SwitzerlandNo worries and congratulations on your Record :D !
Okay, that explains everything.
Sorry, I used the wrong wording. You cannot use Addon Karts at all, neither can AIs, even if they don't affect the Gameplay (though if they are just loaded and unused it is fine). I changed the phrase to clarify. Technically you could use a 100% compatible Addon Kart then change it in the Ghost File, that would not be allowed, but we would have no way to know from a Ghost Recording.
Not sure what you might refer to since the points your are talking about do not apply here (Pidgin is a Standard Kart, it is a 4K Video without issues at 0:24 or so), maybe you commented the wrong video?
- Addons Karts are not allowed if they are used in some way during the Gameplay or affect it. If you see tons of Addons Karts in the Loading Screen but then a Standard Kart is used for an IL then there is no issue with that. If you saw a run actually using an Addon, then there might have been an oversight or different rules at some point, though unless the Kart has inadmissible properties, we would keep such run verified;
- Some small glitches should usually not question the run. You are not having doubts about the run itself? Then I don't see the problem. If you have, then we could investigate to see if we can prove that the person cheated. The Video Quality is not really relevant anyway if it is a Ghost recording since the Ghost itself might be faked;
- 480 is not optimal but we can still see everything that is going on with this resolution. It is not like the Nitro Cans become less than 1 pixel and we cannot check if the Kart did take it or not...
I think that there already was some discussion about how one could cheat. Anyone knowledgeable enough could perfectly make an undetectable fake run even with a good quality Video, and we are not going to check every frame for every submission.
I might think like you if the threshold were 5% instead, which is what I first thought to use, but 10% is already lenient and gives a large room for unoptimizations and mistakes or bad luck. 5.7 s margin for Omc or several minutes for Story Mode are pretty massive and forgiving. We don't need to be comfortably sure that submitted times with even more mistakes were indeed achieved.
If there are multiple instances of very good players with published times that are worse than the threshold, the threshold is not good.
I see this the other way around, if times are worse than the threshold, then they are not that great and don't warrant a proof. Well, even in your own Point Ranking, you would give a terrible score of 3/40 for a time 10% worse... Runs that used to be great might have been "powercrept" by some new strategy or simply more persistence. Andet's or even my own Any% might have been great 4 years ago, but it is no longer the case nowadays.
The only case the current threshold could be an issue would be when you have some insane shortcut that just 1 or 2 insane speedrunners actually used, so you have 1 or 2 times that might be much better than all the others so that anyone within the 10% would be implied to have used that shortcut (obviously, I thought about Volcano Island here). That can be fixed with a complementary "Top 5" Rule, or an explicit Rule enforcing a Video if a complicated glitch was exploited, but I am against raising an already lenient threshold. Otherwise we might just as well drop the Rule...
As concrete comparisons with other places that have a similar rule, the Mario Kart Double Dash Leaderboard does not have a % threshold but rather a fixed time. For Full Runs, they require Video for times under 30 min Igt while the Glitchless Wr is currently 27:58.038, or only 6.8% under the threshold. The gaps vary from 6.8% to 20%, but barring a couple of Cups with some broken exploits, they just go to 12.2%. Similar Rule in Mario Kart 7, with gaps of 8.1-10.3% for the main Categories, and even only 4.1% for the Mushroom Cup. For Mario Kart 8, there is not even any requirement unless you are Top 5.
I think that the rule is alright, it can come in handy in case a recording went wrong, if someone makes some casual runs without recording but did not expect to get a decent time, or for new players that have trouble setting up Obs, etc. And of course, we agree that it should definitively not be required for weak times.
The vast majority of runners are going to provide Videos in any case anyway, making the rule rarely used in practice, but we still have a nice fallback for the cases like the ones above. The threshold was even too high for your own case, which was still accepted as a reasonable exception. And the rules still allow us to reject dubious submissions.
In the Oliver's Math Class or Full Run cases, how I see things is that we already have several people that made it within the 10%, so honestly if someone not too suspicious claims to have made some time that is more than 10% worse, then I would believe it without proof, after all we already know that it is perfectly achievable.
If we were to tweak the rules, then I would not change the 10%, but maybe also require a Video if the player is Top 5 or so instead.
In reaction to the latest submission that was run online but outside of Frankfurt Speedrun, it is now allowed to submit runs done on servers other than Frankfurt Speedrun. Simply make sure to pick the "Online" option for the "Subversion" (this is not needed for Stk Addons) and mention in the description which server was used, or we may reject the run. Naturally, it remains true that the run "may still be rejected if there were noticeable lags or if we notice that the server made unacceptable modifications (different physics, etc.)", and "Only Live recordings are accepted in these cases.".
