Updated rules for Any%
6 years ago

Hi everybody! Everybody is many more people for this community than it was a few days ago, which has already led to a new Red Dragon segment and a new WR!

However, this has also brought extra validation traffic, as well as many relative newcomers to speedrunning. It has also shined a light on the lack of rules for any%.

As such, I worked with SubStylee to form some baseline rules for any%. They are based off of the rules for a much more popular NES game and are intended to keep things as fair as possible without making running or verification onerous.

You can find the new rules by clicking on the "View Rules" button at the top of the leaderboard. To introduce and explain the reasoning behind these rules, I'll run through them here.

Beat the game as fast as possible. All glitches are permitted. This is the typical definition of any%.

Turbo/Autofire and left+right/up+down are banned. This is usually assumed, but this makes it explicit. Neither turbo nor being able to hit opposite directions simultaneously were possible on the original NES controller, therefore it is prohibited to use either in a run.

If using an emulator, please note which emulator was used in the comments. This is important, as emulators vary in their fidelity to the original hardware. If a specific emulator is found to have an unfair advantage over others for this game, then knowing which runs may have been affected is required.

Using savestates to the title screen is prohibited. Use the reset function on your emulator or console and the reset must be shown on the video. This is to ensure that the run is happening from fair initial state.

If you used a flash cart (like Powerpak or Everdrive) or some other way to play the game not on original cartridge, please add that in the comments as well. Flash carts, like emulators, vary in their level of fidelity to the original carts. If you are using one, just note which one in your run comments.

Time starts when you press start at the title screen. That is, start your timer and press start at the same time. Having a good start time in your video makes it much easier to validate.

Time ends on the first frame of the credits screen (i.e. when the screen turns black after the final boss kill). This is a little harder to time exactly, but generally speaking, you should favor hitting late instead of early. Hitting late still allows you (and the validator) to look back at your recording and view the time at the transition more accurately than your ability to stop the timer at just the right time.

Timing must include milliseconds. That means two things. First, your timer needs to be counting down to milliseconds. Second, when you submit your run, fill in the milliseconds part of the time.

Due to the popularity of the game, times below 4:05.00 are treated with suspicion. To maximize your chances of having a run verified it is highly recommended that you stream all of your attempts. This one deserves a little more explanation.

In short, not all runs get the same amount of scrutiny. Mods are volunteers, and have lives outside of validating runs. As such, we adjust our approach to validating a run based on how competitive the time is. 4:05 is where execution in the run needs to be pretty polished. Much farther below that will involve some of the trickier and less accessible tricks of the game. Being able to see your attempts (both successful and failed) becomes useful to build confidence that a your submission is genuine and not falsified.

Are these rules perfect? They are not. I hope they are a reasonable compromise, though. If you have any questions or concerns, please reply to this post or catch me on the Strider Discord: https://discord.gg/VWB4vru

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Rmac524, MattyAlanEstock and 6 others like this
California, USA

I'd like to add that any runs that have been verified before Nate's post are grandfathered in so there is no need to resubmit them to adhere to the rules posted above. Any new runs however will need to follow them.

Arizona, USA

I just want to wonder about the timing. Let just say my time stops and shows 05: 52.00 (that the split when it fades) does that means I HAVE to do that run again to make sure to have the millisecond in. Because I'm not too sure if it's mandatory to have millisecond in it even if you ended up with .00 there for the run.

I mean I know not EVERY run can have that but it rarely can be seen like that happens

Edited by the author 6 years ago
California, USA

Naw, Pup if you get a 5:52.00 for example then that's fine because that is the time you hypothetically got. If you did a run without the milliseconds though and it just shows 5:52 on your timer then we will add .999 to the time unless I or one of the mods is feeling nice and retimes the run, but with how many I myself have verified the last day or so that won't be happening anytime soon, lol.

(Edit: For an example you can look at Chelney's time on the board. He has a 4:33.00, but it only shows 4:33 because of the way the Speedrun boards work.)

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Japan

Two questions:

  1. Is there any evidence behind the claim about flash carts? As someone who just got one, I'm curious about the differences and would like to learn about it, if nothing else to try to keep my future attempts for games as legit as possible.

  2. Is the Japanese version faster? Is it allowed?

Jönköping, Sweden

Good question regarding US / JP differences - I'd be interesting in this as well

Arizona, USA

OK thanks Substylee. I was just wondering and yea I saw Chelney's run because of that.

I might have to look into that since you caught my attention with that Lazarus.

Update: Strider for JP version has never been release. I had to look it up for some reason.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
New York, USA

The Japanese version is a prototype.

France

Most of the runs in the LB haven't been framecounted, and as such it's really silly to add milliseconds to them. Even if you can frame advance to see the livesplit time on the last frame, it's meaningless if you started the timer manually for obvious reasons. Sticking to full seconds is always better than wrong milliseconds that give the illusion of precision.

SomeGirl, jeffsledge and 2 others like this

Honestly, I'd support a move to drop milliseconds. I didn't create this board, I was just the last active runner before GDQ blew Strider up and got modded to help validate all the runs coming in.

Anyhow, yes, I don't think any of the runs have been frame counted because I don't believe any of the runs are that close to each other to warrant it.

