New South Wales, Australia
SupporterHello everyone,
I'm just informing you of a rules update.
As of 15th of September, you must now include the round timer in your runs. It can be set to any number you wish but it cannot be turned off.
The reason for adding this rule is to hinder cheating - ie a spliced run could remove the timer and make it harder for verifiers to confirm that the amount of time spent in a round correlates to the amount recorded by the in-game timer in-between each round - which could potentially be modified by 3rd party "memory editing" software to display any desired result.
This rule is going to be added going forward and will not retro-actively disqualify any already submitted runs. However if you spot an already submitted run which does not have a timer and you suspect foul-play, please let me know and I will investigate thoroughly and report my findings with full transparency.
Quite frankly, there is nothing at all to gain by removing the round timer and it is not unreasonable to enforce it, it requires no effort to leave it on. Removing it is rather ridiculous, and seems to only provoke suspicion as far as I'm concerned.
Thank you, and please let me know if you have any objections.
Sorry for the late reply on this. I don't see a problem with it. I am willing to hear any objections from the community, let me know if anyone thinks this is an issue. For now I will verify any run that was done in team ladder with remote play.
Duckstation didn't exist when the rule was made. Now that Duckstation is a thing, we would need to do some sort of fancy retiming to appropriately adjust all of the runs on epsxe to make duckstation fair, due to load time differences.
Frankly the category just doesn't see enough attention to warrant the workload, and you're the first person to ever bring it up.
I'm not saying supporting duckstation is off the table, but we'd need to sort out all the logistics of switching and there is no one with enough free time to do so at the moment.
It would be ideal if you just used epsxe lol. Saves all of the trouble.
The problem I see with using emulator speedup is that its going to be used somewhat arbitrarily. Adding in a variable as to how "efficiently" someone used it. Idk, given how small the community is and how small support is for the PSX ver of Diablo I guess I wouldn't be hugely opposed to it if that's what everyone wanted, but it seems like kind of an ugly way to handle things.
I've had to deal with this headache on a number of other boards I mod for. It's just better off splitting sub-categories between emulator/real hardware imo. If the community ever got big enough and the run received enough support you could look at adding people to do load removal (not me, I've done it lol .. I pity anyone who would need to do it for a game as long as this).
It sux that there is no consistent/fair way to compare RH to Emulator for PSX games but its the reality.
The only other option I can think of is studying an appropriate "average bonus/penalty time" for emulator compared to PS2 fast disc speed and adding/subtracting that from the final run-time. You would have to enforce everyone using exactly the same emulator and same emulator version to ensure that the loading time would be somewhat consistent between people on emulator so that the penalty/bonus would be fair.
@AJenbo You're absolutely right. It is an "emotional categorization".
Frankly, the category shouldn't be called "Glitchless" .. The run is pretty well defined as what it is, and doesnt need any rules changed. If you understand how it plays its a solid run and it makes sense. The idea was obviously to remove duping so that the run doesn't devolve into "Dupe gold" -> "Roll Adria for god gear" -> "Go".
Removing Duping, but allowing "any other glitch" makes the run play out far more interestingly, requiring you to PLAY the game and deal with the RNG as it comes to you, as opposed to forcing your way in with Duping.
I still have no idea why this community is so stuck in the old days of thinking everything is either "Glitchless" or "any%". Literally every other community has adapted to modern naming schemes such as "No Major Glitches" ... or in this case probably just "No Dupe" would suffice.
Hi guys, I will make the categories for them. I was actually interested in the Amiga version myself, but I found the hardest difficulty on that version to be completely impossible lol.
If you have a run to submit please, do so, and I will write the rules based on how you ran it.
Feel free to negotiate what you think the rules should be for those categories in this thread. I would say that at the very least - timer should start on when you "hit start" to begin the game, end on the final hit to Supervisor and skipping cinematics would of course be allowed.
If you want it to be on a specific difficulty or there be categories for multiple difficulties, let me know.
This trick should be allowed. The effect it has on the run gives you some minor utility early on but the major feature of being able to put together ManaS/FW/Phasing with a single scroll of ManaS cuts 1/3 of the rng of the run.
I'm not gonna go into how stupid it is that this category is called glitchless. I think we all know this category isnt really glitchless.
This category should be called "No Major Glitches" or "Hardcore: No Dupe" because thats what it is.
