I never saw this being put up, but are top scorers in challenge league checked for validity? I do have 15+years sim racing experience and I consider myself to have a good imagination of “laptimes” and whats possible. Take this example:
Weekly league challenge in the Extra. you can basically do the whole course full power, all, except 2 turns, are smooth ones. So basically there is not that much of room for improvements. I guess optimizing, smoothing out, tweak heights and angles you can get up to 1.5-2s off of my time, Im a IRL pilot i do have undestanding of speeds, smoothness, altitudes, G forces affecting speed etc., BUT look at Rank 1 or even better, the world record of 12!!! seconds faster time. You cannot even get this time by flying STRAIGHT to the finish. This is gold rank BTW so it gets more apparent here.
So are we talking about cheaters? Can we please get a selectable ghost or replay system, so we can have a look at top rank flights? There clearly seems to be an validity issue here. Acitivity challenges I dont care, there is no ranking system in place there, but challenge league wants to be exactly that: Competitive! I love that approach and I wann bring this up. You can literally see this in every timed challenge
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Not sure if cheaters or just bugs. I let my boy try once, he crashed but ended up on top of the leaderboard… In the current precision landing with the Cabri G2 for example, you can land anywhere close to the target and hop around until perfectly centered on it…
Wait, are challenges different for you? I dont have a Cabri challenge in weekly league. Lukla is bugged BTW, cant get a landing in without it failing instantly
There may be bugs with assists I found. I just shoved 4s off my time by enabling Auto-Rudder, Auto-Mixture (the Extra doesnt even have mixture controls) and Auto-Trim. Looks like these are OP for challenges. Plane is waaay faster that way
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sorry my bad, the Cabri one might have ended beginning of the week.
The extra doesn’t have a red knob for the mixture control? It does IRL
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this doesn’t surprise me - whether it’s cheating or assists which make it far easier. It’s just par for the course as far as MSFS 2024 goes. Shoddy and unpolished.
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You’re SLOW! LOL
I run 1:29s and no cheats!
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I run 1.27.9 and no cheat. I think i can go down few tenths but not many. I can’t imagine myself run 1.24.6 but i can deal with the fact that some people fly better than me. I hope there are no cheater. Hope
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I land in Lukla without problems
any assists on? auto-rudder, mixture etc?
Most important is the racing line, and that can take literally hundreds of runs to refine.
After you have that you need to juggle mixture and rpm settings.
Assists are no good for this type of flying, mainly designed for more general stable flight, I feel they work against you.
Those fast times are not cheats, just dedicated hard repetitive practice.
If you wanna see it done, search for videos… eg
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Nice one, thanks for that video! That kinda bunks my theory. Honestly doesnt look that much different but maybe racing planes is different kind of breed compared to racing cars 
But I think I understood what you did there. Gonna try and see how close I can get. For now, I cant see 7 seconds there. Maybe I´ll also capture and show my time
so it’s ok for the wings to touch or scrape along the ground in these challenges?
… sometimes… 
But it’s the same for everyone, level playing field - no cheat
So skimming this thread it seems to be a classic case of no matter how good you think you are there is usually someone better? I’ve seen that in a lot of online games, mainly competitive first person shooters, where someone is so far ahead that some are trying to get them banned for cheating, when they are just much better than those people. It happens.
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Yes, you might be correct. I´ve improved to 1:28s. So I admit my initial assumption was indeed an early wrong guess
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