Hey! My name is Stefan Gleibs and online I am known as Paragleiber or simply Gleiber. I am from Europe.
I have been playing video games for most of my life and racing games have always been the genre that I am most talented at. In 2005 I found out about esports and since then I have also been playing racing games competitively. Probably the first game that I ever got really good at was the original Need for Speed Most Wanted.
In 2014, I found out about The Crew and I first got to experience it myself in one of its closed betas. I was very impressed by the game and I was happy to finally see another arcade racing game with a nice grip-based handling model (after the handling in the Need for Speed series turned bad with NFS ProStreet and never became great again).
I got The Crew on release and I played it very actively for about 3 years. Last year I got The Crew 2 on its release day as well and I just now became pretty active in it again because of the new update that brought back the Summit from The Crew 1.
In real life I have completed a university degree in computer science but in the last few years I have been mostly focused on gaming and on growing my YouTube channel, where I have just now reached the mark of 50k subscribers with videos about many different racing games.
It's hard for me to narrow it down to one, so I will just share a few.
- Fun gaming fact: The Crew was actually not the first game from Ubisoft that I played for many hours. More than 10 years ago I already spent about 1000 hours in a game called Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield.
A common misconception of people who know me from YouTube is that I am only into racing games. That's not the case at all though. I like and have played video games from many different genres. Racing just happens to be the one that I am best at. In most other genres I am just an average player, so I don't really have anything special to show there.
There is one other game where I am competitive though, which is the digital card game called Hearthstone. For that game I have traveled to several different countries to compete in some big open tournaments, since I really want to be a part of the esports scene not only as a fan but also as a player and racing games don't really offer me that opportunity anymore.
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Fun non-gaming fact: If you show me a blank world map with all of the borders I can easily name over 100 countries on it. In a lot of areas like music or film I probably know less things than the average person but geography is one thing that I am good at.
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Another non-gaming fact: At university I took beginner courses in Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Normally language courses are very expensive but at my university I had the opportunity to do them for free, so I took full advantage of that. I hardly remember any of it though, so don't ask me to translate anything. :P I can still pronounce a lot of the Russian letters though, so if I see players with Russian names ingame I often know how to pronounce them. I just don't know what they mean.
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And finally something that combines gaming with real life: Last year I actually got to visit the US for the first time and I got to see several different places that I knew from playing The Crew. I saw Lombard Street, Pershing Square and Santa Monica Pier and I also walked over that pedestrian bridge at the finish line of the Highway One PvP track from The Crew 1. :P It was cool to see some of the places in real life that I have been to in the game many times.
Unlike most other big racing game YouTubers, I am not actually a big car enthusiast in real life. The reason why I play a lot of racing games is because I like to play video games competitively and I just happen to be good at the ones about racing, not because I am huge into cars.
In real life I am driving a small hatchback car that can barely reach 160 km/h and I am not a very skilled driver. I wouldn't know how to change a tire and I couldn't tell you how an engine works either, since it's just not something that I am interested in.
If I had to pick a sports car though it would probably be the Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R. I know it's a boring answer because a lot of people would choose it but it just is a really cool car and not a lot of people in the west actually own one, even though it's not as expensive as a Ferrari or a Lambo.
In The Crew I play on PC. I also own several consoles but I only really use them for the games that are exclusive to them. If a game is available for PC I will usually get it there.
It's definitely cool to be a known player in the community of a game. Sometimes in the game when I am briefly in free roam between events somebody in my session will recognize me and tell me in text chat that they have seen some of my videos. In most other games I feel a lot more anonymous.
I also made a bunch of friends through playing the game competitively and they are from many different countries like France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Russia, Estonia, Greece, India, Malaysia and even Japan. It's kind of cool to form a community with such a diverse set of people but on the other hand it's also a downside because I can't easily hang out with those people in real life like I could with friends from a more traditional hobby. But well, at least if I ever want to visit one of those places one day I will have someone that I can ask for advice or meet up with.
In The Crew 1 we sometimes organized private PvP sessions and tournaments where we got together in one lobby with 8 of the fastest players in the game. That led to some exciting races. Sadly in The Crew 2 something like that isn't really possible, since The Crew 2 doesn't have private PvP lobbies or any PvP lobbies at all where you can freely choose from all of the tracks. Therefore in The Crew 2 competitive play is mostly limited to leaderboard runs. In the first few months after release I was quite active in the game and I recorded fast leaderboard runs in 30 different events. It always feels good when you set yourself a target time for an event and then after a lot of practice and a lot of restarts you finally manage to reach it.
In The Crew 2 your results depend not only on your skill but also on the performance parts in your vehicle and on your icon perks, so if you want to get into competitive play you will first need to do a bit of leveling. You definitely don't need perfect affixes to beat the majority of players but you should at least max out the vehicle level in the discipline that you want to do.
