I made a spreadsheet (as I always do) documenting which categories have potential for videoless WRs, as well as showing the percentage gap the current time minimum is from WR.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OPyhCVOJbQReUIkoTxMgs3Oqg_L6iZmKMK4upmyUAL8/edit?usp=sharing

One of the most requested changes even before in-game time argument was updating the minimum video proof times originally posted here: https://www.speedrun.com/mkw/thread/c029i

It's currently possible in many categories to claim a WR run without video proof. I've thought up a few solutions to this and I'd like to hear feedback and other solutions from the community.

This solution involves coming up with extra minimum time requirements for all subcategories for each category (such as Balanced, No Items, Strategic for the cup categories). An issue that arises here is what to do with the video-less runs faster than the minimum requirement. We can either grandfather those runs in, or reject them (which is what I believe most other leaderboards do).

This is similar to a solution the OOT community currently uses for console requirement. The idea is that video is required for all runs within 10% (or any other percentage) of the current world record. When a new WR is set, the minimum required time will change. The two issues here are again the existing video-less run problem, and more so what to do when the WR run does not have video, which is now the case on some leaderboards.

This is the most blunt solution, where we remove all non-video runs and explicitly require a video for a submission.

The original post found here. This is just a mirror/slight adaptation in case the link goes down again.

Here is a list of glitches/shortcuts that are not allowed for times being submitted as "No Skips". Certain things that are allowed are also mentioned.

For the images, red is the banned shortcuts. The green lines and curves are allowed shortcuts/paths.

Mushroom Gorge (MG)

• No riding on walls/mountain
• The 'Canyon Gap' that cuts the final turn is allowed, only if you don't ride the wall/mountain, clipping the wall is okay.

Toad's Factory (TF)

• No clipping any boxes/creates to go through the factory walls.
• Using the lake shortcut near the dozer area is allowed.

Mario Circuit (MC)

• No clipping any trees to land on the track below.
• Using the ramp by the Chain Chomp is allowed.

Coconut Mall (CM)

• No going out of bounds (below the Mall, through the Mall's walls, the car parking lot, etc)
• No using the shroomspot exit to skip the first U-turn

Wario's Gold Mine (WGM)

• No hopping on/off any pipes or beams.
• The right-turn gap after the bat cave is allowed, only if you do not contact any of the beams.
• No using Lakitu to respawn you before the last turn to trigger a lap.

Koopa Cape (KC)*

• No falling off the track near the finish line to create an ultra shortcut

Maple Treeway (MT)

• No going out of bounds/skipping checkpoints of any kind to make the No-Lap-Count SC after the Cannon
• The U-turn gap (after the Wiggler area) is allowed.

Grumble Volcano (GV)

• No riding the rock by the start/finish line
• No jumping on/off any rocks (Yes, this includes the 'Rock-Hop' SC)
• No skipping across the lava next to the Rock Hop SC to force a Lakitu respawn glitch.

Bowser's Castle (BC)

• No using any halfpipes to jump to the upper section of track (right before the triple thwomps)

Rainbow Road (RR)*

• No jumping from the beginning of the downhill to the last ramp.
• Using the gap right after the Figure-8 area is allowed.
• The 'Moonjump' at the beginning is allowed.

GCN Peach Beach (rPB)

• No clipping of any trees to land onto the beach below.

SNES Ghost Valley 2 (rGV2)

• No clipping of any walls/beams to skip portions of the track.

N64 Sherbet Land (rSL)

• No clipping the start/finish pole to land in the water behind.
• Bouncing off the wall to help aid in the shroomspot is allowed.

GBA Shy Guy Beach (rSGB)**

• No clipping the bomb that lands a little past the start/finish line to land in the deep water to achieve a respawn glitch

(Dotted red line represents the path traveled from before to after the respawn by Lakitu)

GCN Waluigi Stadium (rWS)*

• No bouncing on top of the banner to land before the halfpipe section

DS Desert Hills (rDH)

• No clipping the wall at the beginning to skip the lake.
• Jumping on top of the wall to skip the lake is also considered a glitch.

GBA Bowser's Castle 3 (rBC3)

• No using ANY of the yellow ramps to skip the two straights (Yes, this includes the 'Non-Ultra SC')
• You're still allowed to ride on the walls.

