based on comments: A: 6 votes - 7% B: 26 votes - 30% C: 25 votes - 28% D: 31 votes - 35% the cheated clip is: B best explanations were provided by @pamani1234 and @justagyraffe. B has a lower tire slip ratio compared to the rest. C has more tire temperature and suspension travel suggesting the car being pushed harder, and yet B and C times are almost the same not all the reasons were correct though, for example in-game timer being out of sync is a problem with forzatech engine

Former ENASCAR iRacing Coca Cola driver here. When you finish in the top 3 of a Coke Series race, iRacing always pulls your telemetry files and they can ask any driver no matter the finish for their files after the race. From what I can tell being in that space for almost 10 years iRacing has had minimal cheating but I'm sure there were some bad apples in the years before iRacing implemented required telemetry checks ~5 years ago.

PTG lookin hella jealous rn

I have so much respect for the Trackmania devs and community for how much they acknowledge cheating and go about detecting and mitigating it. Edit: I wish other games had what trackmania has in terms of community and replay checking features

Bro gave us homework 😂

from my knowledge of FPS cheats you can also toggle it to a hotkey... so that 1% boost you could literally only use when you're cornering, or think you need it. That is how some /competitive/ players use aimbot and wallhack in FPS games by toggling it on/off randomly instead of having it going 100% of the time.

"Everybody's on -speed hacks- steroids" - Nate Diaz

It's interesting that out of all racing games with competitive e-sports, Trackmania of all games is the gold standard for anti-cheating measures. Deterministic game engine, replay files that include both the car position and the player inputs, and many more stuff under the hood like analysing the frequency of the inputs. Sure it's the simplest game out of all of them but the fact that Nadeo, a (relatively) small company with a budget for their game that doesn't even compare to games like iRacing and FM7, have managed to make an anticheat that hands out beats all the other competitive racing games is wild.

Had no clue people played racing games competitively this is so cool

You are a proper chad for doing this video. In 2020 I raced in Forza's biggest pro tournament that year, Le Mans Esports Series, and it had a long-suspected cheater compete (I'd say nearly all of the top 30 believe this player cheats in one distinct way you show in this video). They finished very high too, scoring thousands of dollars. Funny that they've set crazy LB times for many years yet never *ever* turned up to a ForzaRC or lan event, only this one (a virtual event). Person has had multiple accounts banned over the years but has always come back with new accounts and still plays to this day. Appreciate you making this video, hope it spurs action from studios (we'll keep dreaming)

Some of the more serious sim racing leagues actually do require drivers to submit their telemetry data for each race.

im going to guess its clip B. the only thing i notice that makes it slightly more suspicious than other is how the car has faster corner exit and corner speeds mid-corner. clip d is also a viable option since the car turns into the corner slightly earlier than the other ones

When forza can barely stop simple corner cutting level cheating, how does anyone expect them to care enough to stop cheaters putting any actual effort in.

Makes me wonder if there aren't nefarious and/or criminal organizations out there using competitive gaming tournaments for money laundering or other financial crimes.

Lol, this is such a well timed video considering some the the debates that have gone on in the FM7 community recently about certain players

all of this can stop with the telemetry data alone. There is a physical imitation on every single input and output a car can achieve, all they need to do is program an Ai to Flag drivers that appear to be breaking the laws of in-game physics, by any margin, and then have it human reviewed. nothing else is necessary.

the guy who exposed cheaters in Tarkov got rekt by the community because community is absolutely brain dead.

Not expecting the new Forza to do much about this.

Turn10: I ban sepi Sepi: ok now I'm gonna cheat

This is the quality journalism we need, thank you for your hard work

My best guess is going to be Clip B is the cheater. I'm basing this entirely off of telemetry numbers, NOT including lap times/splits. I ran some initial numbers, and it seems like Clip B has more grip at higher accelerations across the board. I'm going to create a program to do a full analysis and do a write up below...

The one thing about this video that impresses me is the fact that you were able to launch the game on PC without it crashing the moment you loaded into the garage area lmao.

