I've never had a problem with Mazdaspeed 3. Stock or tuned. I have 1.2 CE version.

Grim, I recommend to search google, explore, test and even do a practice run before doing any actual speedrun. You'll notice you did many things wrong, learn new tricks and generally get more experience playing the game. Also, NEVER trust the game and your instincts, always test if this or that is faster (record). Especially in a racing game. Doing your "homework" is half of a good speedrun. Yes, it takes a shitload of time, but after you do all of this, you'll realize how incredibly easy the game is :)

@Ewil: I own every single NFS game for PC but I am probably most experienced and skilled in Most Wanted and Carbon. However, like I said I only have records for individual tracks (using specific rules from the tournament scene) and here you only have records for speedruns (career playthroughs), except for NFS 1-6, so I don't see how I could submit my existing records here. :P

I am interested in giving some career playthroughs a try though, unless they require too many ugly exploits like restarting the game and such, which I don't really enjoy. I want to be able to set a good time mostly thanks to fast driving. :)

I will definitely try Carbon and maybe also Underground 1. Most Wanted and Underground 2 are a bit long I think.

Well, I was actually thinking of adding individual tracks to the table, so let me know if you would be interested. You just have to provide a proof in form of video.

Well, it depends on what the rules would be. If the only category would be "unrestricted" (all cars and nitrous allowed), then I personally wouldn't be interested, since I don't like to play that way. Me and a lot of other competitive players like to play with certain restrictions that we know from the tournaments that used to happen back when the games were new.

Suggested categories for Most Wanted:

• unrestricted
• No Nos (no nitrous allowed)
• BMW (only the bonus BMW M3 GTR allowed + no nitrous allowed)

Suggested categories for Carbon:

• unrestricted
• WCG (no Corvette or Audi allowed + no nitrous allowed)

All of this applies only to Circuit and Sprint. For the other modes (if you want to add them at all) unrestricted would be enough.

No Nos was used for many years in all the MW tournaments hosted by ESL. BMW is also used by many hardcore players, since the car doesn't have a setup, so that everyone has the same conditions.

By the way, no nitrous just means that players aren't allowed to use it. It's impossible to turn it off for single player races in MW, at least with the BMW, so videos have to start sufficiently early to make it clear that no nitrous was used at the end of the previous lap either (which would let you start the timed lap with an unfair speed advantage).

WCG stands for World Cyber Games, which hosted the most important Carbon tournament ever in 2007 and it used these rules, which people still like to use today. In Carbon nitrous can be turned off for single player races, so here this is easy to enforce.

Personally I play with No Nos rules in MW and WCG rules in Carbon.

If you need lists of the tracks you can find them on my website here: http://www.nfsHQ.com

I think we could do both restricted and unrestricted categories.

Could you please explain why no nitrous and why no Corvette and Audi?

In the multiplayer modes of both MW and Carbon you can choose between nitrous on and off. Most tournaments that happened in these games used the option off. I don't know exactly how this originated (it might have been to make cheating harder) but either way it has become the standard for a lot of competitive players. Many people also simply don't enjoy driving with nitrous as much.

Also in Circuit you can't chain perfect laps together when you play with nitrous because to get the fastest possible lap you have to start it with much nitrous and end it with none but then the next lap can't be as good. If you play without nitrous you can aim for the same time in every flying lap when you do a full race, which makes the practice more smooth. With nitrous you need one preparation lap between each timed one to regain full nitrous.

Corvette and Audi in Carbon I believe were also banned to make cheating harder in online matches because there were some ways to edit them from outside of the game but once again even now people still like to use these rules simply because they enjoy the gameplay with them more. To be fast with the Corvette you have to drive pretty rough with a lot of wallrides. With the Lancer (best car on most tracks with these rules) the driving is a lot more clean and for many people more fun.

(Of course other games like Underground 1+2 also have wallrides but in those games they would be there regardless of the car, while in Carbon it is possible to make them a lot less viable by just banning a single car.)

Anyway, I am just suggesting these rules because I know that a lot of people like to use them, no matter how they originated. :) (some people would probably even suggest some additional ones in MW where not all upgrades are allowed but those ones don't make sense to me personally)

I see that you also have different categories for each track in NFS 1-6 (like Stock and Tuning in Porsche or Regular and NFS Edition in HP2), probably because each way of playing is preferred by some people. In can assure you that in MW and Carbon (and some others) people also have preferences like that. :P

Example of a competitive match with nitrous turned off in MW: (video description has timestamps of the races)

Final race of the WCG 2007 Carbon tournament:

And you can find tons of BMW videos if you search for "NFS MW BMW No Nos".

