ENDED Free Rider World Cup 6

And with an epic LAST MINUTE comeback, probably the first one in a final since the first edition, Cerasium changes up this final round and becomes the champion of the 6th edition of the Free Rider World Cup 6!

Congrats, man! Epic win! RadiumRC takes a very honorable 2nd place medal. Congrats as well, man!

Final times:

RadiumRC 35.73 vs 33.10 Cerasium

I'm busy tonight and tomorrow will be a bit of a busy day for me as well. But expect all of the commentary posts and prize posts either tomorrow or the day after. Congrats to everyone who joined. It was a fun contest. Cerasium makes history getting his 2nd FRWC medal and his third major ghosting contest win (GBC3, ORG and FRWC6). Great stuff, man!​

 

And just like Brazil's campaign in the FIFA World Cup, it's ALL OVER. I was actually busy with all kinds of stuff yesterday (including being sad because of the World Cup elimination), so I only had the time to make the final posts. And what can I say: What an ending!

Yeah, maybe some things didn't work that smoothly on this contest, but given all of the context surrounding the contest, I'm happy with the outcome. I put a poll on forums in August asking if I should do this, because the forums seemed to be quite dead at that time, so I just did that to see if maybe it would be worth the effort in case I found the time to host another edition of the FRWC. I was quite surprised that we got almost 40 votes and almost 80% of the people were really down to join another contest, so I started considering it.

The issue was that I didn't know if I could make it or not. I was switching jobs and also courses in college, so I wasn't sure of how my schedule would look like now. Fortunately, I realized that if it didn't took too long I could try to organize this to work on November and that's what I did. I made the announcement on October 8th and 24 days later the contest had already started, lol. I had pretty much no tracks or trackmakers confirmed (maybe 1 or 2 including me), no idea on when I could start work on things properly, no prizes or anything. I copied the spreadsheet and the format from last year and tried to work with what I was given as time passed. Considering that we had over the course of the contest 3 trackmakers dropping out, tracks being delayed or totally reorganized at the last minute, I had some work and college issues, had a trip and was hosting it all by myself, I don't think we did bad, lol. I want to thank everyone that helped, especially with the tracks and also everyone that joined and had the patience to deal with all of the delays, changes, tough tracks at times and everything else. We made it to the end once again, haha.

Since this is the final post, I want to talk a little bit about everything, so I'll talk about each round, mentioning the highlights of those rounds and talking a bit about the tracks as well up to the 3rd Place Match. After that I'll make a part 2 of this post where I will be talking about the final round and then a part 3 post where I'll talk about the prizes. So let's go.

CONTEST RECAP:

QUALIFIERS:

The Qualifiers round is always an important one, because it sets the players that will be around for 5 rounds including the Qualifiers, it's a round that sets the pots for the Group Stage and it's also the opening for the contest, so it's always good to cause a good impression. The challenge here with the track was that it was supposed to be an Apocolypse track, like last year, but he got busy, so I had think about a replacement. I brought in RandomTurtleBoi, that was supposed to work on a track for one of the Group Stage rounds, but needed to rush things a little bit to match the new deadline. So props to him for doing that, I don't think I could have gotten a track for the Qualifiers in time if you didn't show up.

The track was a simple offroad with a few obstacles here and there, like small tubes and bombs, and also some small climbing parts. It got 86% of approval with 83 votes and 7.5k plays. Not bad!

As for the highlights about the ghosters, we initally had RadiumRC doing a great cut, but that was a bit overshadowed by ShamatoZ's insane cut that lead to a 1st place ghost in the round. Really sick! We saw some ghosters like Xenom, Uniior and Reborn getting in pot 1 (top 8) and leaving some experienced ghosters behind, we had ghosters like Setsu being a surprise and finishing in the top 10 as well. We also had ghosters that received almost no votes in the poll about advancing in the qualifiers such as R1ley070, MatthewMatthew58 and lightninggod, that ended up advancing and doing great in the contest. We had pawflix that ended up almost getting eliminated multiple times but secured the 32nd spot in the end as well.

There were some upsets, since guys that were really expected to advance such as Madara, Pie42 and Egway didn't make it. But overall it was a dope round. I feel like most people didn't have a problem with the track, no controversies or anything with the round, so I believe it was a great round.

