SwitzerlandHere are some Guidelines when submitting Ghosts for your Runs when required.
1. Upload
You currently need to upload Ghosts on some third party service. There is no need to make the submission permanent as we archive Ghosts of current Records on a public GitHub Repository, and other Ghosts are more meant to help with Verification, though it is still appreciated if you can host it somewhere permanently or at least keep a backup in case someone is for any reason interested to retrieve your Ghost.
For uploading them, if you don't know what to use, I can recommend InfoManiak's SwissTransfer: it is straightforward, no sign up required and it will not consider Ghost Files as suspicious or so. Uploads expire after up to 30 days, just don't set the limits to 1 day or 1 download so it does not expire even before we see it...
Another possibility, if you have a Discord Account is to join the Tux Speedrunning Community (Tsc) Discord Server, and post your Ghost there in the #stk-general Channel
However, do not send Ghosts in Private Messages, either to just one Moderator or all of them.
2. Reference to the Ghost Upload
If you posted your Ghost in the Tsc Discord Server, no need to put a link to it in the Submission Description as we will see it. You should still mention that you posted it on Discord since some Moderators don't have an account there or barely use it.
Otherwise, please provide the Link in the Submission's Description (not the Video field, which of course must link to the Live Recording).
Sorry, but if we make exceptions then it would set some precedent and future people who did not Live Record or did not provide a Ghost could argue, "hey, but you accepted Xue_Stk'run, why not mine?"...
You could still submit and have the Run rejected, we can put in the Rejection Reason that the Run seems Ok but does not satisfy the Rules, making your Time Unofficial, but others are free to still consider it as perfectly valid, it will just not appear in the Leaderboards here...
This affects every Version, except 0.8.1 I guess since it does not have Ghosts... I clarified the Rule, of course if the Ghost cannot be produced by the Game in a given Mode or Version, it will not be required.
Rules Updated:
Runs within 10% of the current record require a Live Recording or Ghost File/Recording for submission. Top 3 Runs, or Runs within 2% of the current record, require both a Live Recording and, when they can be produced by the Game, Ghost File (not just Recording) to be verified. Runs more than 10% worse than the current record don't need any proof, unless they are Top 3 in which case a Live Recording or Ghost File/Recording is enough. We however reserve the right to reject runs without proof if there are suspicion of abuse of this rule.
I did a tweak regarding things over 10% yet Top 3... We don't need high requirements in these situations, but it is still nice to have more than nothing in Categories that might be less popular or that were just established...
At the time I thought of the Required Live Recording Rule, 2.0 was supposed to come after 1.4 so in some way we would be doing what I initially intended... Though with the delay, I also started to think that it might after all be nice to give some more time as high requirements may also deter people from running Stk, and we are not a lot of people right now so...
But well, since we are bringing up the subject already, and I also said myself that we can expect serious Runners to make some minimal investments, we could already start enforcing this from now on without delay. I believe Graphics 2 1280x720 Live Recording is feasible with some 10+ years old Haswell with Hd 4600 Integrated Graphics or so, it is not much to ask and waiting some more for 2.0 or even 1.5 will not change the situation...
I already agreed regarding requiring Ghosts. And we can indeed have these Thresholds under which we will strictly enforce acceptable Live Recording + Ghost, over which either one is enough, and nothing required over 10%.
Rule Changes are generally not retroactive so already Verified Runs will stay.
I will do the formal Lawmaking a bit later...
1.4 according to Ghost, people often overlook this field. I fixed this.
This Topic has been accumulating some dust for 5 years, but I am glad to announce that @Haenschen has been promoted to a Moderator!
It has already been a while since I considered making him Moderator, and him pointing out a verification mistake I did lately only further confirmed this sentiment and prompted me to give him an opportunity, which he gladly accepted.
There is no doubt that Haenschen is qualified to make proper Verifications and enforce the Rules, and he is in great terms with fellow Speedrunners and himself a very strong player capable of beating Records. He closely follows SuperTuxKart development, and certainly knows better about Addons than the other Moderators including me, which can definitively help. His Ghost Repository is a great contribution to the SuperTuxKart Speedrunning Community. I am sure that he will be a great Moderator.
Now, I am sorry to say that some who call us Lazy Gods might be disappointed as he is also not someone who can check 24/7 the site. But well, with 4 of us, your runs will be verified 33% faster than with only 3!
Sounds good, if we require a Live Video then also providing the Ghost is not much to ask...
Nice work on the Ghost Repository. If you are regularly updating it then we could use it as reference and people could submit theirs by making Pull Requests so we don't have many Discord Links scattered everywhere and that might expire at any time.
I also considered using Archive.org to save current Record Live Recordings as well... After all, a platform or account could disappear at any time in the long term...
Videos are no longer required if a Ghost is provided, since a Ghost Recording does not add any proof value...