Yeah, different categories are mainly for preferences. You can notice some categories were made specifically for PSX versions, which will have their own game pages very soon since PSX version is simply too different from any other version, especially Porsche Unleashed.

Is using a steering wheel really that beneficial? I was thinking about testing it, but I'm not sure how it would work out in drifts.

Also, nice videos. I love how Lancer handles, pity we can't use it in career since it can't pass opponents in canyons (as far as I know).

Grim, I've managed to duplicate the Mazdaspeed 3 issue. It's caused by grip tyres, both street and pro. If you just use left or middle setting the car drives fine.

EDIT: IL table created. I still have to figure out the starting point for Drifts and Speedtraps though. Let me know if I screwed something up.

Well, to be honest I don't think it makes sense to go for the fastest time in Drift and Speedtrap events. If going for the highest score/speed is not acceptable on a Speedrun website, then I would rather just remove those events completely and only have leaderboards for those types where going for the fastest time is the intended goal. In Canyon you also get a score, so if the goal here has to be the fastest time, then I would only do leaderboards for Circuit, Sprint and Checkpoint. That's already a ton of tracks anyway. And doing a mode that is about score or speed for the time feels very awkward to me. Of course it's totally normal when the event is part of a full career playthrough but as an individual challenge it feels very odd. I don't think any of the NFS players that I know would enjoy playing individual score/speed events for the fastest time.

And in Carbon both steering wheel and gamepad are competitive. In the WCG final it was actually wheel vs gamepad. And this was definitely the most competitive Carbon tournament ever, since it had by far the biggest prize pool, so people practiced super hard for it. :) (http://www.acemprol.com/download/file.php?id=8467&t=1)

I actually did a test speedrun of the career last night just for fun and to get more experienced with it and I took the Lancer instead of the Corvette to see how it would go. I couldn't skip the Canyon against the Lancer (since I still have the RX-7 there) but I believe I skipped all other Canyons in Silverton, although the overtake wasn't always right at the start.

Since the run was terrible I won't submit it on the site but you can see the Canyons with the Lancer at 2:11:30, 2:35:10 and 2:50:20 here:

The perfect setup for the Lancer is a bit unusual. You can actually leave transmission, suspension and brakes Stock. Especially with transmission and suspension this is actually an advantage. Stock transmission only works when you play with manual though but that is recommended in Carbon anyway. :)

The Corvette is probably still the right choice for the playthrough though. It is the fastest car in the game on almost every track.

I kinda like to do drifts as fast as possible thanks to the speed glitch or however it's called :) It's quite challenging. We'll just see if anyone will be interested doing drifts and speedtraps (I am) and if not, I'll just delete them.

Is transmission and suspension on Lancer bugged? I've noticed some parts in this game are broken. They either don't give you any advantage (most transmissions), slow you down (transmission on Elise), or they just completely fuck up the car (grip tyres on Mazdaspeed3).

Well, with NFS you never know if you should call it a bug or a feature. :P

In NFS MW you can also use lesser transmissions to gain a better acceleration at the cost of top speed. There it feels quite reasonable. But yeah, the Stock transmission of the Lancer in Carbon could be called bugged I guess, since it has a very different top speed depending on if you use automatic or manual (303 vs 346). People have accepted it as part of the game though.

By the way, with WCG rules the Lancer is the best car on most tracks but not on all. There are a few exceptions where the Carrera GT or the Viper are slightly better, so have a look at those cars as well. The Viper is basically a weaker version of the Corvette, which is good on extreme top speed tracks like Waterfront Road.

A nice track to compare the 3 cars is Mission Street, where they are all pretty close to each other in the end. It has a very long straight but also some tight corners. The Viper is best for the straight but worst for the corners. The Lancer the other way around. The Porsche is second best for each part. Here is a video that shows a fast run with each of them:

I've tried Viper, but it handles really bad without suspension setup (which takes too long in career to unlock) and makes passing Darius really hard. It's also significantly slower than Corvette. Carrera GT can only be unlocked via Exotic career, which is significantly longer than either Tuner or Muscle career.