It seems like the simplest face value solution would be to take in the exact same inputs as the drivers using the source engine and see if there are any differences. Though as you said in the video the exact same inputs may still lead to different outputs so we would have to find a work-around and improve the engine. Otherwise it would be unsurprising if there some kind of hidden mathematical solution in the telemetry logs to detect cheaters. This seems like a really interesting idea to look into in the future

Coming from competitive Counter-Strike the lack of security in racing games is just laughable. Every online tournament in CSGO demands players to locally record demos of their matches, which at 128 tick often go past 100 MB in size. In case someone has suspicions of cheating the accused player needs to upload the demo, which can be watched by all the other players and the tournament organizers, failure to upload the demo will give the win by default to the opposing team (and likely some penalty in the league). A major scandal broke out over a bug that allowed the coach to place his spectator camera on a single point of their choosing, this allowed the coach to keep watch on an area even if no friendly players are there. This sparked a major investigation that lasted a few months as a committee watched like seven or eight years of old demos to determine who used that bug. In the end a lot of people were banned. For major events they should just eat the storage cost and force demo recordings.

dude, you literally killed my desire to buy a game wheel to participate in competitive races for prizes. I never thought that cheats can be used in racing games - this is crazy, and I have been playing games almost my whole adult life. I'm sad

Probably the best youtube has recommended me in about 6 months or so. Great topic and scripting, subscribed.

Something that makes detecting cheats even harder is the difference that setups can make, you can mask a small grip/top speed advantace by having the excuse of a better setup. The reason everyone is suspicious of Thomas Rohnaar in F1 esports is that he seems to have better minumum speed AND top speed than everyone else, which implies that he's running a lower downforce setup while also having more grip than a high downforce setup. Setups are kept private and arent checked by admins which means that no one can figure out how he can achieve those speeds/grip levels, another major flaw in making sure everyone is on a level playing field.

I'm going to say Clip D was using the 1% grip hack. Is the only one that is keeping almost the same speed around the corners as the rest but is also staying on a tighter line while maintaining that speed. Can tell the most by watching turn 1 at .25 speed. All the other cars went wider and kept about the same average speed but none of them stuck as close to the inside as clip D car did.

I used to organize Nordschleife races in FM7. Always did fixed tunes for balance, so car X would be as close to car Y in performance. There was a VNX racer who would win all races I organized, no matter what car he chose, no matter how fast the other players were. Then, one of the races I made a very powerful Muscle car, one that if you went full throttle, it would spin, no matter what gear you were in. Strangely enough, when checking the telemetey later, I could see at launch, for example, we were both at 100% throttle and while my tires were at 2000% friction, his tires would never go past 700%. The first corner he would be waaay ahead of me already, so I confronted him. All he did was make jokes about me in the Brazillian community, since a lot of those are balls deep into this scheme of making it look like cheats do not exist. That is one of the reasons I gave up on playing this game seriously and making content for it... Thank you for making this video and making it public!

Concerning [35]: Whilst it is a nice mention it is known that some physics engines use fixed point arithmetic instead of floating point arithmetic in critical parts to mitigate that issue. It is a trade of between performance and precision though hence the use in specific areas of the engine.

"I cheated to expose the cheaters" is a real 2023 flex

I never thought of this.... Either way, I hope you're doing well. I'm not sure if you'll ever be back on FH5, but I appreciate what you did with these videos. Also, quick questtion: Why are the Mangrove times and tunes deleted, if you know?

