This is a story of what I went through a several years ago. I didn't feel like sharing until now since it haunted me for some time. I just want to get this off my chest, and leave it behind.
It was just another weekend of me wasting my life away, playing osu!. I finished catching up to the newly ranked maps and felt like exploring the pending section. I was searching for a map that would blow my mind away, just like the first time I saw Knife Party - Centipede. Most maps with extreme difficulty were crap, either troll maps or some other fucked up abomination. A good amount of time passed since I started browsing, and I started to get bored.
I had thought on clicking that “x” on the tab, but noticed a map with a strange name. Its title looked screwed up as if the romanization did not work properly. It had one difficulty and was less than a minute long. I don't remember the mapper but I think he was Australian, but looking back, it wouldn’t be surprising if he used a VPN. What I do remember is that the map’s description was as follows,
"01110011011011110111001001110010011110010111000001101111011011110111001001110011011011110111010101101100011100000110
11000110000101111001011011010110000101110000"
Since I had nothing better to do, bored me decided to break the code. I remember trying every hash decrypter online just to find out that it was just ASCII in binary. I was ready to throw out my laptop out the window, but took a breather instead. I came back and took a look at what it said. It translates to something I still can’t forget, "sorrypoorsoulplaymap". Judging by the crazy high BPM, I was expecting it to be one of those maps that even auto would have trouble on. I decided it would be my last map for the day and play it for funsies. I proceeded to download the map and import it into osu!, but I heard nothing after the import… It was total silence. Yes, I did check my volume settings and it was a blank track.
Most maps with blanked out tracks have hitsounds, so I unticked "ignore beatmap hitsounds" just in case. I was tired after that grueling code cracking, but didn’t skip the intro since it was quite short. While looking at the skip button, I realized the texture was a bit glitched. I believe osu! didn’t have the memory leaks or texture corruption bugs back then, so I still don’t know how that was possible.
As I sat through the song, I noticed the progress display showing that the beatmap was halfway done. There was not a single note played so far, which puzzled me. It was around the last 2 seconds where all of the sudden something on screen flashed just scrolled through and the results screen appeared. Zero 300's, zero 200's, zero 100's... and there was a negative number for the miss count. I am unsure how at least the million notes didn’t manage to lag shit on my piece of toaster trash, but needless to say, it was a troll map.
The following day I went on osu! to grind some pp. I didn't feel like playing the standard mode, so I switched to mania. I was a 100k scrub at that time, barely making it to 3 stars. I remember trying to pass Monster (DotEXE Remix) for hours on end. I decided to play it, expecting to miss randomly as always due to those freakn’ SV’s. I skipped the intro and was presented with a black screen. There were no notes.. This was a clear indicator the game was fucking up. I was thinking to alt-tab out for some time, but it seems I waited long enough for the map to reach the end. However, something weird happened. I once again saw a flash on the screen, something scrolling past, and the results screen popped up. Misses: zero, 50's: zero, 100's: zero, 200's: zero, 300's: zero, Perfects... 583. It was a full 1,000,000 score, getting myself #1 in the global ranks.
At this point my mind was blank. I didn't hit a single note, but I got full perfect! It was absurd. I clicked on another song I had struggled with at the time called Mermaid Girl. Again, there was a black background, no notes. 927 perfect's, full 1,000,000 score! Now, what would a typical noob do given this godly power? You guessed it, play the hardest map. So I scrolled to AiAe and clicked it. Seeing me #1 on the map’s leaderboard was weird. I did nothing, yet I beat everyone. AND HOLY SHIT, That 780 pp!
Looking back, bancho was REALLY slacking if it couldn’t tell something’s up. The osu! community, however, caught on quickly (now I know it was osugame). It didn't take long for me to start getting PM’s from players accusing me of hacking. My response: "I am not a hacker. I am just playing the maps". I didn’t know any better at the time. It was a couple months since I first started playing osu! I didn't know how everything worked. Get banned? Nope, didn't even cross my mind! I went on to become the #1 in the world, surpassing Ideu- in mania at the time. And then I thought, why not dominate other gamemodes too?
I lasted maybe a day until the inevitable happened. There was not much else to do other than tell about this supposed magical map that used some glitch in osu! to allow me to perfect every map. I spent at least an hour painstakingly scrolling through the thousands of maps I had, trying to find that glitched map until I remembered that I can sort by date added. It should have been near the bottom of the list, but it wasn't. It wasn't even in the songs folder. Spending hours trying to find this cursed map on the beatmap listing was also resulted in a fail. Maybe bloodcat had it, but how the fuck do you write that jumbled mess of a title?
I had nothing else to do but hope the osu! staff believed me. I submitted an appeal request saying that I just played maps, something flashed, and I got a full perfect. The osu! staff did not disappoint me! I got an email back saying, "You are not telling the truth. Tell the truth or Fuck Off!". How was I supposed to explain this anomaly? I sent them a reply explaining that I was telling the truth. I explained how the map is not there anymore, gave the mapper's name and everything. Unfortunately, there was no proof. Neither the mapper nor the beat-map existed.. And now my old account doesn't exist. However, I did get a middle-finger meme from peppy in the email, which was rather sweet of him.
I decided not to create drama on the forums and reddit since I doubted it would get my account back. It was only a couple months when I decided to fuck the rules and make a new account. All info about me was wiped anyway, nobody should know who I was. Then why did I decide to tell this now? I feel like I needed get rid of a haunted part of my past. And it doesn't matter to me that my previous identity got wiped anymore. I got over it.
If you read through this far, then thank you. I won’t be answering any questions regarding this, so the mods can just lock this. Sorry. It’s not something I like to talk about and the fact that I mustered up the courage to even post this is enough.