N64 DK's Jungle Parkway (rDKJP)

• No clipping the tree to bounce off the start/finish line to land in the cave below.
• No jumping up through the fence to skip the spiral before the Cannon (known as the 'Spiral SC/Cut')

DS Peach Gardens (rPG)*

• No clipping the tree to bypass an invisible wall and landing before the final turn

GCN DK Mountain (rDKM)

• No clipping through any fences to land in any area down below.
• The chasm SC right before the final turn is allowed.

N64 Bowser's Castle (rBC)

• No clipping the starting pole to respawn after the final ramp.
• No clipping the wall at the bridge (before the spiral) to fall into the lava to spawn up above.
• Riding the walls is allowed.

[1] It's unlikely anyone can make any glitch on these tracks to save time. They're just here to match the original post. [2] The rSGB glitch is only viable for fast lap runs at the moment, but is here for consistency.

Games with a lot of categories make the WR History graph unusably short. Example: https://www.speedrun.com/mkw/gamestats

Currently, I believe that it's not possible to open a run page in a new tab. This is inconvenient when trying to view multiple runs within a filter.

Let's say you want to watch a few runs in a subcategory with the "Videos Only" variable. You first set the filters and then click a run. Then you have to open "Back" in a new tab and then re-enter the filters. You then repeat this for each run.

This gets really tedious and I'd really prefer to be able to just middle click each run I want to view. You can middle click the runner's profile, but not the link that leads you to the run.

@Javi17 I'd love to help switch over.

As an update, jcool edited the times of many of the mistimed runs and rejected the runs with fast load times. I updated the spreadsheet to reflect the changes. I don't entirely agree with removing these runs (the non-Dolphin ones) because they are legit runs. Hopefully we can switch to IGT soon and get these runs back on the leaderboards.

Discussion here already: https://www.speedrun.com/mkw/thread/5xar2

Also, I'm pretty sure this run is on Dolphin. Load times are 1 second faster than other Wii U runs, not to mention he says this in another submission from a run on the same day: [quote]as soon as i can i will continue playing on my wiiu but now i need to play on dolphin.[/quote]

@AmayaMKWii

In the Dolphin section I mentioned: [quote]The first two cons could be resolved by requiring that the Dolphin frame be shown in the recording.[/quote]

I forgot to include any screenshots, so here's some examples of why this would prevent splicing via TAS movie playback. When playing back a TAS, the Dolphin title bar includes the Input and VI fields which aren't shown during normal playback.

TAS playback:

Normal play:

As for Gecko codes, Dolphin is no different from the Wii and Wii U for cheat enforcement.

[big]tl;dr[/big] Math can detect cheaters, load times are inconsistent, people cheated (intentionally or not), RTA is bad. The leaderboards should be in-game time. Dolphin should maybe be legalized.

[section=Introduction] Yeah, I wrote 5 pages about Mario Kart load times, but I spent 3 months on this so what do you expect.

[big]Why[/big] I was curious how easy it would be to add up times for a 32 track run using a spreadsheet and I got very carried away. I’ve already been interested in load times and the in-game timer from previous forum posts on here, and compiling all this data produced some helpful results.

[big]The spreadsheet[/big] [big][big]Here it is <-- This is a link, it's hard to see[/big][/big] This spreadsheet contains all the data I will reference in this post. This consists of data from all of the runs in the individual cup leaderboards with a full video and mostly legible on-screen in-game timer. I didn’t do the 16 track and 32 track categories because I’m sane and I’d prefer not to watch even more runs. If anyone want to help log those times, feel free.

The Suspicious Runs sheet is discussed in detail in the Suspicious runs section. The All Cup Stats contains a data summary for all the non-play times calculated in the spreadsheet. The median non-play time was used instead of an average was used to rule out any skew caused by the mistimed runs like cookie587’s 51 second mistime. The 1st Quartile is the 25th percentile time for each cup representing an approximate best-possible non-play time for each console. The Wii Non-Play and WiiU Non-Play sheets are the Google statistics add-on output for the lists of non-play times at the bottom of the All Cup Stats sheet. Look at these if you love statistics and graphs. These are one of the few things I have to update manually, so they may be out of date occasionally. The X Cup sheets contain the specific data for each run. Runs submitted to two leaderboards (like No Skips and Skips) are listed twice. Runs that were mistimed are listed twice with both the mistimed time and the corrected time. The Real Time column on these sheets is the time claimed on speedrun.com unless noted as a corrected time. These sheets also make up an unofficial IGT leaderboard if you’re interested in that. The Deleted Runs sheet will contain reported runs that were removed from the leaderboard and also removed from my X Cup sheet.

