No problem. SRC is good with notifications and I check the boards almost every day.

"I would be interested to see which runs were rejected due to this, and if they were rop 5 times"

I remember specifically that Joseph did a world record run that was rejected, although it was before the invention of TetrisGym. The point is the same though; no matter who does a speedrun, it should adhere to the existing rules of its leaderboard.

I think I can address the rest together here: What you are describing kind of already happened years ago, long before I even found out about it. The Tetris Discord points to a wide variety of leaderboards that attempt to cover everything the community does. I was so impressed when I combed through them and saw myself on every applicable leaderboard, years after I had played those runs, without ever submitting anything.

The reason this happened is because the Tetris community is composed mostly of players who are really good at Tetris, and the speedrunning leaderboards didn't have leaderboards for non-speedrunning statistics such as "earliest maxouts" and "highest score". SRC isn't the hub for the Tetris community in general because, now that the game is literally infinite, there isn't actually much to speedrun. So just to be perfectly clear: five years from now, if there aren't many people submitting speedruns to the Tetris leaderboards, it won't be because a romhack was disallowed.

All that being said, I am not the only Moderator here; I'm not the only person with a say in the matter. Based on everything you've said about TetrisGym, and especially about Qual Mode, I don't think it's necessary to "ban" it from use on speedruns entirely, but if it is to be allowed for SRC runs, there should definitely be a separate distinction. This could be something as extreme as new leaderboards devoted to Gym use, or as minor as a new "Yes/No" tag on every run indicating if TetrisGym was used, with a rule saying Qual Mode must be used. Updates like this do happen on leaderboards, but not if there isn't demand for them. If the demand exists, and other Moderators think it's a good idea, I wouldn't be against it.

This is not a decision to be taken lightly. My instinct is that the answer should be no, for a number of reasons:

-As a general rule, romhacks are not allowed on virtually any leaderboard for any reason. In fact there have already been Tetris runs that were rejected in the past (not by me) for this very reason.

-The main reason people would want to use it for the categories that currently exist - quality of life, as referred to in the original post - constitutes an unfair advantage (however trivial) over players who only have access to a Tetris cartridge. Not everyone has a flash cart, and lag rules out emulator play for most people.

-The leaderboards that currently exist simply wouldn't gain much from allowing a romhack. What I mean is that if we were running a leaderboard such as "high score" then having an uncapped score counter would eliminate the need to manually calculate points, and it could be argued that something like that would be important. But for the leaderboards that currently exist, we're basically talking about removing an 8 second or so cutscene between attempts, which by contrast does not seem important.

-Finally, for the leaderboards that currently exist, it seems extremely unlikely that anyone would get a world record without specifically aiming for it, so it's extremely unlikely that someone playing a game on a romhack would 'accidentally' get a world record on one of these categories (since the optimal strategy involves purposely playing above the bottom, which people don't do in standard games). And if a player is going to aim for a speedrun time, I see no reason why it would be any issue for them to switch over to a Tetris cartridge to do so.

For these reasons, my vote personally would be no.

It was brought to my attention by SpeedwalkerMicah that load times varied drastically between different players. In order to make the leaderboards fair for everyone, it was important to prevent this from having an impact on the differences between people's runs. I have therefore changed the posted rules for timing to exclude the opening loading screen and to stop time when the prize envelope appears on screen, to make it equivalent to cases where the envelope doesn't actually appear. All leaderboard times have been adjusted accordingly.

If what you were specifically looking for is whether you can use Mesen, it's okay with me. I have updated the rules to reflect the list of emulators that is fairly standard for all NES games, and added Mesen for this one. Obviously, run-ahead is not allowed.

I took a look at the differences between Game A and Game B, and from what I've seen it looks like there would be almost no difference between a speedrun on Game A and a speedrun on Game B. It looks like there would be no difference in terms of what would constitute an optimal time, and nowhere near large enough of an increase in difficulty to expect an optimal time to be significantly less common. For these reasons, I don't see the need to add a separate category for Game B.

If I recall correctly, in addition to having to pause at the right moment, there is a 50/50 chance you'll be on a bad frame and the clip won't work. Based on the way it was explained to me, there is no viable setup to get around this coinflip, just a lot of resetting.

I realize that only top players who only use Tetris Gym would be likely to try this, but if a new category were to be added to NES Tetris, it would be standard to expect everyone to do the run on an unmodded NES Tetris cartridge or ROM with no Game Genie codes, and including all victory screens.

Really well done by the way.

