i keep running into this guy "gigolo" and i'm pretty sure he's pulling the *mr. j* cheat. tonight he was at 8300 and he placed 3rd. he has NEVER beaten me and a quick examination of his screen yields a pretty mediocre 6300ish player. anyone come across this guy yet?
Well, you basically cheat the rating system by creating a save file and reverting back to the file when you lose, saving when you win.
i can pretty much guarantee that gigolo is pulling the mr j save-trick. this morning on blockstats he's at 8310.
I wish I could do a Mr. J so I could practice 4-player without having to fight for two hours to replace the 500 points I inevitably lose.
This makes me wish I had an Action Replay, so I could grab the save file. It'd be interesting to see if the rating really is entirely controlled by the cartridge, as you could (very, very easily) simply play a game, look for data that changed, repeat ad nasuea, until you locate the rating in the savefile data. It'd be interesting as both a proof-of-concept and as a way to give myself a way of having a 10,000+ rating that might attract Nintendo's attention and let them realize that their rating system is just a litttttle broken. (note that I actually wouldn't use it for cheating -- I'd just use another save file for 'legitamate' gaming)
That's the point - You'd do it once to boost aplayer to, say, 13370 (heh), then just leave it there and see how long until Nintendo removes you. It's meant as more of a proof-of-concept of how hackable this game's system is. Though yes, non-rated games would be very welcome
Unless it's encrypted. The entire Mario Kart DS save file is encrypted, which is why the Action Replay doesn't include decal import/export.
studying some of the graphs from blockstats seems to provide proof of the savegame cheat. For instance, a very jagged graph, to me, with only a couple different numerical scores indicates that someone is using the cheat. I think i have seen some of the people in question post here before, so maybe they could enlighten anyone how stats are achieved to alternate from a lower score to a higher score and back and forth. I'm not accusing anyone yet, because there could be a good reason for it, but if you look at his numbers (and many other top 10 player) it just doesn't add up. I have never played the people i'm referring to, so I can't vouch for their actual in-game skills, which might shed more light on if they cheat or not. But if someone is a legit player how could their score fluctuate back and forth between only two values. Does this make sense to anybody, or am i overlooking something. You could say the same for a score that only goes up, like #1 TGM-Holic, but in that case there is a good alternate explanation--he is really good. the #2 ranked person's graph is an even more extreme example of a jagged stat graph, fluctuating only ~9300 and 5785. this doesn't indicate a deliberate attempt to drop and then climb back up to me, since I would expect to see some variance in the score values. In contrast, i can only look at my own graph which I know is accurate and to me, it looks more like what i would expect from any player at any skill level. Again, I don't want to jump the gun here, because for all i know, there could be a bug in blockstats score-keeping. But assuming there is no bug, statistics generally don't lie.
tepples, i had not thought of that and that would definately explain it. Furthermore, the top players would probably be high targets for copycat nicknames. Now, i have cross-referenced Nintendo gaming hub and sure enough there are simultaneously two of the player nackname's in question, one at 8141, and one at 7252, just as blockstats illustrates. It could even be the same person with two DS's one for two-player and one for 4-player maybe. *edit* I removed the reference to a nickname that I now don't believe is using a cheat, so as not to even associate their name with a thread about cheating.
My rating had been fluctuating between two numbers too. It's really strange since I hadn't touched Worldwide for a couple of days.
Not sure gigolo is using the same cheat as mr j. In his blockstats record it stays in the 4000's for a while, then jumps to the 8000's in a day and pretty much stays there, like he could edit his own rating. Even with a cheat, most people would struugle to rise 4000 points in a day, especially if they were a player with a rating of 4000 to begin with.
i actually checked the other night on the hub and can confirm that there are 2 players named gigolo, so the blockstats graph is actually two people or one person with two DS's.
That's wierd, cos I thought he was cheating after looking at the ratings while playing him, so I must have played both of the players using the 'gigolo' nickname in one night. To be fair though, the nickname is actually a word, so could quite possibly be two people (if the name was something like 'bnodfa' I would be more suspicious). 'Mr J' doesn't seem like too obscure a nickname, though the stars would reduce the possibility of there being two players. The way blockstats updates the database more often for higher ranked players also makes it less obvious that there are two players, as the two different figures of each player don't pair up.
tonight i ran into PAUSE and i'm pretty sure he's another gigolo/mr. j saver cheater. he was at 7910 when we began, he was the first out... then disconnected. then he was at 7666. and he wasn't very good.
"First one out" implies you were playing 4-player mode. Skill in 2-player and skill in 4-player don't necessarily correlate. I'm not sure that even the experts in the Shirase videos can cope with no rotation, no next piece display, and shuffling the columns every 20 pieces.
As a matter of fact, what might give me a little reassurance in my pitiful life would be to see them do that, and then cry a little bit. Great pleasure, in that.
