While this is a shared account between a few pros (and noobs
), 2 players that helped us collab have seen this game's prime (2015-2017 basically), and its slow but painful fall.
We all know that FRHD has been dead for basically 2.5 years, and the last year where it was alive was 2023 (after a slow decline from 2018 onwards), pawflix's Track Tracker thread explains it well. COVID slowed down this game's death by about 2 years, it basically slowed down the decline and I lowkey think COVID was like
Screenshot from one of our members talking to Tubiek
I don't wanna yap too much, but for yall newgens just
https://community.freeriderhd.com/t...track-making-contest.15640/page-9#post-364656
https://community.freeriderhd.com/threads/freeriderhd-buyout.15642/#post-364354
https://community.freeriderhd.com/threads/freeriderhd-buyout.15642/#post-364353
i dont wanna make these tplacella style megathreads
(i'm revising this before publishing i just realized i yapped a lot. i put it all in a spoiler, dw guys
)
A while ago, the game very active, and both KANO and the staff were equally as active. Saw a TAS abuser in the leaderboard? Boom, removed all ghosts and banned him 5 minutes later.
Saw a hacker? He gets roasted by thousands!!
Hundreds of people would put effort into ghosting, people would nolife and waste hours and hours into this game. It's a similar scenario with trackmaking, but we still have many good trackmakers (and some newgens who are very very pro)
like Ponjoja, who is very helpful!
or MidReth, wouldn't be surprised if that's an alt lol
But this game is so dead, to the point where image to track is public now
(remember back when everyone begged for it and it was a dream? people would put effort into trying to get it work, way before vibe coding was even a thing)
Multiple tracks were dislike botted (or like botted like the verity one)
The game is dying, and we lack new track makers and ghosters (so track feature inflation is at its peak, and the entire ghosting scene is basically a GHOSTing town) (haha get it???)
but tbf i don't wanna complain because my track style is very bad
also one person who's busy with uni carries our ghosts so we're too busy to go for leaderboards
and i love how people put effort and time into their tracks
as much as 2015-2017 was the prime of the game and so many people were playing, 2020-2023 was a great era, i would consider it to be more alive than 2018-2019
2020-2022 was the prime of ghosting, you could see RedorBlue, Cerasium, RadiumRC, Xenom (his prime was at the end of this time range), Ninjasparkour, Xverse, Cerulean, Pie42, ShamatoZ, Symantec, DrChill and many many others in the same room
Most of the top 100 ghosters were active and actively dedicated to the game, now we barely have 5 active
at 2023, we would have
Many of these guys+Xenom at his prime+Setsu at his prime+XGRAzgr improving over the entirety of 2023 and getting one legit feature (before randomly becoming greedy and cheating when the game was dying exponentially fast in mid 2024)
Piski/KZabrikov would also come back at the end of this era. He would quickly improve not long after coming back, despite being "suspicious" and getting way too pro way too quickly, he was proven legit
The trackmaking scene was stacked in 2020-2023 too
We had Maple's occasional but legendary uploads, RadiumRC's perfect rock details, Zgolex, xwinx, Fluffysmack, Elibloodthirst, dantexpress (who balances industrial details with nature really well), you name it! so many pro trackmakers!! i can't even count and i didn't list 99% of them
We also had more players who would get featured tracks or featured ghosts and put genuinely a TON of effort, but that are less remembered nowadays. We should remember them, but they made bangers. TallTexan, NotVeryGood, braw
Towards the middle-end of that era, Drndemi and Wellebelly would improve a ton and a lot of potential was seen in them, nasrani would come back
We also had the funny guys, like Coager, SilentFinger, RadiumRC, Kanvo, Logeton, xshaade (who would later on change his name to robbieraysfan)
but in the ghosting scene...?
all that's left are 3 pros (who randomly quit and other 3 pros come back) who play for fun and piski
So for instance:
2024: Xenom, Cerasium, NotVeryGood and piski
2026: tetrationiscool, ShamatoZ, DizzyCircles and piski
etc
the rest is basically Dagon+OceanAdventureWR+ZycerakHasNoJob+RandomTASAbuser67
i guess trackmaking is also much deader.... many of these guys have left
i still see banger tracks and banger ghosts tho!
Hot and trending is insanely inflated due to the death of the game, players need more recognition
CP has survived in the servers for multiple hours (very likely from Puravida/beans2 because else nobody is insane enough for that, ngl)
If this was 2017, KANO would step in and absolutely destroy the players, like with kv99gun or NotChar
Puravida/beans2 claims it's possible the hack the game and get 0.03 time with ONE LINE, and he says it's INSANELY easy to ban evade (thankfully this guy didn't tell how to)
While Puravida is a known attention seeker and very creepy/weird, i wouldn't be shocked if it's true, ngl.