SEEDING PROCESS:

Next thing we had was the seeding process for the Group Stage. I wasn't supposed to do this, since I was in the contest, but Eryp got busy so I had to do it at the last minute. I screen recorded the whole thing, so I can show that there was no kind of bias during the making of the seeding. The pots were already set, since they top 8 players in the Qualifiers got in the pot 1, the next 8 got in the pot 2, then the next 8 in pot 3 and the final 8 that qualified were in pot 4. All I did was pick one player from each pot randomly to create the groups, based on their placement in the Qualifiers, using a random number generator. You can see the posts and the groups here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G84pyjUZ2cDyCcRgqctHpho7Ts9ZHMpi_SnRbtlBFKY/edit#gid=7295258

GROUP STAGE MATCH 1:

This was the round where we were supposed to have RandomTurtleBoi's track, so since his track was moved to the Qualifiers round, we didn't have a track for this round. At this point, I wasn't supposed to make a track for the contest, but since I had a short amount of time and I have made a track for all of the others FRWCs I hosted, I decided to make one in a couple of days and I guess it worked.

Most people seemed to enjoy the track, which is always a good thing when you make a trial-like track, since those usually get more hate for being hard. The track had some tubes, bombs and other trial aspects, but it wasn't THAT hard. The track got 80% of approval with 44 votes and 3.1k plays. Not bad.

As for the ghosting side of things, the highlights were probably Cerasium (his 1st win in round in the contest) and RadiumRC killing it with some time saves (there wasn't a clear big cut thankfully this time) and also the great match between Cork and R1ley070, where Cork got the win, but barely, in a match where he was the clear favorite. Xenom got his 1st top 3 performance in a round with a great ghost, so that was a good moment as well.

GROUP STAGE MATCH 2:

A crucial round for the Group Stage for sure. We had the players from pots 1 and 2 facing each other (alongside the players from pot 3 vs players from pot 4). We also had on this round a track from Coated_Badger, that was one of the players that was working on his track for the longest time, so it was a good one. Thanks Coated_Badger!

The track had 87% of approval, with 71 votes and 6.1k plays. It wasn't a hard track, but it was a bit tough to optimize completely. You could use both bikes and it also had at least 2 different routes that were good, so it was an interesting one.

As for other interesting highlights, we had RadiumRC getting 1st place in a round for the first time, with a great alternative route using BMX, and many great matches between some top ghosters. We had a sick Setsu vs Uniior, where Setsu showed that he wasn't playing around and surprised Uniior with an impressive ghost and got the win, we also had a solid Reborn vs Sidewalk, where Reborn got the upset, beating Sidewalk with a really solid ghost as well. Besides that, we had the first ever Free Rider World Cup draw in a 1v1 match. It was between TypicalEshay/CHARREDLIZARD21 and AfterImage. In the last few minutes AfterImage got a solid improvement after a great effort and tied the match, making FRWC history. Xenom and Stevie.T also got great ghosts that deserve a shoutout here.

GROUP STAGE MATCH 3:

In the third and last group stage match, things got interesting. Despite the delay in the round, the round was pretty cool. We had an offroad track from G-raffe, that probably had the closest average time between the players among the group stage tracks.

The track was very non-spacebarrer friendly and it was fun to ghost, so it was an interesting one. It got an approval of 79% (there was some weird dislike spam in the first day for whatever reason), with 76 votes and 4.2k plays.

There 3 major ghosting highlights in the round. The first one involves a slightly controversial situation. This round ended 2 hours later than usual since it was posted late, and that fact was announced 3 or 4 times in the thread. At the time it was supposed to end if there wasn't delays, CHARREDLIZARD21 was winning by a good margin, which would be enough for him to qualify for the Round of 16, but during the additional 2 hours ShamatoZ beat him by the minimum margin of 0.03 and advanced to the Round of 16 in his place. CHARREDLIZARD21 wasn't aware of the deadline change and it seemed that ShamatoZ wasn't fully aware as well, but it was well-advised beforehand, so ShamatoZ got the W here. The second big highlight of the round was the incredible match between adversitas and WrzodX. Non-spacebarrer legend WrzodX got an early great ghost and was beating adversitas during the whole round and qualifying to the Round of 16 coming from pot 4! That's unheard of! Unfortunately for WrzodX, despite being in the top 16 for the round and for the Group Stage combined times (ahead of adversitas), adversitas got a crazy cut that turned WrzodX's big lead over him in the track into ashes. Curious enough, I think adversitas was the only one that got that cut, which is crazy. With that result adversitas advanced and WrzodX went for the Losers Championship. This group was cool, though. The other player in there, MatthewMatthew58 also did great in the matches and also got a top 6 group stage combined time. The third big highlight of that round was Xenom actually winning the round with a 1st place overall ghost, 0.03 second ahead of Cerasium. INSANE! The young guy was showing that he came to make a name for himself in his FRWC debut.

