Because some games are extremely popular, and verifying hundreds of runs would be a gargantuan task.
I'm the lead moderator for Sonic Adventure 2, which is one of the most popular games on the site, and a compromise has been struck in this regard; runs do require verification, but they do NOT require video. Instead, video is only required for runs of the main Stories that are sub-50 minutes RTA, and sub-2 hours for All Stories, with the logic that these times are not too difficult for players to achieve after a little dedicated practice, and then beyond that point the times start becoming more competitive.
Thusly, all times that are >50 minutes and have no video evidence are considered auto-verify, and on a practical basis therefore 'do not require verification' in the strict sense, but still need to be approved by a moderator before appearing on the leaderboards. Unticking the 'requires verification' button is a simpler way to achieve this, but obviously entails more work on the part of the mods to ensure that the runs that are appearing are legitimate. The same time threshold system that is used in SA2B can be seen in many other game rulesets where they stipulate "Times under X require video evidence", one of the points being that times ABOVE that threshold are generally very quick and easy to verify.
One of my games doesn't require verification (it isn't one I take super seriously, hence my position and time --> http://www.speedrun.com/the_swapper ) I think the mod just doesn't give a shit 4Head
you know, you can always look at submissions later and unverify them. it just makes things easier, especially if you're the only mod and often inactive.
For less popular games being able to submit a run instantly is a good motivator. As mentioned you can always go back and remove it. I agree with Drakodan. On Fairly Oddparents I only require a video for a top 3 time (the game only has a few runners).
Making it really hard to get verified will put people off that game.
I don't see any% runs needing a long time to verify, unless there's some community-agreed banned skip or glitch that a run is suspected to use (and even then, it should be clear when in the run it might occur). For any%, if the timer starts and stops in the right places, verify the run. If it doesn't, correct it yourself as mod and then verify the run. Not that hard or time-consuming. Now for "all collectibles" type runs, yes I could see those taking much longer to verify.
Cheating how, though? Any% generally means "complete the game as fast as possible." So what are you looking for except where the timer starts and stops, and the aforementioned possibility of skips or glitches the community has agreed are not fair game? If someone achieved an extraordinary time, either an unrealistically massive personal improvement or an implausible WR, sure I could see fine-tooth'ing the VOD. You're saying verification beyond even looking at a VOD -- what would that even be? Why does anyone care this much? We're not actually doing anything important here.
It sounds like we're talking about an agonising strictness of scrutiny that's like, I dunno, evaluating med school exams or something. This is a fun hobby. We're not becoming doctors here. And personally I think it would become a lot less fun if every frame of every video had to be perused to make sure somebody didn't commit the grave sin of knocking someone out of 29th place illegitimately. Frankly in my games, there's runners I'd freely rubber-stamp if they submit new runs, because I trust them, know their general skill level of the game, and figure they'd like to see their runs get posted.
"Actually verifying runs takes a long time. Like, a real long time. "
I...does it? Have I not been doing it right? Because I basically just watch the run (often on 2x speed because YouTube does that now) just to make sure the run is one piece and the details are all correct. This is really all I've found to be necessary in 99% of cases. This takes like, a few minutes at most.
and frankly SDA's verification process doesn't take ages because they were so stringent and meticulous, it took ages because the process was just kind of shit. And cheated runs got through anyway sometimes.
I have no context for any of that but lmao cheating at fighting game speedruns of all things
@ FurryWulfz The Street Fighter videos were actually obvious even to a relatively untrained eye because they featured TAS-quality menuing.
Most instances of cheating are going to be pretty easy to spot for anyone who knows their game decently well. I was watching a new SA2B player the other day who had forgotten to turn off a game modification before starting a run, and it was blindingly obvious as soon as he gained control of Sonic that the game was not operating under factory conditions. Of course, some people may go to greater lengths if they're DELIBERATELY cheating, but unless they have a similarly fine understanding of the game, there's always going to be telltale signs. And if they do have that required understanding, they're less likely to cheat since they probably don't NEED to in order to achieve the times they want.
I'm in full agreement that SDA's verification system is archaic and overly-drawn out, I have absolutely no interest in ever submitting anything over there, even though some of the runs I've done far outstrip the respective runs they have on there.
Overall I think approaching verification as an 'anti-cheating' check primarily instead of a 'submission QA' check is just going to be needlessly counter-productive most of the time. The number of submissions you'll ever receive that actually feature cheating compared to legitimate runs is vanishingly small.
[quote]SDA looked at audio and frames to verify no cheating had been done. As in, opening runs in programs and looking at audio wavelength among other things in detail so they could 100% say someone hasn't spliced the run, as an example. A lot of the time, this can take a while. [/quote] No, that's a myth. You're expected to watch the run in full, but that's it. Many runs were only later found to be spliced, when other people did this after already having suspicions.
Yup, that's why TSA's runs were on there for so long until like 5-6 years ago when people realized he spliced a ton of his runs. SDA was not perfect nor was it that in depth.