This game was coded in 2013 and KANO only added a couple of lines for 2 new gamemodes or 2 new powerups over 13 years
It's already proven that KANO doesn't even IP ban, some hacker didn't need any residential proxies or VPNs allegedly to make more accounts (i believe it was either NotChar or me_again_radiumrc)
buuut still.... puravida isn't a reliable source so take that with a grain of salt
A public TAS script has been leaked by Hello_World (wouldn't be surprised if this is just Dagon or OceanAdventureWR) and there are no consequences!
Back in 2022, only like 20 people had tas, and they were either top 30 ghosters and trustworthy
or had extremely good connections
you understand that?
frhd had 80,000 monthly unique visitors in 2023, and only like ~30 had tas at the time
(including randoms/guests with no accounts/people who just clicked on it out of curiosity), because similarweb/hypestat says it has like 20,000 now
this game had 2,700,000 monthly visits in sep 2020 according to hypestat, but it also counts visits from people who hop on frhd many times a day
Multiple players have been TAS abusing or hacking with no consequences
The OFG thread has almost 600 PAGES. But only 5 pages were added in the last 12 months..
If FRHD had a Discord server and it was one click away from the main page, it would easily have over 130,000 members.
If it was made in covid, maybe something more like 80,000
We lack members at the forums (only around ~30,000) cuz it's hard to register
FRHD has in total ~6+ million users? I don't remember the exact number but i know it's over 6 mil (including bots, randoms, players who just checked made an acc and quit after a day)
No wonder KANO is removing so many inactive accounts with like 100 points (and transforming into random numbers) or resetting their history/ghosts way faster, it's too much data. The game was too big! Now, a lot of rare usernames are easy to take. I took "notifications", "six", "they", "feat", "iii", etc
And this is not the staff's fault.
It's the fact that the game is SO DEAD that ANY TYPE OF ACTIVITY IS FINE!
if ur still reading so far, comment "holy yap"
And it's very hard to consistently moderate a game that's dying and it's not worth moderating anymore! I feel bad for Eryp, Totoca12, Calculus and the admins, so many 0.03 times they have to purge, so many inappropriate tracks they have to delete, while KANO doesn't even do anything! It's too tiring for them! Ness' rant perfectly describes this
Ocean has given us ideas to sell FRHD, but i don't think KANO will sell it anytime soon
And Ocean pinging everyone many times and overall being super immature (and EVEN PISKI calling him an attention seeker) doesn't make it much better
So these are extra specific arguments to why this game has died, that aren't generic things like "less tracks are being made" or "everyone is quitting" or "kano doesn't care anymore"
Some OGs would keep playing for a long time, like ShamatoZ, Totoca12, Elibloodthirst, Eryp, but many of these have quit due to the death of the game
The issue here is the following, while the game would slowly die along the years and people would quit
Many people have replaced those who quit
But less and less players were replacing those players who quit, more people have quit than started playing
A lot of those who "quit" would eventually come back after a few months, but they aren't even coming back anymore
We got to the point where we didn't even have daily tracks for many days.
I remember Totoca12 saying he would only make recent good tracks daily, and he would only rarely make older tracks daily or repeat dailies (only if the track's too niche and deserves more likes)
As time passed, older tracks became daily more often
But now..? yeah
The staff isn't lazy! It's just not worth it anymore.
This has happened before in parts of 2024 and 2025, but it's a sign that the game has gone downhill so bad, that Eryp doesn't want to click a button to make a track daily (or to schedule it to be daily in 10 days)
anyways eryp lemme pick dailies pls so you never run out xd,
https://www.freeriderhd.com/t/755529-skydust comments might help, check out old feats or old community classics idk
Alright, i feel like i've yapped and complained way too much. I still have hope, i still feel like compliment! I don't wanna just criticize and complain.
We still have a lot of trackmaking and ghosting skill left!
Look at the latest feats! Look at tetration's wheelie at spelunking! I still like modern-day frhd, it's just that... idk... it just feels half-abandoned... yknow?
You know that ghost mall that's very clean and well-mantained, but there aren't many people there? That mall had a very glorious and victorious prime
It's a similar situation to FRHD... Eryp would put effort into moderating, there were still community votes to feature tracks, but the game just feels empty..
Also, tysm to all of you who have put so much effort in this game and made it such a good game.. the staff, the ghosters, the trackmakers. you name it
And thanks Eryp for finally returning daily tracks!! W
This thread was made by multiple users, ignore the typing style changes lol
No wonder it's so long
Only one user can publish to prevent IP matching, let's keep the members of this account secret frfr
Edit: great. Just found out this entire mess was singlehandedly done by OceanAdventureWR, and he wasted the mods' time. I read MidReth's thread 10 mins after writing this, and oh boy. This was all his fault. TAS abuser, 0.03 time hacker, p3d0ph1l3 who posted CP, attention seeker, just go check out my opinion on him. Ew
I wrote this before reading and finding out Ocean is the same guy as bean2 (i was way too inactive to realize in time), treat Ocean/beans like the same criminal kid