No, that point has been discussed already.

Job warping via friend in social club was only allowed as a fix after patch 1.68 (chop shop DLC - winter 2023) killed the way job warps worked on PC (consoles had already been using friend warps for a while before then). PC runners had already wanted to use friend warps before this point but it wasn't allowed specifically because it used an external player. Only after 1.68 made it impossible to do runs which included freemode activities (preps which require job warping), was this changed because otherwise these categories would die off.

The usage of such accounts for purposes other than job warps is what we're discussing now, but the conclusion of one being allowed, so the other must be as well isn't correct.

I am devastated :o

jk, gj guys

But I'll return to the point, yet again, that 1 player = 1 account. Which is something I still feel never needed much explanation.

I guess that's where we differ.

I don't see that account as a player at all, least of which one participating in the speedrun, rather more a tool, one which is used quite a lot, even during casual play.

The explaination that this account is somehow a participant goes beyond me, what is the contribution? Sitting in a friend only lobby 24 hours a day?

And if it were to technically become a player, would listing them as a 5th not solve the problem? (don't have to answer that because it's a silly solution anyway)

Without calling anyone out, this includes getting asked by one of the affected teams, a month prior to their run submission.

Yep, this was briefly mentioned in an earlier response, I don't really have a defense other than this was not communicated with the rest of the group as well as I'm losing out 2 more runs from 7 months ago for which this didn't happen.

Thank you for all your responses so far. If you haven't yet, please feel free, even if you're like @SarahCroft someone who enjoy consuming the content rather than creating it, your input is valued, whichever way you lean.

I'd like for this discussion to be as inclusive an cordial as possible.

At this point I've said my piece and find myself rephrasing the same argument over and over again, so as to not dominate the discussion I don't want to keep repeating it. Going forward I'll probably only reply to direct queries or if a new angle to this discussion comes up.

I'd also hate for this to turn into some pit where we air past grievances and keep it on topic, meaning the legality of alternative uses for warp accounts and retroactive removal of approved runs.

I think this discussion has exposed some repressed opinions, which may be relevant or just adjescent to what we're discussing here, but please use discretion, I fear if we allow the discussion to balloon to any related topic it becomes harder to make meaningful decisions in the end.

I'll address the following shortly:

The fact that some people here are now accusing Witt of wanting to protect his wr runs so that nobody can beat them is really crazy, especially when it comes from GEHT members who should actually know Witt better.

If this comment was aimed at me, you very much wrong.

I am raising an objection to a conflict of interest between myself (as one man, I don't wanna speak for any of my teammembers) and the supermod who's also the current WR holder.

That is not the same as accusing said mod of wrongdoing. The mere fact there's a conflict of interest can raise doubt about the excistence of bias, which is why in the professional world we have rules and guidelines around this (lord knows I've done enough corporate training). In general the conflict of interest would be resolved by simply avoiding it, let someone else handle it.

In that spirit, I'd like to commend WITT for how he's handled this situation so far, while I'm not making an accusation, it is not a light thing I've said.

I think him owning up to the initial mistake was the adult thing to do and I welcome his attempt to have an outsider (another GTA mod) come in to judge things objectively.

I (think at least) have a good relationship with WITT outside of sr.c and we see eachother pretty much every friday on crew events. To me that's all outside of the scope of what's happening here, a dispute between a runner and a moderator.

That said, you haven't responded to any counter argument I've made Rag, nor given your opinion on the matters up for discussion (which you don't have to, if you don't want to).

Just because something is't in writing doesn't mean it is allowed. If you are doing something drastically outside of normal expectations for a game category, it is recommended to contact a moderator to clarify if it is allowed.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, here I go:

The black screen skip (using a warp account) to get to freemode faster was already used in multiple verified runs and discussed by the community in public spaces where the mods had been active in the past. While it isn't the same as explicitly asking for clarification, it's the next best thing and I don't think it fits the definition of "drastically outside of normal expectations for a game category". Warp accounts usage in and of itself was already a known strat, this was just a different implementation of it.

Saying this also ignores the fact that you would've gotten a different answer depending on which moderator you would clarify the strat with.

While I will cede I did make the argument "it wasn't in the rules, so it must be allowed", it's important to note this was one of multiple examples that I used to argue my case from the perspective of a runner.

The fact remains that the rules were the bare minimum and there were rules being applied only the mod team knew existed, which is what got us in this mess in the first place, different mods applying different rules. Had they been written down and there was a public discussion, this situation wouldn't have occurred.

All that is in the past, we can only try to do better, and in then spirit of public debate and you being a notable community figure @Ragnarson70, I'd like to hear your opinion, for the record, on whether we should allow alternative uses of warp accounts and if we should retroactively remove runs that used it.