ROUND OF 16:

The Round Of 16 was interesting, although we had some controversy with the track. For this round we were supposed to have holmrrhy as the trackmaker, but unfortunately he couldn't make it, which is fine, but I needed someone to step in for that. The annoying part is that at this point, losses are eliminatory for some players, so I didn't want to put someone who was in the contest as trackmaker to not be that unfair to the others. Yeah, I know that it happened with RandomTurtleBoi, Coated_Badger and me in earlier rounds, but those tracks were not for the Knockout Stages and all of those were lined up before the seeding process was made, so the pathways were not set yet. And again, that wasn't the ideal situation either, but those are perks of last minute attempts to host a month long massive ghosting contest, lol.

With this aspect in mind, Eryp seemed to be a good pick and he was down to work on something quickly for the contest, which I thank him for. The things in the track that caused some controversy were that there were some clear cuts and a few lucky based parts. But there were some good parts for sure. The track got an approval of 81%, with 37 votes and 3.7k plays. Not bad either.

As for the ghosting aspect, I don't think this was a very crazy round, but a few cool things. RadiumRC won the round with a great ghost, despite the fact that apparently Cerulean tried a last minute attempt to beat him and failed. We had a great match between Cerasium and Sidewalk once again (after their great EOST match last year) with Cerasium winning, a great match between Cork and Coated_Badger, with Cork winning, a great upset from Setsu against 1st place in the Qualifiers ShamatoZ and a few other cool things in the Losers Championship. MatthewMatthew58 surprised RubeGoldberger and got the win and pawflix and AfterImage did a great and even match, that ended up with pawflix taking the W. Another interesting stat that I just found was that we had for the 1st time a FRWC Round of 16 matchup happening in 2 different editions. Last year, Chaos-Fallen and Uniior faced each other in the Round of 16 with an easy win from Chaos-Fallen and now they faced each other again, but the story was different. Uniior left victorious this time. It's always cool to see people improve over the years.

QUARTERFINALS:

The Quarterfinals was an interesting one. Yeah, some people complained that Innominate's track was too long for a ghosting contest, and maybe they were right, but I didn't mind it that much.

Yeah, during the making of that track, I warned him it was a bit big, but then I remembered some tracks from the FRWC3, from the ORG or even the final GBC2 track, and I mean, it's nice to sometimes have an endurance test in a ghosting contest. And I thought this was a good one. The track isn't too hard to complete, but it's pretty hard to do flawless (not even the leaders did it), so it was a good offroad challenge. If I had to be mad with something was that he asked for help with checkpoint placement and I helped, but he then proceed to ignore my suggestions and that was one of the biggest complains about the track, haha. #exposed. But it's a great track, one of the coolest ones in the contest in my opinion. The track got an approval of 83%, with 40 votes and 2.4k plays. Cool numbers.

As for the ghosting side of things, RadiumRC and Cerasium easily dominated the whole round, winning their matches against Stevie.T and Setsu without much problem, with Radium taking the overall win once again in the round. Xenom won his match against a hardworking Cork, that didn't give up until the end and Reborn surprised people once again, beating Uniior here.

In the Losers Championship we had some fun stuff happening. CHARREDLIZARD21 got his revenge on Chaos-Fallen, that had beaten him in the Group Stage, securing an impressive win here. MatthewMatthew58 and lightninggod, two of the players that got the least support on advancing to the Group Stage managed to win again, since adversitas and Cerulean didn't ghost. In lightninggod's case, it was with a time of over 12 MINUTES! LOL. Always complete the track kids. Another really funny story happened in the match between Coated_Badger and R1ley070. Coated_Badger was leading through the whole round with a solid ghost while R1ley070 didn't had a ghost yet, until the last day arrived. In the last day, R1ley070 got a solid ghost and beat Coated_Badger by a decent margin. Since the time zone for Australia can be a bit weird with the calendar of the contest, Coated_Badger eventually saw that he was losing and that he couldn't ghost when the round was about to be over a did a whole rant on hating the format and the situation (see here). It gets even funnier since neither TPlacella or braw ghosted in their match, so the ghoster with the best time from the losers of this Losers Championship round would advance to replace the winner of that match, and it just happened to Coated_Badger, which he discovered just 20 minutes later. LOL. Also, R1ley070 is from New Zealand, so he would suffer from the same time zones problem, haha. It was a funny situation, though. Another cool thing that happened was a match between WrzodX and Sidewalk, two FRHD legends. WrzodX left the contest like a champ, completing a very tough track. Sidewalk advanced a bit further.

