Totally down for this. Me and Nester talked about it and hes down too.

What we're going to do is set up the Individual Level leaderboard with each Character as a "Level". Runs can be submitted to these categories and the main leaderboard simultaneously if you wish (we might be maintaining parity as well .. but its a bit of extra work, so it might be slow to update).

@Tekrat Thank you so much for pointing this out. Everything makes sense now!

For those wondering: Its a workaround they implemented for playing online due to a glitch with netcode rolling back during a transition (I'm assuming this caused something wierd, like the black bars being stuck on the screen during the fight). It further proves my point about it being visual only and not being of any effect to the run.

Thank you for this information.

On a side note ... this is kinda getting rediculous. Like, I don't want to bad mouth the current WR holder .. his run is "good" .. but its by no means optimized to any kind of extreme, nor is my run (a whole 6-8 hours experience and I almost beat WR twice lol) or any run on this board for that matter. This board is currently stagnant and has had no real community built yet and conversely, no highly optimized runs submitted.

The fact anyone is going through any kind of measures to claim the WR is cheated is laughable ... people should run the game first before making these kinds of claims.

You don't feel you need to prove your experience any further .. lol .. you come here .. 0 runs to your name and we're supposed to take you at your word. If you feel like you don't need to prove your experience with the game, then I feel like I don't have to listen to your opinion on the matter.

You make a claim that he fails Shoryuken inputs which appears to be false because he nailed every single one of his wake-up Shoryus on Gill and Ryu. You make claims that his AI is too passive which is again false, hell on my runs its even MORE passive lol. How is the AI any different in my run? .. I exploited the jump in punch/kicks BETTER than he did, but the the jump in Punch/Kick exploit works ... proven by my run.

It's simple, you get yourself mid distance to the opponent, jump in and do a late punch or kick.. it connects like 90% of the time up to fight 8 and you just combo and capitalize on it. You need to fade some block RNG sometimes but it works.

The glitch is from the emulator clearly, and it is visual only and doesn't effect gameplay or speed as PROVEN by my analysis in the other thread. You can't sit here and claim its fake one moment and then just claim that the glitch makes it invalid the next, which is it? .. is it fake? or should it not be on the board because of a glitch? because those are 2 different discussions to be had.

That last part:

"Basically, the run looks fake as hell, and we're also talking about a player who fails Shoryuken inputs frequently and even started the SUV bonus game by high jumping when attempting to do KKZ."

How do you even know he fails at Shoryuken inputs frequently? ... Do you know him?

On default, Level 1-7 The CPU IS generally very passive and un-responsive. That's actually pretty normal. I can get free 92's on Level 1 Sean using different patterns.

Jump In punches/kicks DONT get blocked, its normal. Check my run, I used the same strategy.

At 2:32 his portrait doesn't play twice, its the same transition.. the "black bars" shows up late due to the visual glitch in his emulator (as covered in the other post).

The INSERT COIN message, I have not noticed. But I would imagine it has something to do with the same visual glitch responsible for the missing black bars transition.

The Characters vanishing from screen was because it was transitioning from round 1 to round 2, this is what it looks like if the black bars dont appear .. this is what the black bars hide its why screen transitions exist in video games, to hide re-drawing a new scene. It re-drew the scene with background first, then foreground objects (on the next frame).

You make the assertion that the run is fake, but you have also not specified "how it was fake", just a few things that bother you about it.

You're wrong about the passive AI, I know this from experience. Are you running the same revision?

On Japan 990512 Default AI doesnt ramp up the difficulty until fight 8/9 .. in which case mostly 9 - the RYU fight (for Akuma) is the biggest pain in the run. There is some RNG to getting good perfect rounds, but the AI is in fact a punching bag right up until fight 8/9. I was able to reproduce the Ryu strat he used but I found a better one with the jump-over projectiles to use for my run. As for Gill, his wake up Shoryuken tech is the best method I could find and its the same strat I used.

How about you read the discussion and find out why?

The glitch is visual only and gives the runner no actual advantage.

There was no discussion about CPU behaviour making no sense. This is completely false, I literally used the some of the same strats in my own run and came close to beating it within 2 sessions.

The run is not cheated, its completely beatable. Why are people who have never run this game coming into here and making rediculous assertions about the top runs with no knowledge or experience?

If you have a claim to make, back it up with knowledge and/or proof. Tell me exactly what about the CPU behaviour in his run makes no sense.

Edit: I hadn't read your other post before reading this message, see follow up in other post.

No. The standard grace period is 21 days. Usually 1-2 weeks is roughly how long people take, but its entirely dependent on the moderator.

Having said that I'll ping the mods for you, they are definitely active, just getting closer to end of year they are probably busy with family/school work or whatever.

I think you messed up the invite, clicking on it doesn't proc for me to join the server.

Edit: Figured it out .. the link is adding the ) to the URL .. might want to add a space between the link and the last ).

I recommend sending @CapnClever a polite DM on Twitch. He may not log on to speedrun.com very often but is usually responsive when notified.

• I just made one for us: https://discord.gg/JG26QTQ

Anyone is welcome to join. Be nice to have a place to freely discuss/share strats and help each other out.

If the dude has problems with his system, or if his system has cheaper hardware then that could produce graphical anomolies we can't reproduce.

Care to explain what you mean by the "emulation glitches are not consistent" ? Because as far as I can tell, none of his transitions have the bars .. that's pretty consistent. I also showed you how the bars missing were not evidence of a splice. If the bar's missing was evidence of a splice .. his transitions would be shorter in time because footage would have to have been CUT.