[big]Terms[/big] IGT – In-game time. Timing a speedrun using Mario Kart’s on-screen timer. You time a whole run by adding up the on-screen times for each track. RTA – real time attack. The method of timing a run using an external timer (or video timecode) without pausing the timer. This is the method used by most speedrun leaderboards and is currently used on the MKWii leaderboard. Claimed time – The time the runner submitted to speedrun.com. Note this doesn’t always match the actual time of the run. Non-play time – The time you get when you subtract the in-game time from the real-time of the run. This consists of load screens, cutscenes, menus; the parts where you’re not really playing and just mashing buttons.

[section=Where the non-play time can fall] The non-play time for each run can fall into 3 categories:

• Outliers greater than the median
• Around the median
• Outliers less than the median

Runs with non-play time greater than the median can result from 3 things (in order of likelihood):

• Slow load times
• Not mashing well through menus and cutscenes
• An actual time lower than the claimed time (claiming a time slower than the run actually was) These runs are pretty uninteresting, but are helpful for the runners that fall into this category to understand why a similar (or even faster) run may result in a slower time.

Runs with a non-play time around the median are regular data and are important to help find outliers.

The most interesting runs are ones with non-play time less than the median. They can result from 2 things:

• Fast load times (due to alternate forms of loading such as Dolphin or a USB/SD loader)
• An actual time higher than the claimed time (claiming a time faster than the run actually was) This category is great because with this data, we’re able to consistently find what some would call ‘cheaters’ by just inputting a few numbеrs. Not all the players in this category are cheaters. They’re probably the minority. I believe most of the ‘cheated’ runs here are not intentionally malicious; many of the runs are here due to a timing error or maybe a misunderstanding. Detailed coverage of these runs can be found under Suspicious runs.

[section=Suspicious runs] The first tab on the MKWii IGT spreadsheet is a list of the all of the suspicious runs found from my data. Most of these runs were found because the non-play time was an outlier. I have a rule on the spreadsheet that highlights any time that is less than 1.5*IQR for each console. This is a standard statistical method for finding outliers in a normal distribution. Here I’ll cover a few of the runners here and how I made my conclusion.

[big]RobBobTheCornCob[/big] Mushroom Cup/Skips/Balanced is the fourth most popular category on the MKWii leaderboards and this guy got WR by just lying about his claimed time. This is one of the most egregious examples of the poor moderation on these leaderboards. In the submission comment, RobBob says, [quote]For some reason the Roxio extends black screens and these also mess up the audio. So,the audio is annoying in this whole video and I used Insane's time to confirm the time of this run.[/quote] What I’m concluding from this comment is that he used his capture card as an excuse to just copy Insane’s time. The non-play time for this run is 7 seconds faster than the 1st quartile for Mushroom Cup Wii U times. Timing by the video it’s 7:22.126 which puts his run within a second of the median. To be clear, the run is great and deserves 2nd place, but I’m not sure how this got by the mods. I even reported this in the Discord in October and nothing was done about it. Please just watch the videos.

[big]Gabbbii633[/big] Gabbbii’s runs are an example of what I might consider intentional cheating. Gabbbii has 4 verified runs that pretty obvious cheats by just watching the video. In the 3 (actually two, one is just submitted under two categories) Lightning Cup runs Gabbbii shows a phone timer at the start and after the run. The times on the phone are wildly different from just timing using the video. Even comparing the amounts cut off by what I’m assuming is stopping the timer early offscreen yields different amounts, which rules out a ‘slow’ timer. In Gabbbii’s 7:10 Shell Cup run, only the last two tracks are recorded on video, but with that I’m still able to conclude that the time is probably false. Getting the claimed time would require WR level in-game times on tracks 1 & 2. This seems too unreasonable, especially considering the skill level and other suspicious times submitted by the player. I wouldn’t expect the mods to catch this, especially when the submitted times are outside of the range that require a video. I don’t want to punish someone for submitting a run with a recording (which is uncommon on this leaderboard), so I’d recommend just editing the time to be proper.

