Was just made aware of this thread by EightBit Rain. I just wanted to throw in my 2 cents. Nobody at HL2DQ was aware of Bandit5k using timescale, at least not for certain. It doesnât really matter at this point, what with HL2 being changed shortly after the run was released, later removed from SDA, and replaced with subsequent runs. However, I will say that for virtually every run that Bandit5k submitted to HL2DQ, there was a time within seconds of his submitted or achieved by somebody else.
From my perspective, I remember, during the Coast maps especially, how odd it was that he seemed to have perfect acceleration on every bunnyhop, and his movement was so smooth. They were some of the most fun and straightforward maps to run, especially with AHK, so I did try to beat his times and get one on the board, but he always managed to get one 1 or 2 seconds faster.
There was some controversy about timescale on the last ravenholm map with the train tracks. Me and Bandit ran this map separately while connected to TeamSpeak and talked about our progress. I remember he was had a british accent, I believe he claimed to be from the Team Fortress community (could be wrong), and he was extremely cocky on voice. He made it sound like he was so much better than me at that map, even though it sounded like a successful run was taking him much longer than the expected time. He submitted a run which showed him snapping to an enemy and blasting him with a shotgun, in a manner that was VERY suspicious. I have a very competitive online gaming background, so I know a good flick shot when I see one, but his took a curved, long winded and ridiculously fast path to the body that just looked like somebody put the game in fast forward. I called him out on timescale use and suspected him of possibly using it on previous maps, but he denied ever using anything. Lonerville told us that you could check the demo file and see if the timescale command was used, and there was nothing like that on the file that we could see. Still, we made him re-run the map because of how suspicious it was.
Basically, Banditâs use of timescale maybe took about 10-20 seconds of time off the final run, probably less. It didnât make the run shorter in any significant way, it was literally just one low-skilled guy trying to make himself look better than he was. Most of the coast and ravenholm maps would have had similar times by me if bandit never beat my time using cheats. If we knew for sure he used it, we would have gone back and re-ran each map, but it wasnât able to be proven and didnât seem viable based on the information we had. So, sorry that got in there, but I donât think it really changes much at this point.