There are a couple of runs that rely on the AI behaving wrongly to achieve the fastest times, ways that might be/become impossible to get as of today since the devs are always making AI improvements amongst other various bug fixes.

Examples of this would be in the scenarios "Bank Robbery" and "Police Patrol".

In both of the current 1st place speedruns, the AI bugs out and causes the scenario to end in a success state earlier than what it's supposed to. Also in "Bank Robbery", the 2nd/3rd place runs use a path that is no longer possible and results in a failure state of the scenario. "Police Patrol" is better in the fact that the scenario hasn't been altered much by updates, but the AI occasionally just faults immediately which causes an early success state. I wasn't able to reproduce the AI behavior in my attempted runs, but even then, I can't say for sure that the AI was fixed or not since the first place run took place.

I also found that the scenario "Canyon Jump" has been changed since some of the runs, altering the starting area from the dirt back further to the parking lot. It seems to have made achieving a sub 20 second time just about impossible. Also in doing so, it makes the current 1st place run obsolete, since it starts already well into the dirt before the first jump.

IMO if the AI bugs out before the player has a chance to interact with them during a run, it probably shouldn't be counted. It leaves quite a lot to RNG/randomness in a game that already relies on a lot of good luck with AI.

Even though I believe that this may introduce other aspects to verifying speedruns as well, such as if the AI behaved sub-optimally at the start of a scenario and/or didn't move for the first couple of seconds after the beginning of a speedrun for that scenario and whether it should be counted based on that.

This is not to be confused with the pathing that an AI takes during any "chase" scenario, which is dependent upon where the player is located, which can be manipulated/altered in-game for faster runs without relying on just pure RNG.

That's all I have to say, thank you for taking the time to read all of this and may fortune be on your side for faster speedruns.

I whole heartedly agree on Bank Robbery. I went to replicate the run and found that there was now a kill zone which makes the path impossible.

I agree with you on each of the points you made, and I have thus invalidated the 1st/2nd/3rd place runs for Bank Robbery and the 1st place run for police patrol, as I realize that my previous "anything goes" attitude for run verification is not quite fair nor practical in a game that continues to make updates and and bug fixes. I would like to hold off on invalidating the runs for Canyon Jump until we have completely exhausted the possibility of superceding the 1st place run due to its advantageous start positioning.

Thanks for your concern!

I don't want to make a new whole new thread just for this, so I'm just going to revive this thread since it's still relevant. I was running the scenario Canyon Jump again today with the current version of the game, and I'm having a hard time even squeezing a sub 21 second run out of it, and can't even seem to replicate my old time of 20s 430ms either. Considering the updates to the game even since when this thread was originally posted 5 months ago, and when the current first place run was posted nearly two years ago, I no longer believe that with the current version of the game it's possible to run a sub 20 second run on the Canyon Jump scenario. I'm sure low 20s are still possible, but that half a second below 20 seconds to beat the current 1st place just seems like a long shot IMO. For if you decide to remove the old runs, my 5 month old one included, I'm going to submit a new Canyon Jump run done with the current version of the game.

Once again, thanks for reading.

Latest big update to East Coast, Hirochi raceway, and Derby maps may have just invalidated some scenario times. I'm going to check out the changes right now. I'm going to check "Destroy the Moonhawk" first since I noticed the gas station area looking a lot different in the trailer, and because I tried for a while to beat that one and never got close... lol

Sure enough the AI acts differently now on "Destroy the Moonhawk", there doesn't seem to be a way to influence it to go to the right at the start and getting a quick (sub 10 second time) seems impossible right now. At the first left turn out of the gas station seems to be the only chance you have to get a knock on it, and it seems to react differently now to being pushed from the back. I had one glitchy start where the moonhawk started the scenario with the engine smoking... and in reverse... not sure what that was. 42 seconds flat is best I've gotten so far.

got it down to 26.xx :)