I'm going to be as blunt as I can. I have spent the last few months trying to make a decision as to what to do. I honestly just believed that the whole incident in the other Discord had been dropped and was a part of the past. It's been nearly 19 months. I just assumed that the incident had left a bad taste in Zericc's mouth and that's why he was hostile toward me. I've moved on from both games and am mostly playing Contra. Three days ago, I get pinged on discord with a link to a post on the other forum. The Solar Jetman mod wanted me to see it and his response, as I was so intimately involved in the whole idiotic process paraphrased above. I saw unequivocal proof that no, they had not let it go in 19 months. I read the entire document multiple times. I honestly couldn't believe my eyes. Here it was: a document with so many false allegations of malicious intent and mischaracterizations of events that, in my non-lawyer opinion, is borderline libelous. This document was presented as a bid to remove the mod, evidently for no other reason than see above. It is not abnormal for a community to split categories when a new route or glitch is discovered, and in my conversations with both I mentioned Super Mario World as an example board that does exactly this. Nothing was done to hide the run, the only thing was that the new skip fundamentally changed the run, and it didn't seem right to put that next to so many runs before the new skip. Even still, the mod tried to negotiate. Bug was chosen as the new mod, and yesterday, we thought, again, that it was all done and in the past. Today, I am alerted to more drama. My heart sank. Zericc was demanding that everything happen NOW. Not next week, not when his schedule clears up, NOW. Pretty ironic that he got some of you to dogpile me for politely asking if the mods had seen my submission, and he behaves like this. This isn't just me saying this, either. He posted the unedited screenshots of his DMs with the mod on their forum. And don't worry, Zericc, I have it saved in case you twig that you don't look as good as you think. It'll go right back up if you take it down. The person who dragged me for asking one of 5 mods for input, is demanding immediate action from a community with a dozen odd members and a single mod.

Let's wrap up. Seeing him do that, knowing he's still an accepted member of this community, and knowing the lengths he will go to to get his way, I can't come back. I won't. The person I at first thought was a normal, decent speedrunner showed me who he really was. I don't believe in making demands. I won't demand his expulsion, but I won't be back. Zericc is a menace, willing to coerce, attack, and brigade against anyone who crosses them. Knowing what this is all about, knowing the ulterior motives, it's just made me see them for who they are. This whole incident has been extremely painful for me. I had to leave a community I loved, driven out by someone who couldn't let things go and refused to compromise. I was betrayed by people I considered friends so I could be reduced to a joke. I now have to work to ensure the damage he has caused in another community isn't terminal. Speedrunning is a hobby. Something I do for fun. FUN. I couldn't care less about world records, or even "proper" speedrunning strategy. I just want to play better and develop strategies, set-ups, and routes. I have enough stress in my life as it is. This has become a source of more stress, more sleeplessness, and more depression. I need to draw a line under it. I won't be reading the replies. I'm no longer following the game, and I'm done exposing myself to the needless pain that this drama has caused me. I just refuse to go silently.

Goodbye,

Jacob

So...

NintendoNatalie: You are the best. You have a great outlook that made me and my wife smile more than I can count. Talking with you was always something I looked forward when you popped into my streams, and without you, racing would have simply never happened.

MwdaShadow: Honestly, for a long time I thought you were Nat's shadow. I still remember being surprised seeing you stream and realizing you did too. You were almost always down for a race, and I always liked talking with you.

Foulco: Thanking you for everything would take too long. I think the thing I want to thank you for the most, though, is the arguments. I would get so frustrated with you sometimes. Your knowledge of assembly and the inner workings of ST are second to none, and even working on that TAS was largely standing on your shoulders. Talking with you helped me grow as a programmer, a TASer, and a gamer in general.

BugDr: You are the friendliest, most understanding, most approachable, most helpful person I have ever met. I still remember you following my stream and having to reset because I actually had to take a moment because "OMG THE WR HOLDER IS FOLLOWING MEEEEEE!!!". Since then, I have come to know you as a humble, honest person, who I have been proud to know and count as a friend.

MickeyRadDad: I still have the hat, and the card. In fact, I have taken pictures of both of my kids wearing it. Getting that package in the mail was... incredible. After years of people saying things online, there it was: an actual, beautiful, surprisingly comfortable Octo hat. I will keep and treasure it and the memories it brings back forever.

Finally, Terrex: We haven't had very many interactions. I really wasn't sure what kind of person you were before you messaged me. Through our conversation, I came to know you as a fair and honest person, willing to take accountability for something you weren't even involved in. You understood the situation, and apologized for it, but you also weren't afraid to tell me where you felt I was wrong. Talking to you, I felt heard. You, and the people listed above, were the people holding me to this community, and I appreciate each of you every bit as much as any friend I've had in person. I miss all of you.

