Hello everyone! I'd like to request an Atari ST game to be added, some time soon. Reading the information on doing so: [quote]Moderators for each game are expected to set up categories and settings for the game and verify runs.[/quote] How exactly does one 'verify' runs? After all, couldn't somebody TAS something, or stitch a video together by cutting and pasting?
if you want to request a game http://www.speedrun.com/requestgame there's where you can do so, and well that's for the moderator to figure out whether it is a cheated run, it can be difficult but ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Alright. Any tips are welcome, of course. ;) I know how to request a game, if I didn't, I couldn't have quoted a section from the text on that page. ;)
"Verifying" merely means accepting the run to the leaderboard.
Look at the run, be sure that the category's goals were met, be reasonably confident that it's not cheated, and that the submitted time is accurate. Then you accept the run by verifying (click the three dots in upper-right corner of a run's page, select verify). The site can't check how closely you looked at the run before verifying the run. Instead, the runners trust the moderators to do a reasonable job.
You can't rule out cheating 100 % from a video recording. Some trust is required. :-)
If you're suspicious about a run, ask community members. If nobody finds solid proof, I'd verify the run. Most submissions are not cheated, that's the important base case. In a pinch, moderators can remove a run after it got verified.
You'll develop intuition for what is good human play, and what is probably TAS. In some 3D games with analog directional input, you can distinguish good TASing from human input from character movement. In old 2D platformers, that's much more difficult. :-) Humans nail frame-perfect presses and can button-mash faster than 10 Hz with good rhythm.
"Cheating in Speedrunning - How easy is it? A brief history and assessment" talks about game modding, TASing, and splicing (stitching videos together), along with examples how each got debunked: https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/6ci50v/
-- Simon
There really isn't a community-wide established way of confirming runs. Each game has their own eccentricities, but if there is a specific section that looks dubious (the mouse moves more quickly or accurately, the load time seems faster than other sections, etc.), you can always ask a person to live stream that specific section for you in real time. If they can't reproduce it or if the timing of the reproduction looks exactly the same as the video they submitted, then ask them to make a maneuver during the live test that they couldn't do if it was pre-recorded. Because it's just a clip and not actually being timed, there is no reason a person shouldn't be able to, say, make the character walk in a random circle during live play to ensure that what you're seeing isn't pre-recorded or using a bot with pre-set instructions.
@dahsirjones456 can you clarify what you mean? You currently aren't a moderator for any games.
If you're asking how long a pending run takes to become verified, the goal is for it to be verified within 21 days. But this could be faster or slower depending on the activity of the moderators and the amount of pending runs in the queue.
Generally speaking, you watch a run that’s pending approval. The amount of scrutiny required to review a run may vary.