For me, it is less an issue of possible RNG manipulation, and more an issue of keeping emulator runs within reasonable accuracy to original hardware. On an original console and cartridge, you cannot quick start the game with a save state.

However I support these community discussions and whatever the community decides is best.

I think when the idea for this category was first being discussed, it started as more of "no skips like wall/floor clips", then "no boulder skip because that saves a bunch of time", then "then no rafiki gate skipping because thats also clipping" until eventually it got out of hand and became the current "how the developer's intended" set of rules. It seems like we can all agree that the rules need a lot of trimming to make it more appealing.

In my opinion, I'd be happy with stripping it all the way down to not allowing any clips that allow you to skip sections of levels. That would be the clips in Exile and the big clip in Be Prepared. Boulder Skip also allows you to skip a part of the level, but its also just carefully timed swiping. I would allow it, but I can certainly see keeping it banned since there is a fair argument either way. Skipping the rafiki gates in Destiny is also tricky, but in the reverse way. They do not skip a section of the level, but they are clips. Again, I can see the argument either way.

Personally I would draw the line there, because then it starts to become a slippery slope of becoming convoluted all over again.

PlayingWithDick also brings up the interesting idea of making a no major clips category while keeping something similar to the current exploitless category (just trimmed up a little). I feel like that starts becoming an issue of too many categories, but if people prefer having the extra categories then so be it.

Now that the time saves are becoming less and less, and a tie currently exists for 2nd on the most popular category, I can see adding ms. Is the common opinion to still only add it for times below a certain threshold, for example, runs below 12:30 or 13:00 for Easy and something comparable to the other categories? I feel like that is a good compromise in not needing to frame count every single run that gets submitted, yet still allowing the board to look clean and organized. Curious to see what people think about that specifically before a vote happens.

Recently, a new game was requested for the Barbie series, via direct messages to all of the series moderators. In response, two separate leaderboards were created by two separate series mods within a day of each other.

https://www.speedrun.com/detective_barbie_in_the_mystery_of_the_carnival_caper was created on 2021-04-13.

https://www.speedrun.com/detective_barbie_carnival was created on 2021-04-14.

As a series mod myself, I don't believe I can edit existing games. I would contact the mod of the duplicate leaderboard, but as far as I know, mods cannot delete boards. Also, I did not see anything in the Support Hub or in the sticky threads about this either.

Does anyone know how to handle these situations? Thanks in advance and sorry if I'm missing something obvious!

Sorry to be a pest, but it seems like https://www.speedrun.com/magic_darts might be broken somehow. Starsmiley has tried adding me as mod twice now, but there are still no mods. Does anyone think this should be reported as a bug? Thanks again.

I just checked the https://www.speedrun.com/magic_darts board and it looks like I'm not actually set as moderator yet. Somehow it didn't process? Sorry for the tag @starsmiley but figured you might want to know. Thanks again in advance!

I would like to request becoming a mod for Magic Darts https://www.speedrun.com/magic_darts . The board currently has no mods, and with it being in the current Big 20 race, it will surely have plenty of new pending runs incoming. I currently run the game and am familiar with the rules and most of the community.

It appears that the previous mod, NickBGoHard, has deleted his account, hence the lack of mods.

Thanks.

That would be an interesting run to watch. I doubt I would do it since I prefer short runs, but I see no issue in this being a category. Looks like there is some interest from a few people as well.

Although I'm not personally interested in this category, I do feel like glitchless categories should only fall under Misc if it doesn't change the run sufficiently or if there is a general lack of interest from players. The fact that it skips almost the entirety of one level, and large portions of another certainly make it a sufficiently different run. The fact that there are nine players in that category shows that there is interest. I'm not sure if people would run the category for Normal or Difficult, but I suppose that remains to be seen.

As far as voting for it to be in Misc in the first place, I have to agree that this is ultimately a community decision, but was there a vote? I might be completely forgetting this happening, but I don't remember there being one... just some discussion in Discord, of which I'm not very active in to be fair. As far as the opinions voiced in this thread, it looks like EiGhT, dwarvendynamite, cajink87 and I would prefer this category to not fall within Misc.

