Dedimania forum

xymph wrote:

But while previous track spamming by near-identical nicks happened on Stadium with Nations accounts, all these are United accounts (obviously, for driving on Coast), and my first hesitation is that I find it unlikely that one person purchased a dozen+ United licenses. That's pretty nuts.

i found that weird, too. however, to my knowledge, some united players tend to have multiple tmuf accounts to supply themselves with coppers, primarily for solomode, though. it could also be possible that some of the keys for those logins were bought during a steam sale, unfortunately, the chart data is very limited as seen here and it is difficult to prove whether those account keys were bought during a sale, since IDs do not provide a specific timeframe, really.

seeing how most (all?) of the servers are 70k+ LP, it is not unreasonable to assume that they were created for some sort of "copper farming", if you will. the top donators on all the servers are also "upcbye1955", sometimes reaching 100k+ coppers on several accounts.

xymph wrote:

But a track normally runs for about 5 minutes (TimeAttackLimit) or longer (until RoundsPointsLimit is reached). Having the record timestamps much closer together (within 2 minutes) means that the server operator must have performed a next/restart track after one finish to invoke ChallengeRaceTimes sooner. And that many many times; that is very nutty too.

as checked (had to ask a friend of mine, as i do not have 70k+ LP), all the servers run a somewhat normal setup for both TA and Rounds. the TA servers have a timelimit of 5 minutes, and the Rounds servers have a pointlimit of 100, with the winner getting 30 points per round. at first, i personally assumed that either the pointlimit was set to a very low value, or that the points for first place far exceeded the limit, thus making it skip/restart instantly. admittedly, that is not the case, and an admin/operator must have gotten involved with skipping/restarting the maps continuously after each round, pretty much. the operator list is also unavailable to me as a normal player on any of those servers, but the masteradmin on all of them is one of the "upcbye1955" accounts. i would assume that other similar logins have some sort of admin privilege on the servers, though.

xymph wrote:

Can a single person keep doing all that for many years, or does it involve multiple people?

this is a really tough call to make. i have personally never seen anything like this before. usually, such record spammers take down just one or two maps, but over 10 thousands? the dedication is quite impressive, should it be just one person.

most of the evidence, however, points to a "yes", but it is still not definitive without ip-logs of some sort. considering that person (or those people) really only play(s) on one server which is their own, we will never know for a fact. the only real proof is the tmx situation, which is what redshadow has described.

xymph wrote:

Banned from where, TMX? Can you share more information about this?

on behalf of owly (who is also a tmuf-x moderator):

problem is that he also multi accounted on tmx and tried to claim that the other accounts are being used by his friends

i could try to get him on here to comment on this situation in more detail, if needed.

Hey again,

I'll get in contact with the TMX Crew about this. Unfortunately I am not allowed to send more information than that. If you want more details, Dedimania admins are welcome to contact upc1955 themselves. Sorry!

I'll check back here soon, I hope that is enough.

Last edited by redshadow____ (2024-12-08 01:31:47)

xymph wrote:

Any luck, then?

unfortunately not, i messaged the guy (owly) right away. to my surprise he refused to provide any assistance (i personally found it weird because his post elsewhere prompted me to post here), stating that since "the records aren't cheated, there's no point of removing them". he's also shared that it is possible that it could be "a group of LAN players", which could explain the IP match (i still doubt that's the case though, and either way, why would somebody create 10+ tmx accounts with similar names in that case). that's when i messaged redshadow instead, and his response is what you can see just above.

i don't know anything about how they handle the stuff on tmx behind the scenes, but it seems they consider this issue to be of no importance, despite it clearly being somewhat against the dedimania rules i believe. i was told that they'll contact eyebo (the site lead) to get more info out publicly, but again, no idea if eyebo is willing to greenlight this.