EnglandIf it's a game you moderate, you are essentially the authority on what runs end up on the boards. If you have reason to suspect that something is illegitimate, you're within your rights to reject the run and cite cheating as the reason. You can also blacklist the user if you're certain that it was a deliberate attempt to break the rules.
For this reason, it's well worth being an expert on whatever games you moderate. As I'm sure you know, many games have a very wide variety of weird glitches and phenomena, and something odd that you've never seen in the game could be a naturally occurring glitch rather than an alteration to the code.
By and large I'm not a fan of the Filter lists because they can be kinda unwieldy, especially with a lot of variables.
I would quite like to be able to Sort a leaderboard's runs by clicking the relevant headers such as Player to sort by alphabetical order, Platform to show which runs were done on what console, Date so that you have a chronological view of the board, etc.
I feel like this would essentially perform the same function as the Filter list whilst only being a single mouse-click away, so I'm not sure why this isn't a feature already.
The timing is simply redone by a moderator, or preferably yourself. You're responsible for your own run after all, and it shouldn't be the mod's job to essentially do the submission for you. They'll of course do it if it's necessary due to inaccuracies in a submission, but it's not fair to expect them to regularly do it for runners.
Lots of people don't seem to appreciate that even when timing with an onscreen timer, like LiveSplit, you're invariably going to have inaccuracies. People just submit whatever time the timer displays when they stop it at the end of the run as their run time, but that's not likely to be correct if you're not paying very close attention to when you should be starting/ending time. Every run has a specific start/end point, and any time before/after that does not factor into the run, regardless of what the timer reads.
For games that only measure down to seconds, this isn't really a problem as it's very easy to manually time even just with a video progress bar, but for games that track centi/milliseconds, you're gonna have to framecount. This is made much easier on games that use Ingame Time however, as those typically have timers within the game that you can then just copy/paste if it's a cumulative time across the run, or just add up level times if the IGT is the sum of individual levels.
Many PC games also have functional autosplitters that will do your timing for you, so there's that.
There's no requirement to have a timer onscreen, it's just a handy tool to have so that you and the viewers can easily track your progress. The physical presence of a timer has no bearing on the actual time of a run, though.
No drama, just truth really. Actions and reputations stick. It's strange to see the people who come along and manage to make an awful first impression, too.
Can you give more specifics? I'm going to assume that you're talking purely about making LiveSplit more aesthetically pleasing. Most people choose to use a background image, which is simply a feature provided in the newer versions of LiveSplit, and from there it's just changing the fonts and order of elements in LiveSplit. It's hard to give specific direction without seeing what your LiveSplit window already looks like though.
I would like to add that being a high-ranking runner, or even an active runner is not necessarily a prerequisite of being a moderator. It's certainly DESIRABLE, but saying, "X doesn't actively run the game" is not an argument to revoke someone's mod status, nor is "I have the WR" an argument for being a moderator. The current moderators may have been past runners who just don't have the time anymore, and even if they have never done RTA speedruns of the game they may still have a deep knowledge of the game from routing/glitch hunting/testing, or otherwise be highly-esteemed members of the community. Conversely, having WR in a game doesn't necessarily entail that you would be an effective moderator. You could be a really good speedrunner, but also terrible with people and communication, which are vital traits for a good moderator to have.
I would also add that being a site member for a few days and requesting 'Head/Main Moderator' (That isn't a thing, by the way. Closest is Super Mod, and 'Head Moderator' is only ever going to be an unofficial label given by a community, I debatably have this for SA2B) is not really a good impression to set to people.
@ FurryWulfz The Street Fighter videos were actually obvious even to a relatively untrained eye because they featured TAS-quality menuing.
Most instances of cheating are going to be pretty easy to spot for anyone who knows their game decently well. I was watching a new SA2B player the other day who had forgotten to turn off a game modification before starting a run, and it was blindingly obvious as soon as he gained control of Sonic that the game was not operating under factory conditions. Of course, some people may go to greater lengths if they're DELIBERATELY cheating, but unless they have a similarly fine understanding of the game, there's always going to be telltale signs. And if they do have that required understanding, they're less likely to cheat since they probably don't NEED to in order to achieve the times they want.
I'm in full agreement that SDA's verification system is archaic and overly-drawn out, I have absolutely no interest in ever submitting anything over there, even though some of the runs I've done far outstrip the respective runs they have on there.
Overall I think approaching verification as an 'anti-cheating' check primarily instead of a 'submission QA' check is just going to be needlessly counter-productive most of the time. The number of submissions you'll ever receive that actually feature cheating compared to legitimate runs is vanishingly small.
I'm fairly sure you're free to write whatever guide you want and just submit it to the Guides section, I don't think you need moderator privileges to post there. Seems like a great idea providing the information you provide is accurate and concise, and a mod can always alter the guide if there are inaccuracies.
They get manually resized on upload. I've done a bunch of these for most of the games I moderate, and it often follows a process of, in Paint.NET:
- Find an appropriate/fitting icon, preferably one that's not very big so it needs little resizing
- Erase every pixel around the icon (For this reason, icons that actually ARE pixelated are easy to work with)
- Use the Saturation/Hue tool to recolour the icon for 1st/2nd/3rd places, it's not difficult to recolour stuff to look gold/silver/bronze
And there you go. For Favicons I do the same thing, but dispense with the Saturation/Hue edits.
Three answers in as many minutes, I'm proud of you guys.
Version differences are negligible in this game, the reason most people run on PC is because it's the most accessible to get your hands on and easiest to record, and also because it has the autosplitter/ingame timer that we almost all now use to time our runs accurately. Before we switched to timing by IGT, PC was the dominant version purely due to loading times, the consoles just cannot keep up with it and therefore PC is still preferred for races.
As far as skips go, technically it's actually GameCube that has the advantage. Hidden Base has a GameCube exclusive skip involving flying straight through a wall since the collision simply doesn't work correctly on GameCube version. There is however a tradeoff in the Knuckles stages; Death Chamber and Meteor Herd have less hint monitors on GameCube version, which can have a significant impact on your level time. Dreamcast also has a version-exclusive skip in Eternal Engine, but it's extremely difficult and nobody would want to attempt it in a run.
For controllers, the same 'issues', if you want to call them that, exist the same on 360/PS4 controller as they do on GC controller. As you said, you only have two basic buttons for this game: A, and then the Action Button, which is jointly assigned to B/X, and performs different actions depending on your position and state. This is the same on the above controllers: A on 360 against B/X, and X on PS4 against Square and Circle.
tl;dr the version differences are minor at worst and you're still basically playing the same run regardless of version, we just generally prefer PC because it's more convenient.
Xsplit/OBS is a toss-up for recording software and seems to come down to personal preference at the end of the day, but I would highly advise you not to use Wsplit as a timer and to opt for LiveSplit instead; it does the exact same thing as Wsplit, but is far more customisable, with more features and integration with SRL/SRcom, and is frequently maintained/updated.
On free WRs being the best WRs, it can certainly feel like it initially, but I urge you to also aim for 'competitive' WRs, as you will get a much greater sense of accomplishment by toppling an already-established and 'strong' WR.
If the game doesn't exist in the game list, submit it yourself. If/when the game is added, your submission details are very likely not going to be noticed here.