[big]Menozen[/big] Menozen has two runs (including one WR) in Mushroom Cup that have outlier non-play times. The 8:05 WR No Skips/Strategic run has already been discussed a bit here. This run does not suffer from any timing errors, and it’s evident that the load times are faster. An interesting fact about this run is that timing by IGT, Francesco’s run is 8 seconds faster. Timing by real time, Menozen’s run is 9 seconds faster. That means Francesco loses 17 seconds to Menozen in just load times. This is exaggerated by the fact that Francesco has the slowest Wii I’ve documented in my data. The No Skips/No Items run also features people getting screwed by RTA timing. Timing by IGT, Spoofy’s 8:08 run and Spec’s 8:13 run are both faster than Menozen’s 8:06 run. These 3 people are all playing better runs and yet are still slower than Menozen due to RTA. So how are Menozen’s load times so fast? The possibilities are either Dolphin or a USB loader, so how can one tell which? Recently I figured out that each console has a unique audio signature visible in a spectrogram. Luckily, Menozen included audio in his run so we can check it using that. In the following image, I show samples of the audio from runs done on various consoles. You can see that the Wii has a distinct noise in during the load times which is due to the analog audio output the Wii is limited to. The Wii U has a different audio signature with less low frequency sound going into the load and no noise due to the nature of recording diɡitally through HDMI audio. Dolphin also uses a purely diɡital route, but shows an audio signature unique to itself featuring strong low frequencies and a light noise elsewhere going into the load. Just by looking at the image, it’s clear that Menozen’s run matches up with Dolphin’s audio signature. The image also shows how much faster his load times are compared to Wii, Wii U, and even the Dolphin build I used.

[big]TheSeineTV[/big] Similar to Menozen, TheSeineTV has two runs that have a fast load times. The 8:11 Mushroom Cup Skips/No Items run has already been discussed a bit here. An interesting fact to point out about TheSeineTV is that they have a point-a-camera-at-your-TV Shell Cup run with the Wii in frame in that has legit load times, but the game is in German. All the suspected Dolphin fast load runs are in English, not to mention the high resolution and anti-aliasing. Just by that, it’s clear the suspected runs are Dolphin. TheSeineTV’s Mushroom Cup run also features Spec’s 8:13 getting screwed by RTA timing due to fast loads. I’ll also note that TheSeineTV also has a Retro Tracks run that is in English and high resolution that I’d suspect is Dolphin.

[big]Insane[/big] Insane, the king of individual cup MKWii speedruns. He seems to have first place in nearly every category. Unfortunately, all of the runs done on his Wii have load times 9 seconds faster than the median time for a Wii. Insane switched to Wii U recently, and his load times are perfectly normal on there, but his Wii load times are well…insane! I asked Insane about his load times in a YouTube comment: He claims he left his Wii on as long as possible to improve load times, and ultimately its demise. I have never heard of this method to improve load times, and research turned up nothing, so I’m still skeptical. My guess is he was just using a USB loader. Regardless of his load times, his IGT is still really impressive. Unfortunately, he gets a 9 second head start compared to others attempting to beat his times on Wii. In my opinion, this is one of the strongest reasons to switch the leaderboard to IGT. A few of these times are unbeatable on disc with console using RTA. Some of them have already been broken in IGT, but place 2nd on the leaderboards due to Insane’s load times. There’s no way for Insane to prove he had a magical Wii, and he deserves no punishment. His runs are super impressive and deserve a spot on the leaderboard. Just give other players a chance and switch to IGT.

[big]Other suspicious runs[/big] Most of the other suspicious runs are too low on the leaderboard to discuss individually, and many of them are just mistimed. I still don’t understand how these get past the mods; all you have to do it watch the beginning and end of the video and do some subtraction. It takes less than 30 seconds. cookie587 claimed a run 51 seconds faster than it actually was and no one noticed! Some of these ‘other’ category suspicious runs have faster load times, but are low enough on the leaderboard that it’s not worth my time to figure out exactly why.

[big]Conclusion[/big] Don’t ban these people for claiming a faster time or having faster loads. For the mistimed runs, just edit the run time to be correct. For the fast load time runs, it gets trickier. The obvious answer is to switch the leaderboards to in-game time, but you still must question if we then start allowing USB loaders and/or Dolphin. I think USB loaders are fine if we switch to IGT, and I’ll discuss Dolphin in the Dolphin legality section.

[section=Dolphin legality] To be honest, I’m still unsure about whether or not Dolphin should be allowed. Pros:

• Easier recording of runs, therefore better proof standards and better capture quality
• Better accessibility for people without a console and capture card Cons:
• Easier splicing of runs using savestates. Submitting a Dolphin movie (.dtm) file alongside the run to check for rerecord counts would NOT work due the ability to easily hex edit the rerecord count.
• Possible run speed/stuttering of Dolphin running game at lower speed to give players an advantage when timing with IGT.
• Ease of locking an RNG variable to have consistent RNG throughout the run.