Once that is done simply pick an event that you like and set an initial time or score in it. Then try again and try to improve your personal record by learning from the mistakes that you did before.
In most disciplines there are a few vehicles that are better than all the others and if you really want to get good ranks on the leaderboards, then you will need to use those top vehicles. If you don't know which vehicle is best for an event, then simply look at the leaderboard and see what the people at the top have used. There can be exceptions but usually the community will figure out the best vehicles quite quickly, so you don't need to test all of them yourself.
If the top times of an event seem completely out of reach, then you can try looking up the event name on YouTube to see if someone shared a video of their run.
There are also the “pro settings”, which in some disciplines can gain you multiple seconds. If you need help with things like that, then you could ask for example on the Discord server for The Crew.
However, the one thing that I want to emphasize the most is that you need to set realistic goals for yourself. I have seen people before who were inspired by my videos to try some leaderboard runs but then after a few days they were very frustrated because they couldn't beat any of my times or get rank 1 on any leaderboard and they decided to quit. That was pretty irritating and depressing to see.
If you start doing something that thousands of other people are already doing, then of course you won't be competing for rank 1 straight away. You also wouldn't pick up 100 meter running and expect to immediately have a chance against Usain Bolt or even to ever get close to his times at all.
There is nothing wrong with being ambitious. In fact that's something good. But it should be within reason. It's good if you want to become one of the better players in the game but you shouldn't expect to become the absolute best. Because a lot of other talented people are trying to be good as well and only one person can hold rank 1 in each event. And if that isn't you, then that doesn't mean that you are bad. It just means that someone else is even better.
If you hit for example rank 10 on a leaderboard with 20k players, then that is already a great result, so it irritates me when people talk about a result like that as if it was a failure (unless it's someone who really has good reasons to expect even more than that based on their past accomplishments).
The competitive racing game community is already pretty small anyway and if everybody is only ever happy with “world records”, then it will never get much bigger, since by definition not everybody can hold such records, so I highly want to encourage new players to be more reasonable with their goals and when evaluating their results. If you hit rank 10 in a very competitive event, then you shouldn't view that as “only rank 10” but as a good result that you can be happy about.
There isn't really one event that stands out to me. There are many events that are interesting in The Crew 2, so I try to not put too many hours into a single one but rather experience a bigger variety of them. Of course as a competitive player I will still replay an event a lot more often than the average player would but I try to limit it to a few hours per event these days, unless there are some actual prizes on the line, which isn't the case in The Crew 2.
In other racing games when actual prizes were on the line in the past I did practice individual tracks for over 10 hours sometimes, for example when I won a free copy of Wild Run in the Highway One community challenge in The Crew 1. But in The Crew 2 the competition has always been just for fun so far, so here I rather put a few hours into many different events instead of many hours into a single one.
On a technical level a “track” in The Crew is really just a series of checkpoints. It doesn't matter where the tarmac or the dirt road is. All you have to do to set a valid time is to hit each of the checkpoints. In between them you can do whatever you want. That's what you have to keep in mind. So if you want to find shortcuts you have to look at each pair of checkpoints and see if there is a more direct path between them than following the road or the GPS. In other words whenever you hit a checkpoint you should immediately look for the next one and see what is the fastest way to reach it.
Another thing to know is that while jumping from ramps might look pretty cool it's unfortunately not very fast, so if you want to set fast times you should try to drive around ramps that don't serve any purpose because they will only slow you down.
Thanks for the interview! It's awesome that Ubisoft and Ivory Tower recognize some of the active members of the community through various means like these interviews, the studio workshops and the Ubisoft Star Player program.
I am most active on my YouTube channel, where I try to upload multiple videos per week. In The Crew 2 I am currently doing weekly guides for all of the Summit events and so far they have been received very well, so I will probably keep doing them for a while. So if you are struggling to hit a good rank in one of the events you can have a look at my channel to see how I did it and maybe it will give you some ideas on how to improve. :)
I also have a channel on Twitch. I haven't done a lot of live streams yet and as an introvert it can be a bit stressful for me but I want to try to get more used to it and start to stream a bit more often, since the quality of the comments on YouTube can be a bit depressing sometimes and I envy a lot of streamers for the awesome community interaction that they have. So if you want to see some live gameplay from me, then make sure to give me a follow on twitch.
I am also on a lot of the other major platforms like twitter, Facebook and reddit. My username on all of them is Paragleiber.
I don't have my own Discord server but you can find me on the server for The Crew and also on the server of IsuckAtDriving, who is another YouTuber with a focus on racing games like The Crew.
Just don't try to reach me on PSN or Xbox. For some reason I regularly get messages there with questions about my videos but on a lot of days I don't even turn on my consoles, so if you want to get your questions answered you should probably ask them elsewhere. Ideally under the videos themselves. :P