I do have a dishonorable mention. Someone who would have been on this list, but decided to join in having a go at me when I nudged the mods. Zero. I really liked you. I looked up to your times. I loved racing against you. In fact, any time you said you were racing, if I didn't have to work or go to an appointment, I made sure I could make it. It rarely worked out, but I'll never forget the thrill when it did. See, I know I am nowhere near Bug or Foulco, but when we raced at SGL, we were neck and neck at the beginning until I made a mistake. You're definitely better than me, but you were my goal. I wanted to be competitive with you. That gave me a lot of motivation to keep pushing my times down. You weren't a brick wall, challenging your times was an attainable goal. I guess I just respected you a lot, maybe more than anyone else on this list. It hurt a lot to lose that, and I lost my motivation to even play ST since then.

After this happened, I was disappointed, but resolved to leave the issue in the past. I had already been dragged into a stupid internet fight while I was working 7AM-8PM every day, visiting my wife and son in the hospital as much as I could, and cleaning, sanding, stripping floors and fixing plumbing until 2-3AM so I could sleep a few hours and do it again. Zericc, on the other hand, made it clear quickly that he was still holding a grudge. First it was going out of their way to criticize and nit-pick posts I made where he felt he had an opening. His interactions with me became more and more petty and hostile as time went on. I still said nothing. I don't like drama, and cross-board drama is even more silly to me. More and more those interactions started to spread to other members. Whether or not I was being spoken about behind my back I don't really know or care. It could also have been that Zericc's consistent attacks that made it seem ok. Honestly, I don't care. Each and every one of you who jumped in, I hope you all feel ashamed. You turned on a friend so you could join in on an online dogpile. Finally, the event described above happened. I had enough, and told him and all of you who joined in what I thought of you, and left. I deleted my forum posts. I removed my runs. I was done.

I hadn't decided what to do. I told Terrex that I was willing to return, but he informed me that Zericc had demanded that I apologize to the community. Initially, I was completely unwilling, but grudgingly was convinced by Terrex. I made it clear to him though that I wouldn't be including Zericc. As time has gone on, however, it has given me more time to think. Rather than apologize to the community, I'm going to thank each of you who has made this hobby better.

This entire saga takes place on another speedrun.com community: Solar Jetman. First, some basic background as to how I came to be involved in this pathetic debacle. Solar Jetman is another NES game close to my heart. Compared to StarTropics, the community is microscopic. A handful of runners have only ever submitted times to Speedrun.com, of which I am NOT one. I am rarely interested in huge skips, and this game has some doozies. I mostly started speedrunning it because I wanted to explore and possibly optimize the warpless category. When I started looking around, I realized it appeared there was no Discord for the game. I asked in the forums, and that was confirmed. Having managed communications servers for nearly every online community I have been a part of, and having experience administering a Discord server, I figured I would do something nice for them and make and administer a Discord. A community having a central communications hub is vital for strategy development and helping new runners, so I figured I would fill a need. I was not making a play for power, I wasn't trying to infringe on an existing community. I extensively talked to other members to make the experience as streamlined as possible, and I never asserted my own ideas or opinions. I wanted to let existing moderation and community status to carry over, and to rock the boat as little as possible. For about two months, it was a smooth time. Then, after working with other players to come up with a strategy, Zericc was the first person to get a big new skip in a submitted run. The moderator there was at first excited about the new time, but then came the time to categorize it. An extremely public disagreement then started between he and the mod. The skip was new, and very significant, cutting an entire level from the already short any% run. I stood completely out of the way, and let the argument happen. I absolutely do not care about anything but warpless, so I had no interest in the argument. Zericc made sure to change that. In DMs, he asked me to mediate the issue. Initially, I was unwilling to, as again, I have no interest in running the community and making rules. As I said no, he started to shift from the easygoing Zericc I had been friendly with to this point. He started claiming that I was a mod, and that I had a responsibility to do something. My wife and I had just had our first child, and my son spent the first two weeks of his life in a Neonatal ICU. My wife wasn't even released for a week after delivery. It was a very scary time. At the same time, we had just bought a house that needed serious work before it was ready to be moved into, and we lived in a run-down, rodent-infested house with no utilities. No water, no electricity, no sewer, nothing. I explained to him that I had a lot of responsibilities in real life, but his only response was that this somehow took priority. After being strongarmed into agreeing to moderate, even though I was dragged into it explicitly against my will, I did what a mediator is to do. The mod and Zericc agreed to me mediating, and I took the time to put my own feelings aside and hear both of them completely out. Zericc wanted to modify Any% to include a field for including the skip. The mod was concerned about the reliability of the skip and whether or not it completely obsolesced not only a record, but the entire route. Hearing both sides of the argument, I chose a solution that I felt best incorporated both viewpoints. I proposed a category rearrangement. That way runners not using the new skip wouldn't constantly be discouraged by a time they could never hope to reach, the lowest times would still be the route with the skips, and warpless and 100% wouldn't be affected. Once it was clear that I wasn't just going to blindly follow that Zericc wanted me to do, he started ignoring me and questioning why I was even involved. He started accusing us of trying to bury his time, trying to illegitimize his record, and started complaining that nobody would care about his time because it was the only one on that board. I explained that in plenty of games the fastest category isn't the most popular, but I was part of the wall by that point. Zericc had been made a mod earlier in this confusion to add the checkbox option, but tried to take unilateral control of the board after this. The mod agreed to split the categories, agreeing it was a better solution. Zericc then took it upon himself to revert all of those changes back to his proposition. After seeing what happened, his mod status was revoked. He outright stated that he had been attacked by us, and left the board.