If we're only talking IL, then yeah these 4 cars are best, but career is quite different. You have to realize when is the time to switch to a faster car, when is the time to upgrade, what upgrades are worth unlocking etc. :)

That video is really great. Would you mind sharing your setups with us? I'm really interested if for example tires or turbo makes any difference since I haven't seen any measureable difference.

EDIT: Grim, why do you think that this site shouldn't hold any ILs or segmented runs? There are already plenty of games that have IL and segmented runs. I don't really understand why some new speedrunners feel like RTA runs are the only TRUE speedruns. Before speedrunslive.com, there were no RTA speedruns. 95% of all runs were either segmented or just IL table and 5% was single-segment (no resets and no saving), and they were all hosted on SDA as the biggest speedrunning site. Nowadays not many people don't give a shit about SDA anymore, so the speedrunning community moved here to speedrun.com. Killing off an entire category is imho not a good way to please public. Some people like to run RTA, some people prefer segmented runs and some people just wanna be the fastest person in a single level/track. Why should we deny them that option?

OK sorry, that was a bit misjudged. It's true there are not many segmented runs here. The reason is simple - most of the old segmented runs hosted on SDA were already beaten as RTAs, because since then new tricks were discovered and since RTA speedrunning is now MUCH more popular than segmented runs (I completely understand why), there is basically no reason to submit old segmented runs here.

On the other hand, segmented runs will always be faster, better optimized, use harder tricks (some segmented runs use tricks that have like 1:100+ chance to succeed) and your HW doesn't matter since loading screens are not counted. They are also great to counter heavy rng and long speedruns like MW, so segmented runs have definitely a place here, although a small one.

As for ILs... well, for me speedrun means anything with clearly defined start/finish positions that can be completed in faster pace than casual. So yeah, ILs fit that description. Actually a lot of games with levels or tracks have IL table. We could probably delete those drifts and speedtraps, but the rest is fine. Some games doesn't even have a career or new game like NFS1-3, so the only way to speedrun them is via IL.

@Ewil: Yeah, I was not talking about the career there with the 3 cars. Of course when you can use Corvette there is never a reason to use Viper. :)

Here you can find my standard setups for Lancer and Porsche: http://www.nfs-hq.com/carboncircuit03.html http://www.nfs-hq.com/carboncircuit11.html (3 3 3 means all sliders to the right, 3 3 2 means first two to the right and last one in the center and so on...) I don't have a Viper setup right now.

And just to make it clear: I did not ask for individual track leaderboards. You said you wanted to do them anyway, so I just wrote that IF you do them they should be with categories. I actually agree with Grim that the term "Speedrun" only refers to a fast playthrough of a whole game (career/story mode) and is not used for fast quickrace times on individual tracks. Then again both activities are about being fast in a video game, so they are at least somewhat related.

I don't really know. I am fine with track leaderboards being here (except those for fast times in modes that are not about the time) but I can also understand if people feel that it's the wrong website for them (unfortunately there is no better one that already exists though, at least for Carbon). You guys can decide about it. I don't really want to be involved in that choice, since I only just came here. I can accept either way. If there are track leaderboards, then I will use them. But if not, then I am also happy to just give the career playthrough a try. I didn't expect any more than that when I signed up here anyway. :)

PS: Canyon is also about score, not just Drift and Speedtrap. I would only do Circuit, Sprint and Checkpoint (if any). Another option would be the individual events of the Challenge Series (the ones that are about time). Those are even part of the 100% game completion speedrun. Just a suggestion though. You really don't need to create anything just for me.

If people are willing to use the IL leaderboards then I think they should stay for now. As Paragleiber said there is nowhere else in the Carbon community to post IL times.

I still don't understand why we shouldn't have IL runs, except that you don't think it's a speedrun. There are far more obscure games here that people speedrun - like League of Legends or World of Warcraft, and they're still called speedruns.

As Paragleiber pointed out, there is currently no better place to submit tracks records in Carbon. Well, this is unfortunately true for many NFS games. There used to be sites with records (most of them held by famous cheater SfanFZR), but now they are either gone or those records have no proof. So I think it's a good idea to have ILs here since this site should last for a long time.

Paragleiber, yeah Challenge Series could be added as well. Thanks for the setups, it confirms some of my discoveries except one - Turbo. Is there any particular reason to set Turbo for 111 and 332?

To be honest, while Grim is correct, hosting IL cannot be a bad thing. It can get more people interested in getting back in the game, and have a challenge other than the RTA speedrun. The goal is always the same, get the fastest time, and it takes skill and knowledge to do it.