Well my intention with that last comment was to explain why allowing usage of warp accounts outside of job warps may not be a bad thing. With them being a big part of the more dedicated playerbase's experience as well as my own policy to always provide speedrunners with my services, it doesn't make too much sense to keep it as a band-aid only, and so relates to my reasoning on why we should consider allowing it.

I mentioned it in the first reply, but I started this project to support speedrunning and keep job-warp-dependent leaderboards alive. Even though it started with 250 friend slots, it has since grown to 1000, mostly due to casual people grinding the game, but I've often said if GTAO were to get 1000 active runners tomorrow, I would trade them all in favour of those.

That said, let's not get side tracked too much.

I myself would like to hear from the rest of the community on the issue of allowing warp accounts alternative uses as well as the decision to retroactively remove runs from the board.

I get where you're coming from with only allowing warp accounts as a band-aid to keep leaderboards with job warping alive, and it must feel like a slippery slope allowing it in other instances.

Though it must be said that today's GTAO isn't exactly the same as dec. 2023's. I think the playerbase as a whole has gotten used to the prescence of warp accounts, outside of a speedrunning context too, most people using my accounts are just grinding the game.

I'm not planning on giving up this project any time soon and have always privileged speedrunners to enable them.

And I'm not just one-guying this, there are others with warp accounts online 24/7 too, looking at the chinese steam group that's like 5000 strong as well as anawack and all his accounts for various consoles.

This seems to be just a part of modern GTAO.

At some point in the future my accounts will go offline, and the others too, but I think when that finally happens we can look back and say we delayed the inevitable for a few years.

(part 2 of 2)

Conflict of interest

I think we should address the elephant in the room, WITT has been the (often sole) mod for a long time now, and so I think has gained credibility in that sense. But it seems he has a clear conflict of interest in this case.

With him being the sole super mod for this game as well as the world record holder, a sudden rule change which makes a run beating his 4 year old record illegal should be viewed with skepticism.

From what I gather in this thread, the GTA Speedrunning discord and private conversations with community members, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of support for this rule change aside from WITT himself, who has a conflict of interest.

I myself have a conflict of interest too, being on the other end of this, same goes for Xeenon and Agent, who recently became mods, but not super mods, it seems their input didn't weigh up against the super mods. We're all tied up in conflicts of interests.

Instead of one guy deciding what to do here, I think all those who have a conflict of interest should step back from this discussion. Instead we should follow speedrun.com moderation rules, in particular this entry: "The users moderating a game should represent the consensus of the players of the game."

Leaving me, Agent, Xeenon and WITT out of it and let the community speak their opinion and from there formulate the rules, with remaining mods such as Bitsau, Send & Hiroriks leading the discussion, but obviously taking into account responses from the wider community.

Some general observations

I know I keep hammering on about the rules and there's been a big push to improve this already, so I just wanted to acknowledge the work that's already been done.

We're a bit of a unique case as speedrunning goes, not only being multiplayer, but also not having the luxury to choose which version we want to run on, meaning we have to cope with updates which break the game and make runs/strats slower as well as new content allowing for new strats which makes things faster.

Allowing/disallowing a glitch then becomes a though decision, because the developer has an incentive to patch glitches, which if allowed, might result in a category completely dying (cluckin' bell & prison contract are good examples).

Other glitches have been disallowed out of caution, but have been in the game for a long time now.

We cannot look into Rockstars roadmap or bugtracker and so will always be left guessing if something is going to get patched, we can only make observations from past patches.

If it wasn't clear already, the rules should be clearly defined, and there should only be one instance where a run (any run) can get rejected over something which wasn't in the rules yet, which is the first time a run is submitted using a new strat.

That's when you have a discussion, maybe internally at first, but definitely with the community too.

Then when there's consensus we add it to the rules.

(part 1 of 2)

Actually, the this is not sitting well with me at all

Losing 2 more 7 month old runs because I forgot the host was doing black screen skip is rubbing salt in the wound so here here's where my problem is.

What is legal?

The line from WITT seems to be that using warp accounts for anything other than job warps was always illegal, as some runs were rejected for it and he would answer that if asked.

I would argue that's not the case. Just like a crime must be written down in law before a judge can pass a sentence, so must the rules. Because that's what this is, the strat is the crime, the rules are the law and the mods are the judge.

The rules are there so that anyone can get into participating and we have an equal playing field.

Just like a new player can be expected to read and conform to the rules when submitting a run, so should the rules be expected, better yet, required to be written down before they are enforced.

It should not be possible for a run to be rejected for a rule that doesn't exist (only in the first intance, but it should lead to community discussion, not immediate acceptance/rejection).

