(editorial note: this is a translation of what @VelaRUS originally wrote in Russian. All author’s language mannerisms were purposefully kept intact. Any irregularities should be attributed to differences in phrasing between the two languages.)

@Speedrunners

Hello Diablo 2 speedrun community.

As you know, a day before yesterday speedrunner @Bender_meats_fry had accused me, @VelaRUS, of using cheats.

Link to the accusation:

As I know already, many other speedrunners had taken these accusations quite seriously and asked for clarification not myself, but speedrunner @327, as a Russian-speaking, and, closest to me person because we often spend time on each other’s streams. Strictly speaking many of you had already received answers from him and acknowledged that I play fair and do not use any cheats. He was able to parry all claims you had against me. For those who hear about all this for the first time, I’d like to add:

1. Frozen Armor is easily pre-casted spamming hotkey+RMB during the game load screen. Try it yourself.

2. Photo of my desktop:

I do not know where would I put, according to Bender, another monitor on top. If it were where I have the router and all the cables, my eyes would look much more towards the top, and not like on the webcam. I have a 27” monitor and sit quite closely to it. Therefore by looking at HP, mana, mobs and so on - I just look at different parts of the screen. Looking upwards, as Bender noted, I am either looking at mob HP bar or just at the action in the upper part of the monitor. Or do you think that during speedrun, I am very interested in what is happening on the wall above the monitor? I shall add, that from the beginning of my speedrunner journey, I play not in a small window, rather in a windowed “fullscreen” at 800*600 resolution. Therefore the image is always huge.

3. With regards to 100% swapcast accuracy I probably cannot prove my innocence in any way. But I think that in 3 years of speedrunning, if you want, you can achieve this, there is nothing supernatural about it. There are some speedrunners that do perform swapcast quite well, and there do not seem to be any issues with-’em. I do not know, what is hard about pressing two buttons simultaneously performing swapcast? If you’re interested, I have the cheapest 10 year old keyboard: Logitech Classic Keyboard 200.

4. With regards to the programs on my computer desktop. I do not hide them and sometimes openly show my desktop. Don’t think I did this by accident. DDMM. Just search for this thing in Google. The first link will get you to “DDMM - Dual Display Mouse Manager”. It’s a program that prevents mouse cursor from going to the other monitor in older games. A real cheat in Bender’s view.

Macro recorder and partially WeMod - for most stupid Steam achievements. The brightest example, why I have initially installed macro editor, is in the Age of Empires (2013) game, where were achievements for 100!!! wins for each of the nations. And there are quite many of them in the game. Totalling over 2000 wins. How much time would 100% achievements for platinum would “fairly” need this game? Year, five years, ten? Thanks, no thanks. I might be a speedrunner, but I want to have a life too. Macro Recorder and WeMod help me neutralize mistakes of game developers, who do not think with their heads, adding such achievements in their games. Now for the most interesting - TurboHUD. Bender’s logic is that if you use maphack in Diablo 3 game, you also use it in Diablo 2. Nice logic without logic. Yes, I admit, that since season 4 of Diablo 3 I use TurboHUD. I never hid this. I would say even more, in 2018 I openly streamed this game using this maphack on Twitch, for which I deservingly spend a week in ban. Ban on Twitch, not Blizzard. Blizzard do not care about this program, they do not care about bots either.

Here’s an example, TurboHUD is visible here: https://www.twitch.tv/vela_rus/clip/RelentlessHyperNuggetsCharlieBitMe Why do I use it? Because I had lost any respect for Blizzard as a company. They stopped making games, they started making money. In my view many of the things available in TurboHUD should be in the game from the beginning. To make a pleasant user interface, where all buffs and their timers in seconds are visible is the game developer job! And only of the game developer! And when the developer does not care about their project, because the money from sales had already been collected, people will make a good UI themselves. That’s, essentially, what TurboHUD is. This is my personal view, it may not align with yours. But to accuse me that I use maphack in D2, because my eyes are pointing upwards and because I use TurboHUD in a completely different game is laughable and stupid at best.