So there are a couple of flaws in the video but I do agree with the overall premise of it. First we'll start off with the flaws: this might just be bad editing but he says "we know it's possible to avoid in simpler games" while showing GCD18 talking about Rocket League and Trackmania which both have their own huge drawbacks to how they do things. Rocket League's engine for example does not handle any amount of network latency well. If you have a lag spike at any point during play the ball becomes out of sync for you until a goal is scored even when your connection is relatively good there can be some noticeable syncing issues and rubberbanding. Also because of how the game engine works if you leave a game and comeback the engine replays the game up until that point to get you synced up which increases load time and can cause a bad pc to have lag issues when first loading into an in-progress game. Trackmania's system is much better but is flawed in it's execution. Nadeo has typically not actively pursued the cheater issue instead relying on reports as their means of detection. As a result there have been players who have used tool-assisted runs to get world records on tracks and because they were a good player to begin with the fact that they were tool-assisted was hard to prove until someone in the community wrote a program that could take the replay files and analyze them as the replay files in trackmania stores the inputs of the player to see if they were cheating or not. I don't think it should have required a community member to go out of their way to write this program in the first place but it's a pretty good system overall. How do I think they should prevent this kind of stuff in the future? Two simple changes would make it nearly impossible to get away with cheating. First change is to make it so that the top 3-10 positions' telemetry are saved to be analyzed for anomalies, depending on the computing power that it would take to save and analyze you'd need to adjust how many of the top placers you'd check. Second change which I think would go a long way to deterring people from cheating in the first place is to implement a random telemetry submission, make there be a 10% chance on any given race that your telemetry will be submitted for analyzation for anomalies. The key is that it has to be random otherwise people will just try to figure out when they're going to be tested just like they do with PEDs in sports

I love your commentated videos

Damn I wish you were a consultant for the devs, what a nice take on cheating. Hopefully videos like these will start discussions. The difference from you to another youtubers is that you are not focusing on the drama, but on the problem itself. You are one of a kind on the racing community sepi, please keep posting 🙏

Great info! Your tunes in FH5 were just great :D

I stopped playing competitively and in multiplayer races. Now, I only race against myself.

I’m gonna say that Clip D had the grip increase, it seems like they were more confident in some corners where the other clips struggled a little more.

I cant even bear to watch the video because its all so crystal clear for me. Most esports have zero integrity, including most LAN events. Its just too easy to cheat and the risk-reward ratio is just too good for cheaters. They are cheating for hundreds of thousands of dollars with little chance of getting caught. Private cheats, hardware cheats in mouses, keyboards, gamepads, wheelbases etc.

As a rocket league player i found it hilarious that u used a sunlesskhan video when the game got invaded by bots xD

PTG Team punching the air right now

This would be the last Forza video ever that SP4 would make. Thanks for the memories.

VNX ZachThe1 here, Leader and Tuner @ Vanatix eSports. I appreciate the publicity and the work you're doing trying to push for competitive continuity in Forza. There's a lot of people that could be cheating, but without better tools it's impossible to point the finger. I can't wait for anti-cheat and FPS lock to be implemented, half the people complaining about cheating are probably cheating themselves. All we can do is hope Turn 10 does a good job on Forza Next. Also VNX Komi is a girl btw.

Great content man👍

finally a new video

Digging the System Shock Remake cyberspace music!

I think Clip D is the one using the hack. I had just one idea to start with : If you have more grip, you need more power, more torque to make your car move especially at the race start. So i just looked at the torque in every clip data and D seems to be the one with more.

"If everyone is cheating, then no one is cheating" - somebody idk

I think option C. Higher average tire temperature by 1 degree than the other clips, which may be due to increased traction.

1:38 Forza 7's replays during its launch 😂 cars used to fly and they didn't even have an accelrating sound

0:37 Wooo thats me :) Fantastic video mate

Hey SP4, any plan on when we might get the new tuning guide? Great video btw

We did have about 5 drivers drivers think something isn't right.They almost were going to say something to get it looked at.

this is a weirdly deep rabbit hole about online racing i can almost smell the swap between the cheeks of the people racing in those tournaments

