public for everyone to view even the top 100 from the lifetime rankings, then all of this would become immediately obvious to every player running any given trial. But as it stands, with the current way of things the only option we have as players is to just either randomly add every player we come across while running these time trials, or to just randomly catch a cheater in the act and add their account to see what kind of times they're getting, that's how i've slowly accumulated very small cracks to the shroud of anonymity but believe you me, there are countless more on top of just the ones that i happen to have added. There's a whole different can of worms with a rare, random and merciless glitch that can sometimes occur without a warning, it's a known and documented bug in the community where it's believed that the connection between a players client and the game server becomes so unstable that the server struggles to keep up with the player's position, and that somehow begins to slow down the adventure's timer, either freezing it entirely or sometimes having it stall and even count backwards, resulting in a time that shows you as having finished the trial with a much faster time than what you actually ran in reality. If that happens to you, you're likely to still be watching the track in front of you which would typically prevent you from catching on until you pass the finish line, and after you get a time like that there is no way for you to remove it, and in some cases it's too fast to realistically be reached again or surpassed. Take Andur's 35.600 seconds on this track as an example of that, it happened to him a few years ago right after the festival launched and tons of players all logged in at the same time and put a lot of load on the servers. Or Garfried's 56.000 seconds, he got that while we were still running times above the minute mark. There's even claims of the timer resetting completely on some tracks.