Consider the following scenario:

• A rules section which has the basics as defined by sr.c guidelines, rules specific to the game and categories and no indication they are incomplete.

• Other (WR!) runs using this strat

• This strat being openly discussed on public spaces (the GTAO speedrunning discord is linked on this page)

• No visibility on rejected runs or why they're rejected.

Any reasonable hypothetical person just trying to get into speedruns of GTAO would conclude alternative warp account uses to be legal, given there's documented precedent in verified runs from months before, open discussion without raising objections on legality and most importantly no rule regarding this.

You might argue they can clarify it with the mods, but I think that argument is moot. We might as well throw out the rules section and DM mods about everything. The rules are there specifically so every one doesn't have to clarify everything and get a different answer from each member of the mod team.

So, which is it:

Is it legal because this hypothetical reasonable person can in no way be aware of this rule and there are runs on the leaderboard using it.

or

Is it illegal because part of the mod team knows this rule and has rejected some runs using it, meanwhile:

• not clarifying it in the rules when it first came up

• not engaging in public discussion - either starting it or weighing in when it was being dicussed

• accepting other (WR!) runs which use this

I don't find it particularly fair we (I actually, I'm just speaking for myself here) get to throw out 2 months of attempts because of a rule that didn't exists and could not have reasonably known about.

I do have to admit, in DM's with WITT, it seems one person from our group did ask about alternative warp account uses at some point and was told no, but this was in the context of skipping cutscenes done by another team in another run, not escaping to freemode faster. It seems there was confusion on what was meant with "no, warp accounts is for warps, their purpose to fix job warps" and an assumption this wouldn't include black screen skip owing to previously being allowed.

That said, this wasn't shared in the group, and I'll reiterate my point that it shouldn't be required to contact mods in regards to rules which are already being used to reject runs, those should just be in defined in the rules.

I just got back from some time away from the screens and I didn't feel like having this discussion while sat on a camp chair on mobile, so I didn't get to give my 2 cents before getting axed so here we go.

The whole reason I started the warp account/keep a friend online 24/7 project was a band-aid to not kill any leaderboards that used job warps during freemode activities, since r* patched that in the chop shop DLC in 2023. Of course this was already what console runners did before that, so it finally brought some parity between platforms in that sense.

It's important to know this context to judge the usage of these accounts for purposes other than job warping.

I get the desire to restrict usage to only job warping and nothing else and probably agree too, but what the real issue is is that this had been allowed for months, which is why we (the PB run team) used this strat, assuming mods were aware of this, having verified it before.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume all strats in a run that's already verified can be considered legal.

We (as runners who aren't part of the mod team), aren't aware of runs which get rejected for illegal stats, so only have accepted runs and the rules to go by.

I think I've said it before, but it is unfair towards runners to apply rules and restrictions which are not defined in the rules and only (select) mods know. we spent I think around 2 months trying to beat the PB WR, all of which is now for nothing.

We could've clarified it with the mods before using this strat, but again, there were already (WR!) runs that used this, and so assumed this was considered legal.

That said, WITT (being lead mod) has done the adult thing and taken responsibility, so in my opinion we move on, just as long as we learn from our mistakes.

I hope with the new mods that got added recently as well as Xeenons effort (I know you've been working on this a long time!) to better define the rules around the game we love and play, this situation does not repeat itself.

Going forward it's important we all, as a community get to have visibility on what's allowed and what's not, meaning up-to-date rules and a public discussion if a new strat is discovered and it's legality is in question.

The GTAO channels within the GTA Speedrunning discord are somewhat active but not everyone uses it, in future I think we should have threads on speedrun.com such as this, but then the moment such a new strat/rule change comes up, and if a run is rejected for something that's not in the rules, add it to the rules so there's no confusion.

As for myself, I think there's still a desire within the group to attempt more PB runs, so I hope to still get that record.

My bad, I wasn't aware that's how console versioning worked.

Adding Legacy and Enhanced as separate versions seems to be the most elegant way to go about this, if we really want to have that distinction (I don't think this was an issue for however long consoles have had enhanced). As for Rag, I don't think that's what this thread is about, Cutscene skip is (I'm pretty sure) available on both versions of the game, although I do think that's the more important discussion to be having, but I'll save my comment for that thread if It ever comes around I guess.

Nice run, congrats!

Congrats Rag!

If you go to your profile and hit the pending tab you can see your unverified runs.

You can check the current queue with this tool: https://randomidiot13.github.io/queueclient-web/ (enter gtao)

It can take a while for your run to be verified.

Hello, no need to submit your run 4 times, it's in the queue to be verified.

How did you get so little traffic to spawn?

wtf, good job

Nice run, what's the deal with keeping the camera backwards during finale escape?