California, USA

We can drop the ms I have no problem with that. Makes my life easier.

Suriname

ok, so runs without sound. These will be hard to verify. 1 we can't tell if its spliced, 2. We can't tell if emulation is sped up even slightly, 3. i want to be able to tell based off the audio alone how many start presses were required.

baldnate likes this

Glad to see the healthy debate in here. Since ms have been dropped from the leaderboard, I deleted the reminder post about it and removed the mention of ms from the rules.

Jönköping, Sweden

I am still for ms and will continue submitting my own runs with these included, I'd encourage others to do the same for a tight game like this - just check The Little Mermaid NES leaderboard.. I would also ban all runs with no game audio period, due to splicing posabilities and easier to avoid detection if it isn't included.

Edit: So you men actually already removed ms as an option...

so just to give you ALL an example of how this is shit I have a 4:37:940 according to your rules, that should be converted to a 4:37 how the fuck is that even remotely accurate!?

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND MODS TO RECONSIDER

Edited by the author 6 years ago
France

I just checked The Little Mermaid LB, it's a good representation of everything bad about putting ms for every run (and more generally poor verification). I literally checked two runs, first one's video cut 1s before the final hit so i have no idea where the time comes from. Second run entered what livesplit said for the milliseconds despite being a very late split and it's in fact so off the guy's time isn't the right second as far as i can tell.

If you want to see a LB that handles milliseconds perfectly, I suggest the super mario bros. one instead. Every run with milliseconds is actually framecounted. The difference is the competition at the top is really tight (which is not the case for Strider) and requires milliseconds, and they only require it under a certain threshold that makes sense in that regard (you're not gonna ask someone one minute slower than the WR to framecount, it's counterproductive and rather pointless). Strider is in the same situation Super Mario Bros. 3 is in for any%, i would say. It's interesting and important to have accurate milliseconds for the runs at the very top for proper reference & comparison, but it would be overkill to compare beyond a full second runs that are 40s slower than the best runs...

Edited by the author 6 years ago
jeffsledge, SubStylee, and Zecks like this
California, USA

So this is going to be a hot topic, but for the time being Strider will stay off of ms. As noted the times are not competitive and other leaderboards with big runs and I will list examples don't do ms. Now some do have ms, but that's usually for when frames count for WR and top spots (ie top 5 or so). When times get tighter and if it ends up being needed we can convert it back to ms it's not that hard.

On that note though, if and when we go back to ms, some of you need to do your due diligence and make our lives easier and accurately note your ms with your video editing programs. I can easily frame count my stuff, but I don't have your vods on my PC, so it becomes a huge pain on my end and for the other mods to do yours.

One more thing we are all about hearing opinions and ideas, but do please bring them up in a polite and clear way with good examples if possible. Snarky, passive aggressive and overall hostile tones is not going to help your cause at all.

I guess that's it for now so by all means keep on voicing concerns or suggestions in a civil manner and I plus the other mods will take stuff into consideration. Thanks!

Examples of LB's with no or little ms runs.

https://www.speedrun.com/ng2nes

https://www.speedrun.com/smb3#100

http://megamanleaderboards.net/index.php?game=12&category=336

https://www.speedrun.com/supermetroid

https://www.speedrun.com/Contra

https://www.speedrun.com/dt

California, USA

I know it's a pain, Nerdy, but k0zzx does bring up good points about silent videos. As sad as it sounds people do cheat runs (way less popular then this like Roger Rabbit no less) and for NES games especially with FCEUX and Bizhawk it's super simple to do. By all means you can have whatever audio playing in the background it's no big deal to any of us as long as the game audio is present with it.

Sorry that it inconvenienced you, but I know you can get a better time soon!

France

Yeah as a last remark, what we do with SMB3 any% for example is we "allow" milliseconds to be entered (only so it can be used for top runs) but we tell people to just submit full seconds unless they're basically going for a top time. Many people still submit with milliseconds (and i've literally yet to see a single submission where the milliseconds were accurate with an actual framecount and not just what livesplit says after manually stopping it) as the option is there so we just remove the milliseconds from their times when verifying.

For example if someone submits 4:20.690 for smb3 any%, we check if it's indeed a 4:20 time and we edit out the .690 part from their submission. As you can see in that LB, only the top two times have milliseconds right now and both were framecounted.

So if you want to have milliseconds for Strider (if only for the WR), you can probably use the same approach as us. Up to you obv, i'm just an outsider here but as I mentioned i feel that the Strider and SMB3 any% LBs are very similar.

Aldriel and baldnate like this

I like Kirua's idea. It seems like a decent compromise of mod work, runner work, and of leaderboard fidelity. Well, aside from whatever work there is to edit all the current "non-top" submissions; that sounds tedious and would perhaps cause just as much uproar as the initial change.

Anyhow, I'm curious if Kirua's suggestion would satisfy the concerns of others here.

That said, I've never frame counted any run either as a runner or a mod. The closest I've done is examine Twitch highlights and YouTube videos to make sure the run submission time is not patently off from the time I observe.

Jönköping, Sweden

it's a step towards the right direction, I can live with that compromise. Ofc I don't speak for the rest of the community.

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