However, a reminder that Ghosts or Ghost Recordings will no longer be accepted starting from 2.0 (including Runs from previous versions that might be performed after 2.0 release).
No worries and congratulations on your Record :D !
Okay, that explains everything.
Sorry, I used the wrong wording. You cannot use Addon Karts at all, neither can AIs, even if they don't affect the Gameplay (though if they are just loaded and unused it is fine). I changed the phrase to clarify. Technically you could use a 100% compatible Addon Kart then change it in the Ghost File, that would not be allowed, but we would have no way to know from a Ghost Recording.
Not sure what you might refer to since the points your are talking about do not apply here (Pidgin is a Standard Kart, it is a 4K Video without issues at 0:24 or so), maybe you commented the wrong video?
- Addons Karts are not allowed if they are used in some way during the Gameplay or affect it. If you see tons of Addons Karts in the Loading Screen but then a Standard Kart is used for an IL then there is no issue with that. If you saw a run actually using an Addon, then there might have been an oversight or different rules at some point, though unless the Kart has inadmissible properties, we would keep such run verified;
- Some small glitches should usually not question the run. You are not having doubts about the run itself? Then I don't see the problem. If you have, then we could investigate to see if we can prove that the person cheated. The Video Quality is not really relevant anyway if it is a Ghost recording since the Ghost itself might be faked;
- 480 is not optimal but we can still see everything that is going on with this resolution. It is not like the Nitro Cans become less than 1 pixel and we cannot check if the Kart did take it or not...
I think that there already was some discussion about how one could cheat. Anyone knowledgeable enough could perfectly make an undetectable fake run even with a good quality Video, and we are not going to check every frame for every submission.
I might think like you if the threshold were 5% instead, which is what I first thought to use, but 10% is already lenient and gives a large room for unoptimizations and mistakes or bad luck. 5.7 s margin for Omc or several minutes for Story Mode are pretty massive and forgiving. We don't need to be comfortably sure that submitted times with even more mistakes were indeed achieved.
If there are multiple instances of very good players with published times that are worse than the threshold, the threshold is not good.
I see this the other way around, if times are worse than the threshold, then they are not that great and don't warrant a proof. Well, even in your own Point Ranking, you would give a terrible score of 3/40 for a time 10% worse... Runs that used to be great might have been "powercrept" by some new strategy or simply more persistence. Andet's or even my own Any% might have been great 4 years ago, but it is no longer the case nowadays.
The only case the current threshold could be an issue would be when you have some insane shortcut that just 1 or 2 insane speedrunners actually used, so you have 1 or 2 times that might be much better than all the others so that anyone within the 10% would be implied to have used that shortcut (obviously, I thought about Volcano Island here). That can be fixed with a complementary "Top 5" Rule, or an explicit Rule enforcing a Video if a complicated glitch was exploited, but I am against raising an already lenient threshold. Otherwise we might just as well drop the Rule...
As concrete comparisons with other places that have a similar rule, the Mario Kart Double Dash Leaderboard does not have a % threshold but rather a fixed time. For Full Runs, they require Video for times under 30 min Igt while the Glitchless Wr is currently 27:58.038, or only 6.8% under the threshold. The gaps vary from 6.8% to 20%, but barring a couple of Cups with some broken exploits, they just go to 12.2%. Similar Rule in Mario Kart 7, with gaps of 8.1-10.3% for the main Categories, and even only 4.1% for the Mushroom Cup. For Mario Kart 8, there is not even any requirement unless you are Top 5.
I think that the rule is alright, it can come in handy in case a recording went wrong, if someone makes some casual runs without recording but did not expect to get a decent time, or for new players that have trouble setting up Obs, etc. And of course, we agree that it should definitively not be required for weak times.
The vast majority of runners are going to provide Videos in any case anyway, making the rule rarely used in practice, but we still have a nice fallback for the cases like the ones above. The threshold was even too high for your own case, which was still accepted as a reasonable exception. And the rules still allow us to reject dubious submissions.
In the Oliver's Math Class or Full Run cases, how I see things is that we already have several people that made it within the 10%, so honestly if someone not too suspicious claims to have made some time that is more than 10% worse, then I would believe it without proof, after all we already know that it is perfectly achievable.
If we were to tweak the rules, then I would not change the 10%, but maybe also require a Video if the player is Top 5 or so instead.
In reaction to the latest submission that was run online but outside of Frankfurt Speedrun, it is now allowed to submit runs done on servers other than Frankfurt Speedrun. Simply make sure to pick the "Online" option for the "Subversion" (this is not needed for Stk Addons) and mention in the description which server was used, or we may reject the run. Naturally, it remains true that the run "may still be rejected if there were noticeable lags or if we notice that the server made unacceptable modifications (different physics, etc.)", and "Only Live recordings are accepted in these cases.".
