United StatesI've noticed a couple people say that runs should only be able to be submitted by the runner- I see three issues with this.
- Someone like SSBMstuff who doesn't want to directly submit to leaderboards to avoid the personal drive of "this isn't record I can get record" but would still like his times there.
- Importing times from offsite leaderboards, especially when the runner was the person who originally submitted. Should those runs be ignored by the site just because the runner is no longer active to submit on their own?
- Co-op runs. Would those only need to be submitted by one person on the team, regardless of the other runners? Would all runners need to submit? Co-op runs raise another interesting point about what to do if one person no longer wants the run up but the remaining runners do- which side do you go with? To everyone who said "just remove the run if the runner wants it gone"- how do you handle this instance?
Another option that's been used for hardware running games fast (such as the Super Game Boy) is to find the difference in game speed (if it's constant) and apply a conversion at the end of the run.
CTR is big enough to handle the divide as I mentioned on the Discord, but I figured I'd mention another alternative here as well just so it's documented.
As you say, involved runners of the game will know of the run and who ran it.
New mods would presumably be involved runners who have heard the details, making that a non-issue.
Adding a comment to the anonymous run simply stating "this run was viewed by X mod, it's a trusted time, runner wanted information removed" doesn't have any issues, as it answers any questions and doesn't raise "well wait if that's a good time, why isn't it on the leaderboards?" confusion. I'd argue that's a lot more confusing.
Maybe I'm blind to the potential issues, but there's definitely some real gain in accuracy and reduction in confusion.
Alright, I'll post the dissenting opinion here.
I don't believe a time known to be legitimate should be removed or missing from a leaderboard. A missing time just creates confusion to people outside of the community, and people inside the community still know of and recognize the run and its holder. For the standard viewer/person joining a community, it creates a moment of confusion especially when the missing time(s) are at the top. I feel that allowing these runs to be removed is sabotaging the integrity of the leaderboards- perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but imagine if all of the top 20 for, say, Super Mario 64 decided they didn't like leaderboards. Would pretending those runs don't exist be a desirable result?
That said- I'm in favor of removing identifying features from runs that the runner wants removed. The time stays up, the runner isn't identified, the boards stay accurate, and everybody wins. Which features specifically get removed can vary from game to game, but I don't think anyone should have an issue with "Anonymous" and a time next to it, no console, no date, not even a video.
tl;dr Full run removal: absolutely not Removal of everything but the time: sure. The time is what's important.
I have all of my best times (and scores) on Cyberscore. https://www.cyberscore.me.uk/game/1859
I don't like the interface for SRcom ILs at the moment, and so I tend to avoid setting them up when I can- adding 91 times would be a bit of a pain, but I would do it if necessary.
The time is publicly available data. I can understand and would be in favor of respecting the spirit of your request by removing all identifying information about the run, but removing the time itself only creates confusion.
See, whether the time is on the leaderboards or not, the community knows that it exists. If the run isn't on the leaderboards, people will clarify and answer any questions about the run, including who did the run- spreading the information you don't want further, as in the Streissand effect. However, if the run is on the leaderboards but there is no identifying information, then the only people who know are the people who already know, and the removal has no effect on them.
But seriously- it's data. Accuracy is important, especially at the top.
Why did your wishes trump everyone else's for the leaderboards when you nuked them? A lot of people wanted their times there and you denied that- clearly, in your mind, that makes it okay to go against the wishes of the runner for personal reasons.
Stop trying to play the victim here.
edit: You also left out the fact that you yourself kept adding and removing the run.
The Elgato is good for HD games, but a lot of games don't benefit from that as they're SD. A good SD card is the GV-USB2, which is pretty close to plug and play. For anything 5th gen or earlier, that'd be the capture card to recommend- and it's perfectly sufficient for 6th gen and Wii games as well. Microphones are nice, but a headset works perfectly fine and is generally going to be cheaper. They aren't strictly required to stream either. A webcam is 100% not required to stream and should probably be marked optional. Streaming recommendations make no mind to PC (or mobile/handheld) runs, which don't require a capture card. Though, DS and 3DS capture cards exist, they aren't easily available and certainly aren't available on Amazon. That's where recommending a good camera in its place would be most useful.
