Those who were in the players page skype chat yesterday may know that there has been significant progress on hacking the Wii U lately and some exploits were released that allow, among many other things, TTs to be hacked much easier (using for example speed hacks). A few outrageous screenshots of cuts of 10 seconds or more on the WR were posted on skype yesterday. At this point everyone knows they were fake, but during the time I and some others were quite confused.

The fact that MK8 was hacked is not what bothers me. I knew that would come eventually. What bothers me is how many people on skype were and still are treating the issue. When the screenshots were posted, people were claiming things like there was a new glitch tech discovered that allows you to gain speed by ramming into walls and bogus nonsense like that, even though I'm pretty sure they knew the truth. Other people were confident that it was hacks. I (and probably others) were genuinely confused by all the mixed messages going on. If people would take this seriously I would be a bit happier.

What bothers me even more than the initial reactions is that some players said they were going to be hacking their game to try it out. Obviously I can't stop people from doing that but I can say that I strongly discourage doing so. No matter how well I know and trust someone, I can't have the same level of trust in them as I did before if I know that they have hacked their game. We play this game competitively and I for one can't trust people that much that are joking and fooling around with a serious matter that could be used for cheating.

It's only a matter of time before we start seeing new records that are hacked but have believable splits. It's far too easy to marginally increase the speed of a vehicle to save a  few tenths, making even videos questionable. At this point there is no way I can consider screenshot/photos at the same level of proof as I did before.

Sure, we can trust people, and most of us here have no intentions of cheating. But that cheater could be anybody here and we may not realize for a while if we're not cautious. Also, there's a big disconnect between the western and Japanese communities and it often will be even harder to detect cheaters from Japan, since we often don't know the players over there as well.

Some people have said that the MK8 community is going to end up the same way as the MKW community did. I disagree. We know exactly what decisions were made in MKW and what effect they had. We can learn from previous mistakes. Sure, things will be tougher to deal with now that hacks are beginning to be more prevalent, but we can and should be smarter this time.

I already only play this game since everyone else does. If I didn't have the players page and skype chats to keep me entertained I would have quit months ago. If this community is going to end up as salty as MKW I may actually end up quitting. The players page has become one of the most important things in life for me recently and I'd hate to see it fragment.

"Big deal," you may say, "what's one person quitting out of hundreds, and he's not even a top player?" First of all, I probably won't be the only one quitting if this community goes to ruin, and some of the others may be top players. I may not be a top player, but trust me when I say I'm one of the last people you want to see leave. I'm hard at work programming the first refresh of the players' page in many, many years. If I am fed up with a poor community my motivation will be lost and I know I won't do near as good a job as I would; who knows if I'll even finish. I'm not threatening to quit this site or the revamp of it that I'm working on, but at the same time, changing attitudes can make a big deal.

So what should we do? I say, as much as possible, don't copy what decisions were made in MKW unless there is no better alternative. Hard rules won't solve things a lot of the time (at least that's my opinion), because each case is different. That's not to say we don't need rules. That's not to say that permanent bans won't be necessary here and there. That's not to say that we won't need to make many people provide better proof. But we need to learn from the mistakes that were made in the MKW community.

I'm not experienced in coming up with rules and decisions, but I can say that miiverse/photo proof may not always be enough anymore. Especially for new players and players that are known to have hacked their game, the proof isn't as "hard" as it used to.

I'm just going to say one more time that I strongly discourage people from hacking MK8, even if just for fun. The more people that do it, the more doors are opened up for trouble.

Let's be smart about things this time. The mistakes are already made in MKW. Those mistakes haven't been made in MK8. We can do things better this time, I know we can. It's possible to TAS or hack all the classic MK games and provide fake proof, but their communities are fine.

I'm just going to conclude by saying again that I wasn't happy with the response to this on skype. It has really been irritating me all of yesterday afternoon and all this morning. I wish people would be serious about a serious issue and that's why I'm bringing this issue here: to have a civilized discussion. Feel free to leave some comments and discuss the issue. I'd rather not have a poll for anything on this thread as this is meant to be a general thread on planning for the future; there are plenty of questions fit for a poll and they can be made in more specific threads -- but once again I'd like to hear everyone's opinions.

Well this is a thing now.



The ghosts are all different. One is an MKS lap, one is an SGF lap, one is a full rRRd run, and another has above max speed and starts before the countdown ends.

Mick wrote on 05/05/16 at 13:33:40:


BullyWiiPlaza has uploaded a bunch of videos of MK8 hacking recently:
https://www.youtube.com/user/BullyWiiPlaza/videos

I don't think hacking is the real issue here when it comes down to leader boards. People can hack times all they want, but to actually upload that time to the main leader boards? Absolute dick move. I looked at the rTTC leaderboards last night in disbelief, wondering to myself what the goal of all these fake times even was. Is it for attention? Are people just trolling? Also some of the comments the players made were absolutely autistic (moon's was pretty good though).