A Night Mode in Stk would be really neat Lol Or something like the textures/lighting changing with the System Time :p
Alayan has indeed an history of disappearing for months then suddenly reappear, though this time, after a full year of not logging in here, not sure if he will ever come back... Nobody has any news from him. You can try to send him a message here or on GitHub, who knows...
Afaik Benau is the only remaining Stk Core Developer right now, so expect the development to be slow... And we are not a company with billions to spend, programmers and artists also have lives and there might be long cool down periods where not much happens. Who knows, maybe the situation in a year will be completely different.
Stk is a community project where everyone can contribute, so if you want to speed up a bit the development, you can yourself help if you have some programming or artistic skills and make concrete contributions. But there is no use in pointing out the fact that things are currently slow and posting on several forums to get answers that don't exist or that you already know.
Of course that is not what I mean. At some point someone used the popularity argument to include Mod Circuit to Stk Addons, I was referring to that. What I mean is just because something is popular, does not always make it a good idea to include it in the game, I was responding to your "on the other hand online players seem to favour it and they are the much bigger group" phrase. The community will make propositions and influence the game, but ultimately it is the developers that make the final decisions based on practical and technical rationales.
Well there are a lot of simple improvements that could accompany such track changes, like some balancing (make Heavy/Lightweights speed +/-4% rather than 5% or so), reduce the number of Ai karts in Story Mode, put the new Shifting Sands that everyone was talking about at some point, scale Zen Garden properly, maybe add some good Addons Tracks... In that case, and assuming that 2.x will not be out until years, then I would actually support having a 1.4-1.6 category or something like that. We should just ensure that after these changes, we are good for at least 3-4 releases, with no compatibility breaks. The point would be to have some significant 1.x turning point. Otherwise if it is just updating the tracks like that, I am strongly against and would rather wait years before a new category.
Regarding the versioning, it is the same debate as the Linux kernel that was forever 2.x, then suddenly someone decided that it should be 3.x now, and now we are at 5.x and soon 6.x. Or FireFox that used to remain for years in versions like 2.x, 3.x... then started to inflate that number for some reason, and now we are at 100+... At the end it is just a number...
Wax sent me some screenshots so I saw the changes more concretely. The changes are certainly debatable. It appears to improve the issue of the first person monopolizing the Nitro due to the long respawn time, but adding Nitro at more places will also still tend to favor a frontrunner that does not have any competition, and I don't see the need of doing that or adding Bananas. I would be slightly in the "against" side...
I just express my opinion, if a large majority of people like that then fine. Though I also remember Alayan saying that the development should not be affected just because a change is super popular. With this reasoning we would have added Mod Circuit as a Standard Track, but I am sure that nobody plays on that anymore now... Technical and practical aspects must be considered, and regarding that, the compatibility break is concerning and I am strongly against this. And we should certainly not make such decision on a whim over the course of just a few days!
Frankly, if the changes are not groundbreaking like that, yes, I would wait forever. Unless there are enough versions planned like 1.5 and 1.6 before 2.x, AND you guarantee that there is not any compatibility break in 1.4-1.6 or so. But in that case just name 1.4 2.0, take the opportunity to make some more improvements, and keep the super big ones like new Story Mode for 3.x.
Affecting unexpectedly the compatibility would also create a bad precedent... Many people are for some reason still using old versions too and if it becomes the trend to add or move a few Bananas or Nitros every minor version update that would quickly become a huge mess. There will also be servers that are slow to upgrade, etc.
Where can I see the changes concretely?
This is surprising, wasn't the game supposed to maintain compatibility until 2.x? Is Alayan no longer developing? I am sure that he would strongly oppose to this...
With such changes, we would likely need to create a new/separate 1.4 category, unless they are not that important, after all, in 1.x, there were Iirc some shortcut changes in Xr591, and other menu changes that made one save a few s or so in Story Mode. But if you made this post, I suppose that they are significant enough.
The invalidation of older records is solved with that new category. But what I would really not like is to bloat the Leaderboard with 1.0-1.3/1.4/2.x categories... Once 2.x is out, there will probably be nothing in 1.4 and nobody would run that I think. I don't want to have another Misc category like 0.9.0-0.9.2 to manage... That would also be really annoying to regrind to make 1.4 runs if you made a lot of 1.0-1.3... An option would also be to ban runs starting from 1.4 until 2.x.
My opinion is that we should not make track changes until the development for the 2.0 release starts, so 1.4 runs can be included in 1.x. I posted it in the Irc.
Regarding your i) point, I would need to see the changes concretely in order to make my own analysis about this. Wax also gave me some details, like how it would favor Heavyweights even more, so if they frontrun like you say, that would indeed be bad...