Well, it seems that I have transparently and openly responded to all the unfounded accusations against me.

Now to what I want to say to the whole speedrunner community.

When I have accused @Bender_meats_Fry of using cheats on the Diablo 2 forum, speedrun.com, trying to get people’s attention:

https://www.speedrun.com/d2r/thread/d7s3o

I was simply ignored, without anyone even trying to assess the situation. Almost everyone took Bender’s side, because he had done so much for the community, holy man, how could he cheat? As a result many left me after all this. But I knew what I was getting into and was firmly confident in my words, even at the expense of part of my audience. I wanted to share my thoughts with people - I did.

Now the situation is reversed - Bender accused me and what happened? VelaRUS is a cheater? Oh a scoundrel, how dares he? People didn’t want to figure out what’s what, because they blindly believe everything that holy Bender says. They immediately attacked me for being a fraud. Somehow an unfair situation, don’t you think? Why are the words of two different speedrunners treated completely differently? Someone is not heard and someone is labeled fraud from the get go. A peculiar situation: Bender says that there are “unfair” programs on my desktop, so I’m a cheater. That’s his words. In 10 minutes time, on his own stream he opens a folder with maphack for D2 and shows it to everyone on the stream. As it turns out, according to his own logic, he is a cheater himself? All of a sudden he has a fully configured maphack, a character for it and a ready scene in OBS. A coincidence, indeed. Clown.

And what about @Mekalb, who is always one of the first people defending Bender?

There is a tournament going with a big prize pool from @MrLlamaSC, where you could pick any in-game class with a timer penalty. A weeks time for the whole tournament. Mekalb, as well as Bender picks Amazon. He is unsuccessful the whole week, can’t even get into the top 5. Last day of the tournament. Not more than 7-8 hours till the end. His personal best is 6:19:19. He did runs the whole week, all is bad, he won’t get the money. And all of a sudden, during the last hours he beats his own time. By 5 minutes? No. By 10? No. Maybe by half-an-hour? Also no? And by how much? By a whopping 1 hour, 5 minutes, 11 seconds. After a week of unsuccessful tries immediately becoming the tournament leader. You could probably ask how is this possible? It’s simple: sham Titan’s revenge, 2 pieces of Sander’s boots, Peasant Crown, 100 res amulet and many other good items. As an example, in all 3 years of speedrunning I got Titan’s revenge only once (and not on amazon). Also Sander’s boots and Peasant Crown are quite rare, they drop every 20-50 runs. And here is the last day of the tournament, all these rare items drop within a single run and his personal best is beaten by over an hour. Here is this run: https://www.speedrun.com/d2r/run/mejld50y A coincidence for sure! Clown number 2.

Then there is a question about how in reality do Bender and Mekalb treat real proven cheaters!

There is this one speedrunner @AnIceEggSample, who is also a VIP/moderator on Bender’s and Mekalb’s Twitch channels.

On August 25, 2020 speedrunner @327 published a video on his youtube channel exposing anIceEggsample

In this specific case the forgery was obvious. This was also acknowledged by at least one of the speedrun moderators @Indrek, who in the comment under this video wrote:

"Thanks for putting in the time to make this. I agree this run seems to be spliced”.

So what happens next? His runs are just deleted. Not banned. Deleted. And he remains, as before the whole story a moderator with Bender and Mekalb. That’s the attitude of these two speedrunners towards cheaters. In my view this whole situation nicely characterizes them and shows, how much they really do (not) care about cheating. anIceEggsample - clown number 3.

The same can be said about the earlier speedrunner @Slimo, who posted on his twitter, that he “draws his maps” and deleted this post on the next day, stating, that it was just a joke. His speedruns were also just deleted and that’s it.

