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.