SEMIFINALS:

This round was interesting. We had the Winners Championship Semifinals and the Losers Championship Quarterfinals happening in the same track, so it was cool to see. The track we had for this round was a collab between SilentFinger and robbieraysfan and it was a cool track. We had some delays and ended up needing to extend the track a bit, so there was a few challenges here and there, but the track was cool.

The track had an 83% approval, with 40 votes and 2.6k plays. Really cool.

As for the ghosting side of things, there wasn't too much battle in the Winners Championship side. Despite the efforts from Reborn and Xenom, it wasn't an even battle. Reborn got a glimpse of reaching RadiumRC but then Radium totally destroyed him with another great ghost and another overall win in the round. Xenom got relatively close to Cerasium's time, but if we are being honest there was never a real threat during the round.

In the Losers Championship, the things were slightly more interesting. We had Setsu beating ShamatoZ once again, we had a decent match between CHARREDLIZARD21 and Uniior with Uniior getting the W and we also had the best match of the whole round, between Sidewalk and Cork. Once again, Cork putting some solid effort on his ghost, but Sidewalk got the win here, finishing 0.37 second ahead of him. Nicely done by both players.

LOSERS CHAMPIONSHIP SEMIFINALS:

We then were headed out to the specific Losers Championship rounds. In the Losers Championship Semifinals, we probably had the most controversial track of the contest.

The track made by Cerasium (that wasn't in the Losers Championship) was a mix of a trial and an offroad, but it was considered too hard for a ghosting contest like this. I honestly don't disagree, but I also think that we had tracks with this level of difficulty before in other editions (it's not always well-received, though) and this track was honestly way harder in previous versions. Now seeing that this was a track made by our winner (we'll talk more about that later), we can see that maybe his standards are not the average ones, haha. It was a bit too hard, indeed. But he brought the track on time and we didn't have another one at the time, so I guess I did what I could to have a track for this round. It served as a filter for the LC Finals, though.

The track has an approval rating of 59%, which is great, but it is what it is. The track had 22 votes and around 330 plays.

As for the ghosting side of things, we had one cool match and one that wasn't that cool. The 3 best times of the round were made by the players in the same 1v1v1 matchup: Setsu, Sidewalk and me. Setsu got a deserving win with a good route and a cleaner ghost, compared to me and Sidewalk. I got a good ghost right away, but struggled to beat it during the round. Sidewalk didn't use the best time saves, so he couldn't beat Setsu either. In the other match, Uniior got an easy win, with Coated_Badger coming after him and with MatthewMatthew58 not finishing the track. What a contest from Matthew, though. My man ghosted almost no votes in the Qualifiers round and made it this far. Nicely done. Good job by Coated_Badger as well. I didn't do bad either, neither did Sidewalk.

LOSERS CHAMPIONSHIP FINALS:

This round was cool and not cool at the same time. First off, the track was amazing. This whole situation regarding RadiumRC is very unfortunate. I'm not here to talk about the tracing controversy he got involved and that made him lose the feature on this track, but regardless of that, the track has a great gameplay, nice additional background detail, decent composition, good ride, so it was for sure a great track. It might be my favorite one of this contest. At least it is totally one of the tracks I had the most fun ghosting in the contest for sure. And I wasn't even in the round, lol.

Yeah, it would be cool to keep the tradition for the 3rd year in a row and have a FRWC track that gets featured, and it did happen, but I don't think we should count that since the feature was taken away. The track has an 85% approval, with 89 votes and 10.4k plays.