@Bender_meats_fry it is saddening, that you are so upset about my latest D2 Hell SC p1 Amazon. That was the last straw for you, ain’t it? To beat, with the most standard items, your phony run of the “most honest Bender”, in which there were:

https://www.speedrun.com/d2lod/run/ylkggkrz

Ruby from Andariel 3 first way in Arcane Sanctuary 3 Amn runes without any Countess Very early gloves 20IAS +2java Very early javelin 30IAS +1ama Early SoJ

You're upset, right? Here's a piece of advice. For your next run swindle better items. You can add Peasant Crown, amulet +3java and many others. Learn from Mekalb and try to beat his D2R Hell SC p1 Amazon. All in all I think that it will be you two remaining, “outcheating” one another. You can take your friend Eggsample with you, he’s also not bad at it.

As a result, I do not treat any runs by these speedrunners to be legit for a long time. And this message would not exist if Bender hadn’t picked this topic up again. It is very sad, that even after a year you have remained blind and do not see obvious things. I would like to return 5 years back, when this was a very friendly community, where these controversies did not exist. It was this that attracted me so long ago. Because there were excellent people here. And right now the community is in such state, that you count the days when you can run away to Diablo 4.

Should we go back to the matter at hand, me (here) and 327 (in DMs) should have responded to all accusations against me proving my innocence. Therefore, I ask the speedrunner community to demand that @Bender_meats_Fry publicly apologize to me. I in turn can apologize to Bender, Mekalb, anIceEggsample for calling them clowns. Couldn’t find other words. I am very emotional now, sorry.

Should my request be denied, I will treat it as ethnic discrimination. I cannot find any other explanation as to why my accusations were ignored by everybody a year ago, but accusation of myself had drawn many speedrunners to the case? I can make only one such conclusion. I am a person who spends most of his life sitting at home and playing games.

I'm not going to weigh in on who, if anyone, cheated however I would like to be clear that I believe any accusation of cheating should have substantial proof (similar to what we have seen from 327 in regards to egg).

I understand that Vela and those who support you would be emotional (and rightly so) given that you have been accused of cheating. However throwing accusations at respected members of the speedrunning community Bender and Mekalb with no evidence is not going to get you anywhere.

With regards to LoD speedrunning (which I think we can all agree is far easier to cheat at) is there a possibility that diablo run or d2 interface could check to see if a specific program (i.e. slash diablo) is running and flag it?

Vela, Just to clarify a couple of things - the 6:19:19 you are referring to is my LOD amazon time from almost 3 years ago. I would be very careful throwing out accusations or slights with inaccurate information.

It looks like either I didn't update my splits to whatever my current PB was, or my time was 5:29. If you have ever watched my stream, you'd know that "PB" and "WR" are often not my PB or the WR. It's times I put in there because I'm interested in comparing against those specific times/splits or I'm lazy.

I tend to think my time was in the 5:30 to 5:45 range. Just like almost every other race during the 8-week tournament, I did a no-reset run to get the mechanics of the run down. My final time, 5:14, put me in 2nd place (not the leader of the tournament?), 7s in front of bender, a minute behind kano, and 10 minutes ahead of 327 (whom competed in the same category). By the rules of the tournament, my run was 30 minutes in front of you, a newer speedrunner/competitor that never made top-5 the entire tournament.

I believe Bender did the 5:29 marked "WR" in my splits. He also did a no-reset run early that week and decided he wanted to try other classes. I think after I "did runs the whole week" it's not too reasonable to have a run with similar times as bender and 327, and to beat them with the gear I got. Accusing me of getting a 65 minute PB simply because I got good gear is a "sham" or blatantly ridiculous. My gear sounds similarly good to your 2nd fastest SC amazon run (a couple weeks ago?) which had a ravenfrost ring (which I could probably say I've gotten ravenfrost "only once (and not on amazon)"), which is significantly better for amazon than using titans revenge for plague javing hell ancients down. Also in that run you have duskdeep, nokozan, dwarf star, +2 jav gloves. Runs with good gear happens, and you are also a prime example. Sometimes good gear drops, and it happens more in runs where a 30mf nagel ring drops early on. We also watched you improve your hell amazon time significantly within a span of one or two weeks. My progress in D2R hell amazon mimics your progress in LOD hell amazon, and now you know how a hell amazon run can come abruptly to an end late in the run due to immunities or almost unavoidable deaths, hence why I agree with your statement "all is bad" for me that week, until my final time.

