Because some games are extremely popular, and verifying hundreds of runs would be a gargantuan task.

I'm the lead moderator for Sonic Adventure 2, which is one of the most popular games on the site, and a compromise has been struck in this regard; runs do require verification, but they do NOT require video. Instead, video is only required for runs of the main Stories that are sub-50 minutes RTA, and sub-2 hours for All Stories, with the logic that these times are not too difficult for players to achieve after a little dedicated practice, and then beyond that point the times start becoming more competitive.

Thusly, all times that are >50 minutes and have no video evidence are considered auto-verify, and on a practical basis therefore 'do not require verification' in the strict sense, but still need to be approved by a moderator before appearing on the leaderboards. Unticking the 'requires verification' button is a simpler way to achieve this, but obviously entails more work on the part of the mods to ensure that the runs that are appearing are legitimate. The same time threshold system that is used in SA2B can be seen in many other game rulesets where they stipulate "Times under X require video evidence", one of the points being that times ABOVE that threshold are generally very quick and easy to verify.

He managed to amass 69 followers? Christ.

The rules do specifically state the entire emulator, including window border, so I'd go with the second one.

As previously mentioned, it's moreso the fact that social interaction in speedrunning communities tends to take place in, well, the actual sub-communities. There's this huge misconception that speedrunning is one big community, and it really isn't. Obviously there is overlap between communities on an individual level, but by and large the speedrunning communities are defined on a game-by-game/series-by-series basis, so the main hubs for social interaction are places like individual game forums or Discord servers. Just checked the Sonic Speedrunning Discord to try and prove that point, and yeah. Since last night, absolutely tons of new messages including strat talk, visual cues for tricks, people showing their new PBs, etc. You won't find any of that on the SRcom forums for the Sonic games.

So in other words, if there's a particular game you play, find out where the community hangs out and go there, likely a Discord server.

^ This. It's why you see people who moderate a RIDICULOUS number of games; because they're the person who requested the games. And they often only do it to collect moderator statuses, they couldn't actually give a shit about the games in question.

"And I want to add my friends"

You sound like a stellar moderator.

Can't check the image right now, but what functionalities are you specifically referring to? LiveSplit is pretty simplistic to operate, are you talking about having an offset at the start of your run so that it counts backwards from negative time before the timer starts?

As for splits afterwards, I'm not sure what you mean by setting them to specific times, the point is that it's variable based on your pace, and that it tracks the time of your run. The splits that you see people use are the result of their last PB run, nothing more. You CAN manually set split times and values, but it's not commonly used because comparing to PB is often the preferred method.

Funny you mention that Deln, because I did that exact same thing with Advance Wars 2 and I've yet to hear back from the moderator!

As TImmiluvs said then, in that case you can certainly pick out segments from an all stages run to use as individual levels, you just cannot do it the opposite way, and it's an important distinction to make since full game runs can either be Single Segment or Segmented.

What you're talking about is the difference between Single Segment runs and Segmented runs, as well as Individual Level runs. These are all distinct categories, and Segmented/Individual Level runs are NOT eligible for submission as a Single Segment run of a full game. If the leaderboard in question has a Segmented category and Individual Level boards, then by all means submit them there.

Alright, so after a few days of on/off work, I think I'm done with trying to improve this IL any further. My final time stands at 1:31.75, which is fairly strong I think. I couldn't have done it without the help of some of my friends, including Sonikkustar, LylatRanbewb and others. Apparently I'm really bad at noticing that shorter routes exist in stages, wasting over a full second... If anything, this should show how community-centric speedrunning really is; I had a 1:33 and thought I couldn't improve that much further until it was pointed out to me "... Why are you taking that higher path? You can just walk through the building path on the bottom." Additionally, others noticed some actual issues in the game, which I'll go into detail just now, as I want to give my overall thoughts on the demo:

PROS:

• This game handles and plays REALLY smoothly. Controls are very tight and responsive, and every time I made a mistake it actually felt like it was my own fault rather than the result of a badly-programmed game dropping inputs, as is the case in many 2D sidescrollers. Top marks for this one.

• It looks gorgeous. The environments and textures are very pleasant to look at, and there was a lot of variety just in the demo. Makes me want to see what the rest of the game has to offer.

• The overall design of the demo stage is very conducive to learning how to use the mechanics as you go along; each new obstacle is introduced individually, and the methods for traversing them are generally very intuitive without the game really needing to hold your hand. Again, good design I would say.

• Very good pacing, there are no spots where you just have to wait around for stuff to happen, and the player largely dictates the pace at which the level progresses. This is always very welcome in sidescrollers.

CONS:

• The mechanics themselves aren't especially technical, at least not from what I saw. This one is harder to call a straight up Con because it's a matter of personal preference. Personally, I prefer platformers/sidescrollers to have complex movement mechanics that center around exploiting ways to maintain high speed and transfer momentum between different states, when this demo was more about just finding ways to never stop moving. I'm sure the full game will feature more complex level design and strat implementation that simply doesn't exist in the demo stage, but for the demo stage itself I found myself just holding Right and timing actions 90% of the time.

