Legends
Nobody's AF changed very much in the rivalry, but four people were active. Jamie White and Martin McMullan continued taking records from each other. Jamie took RRy 3lap from Martin, while Martin took both MMF records from Jamie. Eddie Taylor and Trystan Pugh were also active, and Trystan managed to break their tie and is now in 3rd place in the rivalry.
Kings
Phil McCanna gained three new records, one from Paul Tanney and two from Matthew Little. Sean Sullivan then took one from Phil at FS 3lap, so Phil's lead stayed about the same. Paul was also active, but fell farther behind Sean. Martin Morissette got a bunch of new PRs to bring him closer to the rest of these rivals.
Elites
Craig Lubbers has moved up to this rivalry. At the beginning of the week he would have had no wins on anyone, and was a Semi-Pro. He cut off almost a full minute from his 3lap total time, and lots off his flap total time, to reach Elite F and get his AF up to 4.22. He's still quite a bit behind the rest and has no records, but if he keeps up that pace he could be at the top of this rivalry very soon. But right now, the top spot is held by Steve Bryze, who passed John Santamaria and took one record from Robin Usher at DK 3lap to get in first place. John, Robin, and Pat Bertovich were all also active, but their AFs all fell due to Craig's improvements.
Pros
Nathan Cromwell has replaced Craig in this rivalry. He started out in second place but took 4 records from Eric Tapani to tie him in AF and move into first place. Eric was also active, taking 2 records from Nathan and one from Jeffrey Vermont, but it wasn't enough to keep the top spot. Jeffrey was also active.
Legends
Jamie White and Martin McMullan continued their battle for first in this rivalry. Martin took Jamie's YV 3lap record and tied his MMF 3lap record. But Jamie took both CM records and the RRy flap record from Martin, and ended up further ahead than last update. Trystan Pugh was also active, and is now tied for 3rd place in the rivalry AF. Eddie Taylor managed to keep his 3rd place spot by one record, which he took from Martin at TT flap.
Kings
Martin Morissette moved up to this rivalry from the Elite one, now that he has reached the King ranks. He is a bit behind the rest, but he improved some times this update to get a little closer than he started. The only other active person in this rivalry was Phil McCanna. He was very active though, taking three records each from Sean and Paul, and one from Matthew. His lead in AF over second place Sean increased by almost a full point. Not only does he now have a very secure lead in the rivalry, but he is also quickly approaching Legend.
Elites
Two Elites were active, John Santamaria and Robin Usher. John worked on his 3lap times, improving some already strong records. Robin did flaps instead, and got his AF down to 3.00.
Also from now on I'll update the WR page and do the main page news only once a week, on Friday. Otherwise I'd end up with 4-5 news in a row on big WR week. You can also just check the latest WR for each system and see which were WRs and which weren't since I added stars when they were overall WR. I update those whenever a new WR is done.
Greg Lewis:
Day 1: Pro D (18 june)
Day 5: Elite D (22 june)
Day 11: Elite A (28 june)
Day 15: King D (2nd july)
Day 28: Legend F (15th july)
From nothing to Legend in 4 weeks and from Elite A to Legend F in only 17 days! He completely shattered all kinds of fast-rising records set by people like Zwartjes, MJ, Jeff G and Tomazelli in the past. He plans to play less frequently now though. But even with less frequent play, this guy should have the potential to reach the highest ranks sometime in the future. We'll see what's going to happen.
Then the other active players.
GODs/Legends
Michael Jongerius brought his AvgFin score down to equal his all-time best score of 1.250 again. Michael Fried, Martin McMullan and Jamie White all made some significant cuts from their AvgFin scores. Martin and Jamie are approaching #8 ranked Steven Zwartjes fast. Trystan Pugh passed Cooper Lovera for #16. Lucas Oliver, JF Dubreuil and Simon Laflamme all improved around 0.1-0.2 ARR points. Richard Keyser was also active. Myles Bukrim returned from retirement, passed Ihnatenko and tied Miller for 4th place in Shortcut AvgFin!
Kings:
Pier-Yves Lemire had a strong 0.4 ARR cut, and is close to King A. Phil McCanna had an even stronger ARR cut of 1.4 points, to go from King D to King C. Sean Sullivan just managed to stay ahead, by reaching the King C ranks himself. Matthew Little improved his ARR from 8.344 to 8.063. Kyle Simon is getting close to King D.
