New Trackmania Cheating Revelations from Wirtual
Wirtual posted a new video and it's a big one, centering on some of the most extensive deception and shithousery I've ever seen in an online community. You can watch it here, and I encourage you to do so. The bulk of the accusations and and evidence are in the first half, with the second half being more about the wider deception and unhinged behaviour.
Much less general terms used below the cut, and I'll be assuming you watched at least the first 5 minutes of the video.
Holy fuck.
Look, we've known since the initial cheating scandal in 2021 (video here, report here) that players will go to extremely weird lengths to deal with accurate accusations of cheating rather than face a mountain of evidence head-on. We saw that while Techno basically learned of the evidence and admitted his guilt with minimal pushing, riolu tried to generate a hate campaign to discredit the report before it was released. When that failed all of his online accounts went dark, and the base assumption was that he was running away and that he and the community were going to move on.
Boy, was that assumption wrong.
I was howling with laughter at the first half of the video, how sad and silly the whole situation was and how incredibly specific it all was to just this one fucking guy. Literally being able to point to a specific rare controller that he specifically owns and basically nobody else does... christ it was beautiful. Hilarious. Poetic even?
But now we know riolu has committed actual crimes out of spite over this whole situation - doxxing mizu is just a weird fucking move. Wirtual theorises that it could just be spite towards them, but I understand the timeline correctly (and put on my tinfoil-hat) he could also have been trying to implicate blackq in retaliation for trying to doxx him? blackq is known for both smurf accounts and trolling mizu, and copped the bulk of the blame for that incident. That incident which was a criminal act.
Adding that he used an actual real-life friends actual real-life name as a moniker? This guy is an actual fucking danger to know.
I have a pretty hard line view on cheaters and generally for people who violate online community norms in a major way - ban em, move on. It's a good thing I don't run any communities! This isn't a view I think should be the default, but I will advocate for it when called upon for my opinion.
It has been wrong in the past - I've seen speedrun cheaters take some time away and come back as committed non-cheaters in a different game and openly talk about how stupid their behaviour was, becoming advocates against that kind of behaviour. Half of the greatest players in Rocket League got done for account sharing because they were too young to compete - young people do stupid shit.
But riolu has a truly fucked pattern of behaviour, and Nadeo (the company that makes TM) need to be way more proactive dealing with him. I don't entirely disagree with their initial stance on his 92BOB account in the abstract - he's not cheating and he's not active in the community, so live and let live - but they should have been checking in on his behaviour regularly. They have access to all the same data (AND MORE) Wirtual used to show his account spamming, they just never thought to use it. It's just not good enough.
God this is so exhausting. This one guy just ruining so much because he couldn't handle a simple apology. Couldn't accept defeat against a mountain of evidence.
Fuck riolu, man.
Bit of a rant-post! Not my usual jam on this site but I don't think there's a fully reasoned way to talk about this beyond just pointing at Wirtual's video and sighing. Back to normal "enjoying my hobbies" posts shortly.