What pisses me off even more is Nintendo's inability to act in this situation. Sure they banned Ryan, but they didn't even make an effort to delete the times. Either the hackers themselves deleted them, or they were convinced by someone else. Anyone who hacks the leaderboards should be banned immediately. No questions asked. Ban them from online too. Online hacks on mk8 will make worldwides even more silly.

To all the people making stupid jokes about hacking, honestly fuck off. No one cares at all, so just shut your mouth, you're not funny and you won't win some sort of popularity contest. Hacking is a serious issue and has the ability to ruin the fun in any game. Just look at BullyWiiPlaza's videos. If enough people get a hold of these, mk8 online can be absolutely ruined. If you just sit there and joke about hacking, you only make it worse.

If you want to hack mk8 just leave it to regular stuff such as texture hacks, custom tracks, bgm mods etc, that are absolutely harmless. If you hack a time trial, don't upload it. And don't fucking joke about hacking. Disobey any of this myself and I'm sure plenty of others will lose all respect for you. It's not worth it.

The in-game TTC leader board is gone now. I will admit I'm a bit surprised it took so long for this to happen.

DelYoshi wrote on 05/17/16 at 19:47:35:


It's a wonder why Nintendo hasn't removed the hacked times  

Yet alone banning those players  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB3haewyJ-4

we're gonna have to be a lot more careful now that this is a thing

I honestly was suspicious of Blade. He knew how to hack, and he came out of nowhere.

He's obviously banned forever. Stupid ass hacker. At least he motivated J to improve.

40pegh wrote on 05/29/16 at 01:38:16:


I wouldn't say "obviously". While I don't think anyone here would vote to not ban him, forever is a long time. There are former MKW hackers who play MK8 without a problem. We're not banning them from playing MK8. So I actually don't have a problem with Blade returning to a future MK game, where he can prove himself.

40pegh wrote on 05/29/16 at 10:31:20:


Why should we, though? It's another way of saying "yeah, you've got a shot at cheating in this game, but if you get caught, you'll have to wait for the next game and you can try again". I'm in favor of banning people across all of Mario Kart if they're caught cheating. Heck, people in here have even come under a lot heat after it was found out that they had cheated in other games outside of MK.

MaxLAD wrote on 05/29/16 at 11:02:23:


I strongly disagree with this line. Don't feel like getting into specific detail.

TvK wrote on 05/29/16 at 10:44:51:


Fair point. I'm honestly fine with banning/not banning cheaters across all the games, though I kind of lean towards only banning them from the game they cheated. It doesn't make sense to ban them on a game they did not cheat.

I only know two proven cheaters that played another MK game: Jorge and Walter (Black). So if we ban cheaters across all games, lets at least be consistent.

As someone who knows a lot about what is and isn't possible in the realm of hacking MK8, I figured it'd be worth it to drop a few things here. I don't talk to any of the people working on hacks and stuff since I only really care about modding (textures, music) but there are tons of videos from people like BullyWiiPlaza who show code progress regularly (and he just messes around with item hacks and other non-TT stuff.)

Thankfully, the only "subtle" way of cheating a time to pass off as legit is a subtle speed modifier. Everything else I can think of that is possible for anyone right now would end up being extremely obvious. Then again, even subtle speed mods are pretty noticeable by racing vs a suspicious ghost in question and comparing it to several others (which we did to expose Blade.)

The only way I can imagine someone getting away with a speed modded WR right now is to make the speed mod so incremental that you'd already have to be WR level to get it, but you'd have a slight edge. This means that we do need to be on lookout for any and all new players (or new players to a specific track) like some people have said. It is worth noting though that any future hackers have the choice to modify one of 3 speeds: land, water and air. So they could have perfectly normal land and water speed but gain on gliders, which would be harder to detect.

For reference, the only other ways to hack WR times would be very blatant speed mods, KCL mods I think (like replacing rSL road with MKS), whole course replacement mods (putting all of SGF's files over rTTC for example, someone who hacked a rTTC time did this), instant win, lap hacks, modifying the timer as you cross the line (which only one or two people know how to do and haven't released their codes for it), etc etc. All instantly catchable either by watching the ghost or racing it. Character/Kart stat hacks and the likes aren't possible yet as far as my knowledge goes.

I hope that shit like TAS codes and the like don't get developed for a very long time for the sake of this game's longevity.

Cole wrote on 06/02/16 at 20:47:33:


This is excellent work, soon there will be no more "is this run stick or dpad?" debates

RRD wrote on 06/03/16 at 03:27:15:


It doesn't look like Cole looked into the ghost files themselves but rather found these things out through the RAM of the game in TCPGecko.