kzbin.info/www/bejne/amfXgWyZbtWngbs It's honestly pretty easy to just google "GW2 pvp bots/cheaters" and you should find some results lol, again bear in mind that not every player is running a recording software in their background, but the contents seem pretty familiar. These teleport hacks that are used on the time trials, either with the intent of farming any possible items or rewards that an individual account receives from completing them daily, or just some spineless coward that wants to have their own main account at a really high ranking with an unbeatable record on the leaderboard to gain some vain sense of superiority over other players (which just makes them a bigger loser), i believe they are the same hacks that certain individuals use in the PvP and WvW modes that you sometimes see people complaining about on the reddit or the forums with clips of recordings, screenshots, and a lot of bad experiences. _"Between this and people using obvious hacks in pvp, ( teleporting and speed hacking nd shit) I'm starting to wonder if arenanet cares at all._ _They do it so clearly, out in the open for all to see._ _And what's fucked is that I never see these people getting banned._ _I've encountered the same person in several ranked pvp matches using the same hacks._ _Everyone realizes what they're doing but people get this attitude like " it is what it is"._ _I've stopped playing pvp because if this."_ Same shit, different toilet. The PvP teleport hacks seem to follow a similar pattern, the cheater sets up a path of teleport points and then uses them during the fights to teleport out of bounds or escape, or overwhelm a lone player by surprise. They do the same thing in PvE with the resource nodes, and also with the time trial adventures. Some of them are so shameless that they even flaunt it, you can't make this up, this is what it looks like in action: kzbin.info/www/bejne/o3-Vdq2BrtaWq9U Although the forum moderators would be fast to remove such a post even vaguely suggesting or calling somebody out on the basis of witch hunting, "exposure of a player by name or screenshot in an attempt to prompt moderator or GM action.", as well as the way how the forum moderators retain full discretion in how they deal with what they perceive as infractions, in which case the person making the post is actually in a higher risk of suffering consequences in the form of a warning, small, long or permanent ban from the forums, and in nearly all cases deletion of the original post or thread, rather than the person they're making the post about in the first place. This is also exactly what i saw happen the last time somebody tried talking about the cheaters in the time trial leaderboards on the forum of all places, it didn't even matter that they went out of their way to CENSOR the cheaters names in the screenshot of the leaderboard, the post still got deleted and they received a warning, and i believe then another warning for complaining about the first warning, after that the person never brought it up again, they seem to have dropped mount racing altogether ever since. That's one of the many reasons i don't usually ever visit the forums, it feels like a positive safe-space echo chamber where any post you make is under scrutiny, and any suggestion of "uncomfortable" topics like cheating doesn't belong there. Is it any wonder then that people don't talk about it more? Reddit is a cesspool in different ways, but at least the people there can generally speak their minds and bring up even the topics that air out Anet's dirty laundry, it's just usually a 50/50 coin toss whether the people there will side with your perspective or shit on you while promoting "more important topics" or in more honest words whatever they're personally invested in, like class balancing issues, future expansions, whatever upcoming feature or things they personally want to see added, and there's a surprising amount of Anet apologists even on reddit that would be quick to come up with all kinds of copes and excuses in their stead (e.g. "spaghetti code", "waste of company resources" the typical corporate BS really if you've ever played games from different companies) for why there doesn't seem to have been any attempt to address or resolve any of the underlying issues, like the bot invasion or the rampant cheaters. _"A number of races can be done insanely quickly with a griffon"_ <- this was said on the topic of a skimmer trial, but it's basically the same argument for all trials, even the Hoelbreak one from my video. Oh yeah? Name me one beetle race that can actually be done faster on a griffon than a beetle. These same people seem to have no qualms with blindly speculating and shifting blame on griffons or "squads of mesmers using their portals" for these cheated times, i don't know if they're just that much out of the loop but by default the difference in roller beetle's and griffon's max speeds is just 200 units per second (1800 u/s VS 2000 u/s), and a continuously drifting beetle can cross that gap in bursts and go up to 500 u/s faster than the griffon, 700 u/s faster than its own default max speed (1800 u/s VS 2500 u/s), so i really don't see a griffon surpassing a beetle's top record on a beetle track anymore, nor do i see it completing over a minute long track within the matter of a couple of seconds, people also don't seem to realize just how insanely difficult it is to complete a beetle trial on a griffon where the checkpoints don't accommodate flying mounts, the hitboxes are wide but low to the ground, low enough that an inexperienced griffon rider will crash attempting to pass a checkpoint, and even an experienced one will have a hard time reaching the last checkpoint. _"When races as adventures were new, people took some mesmers together to get much faster through portals."_ _"you can just get a squad of mesmers yourself too"_ I like to wonder whether any of these people were actually there to witness any of this? Or is this all just in their head or something, where are all these people getting this info from? Are they just taking someone else's word for it, or have they seen it happen with their own two eyes? This is also a super common excuse on par with the griffon blaming, but i've never seen any substantial evidence of anyone having ever actually successfully attempted this to back it up. I also don't think this whole mesmer-portal-chain concept people bring up is as easy and feasible as they imagine to put together and organize, or as efficient as people imagine it would be, and even with a perfect execution it'd probably still fall behind real cheats that are instantaneous and skip all effort, i also think this whole infamous "mesmer squad" thing is just a myth that someone once upon a time came up with to explain away these 10 second records on the leaderboards. I've never seen more than 1 mesmer try to portal from the start to the first checkpoint of a time trial, which also ends up being slower in the end since they have no momentum when they finally mount their beetle there and start from a dead stop. I'm fairly convinced that these are all just excuses, when in reality what they're talking about are cheats in action plain and simple. Anyway, it has been suggested by several players over the years that Anet would just simply "wipe" the leaderboards clean from either all records or somehow single out just the cheaters or glitched times. The main problem with that is that them making a "fix/reset" like that for the leaderboards would be the same as them publicly acknowledging that there has been a big glaring problem there all this time, but i also don't think they have a system in place to differentiate between players and cheaters, there are real players among the cheated times too after all thanks to the timer glitches and general unreliability, if they just started waving the ban hammer around then they might hit innocent players caught in the crossfire in the process as well, and in the worst case they might've idiotically blinded themselves the same way that they blinded the community from seeing any of the records publicly when they designed them this way. But even if they managed to do it, then what? How long would it take for the same thing to happen again, for the same people to return and ruin the competitive integrity of the time trials once again considering how easy it seems to be. Once again the leaderboards would become similarly inflated with "illegitimate times" (also good to mention that besides the obvious TOS violation from using cheats, there is no real rules in place for how you're supposed to complete a time trial) but basically it'd just get filled up with unbeatable times again and the rankings would just turn into a mess again. And if they got started on that path, they'd need to wipe all the other time trials in the game too. I think the fundamental issue comes down to the fact that these people are somehow able to abuse the game with their cheats to freely teleport around at their own discretion, and while most of them try to be sneaky about it, it disturbs the balance of the game from PvE to PvP, no player is truly "untouched" by their influence, but most of the time unless they're specifically messing with them and their gameplay directly, then it's none of their concern. People don't care, so Anet doesn't care either, or if they do then they're awfully tight-lipped about it. (made so many edits that i'll have to move the rest to a 3rd comment lol)

