Hi all, we've had more submissions than usual recently which is great, but it's been a bit much for me to handle approving them myself with my limited time nowadays, so I'm opening the floor to see if anyone would be interested in helping out in verifying runs for the Dirt Rally leaderboard.

If you are interested, message me directly via speedrun.com's messaging system with the following information:

• Your speedrun.com username
• Any external points of contact (discord username etc)
• A brief summary of your experience with CMR/Dirt games
• A brief summary of your history of speedrunning in general (experience not required to become a verifier)
• A brief summary of any experience you may have verifying/moderating other speedrun games or other moderation experience (not required to become a verifier)

Also if you aren't a part of the CMR Discord I'd highly recommend joining as that's the main way to contact myself and other CMR/Dirt speedrun moderators. Links for that here- https://www.speedrun.com/dirt_rally/forums/rayyz

If you have any questions, would like to participate in the life of CMR community or discuss your new strats, you can join us on discord through this link: https://discord.gg/EPRqPBx

Forwarded from Viper Racing- "We have got a serious problem which is a Google drive link is being posted and is capturing your information. If you hover over a link and see these links PLEASE REPORT THEM TO ME OR ANY OF THE OTHER CMR/DIRT MODS IMMEDIATELY!"

Reminder to everyone to use a unique password for your email address compared to all other accounts and to turn on 2-factor authentication where possible.

So with regards to some recently submitted IL runs, it was discovered that running the game on the Xbox One results in a lower IGT than that of the video recording, and by extension of this, a lower IGT time compared to RTA. From the runs submitted, it can be extrapolated that the timer is slowing down to about 99.78% - 99.85% of what it should be (capture method doesn't appear to make a difference), as extrapolated from runs 100-120 seconds long. In practice, this is estimated to be resulting in a timer save of about 0.15s per minute.

2 possible reasons for this. One is that the Xbone is actually running the game ever so slightly slower than intended, meaning cars would accelerate and turn slower at a slightly lower rate. However this would give a theoretical advantage in ILs of having better reaction times by playing in a slowed-down version of the game, but I'd argue that the slowdown effect would be so small that it wouldn't be humanly perceivable and thus not at all helpful. The other is that the game is running at the same speed as PC, but the in-game timer by itself is actually running slower, which would actually quite a significant advantage for IL runs as it would be a free 0.15s per minute for absolutely nothing. In that case Xbone runs would need to be retimed to RTA for fairness.

Unfortunately it seems very difficult to test which of these scenarios is actually happening, due to the non-deterministic nature of the physics engine preventing the creation of two exact runs to be created on the different systems, as well as not being able to test replay files between Xbox and PC. The former scenario of the game overall slightly slowing down is most likely, given that this is an older generation game running on newer hardware and that tends to be a thing as seen with other games, however of the evidence I have reviewed it is entirely possible that the timer is just running slower but the acceleration and turning rates are the same, however the evidence is nowhere near conclusive enough.

Regarding ILs, for the time being I'm going to approve runs under the assumption that the entire game is running slightly slower, as this seems most fair to those running on those systems as well as being a lot easier to verify. However it is worth keeping in mind that if the situation is actually just the timer misreporting then these runs will need to be retimed to RTA.

For full speedruns, scenario 1 would mean that there's a slight disadvantage to running on Xbox One over PC (combined with the other disadvantages) that should be noted. Scenario 2 has no real effect to these categories. So overall no real issue here.

So I'm a mod for Dirt 3 and we've had a few runs submitted on the Xbox One, but I've noticed that the video time and the IGT displayed are different. I'm trying to work out whether it's the Xbone's capture that's slowed down or whether the game itself is being slowed down etc. I was wondering whether anyone had advice for how other communities might have dealt with this or similar issues? Not sure whether it's right to approve by IGT with this anomaly.

Title. Apparently this was never added to the board for some reason.

Don't see anything in the rules about it.

So with the release of Dirt Rally 2 less than a month away, I've been having thoughts on how runs should be handled for this new release. There are issues with how the board for Dirt Rally is currently set up and I wanted to open up a discussion as to how we can improve it.