• Related to the previous point, simplistic controls are fine on their own as it makes the task of optimising ILs more palatable, the only thing is that if the full game follows the same vein, it may suffer from lack of variety and depth. I'm suspending judgment on this one until I try the full game as it's perfectly likely that a demo stage is deliberately simplistic for the purpose of introducing new players to the game.

• Testing from another user showed that this game actually suffers from a serious problem under certain circumstances: FPS-based physics. To the developers: If you weren't aware that this was an issue in the game, this really needs patching if possible. One spot in particular plays entirely differently depending on how your game performs. Around 18 seconds into my IL, there's a section where you have to jump left onto a red awning, because the checkpoint and air current to the right is JUST out of reach of a jump from the platform below. On my game, I consistently could not get this jump from below, at all, and my game runs at a stable 60 FPS. One of my friends, Kinkycadence, found that he could very consistently land this jump as he was getting extra height, and his game runs at 15-20 FPS according to him (This also begs the question, why no resolution/quality options for the demo?). This is an issue in other games, where performance/framerate issues cause the game mechanics themselves to behave differently, and it actually makes it so that neither I, nor anyone else playing a game that performs 'correctly' can get the best times, since FPS-based tricks are confirmed to exist in at least one spot. If I could perform that jump, it would save half a second on its own.

So overall, most of my Cons may not amount to much if the full game proves to have more meat to it than the demo suggests, which I fully expect. I definitely enjoyed the time I spent on the demo, and want to play more of the game, so suffice it to say I like this game and I encourage others to try it, definitely a solid game so far.

Undertale is always on offer at Christmas it seems and is cheap enough already. It doesn't exactly require any introductions or advertising, suffice it to say that it's WELL worth checking out.

Should his times remain on the board? Yes, obviously.

Should he retain moderator status? No, why would that be the case? This simply has nothing to do showing the proper respect, because moderator is not a status symbol. It's a position of authority and responsibility for a user who is currently fulfilling a specific role. If that person is not fulfilling that role, they're simply NOT a moderator. I completely get wanting to memorialize someone, but this is not the way to do it. Make a thread on the game forum in memory of them or something, just not this. What you're requesting essentially results in the people in question never getting demodded, because when has it been long enough to do so?? Losing people is obviously horrible, but this is just an attempt to cling onto them and not move on.

Just hold your horses and wait. Nothing's going anywhere, and mods being appointed doesn't mean that extra positions will never crop up in the future.

(I do agree that I wouldn't fancy the chances of certain individuals for these positions, though.)

In reference to the last couple of pages:

Why is it apparently too much to ask game moderators to behave like sensible, responsible, mature people? Seriously.

If all else fails, using Monitor Capture and then cropping to a specific region should work without question.

Korra is a good show in its own right, but if you religiously love The Last Airbender and its mythos, character development, writing quality and aesthetic, Korra has many methods of rubbing you up the wrong way.

Is there a particular reason that "Play your favorite game" doesn't help?

The reason we generally suggest that is that it's very advisable for your first experience in speedrunning to be in a game you have a deep love for, as well as hopefully an intimate understanding of how the game works. It doesn't necessarily need to be your FAVOURITE, but it's very good if it's a game you've spent a lot of time on, and don't mind spending a lot more time on.

If you take speedrunning seriously, you're gonna be putting a LOT of hours into it. Hours into the same levels, really. That gets grating real fast if you don't love the game you're playing, and the process of learning is made a lot easier if you already know the game well.

So rather than just say "Play your favourite game", I'll rephrase it with certain criteria, since you yourself will know best what games you should or may want to run based on these criteria:

What games do you like to play the most? What genres of games do you generally enjoy? What games have you put the most time into? What games do you generally consider yourself an expert in? Is your game popular, with a lot of support to help you learn? (This is arguably important for your first game until you learn speedrunning methodologies, then you can look at running games that haven't been done before if you want) Do you mind if a game has a lot of randomness and luck involved, also known as RNG?

If you can come up with a shortlist of games that tick most of these boxes, then you're probably onto a winner. Asking for recommendations for first games may not be as helpful as you expect, since people are invariably just going to come in and recommend the games they themselves run, and they already enjoy those games so it doesn't really say anything about whether YOU would enjoy them. Try instead to use the above criteria, and any others you can think of that would influence your decisions, to come up with a short list of games you may consider, then check out the communities for those games and see if it's easy to get started with learning, I firmly believe that will give you a better start for speedrunning.

If you absolutely must have my personal suggestions though, per genre:

2D sidescroller: Freedom Planet/Super Meat Boy (These ones are HARD) FPS: Borderlands 2 RPG: Undertale 3D platformer: Sonic Adventure 2

Same, just the game audio. I find that for many games, I use the music and SFX as my own audio cues, so listening to something else is a pure distraction.

Punchy go beat my IL