I have to break this into parts.

First of all, I want to reach out to the community. I loved hanging out and chatting with most of you. I had a huge amount of fun with the races, both informal and SGL. StarTropics is one of the first games I ever really played to beat, and one of the first I ever completed. It is still my favorite game on the NES, and that won't be changed by other people and my interactions with them. I still plan to run on my own, and I might still submit runs here if I get a PB worth mentioning. But in terms of these forums, the Discord, and any other form of interaction, I'm not coming back. Before I go, though, I am going to say why, and I will be going into details. You can make your own decisions after, but I am not going to go quietly.

I left the Discord a few months ago now, after a really stupid dust-up. I had recently set a new PB that was deep enough for me to want to submit it, and I did. I have been a part of this community for years, and have never once imposed myself on anyone. I have never demanded or expected attention or action, and anyone of you knows that. When I submitted, I vaguely mentioned it on a Discord post, and left it at that. Generally, with all of the runs I have submitted before then, it was verified within a few days. I had the nagging thought that my post had been missed, and speedrun.com hadn't been checked. After a week, I decided to politely, but more clearly, post about it. It was only a one sentence message, and I intentionally wrote it to be clear that I wasn't trying to nag, just make sure the run had been seen. I know about being an unpaid mod. If a mod had responded "Yeah, I saw it, but don't have time right now to verify it", I would have been fine with it. Again, as it was clear, I wasn't setting out to nag the mods or demand my run be verified. I didn't demand an explanation, and didn't demand attention, I just wanted to put my mind at ease that the mods knew the run was even there. Was I responded to by the mods? No. Did someone DM me to say I was out of line and to think about phrasing or timing in the future? No. In fact, the only mod that did reach out to me apologized for what happened. And on that note, thank you, Terrex. Seriously, that whole painful incident, our conversation was about the only bright point. No, what actually happened was Zericc, who is not a mod, has nothing to do with moderation or verification, decided to attack me and insinuate that I was trying to demand attention from the mods. You can all see the conversation, there's nothing there but the words on the screen. Then, a couple of other members joined in to roast me for absolutely no reason. So, I told you all what I thought of that treatment and left. What needs to be mentioned is why Zericc decided to do this, what he has against me, and what he has done.

Here's a new link.

https://discord.com/invite/4rbguaDMf

And now we have one!

https://discord.gg/6ywhryUd

Building now, will update with this link when it is somewhat ready. Freaking no sprites online, have to go with screenshots lol.

See title. I dont want to clog up the ST discord with an unrelated game lol. Is there one, or should someone make one?

Just a note, I'll probably make a placeholder if I don't see a reply soon and post the invite link. Just a matter of adding roles and fun crap like that.

Video set to private within hours of this. I think that confirms it.

This has apparently been floating around for a while now, but I'll be damned if anyone else wastes their time on this one. Please link to this in case the topic ever comes back up.

Tl;dr This video is not of legitimate, unmodified gameplay. I am willing to say it was recorded using Action Replay. The select dialog box is a red herring. I'll be posting the technical details below.

Edit: On retiming and checking my recreation, I was wrong about the message coming up early. I was counting video frames, and not thinking video frames are 30fps, so 11 ticks on the video is 22 frames in game. It doesn't change anything about the debug flag.

At 0x0053, a counter exists. This is Mike's forward, overworld movement counter. The counter ticks up from 0-15, and resets to 0 when Mike changes direction. This address is more than likely used to keep track of Mike's current position using mod division, which is why it counts up and not down. When the counter is not at 0, 15, or 16, the select press is blocked until it counts up to the nearest of those three. Once it reaches 15, or if it was already at 0 or 16, the input is accepted and a clock somewhere in memory (I haven't been able to find it yet, it may not count sequentially) starts, and 22 frames later the "You are in Chapter X" message appears. It cannot appear before this. If this timer's address was known, it would be trivial to reset it to any arbitrary number. The video linked above contains no cuts in the audio at all, and no visible cuts in the video. It does, however, start suspiciously outside of 3-1, after the countdown dialog. I suspect that before recording, two action replay codes were set, one of which changed that counter to 10 frames, one of which set the debug flag. They then walked on top of Miracola with collision disabled, pressed select, and buffered a right press with the text box. This gameplay is not possible within the game mechanics. I spent hours testing setups for this, and unfortunately, I have no choice but to conclude that this is nothing more than an elaborate hoax.