As far as the ruleset, I've never been a fan, but I remember it appearing to be the most common ground that the community agreed on at the time. My opinion is that it should just ban the use of clips specifically. As in, anytime you force Simba through a wall or floor.

I'd also be fine with it being renamed something like Glitchless if that makes people happy. Fun fact, I was probably the person that first suggested the term of No Exploits to Insomnimatic, as I felt it better described all of the other banned strats better than glitches. Honestly, even calling a clip a glitch is not technically accurate, but I feel that its a fair use so that we can have a more normal sounding category name.

As far as how LiveSplit makes API calls to retrieve data, I agree that is unfortunate, but it shouldn't hold us back from using the features of this site. It's really a lack of features on the part of LiveSplit, because that information can definitely be retrieved. The WRBot and other, similar variants are able to do so.

Ultimately, my suggestion to the community is to first do a quick discussion on rule changes to this category and put it up for a vote. Once that has been cleared up, maybe we can reconsider whether or not this should fall under Misc.

It's been a month and the popular opinion is to add milliseconds to the leaderboard. I should be done frame counting all times of the board, including obsolete runs, in the next few days. At that point I'll add the feature and edit everything accordingly. Thanks to everyone for sharing your thoughts with me.

Due to the short length and precise nature of this run, as well as the increasingly large number of tied times (especially at top ranks), I feel that it might be appropriate to begin timing runs with milliseconds. However, that is my personal opinion, and as a moderator I would like to only make changes that reflect a general consensus of the community.

Therefore, I will be privately contacting every player on the leader board on whether or not milliseconds should be added to all runs. This thread will also remain open for 30 days for anyone that would like to share their opinion publicly. On February 11th, I will post the resulting majority opinion here, which will decide whether or not this change is made.

Currently, there are nine tied times for Lvl 1 NES, which includes a four-way tie for 1st place and a three-way tie for 5th place. There is also a two-way tie for 2nd place for Lvl 2 NES and no tied times for Lvl 3 NES. The Amiga version currently only has one player.

Below is a list of all current tied times after frame counting.

Lvl 1 NES: 00:57.483 DexterClaire 00:57.600 ShesChardcore 00:57.667 k0zzx 00:57.700 Yoho9000 00:58.067 repusoiram 00:58.215 Rayquaza911 00:58.833 authorblues 01:04.481 Roamus 01:04.833 cornshaq

Lvl 2 NES: 00:55.500 ShesChardcore 00:55.900 Yoho9000

If anyone has concerns about not being able to accurately frame count their own runs, I will always be glad to help.

If Retroarch with Genesis Plus GX core / Blastem core and Bizhawk with Genesis Plus GX core are that accurate, then I also feel that a board split is not really necessary, as long as those are the required options. In my personal opinion, if 1-2 frames per transition is the only real difference, then that doesn't seem significant for this kind of run.

Yeah that's how I understood the rules for ILs. Also, I have no issue with save states for them since it's kind of a special circumstance. Like you said, it's almost like allowing saves states makes the ILs runnable in the first place.

The reset rule is very common across the site and its for the reasons that EiGhT states here. Although I'm not aware of any global-based timers that control RNG in this game, there is always the possibility that it exists. Heck, maybe all of you are already aware of such RNG, and I'm stuck in the past haha. More importantly though (in my opinion), saves states create a distinct advantage that was never present in the original game.

If there were ever a desire by the community to re-write the rules, I won't stand in the way, but I do think this is actually a pretty important rule.

On a separate note, I may be dumb and missing something as far as the IL discussion goes. If saves states are allowed there, are we discussing a change to the starting point? (please excuse me im a little exhausted today)

I like to think that when runs pass a certain threshold of feeling well optimized, and you have top times tied, that's when it seems appropriate to add milliseconds. What that threshold means is subjective of course, but maybe sub 12:30 is a good point to start considering it. However, I don't see any tied times on the board (as of this very moment), so it doesn't seem like there is an immediate need. I would certainly support the addition of milliseconds when those top runs start to become tied up again. That's just my opinion though, but I would be fine with whatever the final decision is.