As for aniceeggsample, you can refer to the LOD mods for that decision, I was not involved. My understanding is the speedrun.com site mods got involved and recommended a course of action for his run.

Vela, you often accuse speedrunners of cheating often within your community. Me included. It gets around. You openly accused bender a while back, on this website, of getting a lot of sanders boots. Bender and sanders boots is a meme that comes up regularly in your chat. What is this about? Is it not even a little bit hypocritical to ask for an apology? I don't get it. You even just admitted to cheating in diablo 3, the game you are also known for and speedrun. I don't follow the logic.

For Bender--I will once again say I do not suspect bender of cheating. I learn from his streams, and I often watch what he does extremely closely, as a skilled speedrunner myself. He doesn't do things that make no sense, and profit from it. "Learn from Mekalb and try to beat his D2R Hell SC p1 Amazon" is an extraordinarily ironic statement, as you accused bender of cheating for having abnormally good gear. I think it's fair to say that any of the top 5-10 speedrunners could take a race or a world record at any point from another, and is what has happened all in the last couple of months. Kano, 327, myself, Llama, Bender, Bokser have all won, playing against each other in a race, in the last ~10 competitions (with cash prizes) we have had in the past 6 months.

Sounds like twitch drama and he said she said. Maybe keep it to twitch unless you are making accusations that include actual evidence regarding the people you are accusing, something like 327's video is a nice example. I don't understand what the intention of this post is but let me know if you're ever doing swapcasting lessons, I'm pretty terrible at it.

Hey guys,

I am going to keep my reply here as short as I can:

Yes, Bender has approached me as a LoD moderator to look into your runs. He gave me a list of examples that on first glance look very suspicious, but on closer inspection can be explained reasonably (for the most part). If you want to go into detail on this, feel free to reach out to me on discord. (I haven't dug past Bender's list yet, so there isn't much I can say beyond that due to time restraints)

One conclusion on both your accusation against Bender and vice versa for me is: Diablo 2 is an RNG based game. Sometimes you get lucky, most of the time you don't. By playing the game over and over, you increase your chance to eventually get lucky. And you can increase your chances by using Magic Find gear. Item drops can never be the base to accuse ppl from cheating. I can even say that I found Titans on 2 Amazon runs (1 on SC, 1 on HC) within a week. I was surprised that ppl didn't accuse me back then...

For the animation swap: I must say, even with a large amount of practice years ago, I couldn't get close to your accuracy on hitting it every time. And as far as I know, animation swap needs to have 2 buttons pressed within a frame of each other. Else, you could just glue a piece of wood on your keyboard. Is this evidence? No. But it certainly can feel weird to ppl that tried to achieve this.

On the topic of Slimo: He openly said that he cheated in his runs and then deleted them by himself. While that wasn't the decision of the Moderator team at the time, the pure statement needs to be taken seriously, even if he later reversed it, so we decided to not bring his runs back.

On the topic of Egg: There was a thorough investigation into a run that looked spliced. After finding a lot of circumstantial evidence, we decided to ask the speedrun.com mods on how to proceed. They saw it similar to us, we didn't have enough evidence to permanently ban him, but at the very least to remove the run in question.

And finally: Moderators cannot force anyone to do anything. And while I do understand the notion of wanting them to apologize, there is nothing we can do for you there. If anything, it feels like this should go both ways in the end.

Cheers Teo

Having macro and maphack tools on desktop isn't suspicious to me, most of us have macros and maphack tools that we use to practice or reset runs. I mean Bender himself opened maphack to prove a point about velarus using maphack.

The frozen armor cast after every save and exit looked strange to me as if it was a macro doing it, but there were also instances in the runs where it didn't happen. Also it isn't as difficult to do as Bender made it seem in the video. 327 showed video of him doing it easily. I gave it a try as well and I can see getting used to the timing with relative ease.