I can think of 2 ways to combat the issue that would actually make a difference, but both would require a lot of work and might not be realistically possible for Anet to do. One is to completely rework the adventure systems, put in some flags since i highly doubt that the time trials have any kind of flags in place currently if these leaderboards are anything to go by, and put in some restrictions that either counter the teleport cheats or make them apparent for the moderation so that they can either intervene or get rid of them afterwards, but this is unrealistic when you consider just how many different time trials there are in the game, they'd all need to be reworked and the sheer amount of them would already require a lot of work to get through, it would also leave aside all the cheating that happens outside of the adventures, basically turning their back on the people who struggle with cheaters in their PvP matches. The other option that would put a real dent to all cheating activities would be to either beef up their anti-cheat measures for the excessive teleports, or just go straight for their throat and break the way their teleport cheats work, but that also runs a very high risk of them breaking things like shadowsteps, portals and other teleport skills and items completely in the process, from what i've seen on their streams the developers also use their own version of a teleport tool and i'm not sure if the cheats are somehow trying to replicate how that works, but i assume they don't want to break their own dev tools. If they did manage to somehow break the way their teleport cheats work, and effectively put a complete stop to it, then that'd make a real difference for all players regardless of what kind of content and activities they enjoy in GW2. As it stands though, the best they can do right now is just to clean up the aftermath, or not even that. Deleting and banning an account that was obviously set up to take the fall in place of the real account that ends up reaping the rewards from their cheating isn't really something they should be patting themselves on the back over. People also say that the same cheaters keep popping up in their competitive gamemodes despite them having reported them on numerous occasions, but then again some people love to accuse others of hacking pretty lightly even when they're not really cheating, it's happened to me when i've been drifting around a track, it's happened to some of my guildmates that were just rolling by on their beetles normally without torturing their drift key like i do, and i have no doubt that it happens a lot in the dedicated competitive modes too, and maybe some of those too are just over-exaggerations similarly to how on the opposite side you also see people making posts that typically go along the lines of "i got banned but i promise i did nothing wrong, you can trust me" but then it turns out that they did do something very very wrong and are just being manipulative pieces of shit trying to play the victim after getting caught. There of course are exceptions like in Olrun's case: www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/197jjuq/someone_is_abusing_support_to_gain_access_to/ In the end they're individual cases and it's really fucking hard for us players to play the detective in the developer's stead when all we have to rely on is our personal perception and impressions, and eyewitness reports like screenshots and video recordings that can make or break your case when without them you're basically just talking out of your ass, but with them you're running the risk of receiving punishment for "witch hunting" the poor cheaters. Boohoo 👻 I do understand why witch hunting by itself isn't an encouraged activity, because as we've all probably seen through social media, when someone gets the wrong impression or just makes stuff up to fuck with people, then they're just making false accusations and ultimately tarnishing an innocent person's reputation. However i'll make the case against the semi-anonymity of the leaderboards, the blank appearance and deceitful nature of the leaderboards have over the years made a lot of people even more suspicious, frustrated and overtly zealous so that when they happen to see ONE account with a time like Andur's at 35.600, when they know the feasible times are closer to the 1 minute mark, they usually think that they've caught the bastards and won't ask any questions and just jump straight to accusing people like him of having cheated, demanding to know how they did it or calling them all kinds of vile things in the process, basically funneling all their built-up resentment for the obvious but hidden cheating activities towards the few players that they are able to see in the midst of the anonymity, and directing it all on them. But Andur did not cheat, he just got really unlucky with the timer glitch (or lucky if your ranking is all you care about), we don't have the exact number of "innocent" players on the leaderboards because we don't have the exact number of the "guilty" players either, it's really hard to tell when we can barely see anything on them, but we can make an educated guess that there probably are a lot of normal players with glitched times and cheaters mixed into the same pool in different positions. How do you know how to differentiate a glitched time from a cheated one? How do you know that you're not attacking a real player but a cheater that really deserves your anger? People are so quick to jump the gun on these things, i've also accused innocent people in the past when i had no idea what i was even talking about and i regret doing it. I believe the design-philosophy and the original reason behind Anet not making the leaderboards public from the beginning was to prevent the witch hunting of the people in the top 10-100 ranks and to preserve some abstract sense of privacy (where is that privacy in PvP?), i guess another pessimistic theory is that Anet could already predict that they'd be unable to stop the cheaters from filling up the leaderboards and opted to make the majority of players unable to see it directly, but in any case i think us not being able to view the leaderboards in their entirety at all, and just a couple of names in very few specific sections has defeated that original purpose and made us even more prone to witch hunt the people that we are able to catch sight of, people just assume that if they have a crazy time then they must be one of the cheaters, guilty until proven innocent. How are they supposed to prove their innocence? For your average player, the best way they can explain their situation is that their game was lagging a lot, they can describe what they remember from that time and lag is a big part of it too, but how do they explain an occurrence that they don't fully understand or didn't notice with the exception of the final result? It ends up sounding like a typical excuse of blaming lag and the game in order to lie, when in reality that's the best explanation that they really have for it. To be fair, even the more experienced racers don't know exactly how or why the timer glitch happens, we just know it does and there are recordings floating around showing exactly what it looks like, like Boott's video from 2018, one of the earliest example of this phenomena on a beetle trial: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hIeVl5-drJWHjZo that_shaman has also occasionally been documenting these occurrences along with anyone else that actually pays attention to the rankings: twitter.com/that_shaman/status/1346180872651886596 There are a couple more videos around, but it hasn't happened to me yet, i typically avoid racing right around the release of any festival or update and tend to leave it to the later half or even the very end of the festival before i even attempt a new record. But i have no doubt that it keeps happening to people at random, if you think about how many players aren't recording their gameplay or paying that much attention to their times, just wanting to get the achievs and the daily rewards and quickly move on to other things. You also don't see a lot of people mention this, but theoretically speaking if a person typically averages a time of 1 minute 20 seconds but then ends up with a run of 1 minute 15 seconds, how likely are they to suspect that there was some random lag-induced glitch in play for those 5 odd seconds and that they didn't just get a really good run and then shrug it off? It probably happens a lot more in reality than people actually realize, but the time difference just isn't always so massive that it gathers attention from other people or even the player themselves.