On the topic of Gecko codes, cheating is no easier on Dolphin than console. Cheats like a speed modifier can easily be done on console with homebrew, as well as on Dolphin without changing the code.

The first two cons could be resolved by requiring that the Dolphin frame be shown in the recording. This ensures we are not watching a movie playback, and that the game is running at or near 100% speed. The values shown here usually vary, so just superimposing a static image of a Dolphin window over a movie playback could be detected.

Locking the RNG variable in the RAM is maybe possible, but I haven’t figured out how to do that. I’m also still unsure how much that would help in a run. Memory access is always a threat with emulators and there’s really no way to prevent it. I’d also imagine it’s possible to do the same with a Gecko code on console.

[section=Next steps]

1. Update proof standards. Either require video or update the video requirement standards for the individual cup runs.
2. Switch to in-game time to resolve unfairness in load times. This brings up the issue of runs without videos. I think it would be okay to subtract the median non-play time for the appropriate console. Most of these runs are not near the top of the leaderboard, so 100% accuracy is not needed. For the 16 track and 32 track leaderboards, it’s going to take more work, but it’s doable. We should still require/encourage a real-time field when submitting a run to encourage players not to take long breaks between tracks to ensure the spirit of a speedrun.
3. Remove or edit suspicious runs appropriately.
4. Legalize Dolphin and require video with Dolphin window in view

You can turn off custom tracks and my stuff in the CTGP launch settings and it is indistinguishable from vanilla MKW in both appearance and load times.

Not saying that it should be allowed, just that you could get away with it. Plenty of runs are already up on the leaderboard using CTGP.

In your case specifically, getting a Wii U wouldn't really help in Mushroom Skips/No Items because the WR run is suspicious AF for being Dolphin and it has load times 6.8s faster than Wii U could ever achieve.

There's already 67 categories for this game...

This is still a huge issue. No Items, Balanced, and Strategic runs are now considered the same category under Miscellaneous which is VERY wrong. Not sure if this was a change by the mods, or if it's a site bug, but the filters are NOT what should be used for this section. It worked a couple weeks ago, but broke just recently.

The issue with that is we still have questions about some non-play time I calculated. Four runs on my spreadsheet have a 1:27 non-play time for Mushroom cup. These times are strong outliers and I still have no idea how they're that fast.

Until we can predict non-play time for all platform variations within a reasonable margin of error, I would suggest against converting RTA times to IGT.

I've already done this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ca6Hl5ra8b8rX3KSsgQKXDgenjlEpOOGvHBq6z1bjec/edit?usp=sharing

You can join the MKWii Speedrunning Discord to see some discussion on it:

https://discord.gg/nxX4uHf

I don't remember what 'Speed up disc transfer rate' was set to. Do keep in mind that one of the Dolphin tests was done on a physical disc drive with a burned backup disc.

i literally did it in 10 minutes for a 32 track run

If you have a fear of spreadsheets, LiveSplit has functionality for in-game time input. Other games like Sonic use this (though for reasons unrelated to version differences).

My issue with stuttering in Dolphin is that it's not 100% at parity with console. Generally, games that allow emulator runs have identical performance between console and emulator. The top Wii games I could find that allow Dolphin besides Project M (which isn't even an official game) are Kirby's Return to Dream Land and Super Mario Sluggers which have one emulator run submitted each. The majority of Wii games do not allow Dolphin runs, and in my opinion Dolphin is not at a state where speedruns on it can be comparable to console.

If you want to use estimated load time differences to compare runs across platforms, go ahead. We can't change the leaderboard with these estimates, but I agree that you should consider loads when looking for the fastest run to learn from.

I made that video and here's what I'll say:

There is no constant number to add to create an equivalence in load times between versions. Hell, even different models of Wii's load faster than others. It also depends if you have already loaded the track prior to starting (say you play Luigi's Circuit once before starting a run). Also note that different hard drives on different computers all load the game at different speeds on Dolphin as well.

What's more likely to happen is we time using the in-game timer instead of RTA. Even then, I'm not sure I would allow Dolphin. The Ubershaders update has improved stuttering on MKWii, but I still don't think performance is perfect.