1. I can't say that Mekalb and I are close friends, but I have a lot of respect for him as strong speedrunner. I don't believe that Mekalb ever used illegal software. As for the MrLlama event, at this time all top-level speedrunners grind 12 hours everyday. Of course, someone had to be lucky, Mekalb get one, it happens.

2. Regarding Bender's accusation of Vela cheats:

A) The accusation of maphacking does not make any sense. Vela has many strengths (mechanical play, strong emotional control) but his maps reading is still very low. Even in the world record, he can be lost in act3 maps (and not only there). The fact that his eyes are jumping (and where are your Bender eyes?) is just a consequence of a large monitor. If you look at my game, I sometimes even turn my head, although I play on one monitor. Veal also has eyes jumps in boss fights or farming from 52 to 58 lost cities, and I dont think he is doing it for "maphacking".

B ) No idea why Bender say about frozen armor frame perfect skills, try to choose frozen armor and its use in the load yourself and you will understand that there is nothing complicated about it

C) About swapcast - I can't tell if Vela uses macros or not. Again there are many other runners with 100% swapcasts like Bokser. As I see, a World Record holder should be able to swap at the perfect level, it's not that hard of a trick. Vela has world records without any swapcasts (druid or sorc), why would he spoil his reputation on other classes, if his skill allows him to do it without?

3. As for the accusations against Bender. I do not consider accusations against anyone, but they must contain evidence. If Vela is willing to provide evidence, it should be considered. The fact that he is lucky is not evidence. Until there is evidence, there is nothing to talk about.

Your accusations to me: All you offered was that my best hellruns have good gear and that i found sanders twice in a week if i remember correctly. What do you want the mods to do with that? Provide a concrete trace and im sure they are willing to look into it. Thanks to you i keep getting russian first time chatters in my stream, calling me a cheater for the past year, yet you have absolutely nothing to offer as proof. If anybody should apologize its you

TurboHud:"Why do I use it? Because I had lost any respect for Blizzard as a company."

You loose respect for them and then start to cheat? So lets say roughly a year ago you lost respect for us and all your runs ever since are half an hour faster... You get salty because you lost every competition, accuse me and all of a sudden you are way faster without applying any of the newer found knowledge... not sure that explanation makes you less suspicous

Makro accusation: Look at the normal segments of his runs, whenever he shops+resets or checks shrines, 95% of the time you wont see the mainmenu. Possible to do, sure, i just doubt the consistency. Same for 100% swapcast accuracy in kombination with 8hour+ streams. If you are a heartsurgeon in real life i could see that happen (took me 2minutes to find bokser messing his swapcast up in his hell palarun btw). i believe in 90-95% consistency, but not 100% The same goes for swapping and casting skills during the loading screen. By itself not that hard. But can you exit, move the mouse to the right position, click at the right time to not see the mainmenu, click enter and then do it within ~1.4 seconds? A 100% of the time when you try? Vela can. Theres a faster one i cant find anymore, roughly 1.2, but this gives you an idea.

So yeah, in my opinion there are 100% scripts involved. As comparison during the jaillvling for the normal runs (P1), the mainmenu trick in indreks run is roughly at 40% happening, Bokser at 70-75%. And there you have multiple seconds and you dont perform the 2nd half. The combination of both with a keycombo of Esc -> Enter -> V without ever failing is hard to believe

Maphack: Here is vela looking at skills: Here is him shopping: (note where he looks when reading top line items) Compare that to

Thats more "shelf-lvl above Monitor"-higher in my opinion than the comparisons i showed, but who knows. Also theres no information to be gained in travincal if thats just the top middle of his gamescreen, so why stare there?

Now if you look at earlier in the underground of the same run, he crosses a loading zone Border (thats needed for MH to display stuff), within a second he looks up and changes what he is doing and drags 3 other bossgroups into the fight

He usually doesnt use it to find the right way, but to get more XP. But theres also plays like this, that at least leave a Questionmark: Explores a direction, dies in a room that looks like it should connect in the right direction, but instead of exploring that takes a completely different direction that leads to duriel

So yeah, the timeline of his improvements, hard to believe consistency, comparing where he looks at which doesnt add up... not sure its enough as proof proof, but enough to be deeply considered in my opinion

PS: I wont have time to go deeper into this until at least tomorrow evening, so please be patient if you want to see anything

When it comes to save and exit macro accusation then these examples were strange to me. There are so many buttons to deal with in a short period of time, but during these clips the keyboard hand moves up. Is there an explanation for this @VelaRUS? I don't understand how you're able to get frozen armor cast here.

