EFFORTPOST Riolu's Last Wirtual Ride: Trackmania Drama Delight

Introduction

There are some things that aren't inherently associated with a geographical location (regardless of its size) in real life, but it somehow seems clear to everyone that a certain thing easily belongs to country X or Y. 100Gecs, for example, are uniquely American. So is the Halo series and all its adjacent content. You'd assume it also holds true for Call of Duty - as this gaming franchise is even more patriotic than watching the entirety of the legendary military parade on the fourth of July, but that's not true. Also, I have no idea what people actually do outside of shooting some fireworks and jumping gleefully like you just won a close round of team death match on the fourth. I also don't really care. Never mind, the more important thing is that the issue at stake in this post is uniquely European, Irrespective of any particular viewpoint and it's not Counterstrike. Because we are talking about Trackmania - and more importantly a funny dramatic happening involving two YouTubers/Streamers.

Context

In case you are unaware, Trackmania is a series of racing games made by Nadeo (French video game developer) and published by Ubisoft. Trackmania is known for its emphasis on user-generated content and fast-paced, arcade-style gameplay. The series allows players to create and share custom tracks, fostering a vibrant community. The core gameplay involves time trials and multiplayer races on intricate and challenging tracks. There's a plethora of different styles played on a plethora of maps using a plethora of different rules. Heck, there's more content in the current active version of the series - aptly named just Trackmania - than other long-lasting franchises have in total and while the game looks easy and simple it's brutally hard and unforgiving and some people claim you cannot truly master all of it. There are, in typical eurojank fashion, a lot of bugs in the game that have been uplifted into faetures and you're supposed to know how to abuse some of them. Another special thing is that Trackmania has far more people watching than playing. You can easily find videos on YouTube with several million views, while the number of simultaneous players never actually leaves the five-digit range at its peak, and it usually has a hard time even hitting those five-digits and mostly are watching one guy in particular - namely Wirtual:

Wirtual

Perhaps the most famous content creator for Trackmania is the 20-something year-old Norwegian Wirtual, who has successfully entertained millions of viewers with his documentaries about " brilliant" and "interesting" events in the cosmos.

Wirtual is part of the holy trifecta of soytubers that have a huge grip on their particular niche: GothamChess has chess, Wendigoon has something, and Wirtual pretty much owns Trackmania. There isn't anyone remotely close to his numbers ... and that's a bad thing because Wirtual isn't exactly the saint he pretends to be and if you spent fifteen minutes watching him you can easily tell that his usual attitude is a charade and he's genuinely a smug holier-than-thou butthole. However, this was not always the case and you can literally pinpoint the moment when he was broken forever. We are talking about the biggest cheating scandal in the history of Trackmania here, namely involving his close friend Riolu.

Riolu

Burim "riolu" Fejza is a """German"""" player who previously played for Nordavind. However, him and I have one thing in common: We are both professional racists. He was known as the only Albanian living in the West who didn't commit a crime. Which - of course - doesn't compute. It turned out that Riolu cheated, and not just once or twice but rather over an embarrassingly long time without getting caught:

Link to Video

On the 23rd of May 2021, Wirtual and donadigo published a report accusing Riolu of cheating through running the game in slow-motion during offline world record attempts. The report found that many runs across more than nine years and various Trackmania titles were likely cheated. Riolu denied these accusations in a stream immediately prior to the release of the report. However, he has since gone completely silent, leaving his social media, Twitch, and YouTube channels unaltered. Riolu has yet to comment publicly on the released report.

Ever since this happened roughly three years ago, riolu has been dead silent. Nothing on his socials, no contact to his friends, he didn't even open the game or anything. Not even a single sorry. He's just gone.

Wirtual DID NOT LIKE THIS at all. He's still talking about riolu sometimes even though the word is on pretty much on every blacklist for Trackmania because there's nothing of value to add and the slow-motion jokes stopped being funny well like five hours after the report initially came out. It's pure undistilled seething and it's honestly pathetic.

Latest Development

He recently released his latest video discussion another player called 92BOB .. and the video didn't perform at all (for his standards):

There are multiple reasons for this with the most applicable being that this is just a filler video about a literal nothingburger but in reality he used all 17 minutes of that vid to just schizopost about riolu still being active.