As for the round itself, it was the match between Uniior and Setsu, the rematch from the Group Stage. It was an even match, since both players did great during the whole contest and got close times in their match in the Group Stage, in the group stage combined time rankings and in the knockout/eliminatory rounds after that as well. However, Setsu led since the first day through the whole round with a great lead, so it wasn't really a fight. Props to Uniior tough, that joined the FRWC for the 3rd time and got his best result. He was 14th in the FRWC4, 12th in the FRWC5 and now 6th in the FRWC6. Keep climbing those ranks, man! As for Setsu, he proved to be a good surprise in the contest, beating Uniior twice, ShamatoZ twice and also beating guys like the experienced legend Sidewalk and the experienced noob Totoca12. Setsu was the FRWC6 Losers Champion!

3RD PLACE MATCH:

We actually had a really fun round in the 3rd Place match. Usually, the 3rd place match happens in the same track as the Championship Finals, but we needed to make a delay for the Championship Finals to work, so I had this idea about splitting the final round in 2 separate things to buy some time for the trackmakers. I guess it worked out, haha.

This track is a great one by lightninggod, that mixes offroad, smooth jumps and climbs really well. The reason we even had this track as a backup was because of what happened with the trackmakers dropping out or delaying the rounds. I was afraid that I would need to replace one of the final tracks, so I got people working on multiple backup tracks. Cork didn't really go forward with his, but I got a response from lightninggod and SketchyLemon that they had a backup track ready to go. Turns out that I used both, lol. SketchyLemon's track was a bit harder and given the feedback on Cerasium's track, I decided to pick lightninggod's track. Another factor was that lightninggod sent me his track first. The only thing working against lightninggod was the fact that when he sent me the track he was already in the contest. But he had already left when this 3rd Place match happened, so I think it was the perfect choice.

People seemed to like the track, that got an impressive approval of 90%, with 51 votes and 5.1k plays. Totally one of my favorites from the contest. Thanks lightninggod for coming up with this in such a short notice!

As for the ghosting side of this, it was quite fun as well. It was a close match! Xenom was leading for the most part, but when I made the first update in the final day of the round I saw that Setsu had turned the tables over Xenom and that Reborn was improving his time. Setsu kept leading for quite a while in the final day, but around 2 hours before the end of the round Xenom got the lead once again and this time for good. Xenom finished with a great 56.03 time, while Setsu was only 0.27 second behind, with 56.30. The crazy part was that if you compare both ghosts, Setsu was ahead for almost 30 seconds, which is most of the track. Almost there, man! Reborn finished with a 57.90 ghost, but a fun fact is that right after the round ended he improved to a 57.80 and he now has a 56.97 time on the track. Really cool, man. Props to all 3. You guys did great! I think it was a FRWC debut for all 3 of you, so congrats! I hope to see you guys in future editions. Reborn and Setsu are around for a bit but now are getting more recognition and Xenom is the future of FRHD ghosting, so you guys should be proud of your performances!

PS: Post about the Championship Finals soon and post about the prizes tomorrow.​

 

What an event we just witnessed! After 3 days of darkness and magic powers going up the sky, the days are finally clear again and we are starting to see the aftermath. Two of the most powerful Free Rider High Definition gods were facing each other and when the deities are fighting, us mortals only hope for the best and enjoy the show. And what an interesting show.

Not sure if things happened as it was expected. The prophecies were divided. There were the believers in the Supreme One prophecy. The one that would end all discussions about who's the FRHD All-Time legend, without any doubts. Many thought it could have been Anonyymi or Symantec but it was never clear. The prophecy talks about the Real Champion, the Really Consistent ghoster, the Rare Competitor to find, the ever Rising Comet, the Ruthless Challenger, so many believed it to be the Master Of The Cuts, the Early Round Killer, the Silent Destroyer known as RadiumRC. Others believed in the Prophecy of the Two Seasons, where it was said that one day there would be a new power in the community, loyal to the old gods, that would ascend and bring new red skies to us all. In this prophecy it was said that in the first season (we could understand it as a year) this power would show signs of strength, and in the second season it would come back to dominate it all. Yeah, yeah, I know. This last prophecy isn't clear since it could work for both players. Last year RadiumRC got a good win over Madara and finished in 11th place in the FRWC5 and now he was killing it in the FRWC6, after winning the EOST and doing good on the GBC3, ORG and other ghosting stuff in the past couple of years. But many think it's referring to Cerasium, that was 3rd in the FRWC5 last year, showing some clear signs of greatness, that later proceeded to lead him towards the ORG and GBC3 win, with a great EOST performance and also many other ghosting achievements.

But which prophecy would be right? Both players were predict to win every round up to this Championship Finals and they did. Which power was stronger? Were other powers into action? Other forces did interfere? It's tough to say, but it's possible that we had other forces in motion here.