I’ve been looking at the data sheets, and after analyzing a little, here’s my conclusion: Before I show the results I want to clarify that my analysis is almost 100% based on telemetry, since I think it is where I have the most chance of finding anomalies. Find the cheater Lap A -> 2:01.660 Lap B -> 2:01.604 Lap C -> 2:01.589 Lap D -> 2:01.676 1. First method This will be a comparison of the throttle and the brake usage between lap A and the other 3. Very big differences could indicate some types of cheats. Lap A/Lap B throttle usage: -14172 | Lap A/Lap B brake usage: -618 Lap A/Lap C throttle usage: -4964 | Lap A/Lap C brake usage: 5418 Lap A/Lap D throttle usage: -10425 | Lap A/Lap D brake usage: 1485 Given the results, I can't conclude anything, but we can give some rounds more scope than others. From the first moment, the differences between the lap A and the B have called my attention. The fact that much more accelerator is used and only a little more brake in B, and that the difference in times is only 59 thousandths in favor of B, makes me think two scenarios. The first, and the one that I am sure is that there is a big difference in the racing line, which causes these differences in telemetry and not in the times. However, the second scenario would lead to accept that the lap A is in which the car would be "boosted", based on the fact that having a greater grip you can plot better and make less use of the accelerator to get the times. 2. Second method This will also consist in comparing some data between the 4 laps. In this case the comparison will be on difference on tyre data. The first one is the total tyre slip from the 4 tyres: Lap A -> TTS = 14272 | Lap B -> TTS = 13825 Lap C -> TTS = 14549 | Lap D -> TTS = 13851 In this second case I will be looking at the initial tyre temperatures: TFL TFR TRL TRR Lap A -> 121.18 121.23 121.93 121.93 Lap B -> 121.18 121.23 121.93 121.93 Lap C -> 121.30 121.33 121.94 121.94 Lap D -> 121.18 121.23 121.93 121.93 These results made me change my mind. The fact initial tyre temperatures in laps A, B and D are the same, and in lap C are higher is suspicious. Also, you can see the total tyre slip, where C has the highest value, what could indicate more confidence on the car because of this little boost. But if you consider what you said about the amount of time gained, which was of 0.2 per minute, and you take the lap times, lap C is nearly 0.4 faster in a 2 minutes lap than the 3 other, which make me go for C. IM NOT AN EXPERT, JUST A STATISTICS STUDENT AND RACING FUN, I TRULLY THINK I MIGHT BE WRONG BUT I JUST WANNA TRY.

Clip D since the the car has the same lap time while also the sloppiest driving/least overall road width usage. One major thing I noticed though is that all of the clips are not perfect laps so each corner or section always has time to be gained if driven properly... essentially all of these clips are bad data and trying to see which one is the cheater is always going to be difficult but even more so the less precise the driving becomes. I originally was going to choose A since the overall apex top speeds was highest in Clip A but Clip B was holding the most of the time best racing line with similar speeds.

like the old saying, its not illegal unitl you get caught the cheated lap is clip 🅱 no matter where you pause it on the exact same race time, clip 🅱 lap time is ahead by at least .005 sec

I miss the days of Forza motorsport 2 where there was a tournament every month to sign up for. Racing games have progressively moved away from trying to find out who is the best and just trying to cater to investors. Sell the product but don't support it in a way that will facilitate healthy competition because that cuts into the bottom line. I really wanted to participate in the competitive forza scene but the community isn't treated properly. Crap moderators. Crap automated banning system. Crap vehicle class balancing. I just want old forza back. The xbox360 days of forza 2-4 were the best ones for competition. I don't think we will ever see those days again in forza, sadly. It's been my favorite racing series because of its aproachability but high skill ceiling. But turn10 and playground games don't care about that. They want to see a bottom line. Not happy players.

The big events should be local only, same hardware and monitored computers, that way there's no advantages.

Love FTL music on the background!

"Let's make light of the problem by becoming part of the problem." Great logic.

Once, i found a car with an S1 class in some of those playground events, and it was set to be A class only lmao.

I think D is the 1% grip boost because it looks a bit SUS in the last corner

[34] relates to a monitor refresh rate test where a worse than average driver tries to stay on the road and with more laps necessarily goes faster. at least that one doesn't relate to physics at all. also not to take away from the rest of the video - good stuff!

you should dig up Austin Ogonoski previous videos, he hinted us how corrupt the online competition scene is regarding racing devs and it's connection with physics devs and high rated players, nice touch with Deus Ex music !

