Cheating ranking points

Cheating ranking points is abusing ranking system with the help of several online accounts.

Why do they cheat this way and not another?

There are many ways to achieve better speed offline, for example, changing kart classes, settings, code, or visual things. But this is not effective online because any change on the side of client does nothing to server who actually plays the game, receiving only actions from a player. Thus, any such change can only harm the player because differences between server and client data cause lags. So the way with several accounts is believed to be the only way to cheat (actually no but other ways are not really sufficient).

How does it work?

A player (or a group of players) create several accounts, one of them is chosen to be the "main" account to score points, other accounts are "additional" ones. The cheating itself happens when those accounts gather on one server (very preferably when nobody else is there), and all additional accounts lose the race on purpose (for example, rage quitting) while the main accounts wins. This is repeated many times until someone notices/joins or the preferable number of points is reached. Usually it is done using 1 lap races on a short tracks like Snow Peak or Oliver's Math Class because this gives more points per minute. This way even a high-ranked player can gain between 3 and 8 points (depending on the rank number of races of his "opponents").

A related method is playing a "weak" account against strong players and a "strong" account against weak players, which was first introduced by nascartux.

Why are they cheating?

Players mostly do this in order to get more ranking points because they believe they matter (see this). In most cases, it is done to annoy some other players or because a player is overestimating own skill and wants some good rank anyway despite being stuck at some point of ranking. Though there are also cases where it is done because a player has lost many points due to a technical error (which doesn't validate cheating, but can make it understandable for some other players).

Why is this cheating?

Obviously, it is unfair because the ranking is changed by an event that doesn't prove the player's skill. Also a distorted rank of all cheating accounts allows to distort ranking changes for accounts playing with them which is also unfair.

Relation to second devices

There is no rule "one account per person" in STK, but in fact it is assumed by moderators to be applied. However, it can be interpreted as "one account per device", i.e. "per a person playing certain device type" because the experience is quite different. Benau assumes that the rule is exactly "one account per person" so we do not recommend to use several accounts on ranked.

However, because of this interpretation and because it is more convenient for non-ranked to distinguish mobile and non-mobile, many mobile accounts like MobileFabianF (not necessarily involved in ranking) appeared.

Examples

• nascartux / Daytona500 / nascartux2 - the first noted case (August 2019), eventually the ranking of both accounts got removed
• FabianF / MobileFabianF or JustACheater
• cingeaua / DinamoBucuresti / many other accounts - a case with huge usage of VPN to prevent proving the fact those are accounts of one group of players acting together. However, their speech and nicknames, and also not very clever usage of VPN exposed them. Most of those accounts got banned, and all of them were also insulting other players or also had offensive names, or names similar to names of other players.
• kcharlie / Bcharlie
• Many other players using several accounts