We're finally near to bring closure to a heated debate that's been around ever since the leaderboards came out over 10 years ago.
Before we begin I want to emphasize that this is an important topic for many people including myself and will be treated as such on public channels. Lots of compromises were made for setting the example of what this community can achieve and I'm grateful to anyone who stands for this cause.
Timeline
The racing community started to form right after the release of alpha version 0.34.0 that introduced the race mode, with mappers releasing many projects and racers dedicating themselves to achieve the fastest times.
We kept track of scores by screenshots and word of mouth on public servers because there were no leaderboards available back then.
Everyone wanted to be included in the grind but with servers being absolutely packed it was clear people couldn't keep up with all the records, so after a few attempts at a community-made leaderboards system, the breakthrough came from brandon in 2016 and his Race Leaderboards addon that actually brought the steamworks API to light and became an essential part of Reflex race even to this day.
It also brought evidence of the extent of people taking credit of records achieved with casual play to those who wanted a fair competition, so much that it made moderating the leaderboards a top priority. But this was easier said than done because:
- We didn't have a community network.
- Developers had just left the game so updates could only be made on already archived versions of the leaderboards and not on the official database.
In order to solve that, we first had to address the community network which back then was limited to a channel on the official Reflex Arena discord and a race section on the forums that was eventually taken down and lost.
So when I created the Reflex Racing discord in 2018, lolograde and I started working on the first Reflex Racing World Cup. This is important to the topic because it brought the first list of community rules and guidelines to the players.
Competitive Racing Ruleset
These are the fundamental rules of our tournaments that players have to follow:
1. Maps must not be edited.
2. Only the correct physics ruleset must be used as explicitly required by the map.
3. No wallbugs or any other game-breaking glitches can be used.
4. Time-resets that involve going back to the start line after crossing its border are not allowed.
Many people, starting from the WM clan which purpose is to promote fair competitive play, abide by these rules on public matches too.
The main issue with public leaderboards is that both casual and comp players are ranked together and there is no way to differentiate these records unless actually looking at the replays, which can only be accessed when shared by the players themselves.
In the last 10 years we did our best to promote these rules of conduct to the community, but had no way to enforce them outside of our tournaments.
So now that (1) we have an established racing community network and (2) the main dev returned to Reflex from his leave, we can actually solve this problem once and for all.
Solution #1: Community sovereignty
Since the reflex.racing leaderboards are now separated from the official database, this solution treats the race community as independent from the game and involves filtering the datasets to include comp players only.
A grace period of 1 month would be announced to give casual players the chance of overwriting their records without registering on the activity feed.
After that, any player caught holding at least 1 record not following comp guidelines will be blacklisted from the website and rankings will be recalculated without their records.
Players are advised to save a replay for each record to prove the legitimacy of their runs with the reflex.racing admins at any time.
Banned players are not allowed to appeal their ban as long as the current game version doesn't include a remediation for that specific exploit, following either with a verified manual overwrite of their records or a leaderboards reset.
In the event of the community scaling up, a whitelist system may be implemented instead.
For your information, there is a list of offenders ready to be banned, gathered from the recent census of maps, public replays and matches over the years.
This system however should be considered only if the following solution #2 is not applicable in a relative short amount of time.
Solution #2: Ruleset creation
Some solutions for the 4 exploits mentioned above can include:
- Checking if the map hash is equal to the latest version of map currently available on the Steam workshop and preventing records from saving during editor enabled matches.
- Add physics changing brushes that players can walk into and remove the option to vote for them.
- Add slick surfaces and force a conversion on walls within a certain inclination to retroactively update all maps. First tried with kawumm's slick mod.
- Disable time-resets after crossing the start brush.
This is in the hands of shooter and I'm not aware of his backlog so I can't tell how long it will take to implement, just my opinion on what can be done to fix these issues.
But how will applying all these fixes affect the current leaderboards?
This is critical because it would require either a complete reset of the leaderboards to free all maps from old unmoderated records,
Note that no records will be lost! The current network is already keeping track of our entire record history outside of the game and even once the reset is applied, those leaderboards will still be archived on the datasets.
OR, creating an actual Competitive Racing Ruleset that people can switch to whenever they want.
This ruleset would include the fixes listed above and would only save records on a new, separate leaderboard for each map, leaving casual and unmoderated records as they are.
Some degree of measures will have to be considered to prevent people from saving casual records on comp leaderboards, and having the ability to remove those that did.
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This is a great long-term solution to ensure keeping the community together and engaged, since all records achieved using this new competitive ruleset will be saved on the current official steamworks database, just with a different name for each leaderboards table.
For instance, given the current leaderboards tables are called mapid.race, the comp ruleset would just save to a new empty mapid_crr.race table to the database.
No need to force manual overwrites, resets or making anyone learn a list of rules in order to avoid a ban.
Conclusion
It all comes down to choosing one of these 2 options:
- Apply solution #1 and move forward with independent control, forming a new racing community.
- Wait for shooter to release a race comp ruleset, then serve both casual and comp leaderboards on the reflex.racing website.
Second option is preferable but with the free-to-play release, casual play may increase to uncontrollable levels if this issue is not addressed right away.
So I'm asking for shooter to kindly confirm whether that ruleset solution can be applied in a relative short amount of time, let's say by the end of the year, otherwise I will have to proceed with the first option.
Thank you all for supporting this community!
-htp