We noticed that Radium would rather make only 1 or 2 impressive ghosts in the beginning of the round and chill during the rounds, while Cerasium would work on his magic for longer to try to reach the best possible results. But what would happen in a final between the two? Two different styles of FRHD magic facing each other during a limited period of time. Who would prevail?

But as mentioned, I guess we had some external forces messing up with this battle, so let's talk about it. First off, this final round was supposed to happen in a legendary battlefield, crafted carefully by trackmaking legends Eryp and Max007x, but that plane of existence was even above our FRHD Ghosting gods! Maybe our ghosting deities would be ready for the challenge, but the unfinished work from the divines was not allowed to be shown to mere bikers like us, so we needed to find another battlefield. And we did. Great trackmaker SketchyLemon let us use his backup track for this intense battle, and we did. Props to him for letting us do this.

Not that is up to us mortals to rate battlefield zones from a battle betwee FRHD gods, but it's fair to point out that this one was rated pretty high, with an approval of 96%, with 47 votes and 3.2k plays.

The round started as expected, with the great Early Round Killer RadiumRC making his 35.73 ghost right in the beginning of the first day of the final round. For many it was clear that RadiumRC would get the victory. The poll came to a point where it was favoring RadiumRC by 14 votes to 7. People were believing in the Supreme One prophecy.

However the hours were going by and we had some major things happening. First off, Cerasium was working on his best magical spells and was gathering help from everything he could. He then proceeded to something interesting. He asked the great ZPresley, Anonyymi's destroyer, for help. Would he be the one in the Two Seasons prophecy? The one loyal to the old gods that would bring new red skies to the world? Could he be the one? We didn't know yet. The skies were still dark from this crazy battle.


Actual proof of Cerasium asking ZPresley for strength. Peep Anonyymi also showing support. For those that don't know, Anonyymi is the only FRWC champion that faced ZPresley, so the knowledge he acquired with time must be insane.

And then the unthinkable happened. A wizard named Rayb25, keeper of a powerful artifact named "The Holiest Stone", landed several attacks on RadiumRC regarding the Trackmaking Realm, which made the skies even darker. As you guys know, Radium is already reached god-level in the Ghosting Realm, but the FRHD World has two major realms and Radium was aiming for the supreme crown on both of them, as some players like spruce, Eryp and mudkip totally attempted over the years and some players like mR..A totally achieved.

PS: Coated_Badger - The sabotage of RadiumRC's trophy by Rayb25 would make a good topic for your next Chronicle.

I won't get into too much detail about this situation since I don't know the Trackmaking Magic ways too well, but it's undeniable that it took a toll in the contest. At least a little bit. This was released in the middle of the final round and pretty much made RadiumRC vanish, which is pretty sad.

Regardless of anything, in my humble opinion, RadiumRC still has potential to be great on both realms. He's the current GOAT in the Ghosting Realm and the good thing about his tracks were not only the potentially traced objects, so I hope he comes back. We lost too many legends to the Void Of Time or the Black Hole Of FRHD Irrelevancy, so let's not kill the remaining great ones that are around (I get the whole frustration with the situation, though).

The days were going by and in the last day, RadiumRC still had the lead. 10 times from the end, RadiumRC was still in the lead, but it seemed like Cerasium had a trick on his sleeve. It seemed that he planned a last minute upset. RadiumRC had a 35.73 time and Cerasium had a 36.07 time. It was all in the open.

Which prophecy would be proven right?

It seemed like Cerasium would take the win, since RadiumRC apparently was not seen in a while, but then something happened:

RadiumRC was spotted online and checking the final track in the last 5 minutes of the contest. Would he pull off a last minute comeback?

Well, he didn't. Instead of that, he played other tracks, got to 100k points in the game, ghosting for the last time a track named "gone". He was not seen after that. Was it some foreshadowing? We know Radium's ghosting skills, so we know that he could have easily beaten that 35.73 ghost. Cerasium improved his ghost 2 times in the last minute to a great 33.10, so maybe Cerasium would still be the winner, but we know Radium could have improved. Did he contemplate the idea of maybe ending his FRHD career with a win but then decided: "Not today"? We might never know. Maybe he passed the torch back to Cerasium, maybe he didn't. Time might tell, but we can't be sure.