Cheating and scandals in racing games is huge, especially forza, and the devs support it, and people getting banned for nothing they thought he was cheating, even though he had proof of everything (basically he had everything in the game and almost max credits) and they thought he cheated them in, but he had won it all and grinded for weeks to get it IGT he’s been abandoned by the devs and everything they don’t wanna hear a bar of it. On the other hand, they supported cheating in legit esports forza teams and banned people who spoke out about it

active simracing driver here. yes, i acknowledge this is a very big problem that no one sees, and once they see it, news spread like wildfire. anti-cheat and game engine inconsistency seems to be a forgotten topic in simracing and it seems like the directors of the developers turns a blind eye on this matter. just recently, someone cheated on a local simracing league here and got bullied very hard, but the question arises now who else are cheating? and it is a very hard question to answer, since anti-cheat is almost nonexistent in simracing

Forza reddit on their way making "PSA" about sepi with this video

Its so baffling to me that they spend the money into generating the events, the sponsors, they have an entire rig just to stream the game, but can't that same rig just record everyone's telemetry? cuz then it wont be on mercy of whatever the competitor is running, and space wont be an issue since they can just use whatever million dollars they have and pay google idk 20 bucks a year to store that maybe gb or 2 file folder there for future reference

I’m a competitive Minecraft ice boat racer. I use my crafting tables to get the telemetry. I’m starting a Esports league for this EXTREMELY competitive environment

The Forza series' physics engine ran at a fixed rate before FH5. It's almost as if the devs are actively trying to dissuade competitive play.

Thomas Ronhaar has entered the chat

My boy Vanquish slaps at races, race with him alot on Forza leagues.

Yoooo , wassup with the deus ex Majestic 12 music.

I miss you bro.

theres a game from 2004 i used to play when i was little on the ps2, it was called crash ‘n’ burn. Imo the game deserves more attention.

Clip C have grip backs cuz the apex speed in some corners are slower but catch up and is faster on the exit of the corners than all the others clips

for the guess the cheater, purely based off of the first corner, I would guess clip D. I originally though D or A from the side by side comparison from the main video, but went through each first corner and I think it is D. I am probably wrong

I play on Series X. If turn off cross play will it reduce the amount of cheaters I encounter?

This type of cheating occurs in shooting games as well. Even if they activate it for 1 round out of 13, it still gave them an advantage which has a snowballing effect

People finding out that cheats exists even on racing games... yeah even some pro players has been caught using cheats in other genres, what a surprise huh?

Cant seem to find any of your test tracks on horizon, are they all deleted?

B is the cheat clip. Speed is consistantly higher by 1-2mph through the turns

Great video!

Well well well... sure would be easy for a certain someone to do this...

thomas ronhaar is shaking rn

What a kick to the gut. If all the cheaters got purged in the world, I wonder where all the top players would be afterwards

The future is single player racing game

C lack of wheels spin on corner exit at first hairpin, also the lack of tire noise that is played on the limit of grip.

Trackmania cheat detection system it's almost as close as you can get to perfection

I really couldnt believe there was a million dollar tournament for that Turbo game

It's B, you missed the apex, yet still carried more speed through the corner than other runs. Spotted on first viewing, confirmed on second viewing. One of the reasons I quit competitive SimRacing is because of how many drivers I highly suspected of griphacking.

Sepi will you be making videos on the upcoming Forza Motorsport 8?

Thanks for wrecking us at Spa, and enjoy your blacklisting.

This is a masterpiece 🔥🔥

i did it the simple way for now atleast, choosing clip C since it was the faster, might do later research later on.

It’s in gaming overall that cheating is a big problem. Call of Duty is struggling against cheaters too. Damn shame

So does framerate have a noticeable impact in FM7? I've noticed a few players, even teanmates, times substantially improve after a move from xbox to PC, with no other discernible factors that might explain it

sadly all effort will be put for in game gacha and microtransaction and car/weather reflection graphic hence why RaceDriver Grid is still my all time fav racing game cuz it's doesn't require top notch PC to run

I’m gonna keep petitioning for SP4 to reshare his tunes. 😄 Quality work, quality content. Many of us are good non cheating drivers who enjoy a tune that’s good to drive and is competitive even if we don’t win every race.