Actually it makes sense... only need keyboard during the load screen.

Message from Deengee. He asked me to post it:

With regards to “eyes looking upwards” or “strange hand movement” as noted by @Indrek in the previous message.

I believe that you missing the perspective (as in graphical projection of image due to camera placement of @VelaRUS).

Look at his photo and note where the webcam is located relative to monitor, keyboard and himself. The webcam is under the monitor on the same level as mouse pointing upwards and to the right (relative to the shutter). This means that all movements done by the guy will be exaggerated towards the angles that are the “farthest” from the camera (viewer) POV.

@Indrek, you have your own webcam setup. You can easily test it (that the scientific part of proving something, doing the same thing and comparing the result, isn’t it?).

• place the camera, monitor, keyboard and mouse like the image posted
• sit in the same position so your head and shoulders are visible (quite likely you’d be sitting closer to the monitor, than you do now)
• run D2, as @VelaRUS noted, in “windowed fullscreen @800x600”, meaning that you’ll have D2 all over your screen as a huge square
• and record yourself doing same things - looking at the mob HP at the top of the screen, at your mana and HP, upper part of the shop (e.g. Ormus when hunting for the TP staff) and so on
• move you hand over the keyboard doing the esc+… sequences
• compare the result


This applies to anyone with a webcam, actually. Very easy to reproduce.

Так, ну тенденцию я понял. В общем пока мне не принесут официальных извинений, я буду писать на своём родном языке. Я не могу каждый раз просить и беспокоить людей, чтобы мне переводили огромные тексты. Нужны от меня ответы - пользуйтесь машинными переводчиками сами. По поводу темы. Всё, что я хотел сказать - я вам уже сказал. Игнорируя мои обвинения Бендеру, даже не делая попыток углубиться в вопросе, я буду игнорировать ваши нелепые обвинения мне. Если тут единолично правит "королевство Бендера с его слепыми пешками" и нет равноправия между спидраннерами, мне не о чем говорить с таким коммьюнити. Играя в игру с момента релиза в 2000 году и занимаясь её спидранами уже более 3.5 лет, большинство действий я делаю в игре машинально, даже не задумываясь об этом. Это схоже с тем, как люди первый раз садятся за руль автомобиля. Сначала каждое действие перед тем, как его сделать, им приходится прокручивать в голове. Но уже спустя какое-то время, с наличием постоянной практики, они управляют им, не задумываясь, на том самом "машинальном уровне". Я не собираюсь как попугай говорить вам одни и те же вещи, только разными словами. Я не клоун, в отличие от некоторых. Поэтому если у вас нет 100% оснований к моему бану, попрошу не осквернять мои честные, заработанные тысячами рестартов результаты. Если вы в адекватной и уважительной форме попросите меня сделать КОНКРЕТНОЕ действие (например записать видео и что-то показать на нем) - я его сделаю. Если продолжите пустую, ни на чём не основанную демагогию (а именно этим вы сейчас и занимаетесь) - я вас проигнорирую.

This is becoming childish. What it sounds like to me is that it's too easy to cheat and therefore we need to submit more information than a highlighted video. A couple of examples: Showing the command line in the launcher, and the folder our D2R saves are in. There's probably more ways to check for cheating?

I will say that the Minecraft Speedrunning community maybe on average 10+ years younger, but they do have a much more thorough system of checks for cheating. Mostly because they've had to deal with so many cheaters. And they caught Dream (31.4 million subs on YT) cheating in speedruns that he submitted.

I think D2 is lacking these checks because we've worked on a honor system for so long, but that seems to be eroding away, so lets go ahead and gather more information for future runs on how we're all using Vanilla (unmodified) D2R to speedrun.