I won't say that this was exactly anticlimatic, like last year with Backtwice not ghosting, but it was a bit weird. It really seemed to me that not improving was a decision, so we might never know what would have happened if he tried. Cerasium did his part, though. And he did in a high fashion. In the final minute, the darkness vanished and the skies turned red. Cerasium was the one, that lead by ZPresley's powers, conquered the world.

Is it too soon to mention an US Dynnasty? After 4 editions of Finland beating everyone with Noob, Backtwice and Anonyymi, the US gets 2 in a row with mudkip and Cerasium getting an upset against Backtwice and RadiumRC. Nice!

The poll ended 12 votes to 11 in favor of RadiumRC, so we could consider this a small upset. Nice one Cerasium!

He's the one from the Prophecy Of The Two Seasons, the Successor of ZPresley, the American Hope, the Tireless Warrior, the BoostButt Resurrected, the one and only, Cerasium, First Of His Name, King and World Champion Of FRHD!

From nothing to 3rd, from 3rd to 1st place, making history. First player to get 3 major ghosting contest wins (ORG, GBC3, FRWC6) and in 3 different ones. Crazy! First player to have 6 ghosting medals and 5 ghosting contest medals. Tied with zwinxz and RadiumRC for the most medals on forums (6). Only the 4th player and the first one outside the Finnish Dynasty to get medals in 2 different FRWC editions (Anonyymi - 2 golds, Noob - 1 gold and 1 silver, Backtwice - 1 gold and 1 silver, Cerasium - 1 bronze and 1 gold).

Final message to RadiumRC:

Insane contest, man. You got 2nd place in Qualifiers, which made you get in pot 1. Then you beat we_are_number_one, Coated_Badger and Tubiek in the Group Stage, passing in first place on your group and getting the 2nd best group stage combined time overall. Then you beat Cerulean in the Round of 16, Stevie.T in the Quarterfinals, Reborn in the Semifinals and then you lost in the Championship Finals. Sick stuff, though. Keep it up, man! I know the times are weird, but you have been a huge part of the community for the past year, so it would be cool to keep seeing around in the future. Anyways, what you did is already remarkable on itself. Besides the trackmaking things, you have shown to be a great ghoster for a while now, sent some good proof about your ghosting skills whenever asked, helped a lot with the official ghosting threads, so you already had a cool impact on the community regardless. Lots of medals, lots of ghosting awards, lots of features that will be hard to beat, 1st place in the FRHD All-Time Top Ghosters. No small achievements. Take care, man. Real life is always more important, though.


Final message to Cerasium:

Epic work, man. I thought you would make it to the final, but I honestly wasn't sure if you could win this, but you made it work, with a crazy ghost in the final and some good tactics. Nicely done, man. You were the Losers Champion last year and got the 3rd place, but now you came for the highest crown. ORG, GBC, FRWC, you got them all. Nice, man. This year you got 3rd place in the Qualifiers, then beat WrzodX, adversitas and MatthewMatthew58 in the Group Stage, finishing with the best Group Stage combined time overall and the 1st place in your group. Then you beat Sidewalk in the Round of 16, Setsu in the Quarterfinals, Xenom in the Semifinals and RadiumRC in the Championship Finals. What a line up, lol. You beat some GREAT ghosters and proved that you deserve this medal. You got your revenge over RadiumRC in the End Of Season Tournament, beat Sidewalk once again, passed without problems in a tough group and beat the 3rd and 4th places in the contest. Really impressive. The grind paid off once again. You actually had the best combined time compared to RadiumRC (289.57 against 290.56), so it wasn't just a lucky win from the final round. Congrats, man. I hope to see you back in future editions.

PS: Thanks to everyone that joined and helped with the contest. It took ages to write this essay, so I'll leave the prizes for tomorrow. That should be my final relevant post here.​

 

PS: It's already possible to check Overall Placement for everyone that joined here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...tHpho7Ts9ZHMpi_SnRbtlBFKY/edit#gid=1606710056

 

FINAL PRIZES, OVERALL PLACEMENT AND SOME ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY:



Hey, guys. Did you guys think that we wouldn't have a poorly made top 3 podium this year as usual? WRONG. Haha. In all seriousness, I just forgot to add it to the previous post, so I'm putting it here because why not?