On the searching side of things- "popular platforms" weren't useful to me. "pl" recommended PS3 and PS4, and I know that PS1 and PS2 games are more commonly run, especially PS1. I don't like that there's no way to search for specific category types, such as any% or 100% (yes, I know not all games have a 100% category and for some games the 100% category is > 100%- I still think that this sort of search functionality would be nice to have even if it was somewhat buggy. After all, the difference between any% and 100% can be hours.)
On the game pages, two things don't work properly. Subcategories only show the fastest run for the main category (see Link to the Past) and any special formatting put into the rules field (such as bold, bullet points, or even just new lines/enters/returns) are ignored on your site. Also, miscellaneous categories aren't shown as miscellaneous- this is probably an important distinction to make.
NTSC-U and PAL: very similar, I believe NTSC loads slightly quicker but that could be up to specific hardware instance.
PS2 and PS3: PS3 lags a lot less and loads a fair bit quicker, saving over a minute throughout the run.
JP and US: There is a skip in the airplane level that only works on JP, which saves about 30 seconds I believe.
Kei vs. Yumi: The first morph behaves slightly differently, which makes White Monkey slightly faster with Kei. Some monkeys are a member of Yumi's fan club, and so don't move at all when approached. The hot spring level also starts slightly differently depending on character, as the door opens to either the men's or women's changing room. There's a passage between them, and Yumi's path here is slightly quicker.
That's the exact kind of statement that makes nobody ever trust you in a position of power.
It's also more focused on MMOs and not speedrunning, making the original survey more relevant for polling the speedrunning community.
I would say that the run was done by both players- I see no issues with a tag-team run but some people might.
If you don't mind going PC, Helen's Mysterious Castle is 30-40 minutes depending on category and is currently $1.39 on Steam. Yes, this is the obligatory "plugging a game basically only I run" suggestion...
...with that out of the way, you want a GBA JRPG in the 60-90 minute range. First generation Pokemon games are a little longer than that at around 2 hours, but fits everything else you want.
Final Fantasy Adventure and Final Fantasy Legend (1, 2 and 3) also fit, though I'm not sure quite how well.
Boktai (which I've only heard of due to its solar sensor in the cartridge) apparently is about a 2 hour run.
I have the PS1 version of this game, and the Puzzle Mode has 100 stages there- and they're also completely different than the Arcade version. Can we get a console category?
To expand on Crash 2- there are 3 any% categories. Any% no game over abuse, Any% game over abuse, and Any% item glitch (true any%). There's also a partial save corruption-y thing that can allow saving over a completed file and ending up in the final boss, but this is treated as NG+ and not tracked due to being trivial.
NOGO is the "standard" category of going through all 25 levels to get the crystals, beating a boss every 5. GO abuse does the same, but you can get a game over after collecting a crystal and it still counts as collected, as long as another level is completed. So you can enter a level, get the crystal, game over, repeat 4 times and then complete the 5th level and you'll get all 5 crystals. Any%, however, enters Snow Go, bounces on a box 200 times, abuses spin-crouching to maintain a bounce combo, and then kills 24 (25?) seals to get 25 crystals. This works due to consecutive bounces giving more wumpa fruit and then a life, and 200 indexes past the start is where crystals are stored in memory.
Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly has a lengthy loading screen, a cutscene skip, a loading screen, 3-4 seconds of movement to skip into the final boss, a loading screen, and then a dumb boss.
CTR any% involves tripping the credits from within battle mode by completing 19 matches- this is best done by making player 2 suicide on beakers repeatedly.
My guess: something to do with VSync messing with the framerate.
This sort of issue where a game will run faster than intended under certain conditions has come up before, even for a game as popular as Ori and the Blind Forest. I don't know the specifics, but if a game is running fast, then the run doesn't count.
It's legal, but generally bad practice. Seeing as the boards are now completely empty, I think this is actually a worse state than getting some initial times down.
I would think that the milliseconds place would be better than the hours field- hours caps at 23, while milliseconds accepts all values from 0 through 999.
It does matter- the page takes quite a lot longer to load than other pages, and lags for me when I scroll it. It also doesn't really scale well with even more threads and activity.
Pretty much exactly that. Posts are limited per page, so why aren't threads?
The Ape Escape speedrunning community has a Discord of its own. It's still a little small due to some historic overlap with other communities, but it's still there.
So, here's the invite: https://discord.gg/8CQxxBT
On the behalf of the AE speedrunning community, we hope to see you in here soon! :)