Elites:
Elite A players Martin Morissette and Rafael Pissolato were active, and will probably reach the King ranks soon. And then, look at ranks #130-#139 on the ARR page. 5 active players all within 10 ranks from eachother. Stefan Mianowski, Robin Usher and John Santamaria seem to be the fastest climbers of them.
Sub-Elite:
A large number of active players in these ranks. Most of them made some good ranking progress. I'll just list them here:
Luiz Galante: Pro F --> Pro C
Vikas Pandey: Semi-Pro D --> Pro F
James Staff: Expert C --> Semi-Pro B
Eric Tapani: Expert A --> Semi-Pro D
David Lalo: Semi-Pro F --> Semi-Pro F
George Dimitriou: Expert C --> Expert B
Nathan Cromwell: Intermediate B --> Advanced B
Lauren Soutar: Beginner D --> Apprentice C
New members:
Three new members joined the site. Welcome to Jeffrey Vermont from the USA (Advanced D), Joao Ribeiro from Brazil (Intermediate D), and Bo Garman from the USA (Apprentice A).
After getting a tie with Michael Jongerius on DK Flap Jamie White tried again and got a new WR time of 35"54.
Then the next day we saw Michael Jongerius gets back that WR by getting the DK Flap down to 35"52*.
So by improving the WR tie Jamie end up losing it and is removed from the WR page. But if you never try you'll never get anything. And I do think we'll see Jamie back on that page in the futur. Well done to both of you.
Kings
Kyle Simon took three records this update, each from a different opponent. Matthew Little was also active and tied Paul Tanney for 2nd place in the rivalry. Then Phil McCanna took three records from Matthew and three more from Sean to pass both Paul and Matthew for 2nd place.
Elites
Everyone was active in this rivalry. Martin Morissette was the only one to get a new record, taking the KD 3lap from Steve.
Today we have Jamie White who grabs his first WR ever on MK64. He did his time on DK Flap where he managed to tie Michael Jongerius time with a nice 35"60*. Good job!
Yesterday Michael Jongerius took down the LR 3lap WR! He cut 0"01 off it so it now stands at 1'38"24*. With this he now hold 24 WR! yeah that's right 75% of the WR! Well done Michael.
Then before yesterday we saw the "retired" Myles Bukrim get a WR tie on YV sc Flap. His 5"79** time was set with Yoshi on 2nd lap.
The total WR chart lost Steven Zwartjes so let's see if he can keep up with what he said and get a better LR 3lap time :).
New Players
Welcome to new players: George Dimitriou, James Staff, and Steve Hasiotis
21 players were active this update. 9 of them were GOD/Legend players. They were the well known names that have been regularly active in the previous updates. Some good improvements were made, without a player standing out in particular.
In the King and Elite ranks the largest jump was made by Robin Usher. He improved from 16.9 (Elite C) to 14.9 (Elite B). Two other good climbers were Sean Sullivan (close to King C) and Phil McCanna (King F to King D).
In the sub-elite ranks, Stefan Mianowski submitted a new PR update since 3 weeks ago, and climbed from Semi-Pro B to Master A! Vincent Tolhuis got a more complete set of times in both nonSC and SC. With still a few nonSC times missing, but still a semi-pro A rank, he shows he's a player to watch for the future. Rich Hatch is another relatively new member who's climbing fast.
And then there are also 2 new members. George Dimitriou from Australia and James Staff from the USA both join with an Expert C rank. George is a pretty strong shortcut player as well.
Now, just the fact that World Records have been assigned to a wrong person for over a year now is already bad enough. However, even worse is the fact that this action completely disregarded any possible standards for being respectful, responsible and trustworthy (which is extremely important on a site like this, where it's impossible to get 100% proof for every small detail).
Now with Eric's very sad lying about "his" identity (either he lied in the past 2 years, or if he didn't, he has to be lying right now), he lost all trustworthiness about that. And since trust is pretty much the only thing we could rely on to determine one's identity, this just puts us in a situation where it's not possible anymore to make a decision that's going to make everyone happy.