So... what's up? One of the reasons I decided to rush the contest a little bit and make it work in November, other than my availability at that time was that I still have Pro, that I got from the Kano staff to handle the ORG prizes last year. Knowing that, I saw that the ORG sponsors would also still have Pro for a bit, since we got it for a year. Since Kano went a bit silent this year (at least before the beginning of this contest), I was afraid that we probably would never get Pro again, since the system is broken and since I'm not confident they would give it to us once again. Yeah, maybe coins are not the best prize ever, but they are still a cool option for prizes. I'm in the middle of a transition between college courses and jobs, as I mentioned, so I couldn't figure out a cash prize this time, like we had in the previous couple of years.

So considering that, I only have 3 days of Pro left (what a timing, lol), so I know that I have to make the coin transfers as soon as I can. For this contest we got 3 players that were sponsors for the ORG last year to sponsor the FRWC6. One of them was me, lol. I didn't have many coins, but I'm donating around 2k to the pot. The other ones were ShamatoZ, that donated around 16k and a_drain, that came in clutch and brought us 64k coins for the pot. Not bad. So we have a bit more than 82k for the pot, which isn't bad, for something not planned that well, lol. I'll have a bit more than 72k for the normal prizes and a bit more than 10k for the bonus prizes that I decided to do later, to keep the tradition going.

We had a great contest, that broke some records. This was the FRWC with the biggest amount of ghosters that signed up (93, beating the 70 players from last year), only losing to the ORG in this aspect, with all ghosting contests considered. This was the FRWC with the biggest amount of active ghosters (53, beating the 48 players from the previous 2 years), only losing to the ORG in that sense as well ,considering all ghosting contests. The thread had more views than the 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions, only being slightly below the 1st and the 5th editions, that were the most popular in that sense. We only had less replies than the 5th edition, so it's cool to see that there's still some people that are engaged in the ghosting community. Really good numbers considering that this wasn't as thoughtfully planned as it could have been and considering that a lot of people consider that Free Rider High Definition is dead.

But now, without further ado, let's get back to the prizes. Here's the overall placement and how much each player will get of "normal prizes":

1 - Cerasium - 25.000 coins
2 - RadiumRC - 15.000 coins
3 - Xenom - 10.000 coins
4 - Setsu - 6.000 coins
5 - Reborn - 4.000 coins
6 - Uniior - 2.000 coins
7 - Sidewalk - 1.500 coins
8 - Totoca12 - 1.250 coins
9 - Coated_Badger - 1.000 coins
10 - MatthewMatthew58 - 750 coins
11 - Cork - 250 coins
12 - TypicalEshay/CHARREDLIZARD21 - 250 coins
13 - lightninggod - 250 coins
14 - R1ley070 - 250 coins
15 - ShamatoZ - 250 coins
16 - Stevie.T - 250 coins
17 - Chaos-Fallen - 250 coins
18 - WrzodX - 250 coins
19 - adversitas - 250 coins
20 - Cynosure - 250 coins
21 - TPlacella - 250 coins
22 - pawflix - 250 coins
23 - braw - 250 coins
24 - Cerulean - 250 coins
25 - RubeGoldberger - 135 coins
26 - Tubiek - 135 coins
27 - AfterImage - 135 coins
28 - Rippedmagnet - 135 coins
29 - HoneyBadgers - 135 coins
30 - Overthrown - 135 coins
31 - RandomTurtleBoi - 135 coins
32 - we_are_number_one - 135 coins
33 - The_risen_skyrider - 80 coins
34 - TheLazyCat - 80 coins
35 - OdysseusSupreme - 80 coins
36 - GhostieAlt - 80 coins
37 - EthMan - 80 coins
38 - fuzzyman8 - 80 coins
39 - Urabni - 80 coins
40 - Wayward - 80 coins
41 - Ollie420 - 80 coins
42 - affiliation - 80 coins
43 - Vince0 - 80 coins
44 - JustAGDFan - 80 coins
45 - verybad_mobile/verybad - 80 coins
46 - PVAV2 - 80 coins
47 - ShadowMaster987 - 80 coins
48 - flappingflip - 80 coins
49 - Methodical - 80 coins
50 - KyelerPlayz - 80 coins
51 - L7NX - 80 coins
52 - Madara - 80 coins
53 - Bellboys - 80 coins

Note: I'm only considering the 53 players that at least made a ghost in the Qualifiers. The other 40 that signed up and didn't ghost I'm not counting.

PS: Also, I would like to know about verybad and CHARREDLIZARD21 about which account I should send the coins to.
PS2: Bonus prizes soon.​