The Neon White leaderboards have been overtaken by cheaters

It’s like a clockwork mechanism: the game comes with a powerful competitive component… and is instantly overwhelmed by players who shoot to the top via nefarious, unauthorized means – cheaters, in other words. last victim neon whitea multi-genre sprint game developed by Angel Matrix and published by Annapurna Interactive.

The most intriguing thing about this fraud disaster neon white is that there is a really official way to cut your time in earnest – no cheating. neon whiteOstensibly a first-person shooter but It can be said that it is more of a fast-paced puzzle platformer gameIt is built around mini levels that you complete in a minute or less. Your goal is to race to the finish as fast as you can, killing all the enemies along the way. If you do fast enough, you will get an “ace” medal, revealing the online leaderboards for that level.

It’s pretty straightforward, but most levels have shortcuts baked in: If you use the right weapons at the right time, you can skip entire clips, cutting precious seconds off your time. Part of the joy neon white In reboot levels to find shortcuts and then execute them. (If you missed it, check out Zack’s song about why it’s fun to find.) These shortcuts are why you can sometimes see tolerances — gaps of 5 or even 10 seconds — between your rankings on the leaderboards and those at the top. Breaking a point in the higher level requires knowing how to short the level and nail it perfectly.

These abbreviations NotHowever, it is beyond the outliers that attract the attention of the players.

Last week, just days later neon white Single player released sarcastic Each leaderboard position is earned by a player with run times of 0.06 seconds (impossible for any level in the game). else pointed out that a player named Nosee scored a suspicious 15-second time for all levels in neon whitethe eighth task; For one of these levels, there is a 16-second gap between Nosee’s first place and the rest of the people in the top ten. There is practically no way to achieve this result through formal abbreviations; If there was an official shortcut, players would probably have discovered it by now and shared it widely. In the Steam forums, a group of speed runners lamented the number of supposedly impossible times players and how they are preventing legitimate players from securing the world records they deserve. (Someone quoted the old saying, “If there is competition, there are cheaters”).

It’s unclear how exactly some players are cheating. But even if I knew, I wouldn’t say. Until Angel Matrix rolls out a fix, telegraphing the exact method for cheating would likely only spur copycats.

The cheating problem has saturated to the point the player base recognizes it, and has developed patchwork, community-driven solutions with the game’s best players, recalibrating their rankings to adjust for cheaters. in this clipFor example, a player clocks 26.85 seconds astonishingly fast at the Forgotten City level. anyway neon whiteThe leaderboard officially listed them at 10th, and the player (rightfully) takes 9th because the person at the top has a time that can only be won through cheating.

Angel Matrix representatives said Kotaku Who is the studio looking at? neon whitecheating case But he refusedoment as well. In the meantime, I think I have a solution: Folks, don’t cheat, come on!