Is it childish to put accusations in the open? Go try to do what he does in the first macro related video i linked, i highly doubt any of us can replicate that within 1.4s once, let alone every single time with the concentrationlvl of "ill read chat during it". I am 100% certain this isnt done without a tool assisting him

Maybe im wrong about Maphack, maybe not. At least i bring evidence you can defend against instead of just accusing without providing any additional point. My name is being slandered by Vela and i guess 327 for over a year now, while one of them is playing in a very questionable way.

Сould you be more open and at least mention what cheat do I use? There is no swapcast in d2r, and you can’t cast in the downloads, as I understand it, it should be my eyes looked at wrong direction on the webcam a couple of times during the run?

I don't think anyone has accused you here 327. Benders comment only referenced the fact that you and Vela have been accusing him of cheating for the last year without providing any evidence outside of "he got lucky." These accusations have gotten the attention of multiple moderators already and received responses. The last comment about "one" of them playing in a questionable way is clearly a reference to Vela, as evidenced in prior posts, and not you. In fact none of the accusations that have been accompanied by evidence have been related to D2R. Leading me to want to lock these threads as they were posted in the D2R forums.

Oh i dont think you are cheating. What i said is that you slander my name by spreading your theories about me cheating in your discord and probably on your stream for over a year

Initially locked the topic to move it to D2:LoD, but we realized it doesn't really matter... It's the same community, practically same game, we can stay here.

Getting back to the main topic. I don't think @VelaRUS has cheated. The maphack accusation evidence to me isn't convincing enough. Other than the underground passage example there aren't any more good examples in his runs. The Tomb example looked normal gameplay to me. I think the eyes moving up doesn't prove anything.

The use of macro is difficult to prove, but many runners have now tried out replicating what Velarus is doing with casting skills during load screen for example and it's rather easy to do.

About the 100% swapcast success rate. I've seen him fail swapcast, I know he uses multiple swapcast setups with different hotkeys. It seems like he's just good at it.

I wrote this just before it was locked -- figured I would follow through and post it now that it's been unlocked. Hopefully the formatting still looks good.

Jym, I'd be very interested in someone coming up with such a program. If someone could come up with a program that validates LOD and/or D2R client is legit, that could be extremely valuable. Just an FYI - Diablo Interface/Diablo Run does show the command line for LOD. You can see vela's command line here:

https://diablo.run/Vela_RUS/VelaRUS256400.

I'm not an expert, but nothing looks suspicious or illegal to me in vela's command line. I don't think that necessarily means nothing else could be going on simultaneously (like another client with maphack running, which I've heard is a known thing some LOD players do), but once again I don't know. I've looked at the clips bender has shown of vela, and I've looked into the map hack allegations and I just don't see it. Vela seems to lack some skill in map reading, and in return does dumb and suspicious looking things sometimes. Get a good highlight real of the dumb and suspicious things that he manages to profit from, and suddenly we are on the forums all accusing each other of cheating. I don't know what vela looks at during his run, but I rarely see him profiting from doing non-optimized pathing. The "looking for monster groups" maphack thing only really works on assassin, and maybe druid, but the amazon example in the underground passage was just bad playing, or someone who is use to playing an assassin trying to make piles. But even with that, I don't see it. Also, vela has his map incredibly faded, that probably has a lot to do with his map reading. I don't agree with the maphack allegations bender has shown.

For the other stuff mentioned in this thread and the other 327 thread:

For the probability stuff -- I remembered that run where bender got both those amn runes doing council. I don't know how to calculate probability so someone will have to help me. Amn is a 1:1212 drop chance for all council members. Each council member is worth 3500 exp, and he gains about 426,493 exp (from 23 to 24.5). Maybe round down a little from other adds and experience shrines and he kills 400,000 exp worth of council members, or 114 kills. He horks most of them, maybe we can say he horks 2/3 of them with lvl 3 find item of 24%. 114x2/3x24% simulates another 18 kills (correct me if I'm wrong, this is a lot of math).