This category does 1 thing and it does it well. It removes the route of duping gold to buy what you need from Adria, forcing you to play a complete game from start to finish, while still allowing the runner to abuse any and all "speedrun strats" that are allowed beyond that.
This trick still respects that. That is what the spirit of this run is in my opinion.
We know how the run plays. All this trick does is reduce rng, but not so much that it becomes a linear automated run, while also providing some neat utility early on (ie free casting heal/tp). It doesnt allow you to get infinite gold, and doesnt reduce the run into rolling adria and ignoring everything that drops.
Also, abusing this strat is literally no different from abusing double casting which is allowed. Its just double casting plus.
Thanks! This is great information!
We do this a lot in Mortal Kombat as well where taking a hit to avoid Flawless victory is worth roughly 1-2 seconds per round and it all really adds up in the end. Finding a consistent way to route taking a hit would be very valuable! Assuming you can do it without spending more time in the process
When people who actually run the game start making these requests, we'll entertain those ideas.
When you actually run the categories that are currently available, you tend to see why there is not really much to gain by adding categories for individual towers.
For accessibility, Any% exists
For challenge, standard exists
For authenticity, No Coin Skip exists
For glitchless, No major exploits exists
For the specialist, Individual Character runs exists (for each of those subcategories)
We really dont need N^4^4 Sub-Categories for each Existing Sub-category cluttering up the board. What we have is enough.
If you really disagree. Run the game. Join our community. Then discuss.
Sorry for the late reply. As Molotok said, unfortunately the emulation on your run is too innacurate to be acceptable (the blatant glitch auto ringouts are a dead giveaway).
And yes, in regards to Janet's run. That's not how speedrunning works. As long as evidence of a run exists, it qualifies. For us to remove it, Janet would have to contact us and personally object to the run being on the board. And even if they did, we would still be entitled to leave a placeholder "anonymous" entry in their place to represent the rightful WR time for this category, so either way their WR time would still stand on this leaderboard.
Hey guys, I just added a character variable to the main leaderboard and we also now have Individual Level leaderboards for all the characters and difficulties.
Obviously, many runs from the main leaderboard would qualify for these already but I don't have the time to copy them across at the moment. If you wish to duplicate your submission for those categories so I can verify them, you are welcome to do so. Eitherwise I will get to copying them at some point eventually.
Also in regards to character variable on main: I only did the PB's. If you have obseleted runs that are incorrectly marked with the wrong character value, feel free to modify/fix them yourselves and I will verify them.
Figured I'd chime in because Xen brought it up to me:
In regards to the Arcade version, your best bet is MAME. It looks like MAME revisions prior to revision 0.233 have a very minor graphical error - you can see the report here: https://mametesters.org/view.php?id=8040&nbn=2#bugnotes
Personally I wouldn't really see that as an issue and you should be more or less safe to allow any version of MAME as far as emulation goes, but if you want to be really thorough with the above issue you could ask that runners only submit MAME 0.233 or higher.
Other than that, you should be good. Just be sure to put in separate timing rules for the Arcade version. If the board ever becomes highly optimized or you have doubts about the legitimacy of a run, you could ask that runners use a special version of MAME called WolfMAME which employs anti-cheat methods such as blocking save state and debug cheat usages.
WolfMAME is a little complex to use though so I wouldnt recommend requiring it unless you absolutely have to, over at MK we ask that runners use WolfMAME only when they reach a certain skill threshold (if they get below a certain competetive time). I dont think you need to worry about that right now though since the board is so small.
TLDR, ask runners to use MAME, add timing rules specific for arcade
My 2 cents, hmu if u have any questions.
Oooh Right. Sorry I completely forgot about that.
In that case unfortunately it does not classify as having completed the run as the bad ending is seen as a game over, rather than a completion. My apologies, I completely forgot about it, and yes it means you would need to restart and try again.
You can lose, or even continue as many times as you wish throughout the run. The only penalty is the amount of time it takes in doing so. Obviously a good run will be 1CC with no round losses, but if your current best run has a round loss or a continue, it is still valid and will still be verified.
Apologies, I abandoned moderatorship for this game myself as I have no intentions of returning to it and I am too busy with other games. You may apply for moderatorship yourself using the support hub if the remaining moderators are inactive, which will allow you to verify your runs and manage the board yourself if you wish.
You can find the support hub here: https://www.speedrun.com/knowledgebase/supporthub