In the end i ended up writing a whole damn book in these comments💀it's quite the rabbit hole even when this is mainly just about the timed adventures, there's still probably a lot more to this that i don't even know about but i think i've seen enough to be rightfully pissed off. It wouldn't be weird for some jackass to come along and ask me or anyone else worried about the state of the timed adventures (or i guess about cheaters in general) why we care about them so much "when there are other things to do in the game", but buddy, to care about something is what it means to have passion for anything in the first place. If we did not care, why would we even be here, playing this game in the first place? Contrary to the belief, not everyone that plays some competitive form of content hates themselves. It doesn't make sense to me for someone to question a gamers attachment to a game that they enjoy playing because they're complaining about the cheaters in it, what kind of ass-backwards logic is that? Of course they'd complain. Those who are truly passionate about the game are the first ones to admit its problems and call them out, people that are unhappy with oversights and the larger problems, and even the ones that fly under the radar because they know that the game could be better and they'd want that more than anyone else, instead of sucking up to Anet and excusing their errors, and worst of all ignoring the cancer that the cheaters are towards the community. Get the fuck outta here with that defeatist BS already. I don't want to hear any more excuses from self-appointed armchair developers, if they're not an Anet dev then they don't really know what they're talking about despite trying to speak on their behalf, they're just speculating just like everyone else. I'm not so stupid that it's never crossed my mind that maybe the reason behind Anet's apparent inaction isn't because they don't want to do anything about things, maybe it's that they can't, maybe it's their policy to try to work things out quietly behind the scenes, or maybe their hands are tied, it's also really difficult for us to know what's really going on with them. But they are ultimately the ones to carry the responsibility for letting things go this far, and it doesn't matter whether they did so intentionally or not. Since when did we players start just giving up and giving in to the cheaters? Are we really fine with just leaving them be and letting them do whatever they want, break the rules and ruin people's experiences? There's nothing i or you can do about what's going on, but you can be damn sure that i'm not going to just accept it and leave it be. I swear people are so quick to give up, you should have more wants and demands for the game, it's no wonder if people are so indifferent if they just give up so easily. You don't have to approve of something just because it appears immutable to you. We know there's more to the game, and we play the rest of the game all the same, but we also know that there are issues that most people aren't even aware of, and that just pisses us off, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. And as time has shown, the bar for simply hating on cheaters isn't set very high. I changed my mind but i was gonna leave a final quote here from someone being extremely tone-deaf to the point of siding with the cheaters in the hopes of getting the content they want, choosing to selfishly focus only on their own personal wants "as a veteran of the community" and to ignore the "trivial, mundane, banal, vanilla, pedestrian" (i'm not kidding) worries like the cheaters that are a massive pest that in equal parts ruin the fun for everyone else that plays the game and mistakenly thinks that it's fair or actively moderated, specifically highlighting the way how they don't give a fuck about anything that they're not personally invested in or interested about and how common that way of thinking really is, which isn't necessarily what you'd expect if you're someone who actually wants some kind of change to happen, you wouldn't really think that someone would find a way to argue against you when you're simply complaining about cheaters in a videogame.

