I have done quite a bit of IL runs the last couple of weeks and I did finally find out the reason behind why the best time at the end of a race sometimes gets updated with a worse time, I call it the null value glitch.

If you look at the leaderboard you will notice that unless the time is a XX.00 flat, there are no XX.X0 IL times at all recorded throughout the entire history of the game. Considering how many IL runs there has been this is statistically unlikely, yet plausible, and I know that the timer acts strangely and speeds up after a new second is started (this can be seen quite easily if you keep your eyes on the IGT during footage of the game), so I got a bit curious about it and started to as I always do when I am curious about how oddities works in game look at it a little bit deeper.

So I started to look at runs frame by frame to see what is going on with the timer, in particular on one IL run I did where I started to notice that FLAP runs that by all means should have been PBs were actually given quite terrible times. I looked at individual frames in my video editor, and I did notice one pecurial thing. Between two nearby frames the timer went from a XY:4Z to an XY:2Z, time had somehow magically rewinded between these two frames.

I kept looking and saw this consistently happening during the first tenth of a second on a new lap. The most plausible explaination for this is that somehow the developers made the 0 in the tenths of a second a null value, meaning that instead the hundreths of seconds are being displayed there instead, and the thousands of a second being displayed on the thousands spot, or, worse yet but not implausible considering that this is HKK (I haven't looked into this posibility yet), junk data is being displayed. Although, it seems to only go up until it reaches 9 so it is most plausible that it is the actual hundreths and thousands of seconds being shown, and the heavy speedup on the timer also implies the former theory rather than it being due to junk data being shown.

This does beg the question, how do we handle this information when it comes to IL timing? Personally during my grind I did treat the IL timer as law. This is in part because this glitch is by its nature never beneficial, and I rather have runs being corrected downwards than upwards, it is fair as it affects all runners equally, but it is also because the glitch could just be so bad to spot if it happens on lap 2 or as the final time as the only really easy way to tell it happens is if one during lap 3 gets their best time changed to a higher time (as a 31.03 is better than a 31.120 as an example, even though the 31.030 is displayed as a 31.30) which could make retiming runs a nightmare for runners to know if they truly got a PB or not, assuming they KNOW about this glitch, and the reason why I make this forum post now when I have discovered it to make it fair. I do also think there is quite a good utility to use IGT for ILs which are measured down to hundreths of a second for that same reason, to make it so half a session of IL attempts are not spent retiming runs as some levels are getting quite competitive to the point that the difference between runs are hundreths of a second. But I would love to inform people about this and a set stance on this by the mod team.

Also, this glitch seems to be present in both the Wii U and Switch version of the game.