Dragon Warrior's RNG, while otherwise straightforward, is for whatever reason unpredictable after the hero opens a door. Since there is a door in the throne room, RNG manipulation requires a save after exiting the throne room, which there would be no reason to do in a no manipulation run. In Final Fantasy you can beat the game to reset the RAM RNG which governs attacks, and then you get first strike against 5 Imps in your first battle, but in order to continue manipulating the RNG you would have to do something really obvious in the second round of that battle (there is no way to kill 5 Imps with 4 characters in the first round of the first battle). For these reasons, no RNG manipulation categories in those games appear to be free of extended manipulation.

The general debate that occurred when these categories were being conceived centered around the possibility of hiding manipulation, and that is the main issue here. If the community supports the idea of taking the risk and the Moderator is comfortable with the implications, I would support the choice to divide the categories if the rules for no RNG manipulation include a requirement to show a game over from the previous game or something like that.

(For the record, if the categories were split, I would fully intend to play both of them.)

I sympathize with your position. I've seen many leaderboards thrive for years, then have RNG manipulation discovered and have 2 separate categories for the runs, and everybody's happy. Unfortunately, in this game I don't think there's anyway to prove that no RNG manipulation is being used. Theoretically someone could do what looks like a normal run, but go faster than normal out of advance knowledge of what pieces are coming.

Under normal circumstances I would want 2 categories for this game too. But because there is apparently no way to prove a runner wasn't using RNG manipulation, I'm not sure it's feasible here.

Emulators are allowed. FCEUX is a good one to use. A lot of people use Bizhawk as well. Mesen has recently been banned by a lot of communities so I wouldn't use that one. Smartphone emulators are banned. Best of luck to you!

If anyone is still concerned about this, I don't think there's any reason to classify what's happening here as a glitch. It's sort of like answering the riddle before it's asked; the question was already in mind, and answering it before you hear it doesn't make your answer any less incorrect.

This doesn't really change anything either, other than the fact that we don't have to speak and hear the riddle. If you had to ask for the riddle, the speedrun wouldn't change; we would just end up resetting 5 out of 6 attempts, which would definitely be worth it to save the time it would otherwise take to pick up other items used only for the riddle.

Things like this happen in NES games all the time, and while it could arguably be described as a programming oversight, I don't think there's any reason to exclude it from the glitchless category.

A core principle of speedrunning revolves around the timer starting given a specific criterion. In this game, it's when you gain control of your character. So the timer would have to start when you gain control in the practice stage, unless you were to reset afterwards (to start a new run). Resets are allowed in some games (to retain some benefit or manipulate RNG) so the question would normally be up for debate, but since you lose the meatball on reset there's no way to make it speedrun-viable.

This was the right thing to do. I have always felt that different localizations should have different categories whenever they have differences that cause one to be faster, even if it's just length of text. This instance is a much clearer situation. Those slow pitches are hilarious

Very interesting. My initial reaction is that this should be allowed, as it is a natural game function available to all players, but I think a new category should be made, and the current category should allow no speed changes. As Neural89 said, people will choose their own speeds, which will cause the any% record to plummet extremely low. It definitely seems to me like the kind of dynamic that warrants a separate category. Nice find Dwedit!

Is there a listing of all deaths somewhere? If we're going to float this idea, perhaps someone could post a complete list here.

The notes for vaxherd's any% route simply state what to do if starting from empty save RAM, but don't say anything about how to do this. I tried starting a run by deleting all files and creating the starting files required but this yielded incorrect stats for my new characters. I am assuming the discard counter is what needs to be reset, I tried setting the discard counter used in the glitchless category and indeed got different character stats, but still not the right ones.

Could someone please state in explicit detail what is required to set up an NES cartridge from any state to execute this run? I imagine it will be useful for new runners to be able to find this information here as well. Many thanks in advance.

The rules don't say "no recordings" they say "no submitting a movie file." Youtube video is fine.

With the arrival of a new speedrun using warps throughout, it appears the time has finally come to create a Warpless category for all stages. I am moving all warpless runs over to the new category. Players going for a warpless run on all 16 stage layouts are also welcome to submit the time they achieve on the first 6 levels, effectively playing 2 categories at the same time. Enjoy!

I think the rules for '1 Loop' should just say "Warps are not allowed." I'll add that in tonight.

As for the 'All Levels' category, after being informed by link_7777 about the warping process, I honestly think that if warps are permitted for 'All Levels' there should also be an 'All Levels (Warpless)' category. My 'All Levels' run currently has no warps, and I think the challenge of completing all 16 unique road layouts without warping is something that should exist. Just something to think about for now.

Ultimately I think there shouldn't be any custom teams or leagues. If this were a bigger game, I'd be fine with having a separate category for times achieved with a customization, but at the moment I don't see that as necessary. It's not uncommon for sports games to allow you to build a custom team, and my opinion is the same for all of them.