Currently in Dirt Rally we have the leaderboard setup in Level Leaderboard, as the grid layout looks a lot nicer and easier to see who is on top in the overall view. The downside to this has been that none of the runs are considered 'full game runs' and thus don't appear at the front of runners profile pages, which is a shame cause a lot of these runs are extremely good. For Dirt Rally 2 it would be nice to actually have these runs be more publicly displayed, but that grid layout is much easier to look at overall.

As a result of having the runs on the 'level leaderboard', we don't have any space for proper individual levels. Dirt Rally had online leaderboards but I'm pretty sure the times have been hacked for those. A solution I have pondered for Dirt Rally at least is to request a separate 'category extensions' leaderboard to store IL times if people wanted them. If runs were stored on the full game runs board we would have space for these, but if we decide to use the same level leaderboard setup for DR2 then a category extensions board could be an option if people want it. The overall question is whether people are interested in having ILs or not, both for Dirt Rally and DR2.

We had a fair bit of timing issues when first doing DR runs. Ultimately IGT was easier and favoured more due to inconsistent loading times, however IGT has a number of issues of it's own. Firstly, IGT doesn't increment during the setup/repair section of runs, allowing people to just dawdle around during that section. Secondly it completely eliminates any speedrunning tricks that we could implement. For example, we could take a 10 second penalty by jumping the start, allowing us to save 5 seconds RTA for a total of a minute over the full 12 track run. It also means runs are completely dead upon an out-of-bounds penalty, and kills off any potential for wrong-warp strats to be used in runs as well. Because of this, I believe we should start fresh for DR2 using LOADLESS timing instead. This doesn't come with it's own consequences though, mainly being way harder to time locally and it's also way more work to validate runs. I personally am willing to put the work into this validation process as the community should be small enough to handle that, however without a proper load remover it opens up the opportunity for accuracy errors to be introduced. Given that we round down the second anyway it wouldn't be too inaccurate, but still more likely. With this timing methodology I believe runs will become much more of a true speedrun than what they currently are.

So those are the main issues I want to hear people's thoughts on. Did having runs stored on the level leaderboard work well? Would people be interesting in being able to submit ILs? What timing methodology should we go with for the future?

Added drift showcase, not for points but to complete it as fast as possible. Only available on 4 tracks but the unique physics of the drift cars actually make it quite fun to figure out how to do it with speed. See the rules of the drift showcase category for full details.

Contemplating removing the glitchless category at the moment. The original reason we had a glitchless category was so that consoles could still be competitive, but we have had literally 0 runs submitted on anything but PC. Not only that, but the current known glitches only save about 5 minutes over the course of the standard Any% run, most of which is in season 1. Hardly much of a time save relative to how long Any% currently is. Any times currently in the glitchless category would be moved into the main category, which only really affects one person (which let's admit, those runs aren't exactly optimised).

If anyone has any arguments as to why we should keep Glitchless then speak up soon, because right it seems fairly pointless to keep it around.

Hi all, seems to be a good idea to keep track of routes and tricks/glitches people may or may not be aware of, so feel free to post all your findings here.

For starters, it seems you only need to come 3rd in each race except for the championship. This means you can save an easy 15 seconds every elimination race by purposely driving backwards once 4th gets eliminated to eliminate yourself at 3rd place.

In the level leaderboard overview, the person with the lower RTA are displayed to represent that category, even though they are not first when the leaderboard is meant to be sorted by IGT.

Example- https://www.speedrun.com/Dirt_Rally In the category 2010s Sweden, you can see that the leaderboard is showing PojeBunny, but if you actually click on that leaderboard you can clearly see that larathen is in first place and should be being displayed instead of PojeBunny.

Any setting I'm missing to fix this?

I'll give a cookie to anyone who can figure out how to replicate this.

Is there a way to have leaderboards set so that only level leaderboard submissions have the millisecond parameter while full runs submissions don't?