Link To Video

Short Summary:

• The reported player has reached #1 on the Trackmania leaderboard at an insane speed

• He achieved this by setting several records on prestigious tracks

• Trackmania is uber competitive and this can't happen to a beginner

• Cheats or hacks were excluded by Nadeo who analysed the runs and told everyone he's legit

• The common theory is that 92BOB is riolu's second account

• However, the account is from France, was created in the late '00s and follows common French internet jargon at the time (Year of Birth + Short Name)

• According to Nadeo the IP and other stuff is very different from Riolu's

This is exactly where the video should end ... BUT Wirtual didn't have enough yet. He contacted a famous black sheep in the Trackmania community who is famous for hacking, doxing, and other malicious behaviour to essentially do the same thing to 92BOB. That guy used in game messaging services, groomercord messages and other stuff to get Bob to click something which would basically dox him and if you didn't use your audience of a million subscribers, the help of your entire massive community and the help of a leet haxxor to dox someone just because you think he might be a guy you knew that cheated in a video game you haven't really lived. Anyway, here are some reactions:

Reactions

Trackmania

New Wirtual video on 92BOB - [200+ comments]

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrackMania/comments/1at7woc/new_wirtual_video_on_92bob/kqwcgfn/?context=8#thing_t1_kqwcgfn

This video is just embarrassing for the TM community honestly. It could've been 8 minutes long and just stopped at "Nadeo looked at the records and confirmed it's one person and they aren't cheating." Everything past that is just invading Bob's privacy to try to figure out who they are.

Going on an entire witch hunt to try to figure out if it's actually Riolu or not is embarrassing. It's also not "sneaky" or "clever" to send him a phishing link to try to figure out his identity, it's fricking weird and an invasion of privacy.

And the entire part where Wirtual goes "this creates a very haunting picture of him sitting in his apartment spending hours every day trying to reach rank 1 again, perhaps trying to prove something to the community, perhaps just trying to prove something to himself, as a healing project, so that he can finally leave the game behind and move on." is just cringy.

It is not a "haunting picture" for him to just be playing the game he played for so long. He is not bothering anyone and he is not cheating. If he wants to play for fun, or to have legit world records, then what is the issue? If you don't want his LEGIT TIMES to be the record then just go beat it like any other TM player.

This entire video is just "92Bob might be Riolu, but he might not be, but I think he is" and it just creates an unnecessarily sketchy reputation for someone who might not have anything to do with Riolu or the cheating scandal. 92Bob could be some random French dude who just got really good at TM and plays for fun, Wirtual literally confirmed nothing.

riolu lives rent free in this motherlover's head and it shows

this is one of the most embarrassing things i've ever seen associated with a videogame and it shows how desperate wirtual is to stir shit up for youtube clicks that he's willing to straight up make things up and threaten to violate other people's privacy

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrackMania/comments/1at7woc/new_wirtual_video_on_92bob/kqwhqaz/?context=8#thing_t1_kqwhqaz

Wirtual loves complaining how unethical it is to cheat in a video game, but he's crossing some other ones with this. You can't just try to start a witch hunt when you don't even have any proof. It's time to stop milking this drama Wirtual.

Perhaps, old wounds still hurt... Note that if you remove almost all riolu moments in this video, you will get a self sustain story about neko and other players. Such video would be a good conslusion to the drama after two years. Moreover the "moral in the end" is directly connected to these players. But wirtual mixed this story with two other topics "who is bob92" and "riolu didn't admit his mistakes" because... old wounds still hurt, I guess

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrackMania/comments/1at7woc/new_wirtual_video_on_92bob/kqvn7eh/?context=8#thing_t1_kqvn7eh

Sending a phishing link is outrageous & disgusting behaviour. I'm very disappointed Wirtual didn't condemn this action by blackq in his video. Pinning a comment saying he disagree's with it is a complete cop-out. Everyone has a right to privacy.

So long as the records aren't cheated, what does it matter? If 92bob is riolu and he doesn't want apologise or take responsibility for his actions, it's scummy tbh, but completely his own decision.

He shouldn't have his personal privacy breached over a fricking video game.

Its wild to me that Wirtual talking about sending a phishing link as the perspective of the good guy lol. Insane behavior. Id even say that the same or even worse than the cheating scandal all together lol

It is worse than the cheating scandal. Cheaters gonna cheat, it's up to Nadeo to sort that shit out, but it's just a game at the end of the day.

Trying to dox someone, even if they're in the public eye, is really fricked up.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrackMania/comments/1at7woc/new_wirtual_video_on_92bob/kqywwph/?context=8#thing_t1_kqywwph

So Wirtual finally made his transformation from a bad person to complete garbage, congratulations. Uploading this video deserves a ban by Nadeo & legal consequences.

/r/Wirtual

There's a bunch of fighting here in these threads but it's honestly whatever. Just logging it for completion's sake.

Was the 92BOB video that bad

Concerns with the 92BOB video

End

So in the video there's this funny line unironically said by Wirtual:

"this creates a very haunting picture of him sitting in his apartment spending hours every day trying to reach rank 1 again, perhaps trying to prove something to the community, perhaps just trying to prove something to himself, as a healing project, so that he can finally leave the game behind and move on."

which a random redditor summarizes quite well:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrackMania/comments/1at7woc/new_wirtual_video_on_92bob/kqwc8bz/?context=8#thing_t1_kqwc8bz

Nah, you don't see it

Playing trackmania for hours without pause: cringe

Playing trackmania for hours without pause BUT other people watch you doing it: based

also I'm aware this is like two weeks old