Quote from teaz-R :

yes today

I've been to investigate the cause of this problem, and I've found it. I've removed illegally obtained records for both the RB4 and XRT, and permabanned a total of 5 cheaters.

It's now safe to race WE1R again

Quote from SamH :

and permabanned a total of 5 cheaters.

Wow, 5 cheaters...nice work. Let that be a warning to others....Play fair or be struck down by wrath of Sam:jedi:

Yeah, there's some satisfaction in catching cheaters a full week after they've cheated, when they probably think they got away with it. The evidence is all there, though, and there's no question. It was deliberate cheating.

I have to say, though, that I'm more sad than anything. We want as many people in and racing as possible, so kicking out 5 people sticks in the throat a bit.

We've made a commitment to everyone that your STCC licence means you're "keen and clean".. and so when someone (or 5 of them) turn up to undermine that, the only way to address it is to remove them from the running completely.

Specifically the lap times involved, ~50 seconds of Westhill Reversed in a TBO car, where being reproduced consistently lap after lap after lap, so whatever cheat/exploit was in use was not some freak ocurrance. I imagine it was not a hack because so many drivers where doing it, which means they copied it - sadly I/we havn't been able to see what the exploit is though.

All the same, as a general principle this kind of thing, especially from some people with a high licence, is just not welcome. It's well established that we take strong action because it has such a wide spread effect on people using the server after the event.

If you foil our lap record storage system by cheating, then you are not welcome and it is instant perma-ban. We also do this for those using hacks.

isn't it possible to save replays on a dedicated server? or for example save only those replays, where the server records were broken by someone?

I really can'T imagine how you can do WE reverse in 50 seconds with any car, not to mention the TBO's. did they use some grip and speed hack, or did they do a shortcut somewhere? or maybe the track wasn't even westhill, but some other short track, but the server accidentally registered it as westhill?

Before applying a ban the data is corroborated with LFS World.

EDIT: On replays, the dedicated host does not store them, although the STCC Manager Software has a server side replay system that is almost finished now - but it needs a special viewer which i'm yet to write.

I was racing on the silver and up server yesterday and I think the ~50s laptime "cheat" happened because of LFSW lagging. I saw a few pb's achieved on the previous shorter track pop up after the track change. Just a guess.

LFSW doesnt do the timing. It can sometimes lag and report things later, but what it reports is information collated in game, irrespective of lag.

The last two times i've race yesterday (18 and 15 laps!!!), WeIntRev/XRT, after each race it says ''practice offline'' , my laps in low 1:58 ...but I remember a racer, with fastest lap 1:56.xx (XRT)

Yes that was down to some cheating which had gone on before and is now fixed. Those caught, as discussed above, are no longer welcome on STCC and have been perma-banned.