In fact, it would be EASIER to splice if the bars still existed because its easier to splice a black screen. Your logic is completely flawed.

Furthermore, with all due respect, you haven't even submitted a run nor are actually part of this community. Judging by your profile you have never ran anything remotely close to this game or any fighting game.

Unless you can provide more concrete proof we are done here. Thanks.

So after a thorough analysis of the run I can confirm the following:

1. The missing black bars is a mere "emulation glitch"
2. The run is not gaining any time or unfair advantage by the glitch, it is visual only and the rest of the run and gameplay are completely unaffected.
3. Because there is no time gained this also implies that there was no actual "cutting" of the footage, or at the very least it means that the missing black bars is NOT evidence of splicing.

I did my own comparison vid here:

My run on the left, WR run on the right

The 3 comparisons I made:

1. From Vs screen to "Round 1 fight" on Elena, as you can see no time is gained
2. From the end of round 1 to round 2 in a non-perfect round synced up based on the frame in which the win icon appears (the V)
3. From the end of the match to the post fight screen, again synced up from the frame in which the win icon appears (the V and the S)

Important to note:

• On the first comparison its important to compare the same character and opponent, because the intro animation differs the timing. As you can see here with the same characters, the timing is the same.
• On the 2nd and 3rd comparisons its important to use the WIN ICON as a timing measure as the amount of time taken from the "final hit" on the opponent from the moment you KO is different depending on how you finished them. The Win Icon is the most consistent timing measure and as you can see here it lines up in both cases.
• If the WR run "actually had black bars" but cut them out to splice the run, It would be impossible to line up the transition sequences as I have done here as the amount of time spent in the transition would be shorter on his run.

We have gone over the rest of the run in detail but have noticed nothing else sketchy or suspicious about the run. Neither the run in question nor any on this board is really highly optimized.

On a side note, I'm not sure why you thought it was wierd he used Akuma, hes one of the most powerful characters in the game and his Raging Demon is a huge time saver if you use it correctly. More SF Speedruns should be utilizing him wherever possible.

Under light of these facts we have decided to keep the run on the board. A minor graphical glitch from emulation is not cause for concern, it happens all the time. As long as no unfair advantage is gained, we see no threat here.

Thanks for your patience, I hope you understand our stance on this matter.

Hey dude, thanks for pointing this out. We are currently investigating..

While on the surface you may be correct ... theres also a chance that this is a result of an emulation innacuracy simply "not showing" the black bars transitions. Notice how at the END of each round even though the black bars are not displayed over the switch to "Akuma's face" they quickly appear/disappear as if its some kind of glitch.

Now this doesn't mean we are not going to reject the run.. even if it is "just an emulation inaccuracy" that could very well be grounds to remove it as well. We just want to thoroughly investigate all angles before making a decision. We don't take removing runs lightly .. even on a board as small as this.

Thanks for your patience and diligence, we will keep you posted as to what we find and to what our final decision will be.

Thanks for pointing this out @Kromer! I have rejected the run. Good catch.

Well then ... That's just classy.

Holy shit dude! This is awesome! Damn I can't wait to check this out. How exactly did you do it? Is it reproduceable?

Thanks @Liv. Yea we talked it over and agreed, but that's fine if you can't do it right now.

Though if there is a specific reason we "shouldn't" I'd like to know, because at the moment it seems pretty redundant/counter intuitive. Is some kind of functionality is in the works to allow us to specify an associated series for a sub-game or something like that? .. otherwise it's just going to be a bit cumbersome to maintain both simultaneously.

In any case, I'll leave it for now .. thanks for the prompt service. :)

Hello, I'd like to request that the following leaderboards be marked as the "ROM Hack" of their respective games:

Mortal Kombat ( https://www.speedrun.com/mk1 ): https://www.speedrun.com/mkbl https://www.speedrun.com/mk6rh

Mortal Kombat II ( https://www.speedrun.com/mkii ): https://www.speedrun.com/mk2plus (currently incorrectly marked as a rom-hack for MK1) https://www.speedrun.com/mk2abl https://www.speedrun.com/mk2u

Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 ( https://www.speedrun.com/umk3 ): https://www.speedrun.com/mkr https://www.speedrun.com/umkt https://www.speedrun.com/umk3ah

Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero ( https://www.speedrun.com/mkmsz ): https://www.speedrun.com/mk5sz

Once they have been added, we also ask for the removal of the Mortal Kombat Rom Hacks Series page altogether ( https://www.speedrun.com/mkrh ). Obviously the new system is far better and adding leaderboards via series page doesn't correctly link/tag the leaderboards as rom hacks anyway, so we think its for the best. Thanks in advance.

That's a fair proposal @Kromer .. I will notify you when I have a run.

IMO, the thing that makes fighting game speedruns interesting is learning how the AI works and exploiting it. There is ALWAYS a way to do that, even if there is tonnes of RNG and AI cheating going on.

Very Easy categories don't provide enough of this challenge because the AI simply does not react in any intelligent way. It devolves into finding the simplest combo and repeating it. That's fine as well, as a speedrun, but to me it's no where near as important as the hardest difficulty.

Another way to look at it would be the same mentality as the "Any% vs 100%" argument. It's always about "whether or not you actually completed the game". To some people anything goes = any%, to others you didn't actually beat it unless you beat all of it. In this case, Hardest is comparable to a hypothetical 100% category.

I do plan to run this eventually, regardless of what categories are supported, but I would love a Very Hard category to run if you make it (it would certainly make me run it a lot earlier).