Hi all,

Been thinking about this on and off and I am concerned about cheating with this game. Older games are far more susceptible to cheating because their inputs are much simpler; this run on PC in particular in my opinion.

Specifically I think I could download Auto-hotkey (or similar) and create a perfect run in less time than it took me to get the current run. after 61 attempts. (Please don't go and do that, lol) The game is so short and the inputs so simple that you could almost just type them out to get it done. I've got most of them written down already from when I put the route together.

My concern is that a perfectly executed run, and a TAS run using keyboard input playback, would be virtually indistinguishable. Parts of this run look like TAS already due to input buffering, so you wouldn't even need to try too hard to make it look realistic.

There are too many stories about cheating in the community, and how something could have been done if there were preventative measures in place.

Not sure what the best solution would be, but at a minimum I would suggest a video feed of the input device be included in the record attempt (eg video of the keyboard in my case). Not sure if there's something else that can be used (like an official timer app or something) to ensure the footage isn't sped up, but gotta start somewhere.

As an example, here is a video I just found when trying to re-find my own video (it's 8 years old so it could be anything). Dude is either using a different emulator, or straight up splicing, which is detectable in the first 20 seconds of the video compared to mine; though it does seem like the inputs are done by a human.

I'm just thinking we could be pro-active and make cheating in MM3, at the very least, too hard to be worth it.

I'd happily have my record deprecated and have to do it again if this seems like a good idea. I've got some ideas anyway, so would incentivise me to try some stuff.

Doubt had been raised about the legality of the 'doe meister' password for the any % run. It is unlikely this password appears in-game; however it does appear in the official guide book published by new world computing: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/images/9/97/Might_and_Magic_III_-_Isles_of_Terra_-_DOS_-_Cluebook.pdf

I think this makes it part of officially allowed play, though the community can discuss. The password is encrypted in the book, and there are others I am curious about; I will decode them to make sure the code actually appears here and see if there is anything else useful.

You can run a C program, or Basic program, to decrypt them, or do it manually with a simple cypher (reversed alphabet substitution).

Hey dudes, I just started running might and magic games and was looking at other records. I'm not a huge fan of the memory manipulation runs, though they are impressive I feel they should have their own category since they are so far from actually playing the game.

Anyway in this case it looks like a whole lot of setup work is done before the timer starts, this seems wrong. I'm not sure if the stuff that happens before a new game is started is required or not, since both runs do it, but the stuff done on the character creation screen is obviously required. Since it is part of the strategy for performing the run, I would think it would need to be done in real-time and without scripts, and would need to be part of the timed run.

The videos shown obviously either speed up the recording or use a script to perform the steps required on the character creation screen.

Might be annoying for people, but at least the run would be longer, more actions would be included in the timed portion of the run, and competition could be a little stronger?