Also, it shouldn't matter what framerate a video is encoded at. You can still use a program like AVIDEMUX as a standard for frame counting runs across the board and it will tell you the times for starting and ending frames pretty accurately. As in, within a couple of milliseconds at most, whereas a single frame on an actual console is 17ms (16.6881523809523ms specifically). If you wanted to be super accurate, you could even round off to the nearest frame, but that more complicated and shouldn't be necessary unless you find two runs literally tied to the exact same frame.

Thank you @ShadowDraft for taking the time to respond to everyone in depth. It is appreciated. I'm confident that the new moderators will fulfil their mod duties appropriately. However, all of us going forward should please remember to include everyone in an open discussion the next time changes are being considered, or even when someone feels that there is an issue that needs to be resolved. It is the appropriate thing. This is how we maintain the community's integrity, otherwise we are merely undermining ourselves.

PS: Everyone on this leaderboard is great, and we all enjoy the same awesome hobby and game. Let us try to work together so that we can continue enjoying it. :)

First of all, I still stand by my point these things should always be a community discussion. Having one member of the community making these decisions with an ex-moderator of the game (who has never run this game) and a site mod (none of which are involved in Lion King) is biased and not indicative of what we as a whole want from our leaderboard. As far as determining the most adequate moderators, the community as a whole would be a much better judge than one sole member.

I will agree that if runs were becoming that backed up, than yes of course we needed more moderators. Even better, some people may have volunteered as verifiers (a role with no mod powers) to verify backlogs of runs. In fact, its generally a good rule of thumb to have at least three moderators.

However, this isn't about personal biases or the need to have people "see" why a certain view is imperative, this should be about the community. Always. About. The. Community. Even this site's moderation guidelines spell it out very clearly in several ways. Community. Not one or two people's opinions greater than everyone else's.

First of all, I'd like to point out that I mean no offense to the new moderators by making this post. In fact, Carter44 and Akiteru seem to be reputable runners. Also, I would like to thank you both for accepting the task of moderating our leaderboard. However I'd like to echo the aforementioned concerns made before me, which have been posted by three very active members of the community.

Changes to the leaderboard should always be made with input from the community. The leaderboard represents the community after all. The very first sentence of this site's own "Moderation Rules" page even states "Leaderboards should be viewed as owned by the community and curated by the moderators." This same sentence is also present on the "Game Request" page for people requesting new leaderboards. How does the community own a leaderboard if an outside source comes in and designates new moderators without asking any of the runners on the board? The same "Moderation Rules" page even states "The users moderating a game should represent the consensus of the players of the game." How are the new moderators representing the consensus of the players if multiple active members are claiming that they were never consulted on the matter?

Furthermore, there is the issue of Akiteru not being an active runner in this community. I know that he used to have a run on here, but it was removed at some point and was from several years ago. I only bring this up because, again, this site's own "Moderation Rules" page states "Moderators should typically speedrun the game, or at a minimum be heavily involved with the community." In his defense, he actually is active on the Lion King Discord server, but it's generally as discussion revolving the SNES game.

I understand that it's not easy to be a moderator sometimes, because people do have lives outside of speed running, but this would not have taken much effort to post a new topic in this very forum and just ping the community members. I'm not sure who made this executive decision (btw it obviously wasn't Insomnimatic since he doesn't even have Super Mod privileges to assign new Mods), but it would have been nice, and appropriate, to involve the people that make this game a speed run.

Due to inconsistent timing methods being used on the boards, I have gone ahead and updated the rules to include the exact frames to use for timing runs. This is based on authorblues' run, which also seemed to be the most common timing method used by other runners. All runs are being retimed with the new rules in mind. The complete rules are as follows:

Category Rules:

-Player must be set to "Level[1/2/3]" and opponent must be set to "CPU" and "Level[1/2/3]."

Game Rules:

-Timing starts on the first frame that the cursor is visible on the game map.

-Timing ends on the first frame that the screen is completely black after the final battle that results in victory.

-The game must be reset between runs. A visible reset must be included in submitted runs.

-Game video and audio must be clear in submitted runs.

-For emulator runs, please state the name and version of the emulator used. Smartphone emulators are banned.

Option 2 seems better in terms of a visual cue in splitting. Plus, as janglestorm mentioned, it feels like a more complete confirmation of the goal. Option 1 would be fine as well, but I do prefer 2.