114+18 = 132. 132/1212 is 10.8%. 10.8% chance of getting one amn rune from council just like bender did. This is where I really need help with the math. For two amn runes to drop, is it like 5.4% (just divide by 2?), or is it like 10.8%^2 = 1.16% chance? Or maybe I'm just way off, when I took statistics 10 years ago I remember there being very non-obvious rules to calculating probability. But I think it's in the 1-5% chance of 2 amn runes dropping from this sample size. Probably not something worth bringing up in a forum.

I want to say that was the only time he tried council member strats because he found a +3 find item helm (and his sarina looked meh as seen in 327's video). What he did not have was io drops. I watched him smack his head against the nm tower the whole week and he never got black + strength + whatever faster than like an hour in the tower, or like 30+ runs. Trust me, I watched those barb streams like a hawk, and after about a week of 8-10 hour streams he beat my 7:24 time.

Look at his PB nm andy time in the timer, and look at the current run. His NM Andy time is garbage in both of those runs because he forced black runeword. He had to transmute 3 hel runes to make black.

Also silopen shows 1:21 chance of an io dropping. Not sure which database is more accurate or why they are showing different numbers. I'm not going to attempt to recalculate 327's numbers, but my gut feeling says we're looking closer to 3-5% chance of this benderluck(TM) (assuming 327's 1-3% number is accurate).

But calculating rng in diablo 2 is insane. I could easily pull out outrageous numbers like vela getting chromatic ire from hell izual. That's a 1:68,000 chance, and it's an incredible weapon for LOD sorceress to finish out hell CS and a5 with +3 skills, among other stats.

Do I suspect vela of altering drop rate chances? No. He got that ravenfrost on amazon that I mentioned earlier, also an incredible class-specific item. Over the past year he's gotten his fair share of sanders boots (and his chat instantly blows up everytime in laughter and memes). I know, because I enjoy watching vela streams. He's a great speedrunner, and we were friends (or at least friendly towards each other) up until when I told him to leave my stream for accusing bender of cheating several months ago--I was even a VIP in his channel. Maybe that's why he decided to throw the cheating allegations my way, I don't know.

RNG is incredibly complex to analyze, and finding runs from years ago (ironically in runs that didn't PB) is just going to turn into slander being thrown at everyone. Also, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we do have cheaters in the community. I just don't see it, and certainly haven't seen anything worth banning runs and/or runners over. The macro thing might have something to it, but otherwise I don't really suspect anyone of cheating, and without real evidence it seems counterproductive to plaster the forums with it. The macro thing would be a really dumb way to cheat; making a macro for casting frozen armor or to swapcast something that about anyone can achieve 90%+ success rate with seems like a lame way to disqualify your runs.

In the past several years the only analysis I've seen someone show of cheating was 327's video against aniceeggsample. 327's videos in the other thread are new to me, and now might explain why vela felt nobody took him seriously last year. Maybe he should have mentioned such a video exists. Maybe these videos were forwarded to other mods, but I was not made aware. Vela demanding an apology for the community/mods/whoever for not taking his cheating accusations seriously (because he provided no evidence) now kind of makes sense why he's mad, maybe, but once again, he never actually provided real examples and at least some of us weren't aware of 327's videos.

Wow, no your math are not correct, even if you kill 1212 with 1 to 1212 it wont be 100%, its like if you toss coin 2 times it wont be 100% tail, its not even close how math works.

Edit: 5% to get 1 to 1212 two times from 132 attemps ... I start to understand why you are not undestand what happend ...

Edit #2: 2 amn, 1 thul, 1 ort from 9 attempts is not 5%, its not 0.000001%, its impossible, you can spend your life with travincal farm, and you will never get that drop with 9 attemps. It could be only if you got very unique seed, because drop based at seed number, if you know how manipulate drop, or if you change drop odds before you start game.

Can you share the probability of getting exactly 1 amn, exactly 2 amns, at least 1 amn, and at least 2 amns?

Edit: using 1:1212 probability of an amn rune, and 132 monster kills.