@@RACEReaperOfficial I really feel your frustration. I can only imagen how beetle community must feel after years and years not beeing heard and totaly ignored. And that video you linked is a god damn mockery in the face. A person can walk through life hurting everyone in their path, cheating, stealing, lying, robbing, killing, raping etc etc without hinderance or any significant consequences. While another person who is caring, loving, giving, reliable, faithful, honorable, hard working, helpful end up getting cancer and dies before they meet their grandchildren or shortly after. Its disgusting how unjust life is. And that streaches throught everything in life, even down to a freakin beetle race in a 11 year old mmo... IT SUCKS and all i can say i feel your frustration buddy <3 However, keep doin what your doin. Even if you can touch one soul and create a smile, its all worth it in the end. And i can promise you even if my jaw dropped down to my neightbour i still had a big freakin smile on me face. Much love buddy <3

kzbin.info/www/bejne/amaZaZubr5iSgcUsi=2jduQ_yfUcyQ6Oy9 This is the closest we have at the moment, i'm starting to get close to catching up but time will tell if i'll make it in time this year, the track is treacherous and the time i have for runs is limited too ^^"

@@RACEReaperOfficial Ty, wonder why I didn't see that video before. That is insane, but now I know =)

Truth be told i've already caught every fish in the game that has been added so far, so i guess i'll have to go for a few runs every now and then 😔

It took me a while to find the path, but it was a long time coming

Yeah the hitboxes on the track are a bit all over the place

I think something between 1:20-1:30 pace is what a lot of people managed at least during the race events, it's kind of hard to estimate because it depends on which mounts you use and how often you swap and where (so it's up to optimization), most mounts have "burst" type movement abilities like with the raptor leap and jackal blink, or the skyscale's dash, but between waiting for the endurance to recharge you slow down to a slower pace. You also spend a second or two on each swap alone since it's not an instantaneous switch, first you dismount and then mount up again, but in the process you also kill any prior momentum. The roller beetle is a very momentum focused mount similar to the griffon in that once you speed up you try to maintain that speed and stretch it out for as long as you can without swapping mounts until you need to use the abilities again, this makes it so that even in sections where other mounts could outperform or overtake a beetle momentarily by making use of their explosive speed bursts or flight, in the long run the beetle can catch up again and run the rest of the track faster simply through not losing its momentum unnecessarily from either crashing into things, dismounting to switch mounts or needing to spam the abilities like you would on a raptor or a skyscale, as their default movement speeds are significantly slower.

@RACEReaperOfficial ah okay thanks for the answer love your videos btw