I went ahead and made a Discord server: https://discord.gg/9puD9sMJ

This certainly doesn't need to be an official one or anything, but for now we'll have a place for us to post our different strats for each other to learn from.

If it were just that initial loading of the title screen then, yeah, there would be no fairness issue, but it could still affect RNG in ways we don't expect.

It's best to avoid save states entirely with games that have RNG.

Bit late here, but I can see three potential problems with allowing save states:

The first would be compatibility. Save states used on a desktop emulator are no the same as EverDrive N8 save states. In the interest of fairness multiple types of save states would need to somehow be made with identical timing.

The second issue is verifying on what exact frame the save state begins. A player could adjust the save state to be a few frames ahead which would give them an advantage. How would we check for this?

The third is RNG. The crabs at the end of the game are RNG and the use of save states may lock in the crab RNG such that it isn't different every time the way it is meant to be.

I agree with zarc0nis and kuma: we should start all runs with a reset. No save states.

If somebody is willing to test other versions to confirm they do not provide an advantage that sounds great.

But without confirming they don't I believe it's best to assume they do given we've confirmed that one out-dated version does not lag correctly. There isn't a compelling reason to be using an out-dated emulator and with a game this optimized these slight inaccuracies can easily make the difference between 2nd place and a new WR.

If 2.5.0 does not provide an advantage then it would be safe to say all versions that come afterward are also viable emulators for accurate/legit runs.

Please see my thread regarding this: https://www.speedrun.com/the_great_gatsby/thread/l0cid/1#mhb53

The time muten_pizza achieved is not legitimate due to an inaccurate emulator.

After investigation it is imperative that the emualtor FCEUX version 2.2.3 be banned, and quite realistically all versions of FCEUX other than the latest as well, which is the 2.6.2 version.

The time submitted by muten_pizza had an exceptionally fast Stage 1 framecounted to 54.067 which is faster than all three of the Stage 1 times that are currently podium.

We looked into it and after having muten_pizza switch to mesenRTA and perform the identical route the timesave was immediately lost and he was achieving the expected times that the rest of us also get. The version of FCEUX that was being used, for whatever reason, is not accurate enough to lag correctly and will give the player an unfair advantage.

For the reason outlined above I and zarc0nis both strongly believe we should only allow FCEUX version 2.6.2 to be used.

zarc's a good Dodge Ball mod so I'll throw my hat in in support of that, and should the game continue to explode in popularity—I doubt it, honestly—I'm happy to help out with mod shenanigans as well.

And I will say that, for the most part, if I see the split timer at the end of the run reads one way but the submission is a lower time in milliseconds that I assume you all have done the frame count yourselves. I am more than happy to trust you all with your own frame counts

I appreciate the trust, and we're all homies and wouldn't try to cheat, but we're all human first and we make mistakes. I've accidentally submitted bad runs to Dodge Ball that needed to be rejected because of mistakes, and I've mistimed things before.

For example: That happened to Deadguy. He had a 4:10.920 run but accidentally submitted a 4:10.092 which was accepted. Deadguy would never try to cheat but mods should still doublecheck the numbers.

It's extremely important for mods to framecount every single submission to ensure the claimed timing is in fact accurate.

That glitch saves time on the final screen by allowing you to jump into the green light without having to slow down to land on the pillars. The top runs by me, Thee_Deadguy, and CrabbyCrab101 all use this strat to save time there if you want to see it performed.

Otherwise, so far as I can tell, it isn't useful because going down there will make it more difficult to kill enemies which will cause the game to lag. A significant portion of speedrunning this game is lag reduction which is predominately done by killing enemies.

We have that in Super Dodge Ball and I really love it so I'm down for this.