All we know is that Eric's 32 times are times that have really been driven in the past. Now, we would love to assign those 32 times to the correct players who drove them. However, we can not do that because we don't know if the identity of those is 2 new players is in fact real. And we can't keep the times to Habrich's name because he said 30 of those times are not his times.
So, as bad it is, there's no good solution possible that would keep the real record holders on the site. We decided to make this solution:
- The 32 times will stay on the site, on the top 100 tables, NTSC top 25 tables, World Record page and NTSC WR page. So people could keep the challenge to beat those times.
- Eric Habrich's name will be removed from those times, and an anonymous name will take his place.
- Eric's friends will not have their names attached to those times.
- The new and anonymous name behind those 32 times will not show up on the player list, ARR, AvgFin and total times rankings.
Once again, this solution is far from ideal and we don't like this to happen at all. However, this was the only fair way to save the NTSC world records for the site, without allowing possibly fake player names to the top of the rankings. we're forced to do this because of the bad circumstances that have been created, sadly enough.
Tomorrow, at next update, these changes will take place.
As sad as this event is, I hope we can all get a positive lesson for the future out of it. People, please don't try to explore the limits of our validation system by using all strange kinds of time faking, video faking or identity faking. We try to do everything we can to ensure a honest competition with honest players and honest times. However, since this site is just a non-profit site for fun, it's not possible for us to send live referees all over the planet to eyewitness every single PR of every single player and to do identity checks. Our proof methods are just a method to increase trust. However, even after you succesfully delivered the proof, it's important to realize that our existing proof methods still aren't a 100% guarantee that your times are really valid. So, make sure you allways stay responsible and respectful, so that other people will respect you and trust you. If you want this site and this competition to stay succesful in the next few years, it's gonna be extremely important that you all try to use this right mentality.
Michael Liem & Kevin Booth
Kings
Phil McCanna was the only one to pass someone in this rivalry. He passed Kyle Simon by taking away his MMF records. Sean Sullivan went on a rampage, taking three records from Matthew Little, tying Phil's new MMF 3lap record, and taking the flap one. Paul Tanney was added to this rivalry, although he is not active yet.
Elites
Steve Bryze did some improving, taking away the KD 3lap record from John Santamaria and the RRd 3lap record from Martin Morissettte. Martin was also active though. He took the YV 3lap record from John, and took his RRd 3lap record back from Steve. Robin Usher was also active.
Karting Activity
Another great 4 days for MK64. Several new World Records were hit by a returning Michael Jongerius and by Michael Fried, as you could read in Pier-Yves' update. One spectacular new WR that isn't updated yet on the WR page, is the 2"56 (2"13) time on Wario Stadium SC flap by Greg Ihnatenko.
Jeffrey Gutierrez hit one strong PR on YV flap. Martin McMullan strengthened his 10th place he achieved last update. Tuomas Dunkel got a little closer to #11 Alex Penev. Jamie White passed Kevin Booth for 13th place in AvgFin. Trystan Pugh was active. Michael Liem passed a few players on Royal Raceway and passed Lars Nouwen on the AvgFin rankings. Lucas Oliver reached Legend B. He also put some nice validation videos of his on the Message Board. Josh Caudle and Richard Keyser got some PRs.
Our fresh member Greg Lewis continued his spectacular rise up the rankings. After going from nothing to Pro D to Elite D last week, he managed to keep improving from Elite D to Elite A this week! Phil McCanna, a pretty impressive climber as well, just barely managed to stay ahead by improving his ARR from 11.313 to 10.750. He'll probably reach the King ranks soon. Martin Morissette improved 0.8 ARR points and is close to reaching Elite A as well. Pat Bertovich hit some PRs.
Robin Usher finished his nice karting form as of late, with a promotion to the Elite F ranks. Congrats! Now let's go for that King level... :-) Stephen Meakings made a return to the game, and made a very big jummp from Apprentice C to Semi-Pro B.
We had three new members:
Richard Karlsson from Sweden (who's also ranked high on the MKDD site), joined the site as an Expert B player.
Rich Hatch from the USA joins as an Intermediate D player.
Vincent Tolhuis from the Netherlands only submitted 2 times, so his stats aren't too good yet. Those 2 times are top 100 times though, so he has some good potential.
