I'm just curious. Is there a good reason why MZM doesn't automatically sort by IGT? It looks like more than half of the runs don't even have an RTA listed. It obviously can't be an accuracy thing since MZM is one of the few Metroid games that actually shows seconds.

As you can probably imagine, this is something that's been discussed to death over the last few years. Eagle, sam, dragonfangs, and myself - our word is not law, but we are by far the most experienced active players - all agree that RTA is a better sorting mechanism, for two main reasons:

1. Potential for abuse - every time you pause the game, every moving object that is not samus will continue to move by one frame, but the timer will not advance. The best places to see this are the long animations before or after a boss fight, but it applies to lots of other things too, such as ziplines, the escape ship at the end of the game, and even most enemies. While it is easy to impose a ban on runs that spam the pause button, it is a little less easy to ban pausing altogether, due to reason #2:

2. IGT strats. Pause buffering in MZM is not as effective as it is in fusion, but it is still a popular crutch for certain tricks, particularly the shine break at the end of the game. Pausing buffering incurs a penalty in RTA but not in IGT, which is, in simple terms, not fair.

Unfortunately, GBA emulators are not accurate for RTA. I think it would be very damaging to the community to ban them altogether, so for the moment we just have the ugly solution of listing them as a kind of secondary IGT leaderboard. There are also a lot of historical unrecorded runs for which we have no RTA (but, being unrecorded, these aren't very important anyway).

Those seem like pretty good reasons. Thanks for the response.

Do you know anything about IGT vs. RTA in Metroid Fusion?

Do I ever! There are quite a few things to consider for fusion:

Pause buffering is very potent in fusion because unlike ZM, you can buffer directional inputs (as demonstrated most famously by bob skip). There are no concrete rules in place about how much pausing is considered acceptable; there is just a sort of "gentleman's agreement" to not buffer silly things like basic platforming.

You can gain or lose a lot of RTA by being good at timing text during fusion's plentiful dialogue sequences. Many runners consider it a point in IGT's favour that this is not reflected in the final time.

Japanese text saves something in the vicinity of 3 minutes over english, meaning other regions would be completely non-competitive if RTA was the default sorting mechanism. Also, of course, many people play fusion on emulator, which would have to be scrapped too.

As time goes on, the issue of tying "WRs" will be more and more of a problem. While many current runners are happy to consider the record as being shared four ways, others - and most outside observers - consider it pretty silly.

What we're using at the moment - defaulting to IGT but using RTA to break ties - is not a perfect solution, and would not be my personal choice if I were a (benevolent?) dictator, but it's a decent compromise for now.

All very interesting information; thanks for sharing.

I find it interesting the number of games out there where the runners are just expected to obtain the fastest version (usually JAP) for speedrunning. This is the case for many of the most popular games (all Zelda games, many Mario games, Super Metroid, etc.) yet somehow it never took hold in the Metroid community. I guess I personally wouldn't care very much if a switch to RTA necessitated the top players to get a different version since the top players of all the other games managed just fine. I'm going to guess that your personal choice would be just to use RTA based on the fact that your runs are on JAP, and I think I'd tend to agree.

I definitely see what you mean with the tied WR problem. It makes sense that the top Fusion players would be fine with a 4-way tie since then they all get to say they have WR, but I definitely agree as an outside observer that seems a little ridiculous.

I'm sure the same issue will occur in Metroid Prime sometime in the future. Right now there's nobody out there who is in a position to tie the WR in the near future, but I could see a 4-way tie situation happening a few years down the road. The obvious solution would be to switch to RTA before it becomes an issue (which would also prevent multiple extra years of runs which use IGT-at-the-cost-of-RTA strats) however surprisingly there are literally zero people in the entire community (other than me) who are sympathetic to that stance.

Sorry for the rant.

I'm also curious how you managed to convince the community that it was okay not to have segmented runs on the leaderboards since I know that both ZM and Fusion have had histories of people doing segmented runs. (Or rather whether that discussion even took place in the first place.)

For what it's worth, I've been hoping for a long time that Prime players eventually come to embrace RTA more than they currently do. Don't give up the good fight! :p

As for segmented, I didn't have to do any convincing. Segmented has pretty much entirely fallen out of favour for the GBA metroids. The only category that sees much play is 1% in Fusion, and those are really just SS runs with deaths.

Glad to see that your speedrun community has recognized that it's 2015.

Can you say approximatively how big is the difference between an emulator run and a console run in real time ?

(very) approximately 20s in any% and 30-40s in 100% depending on route.

And now it's about 0 seconds. Heh.

Sorry to probably revive an old post, just wondering about Pollsmor comment stating that it is about 0 seconds now, is that true? How can it be checked? and if so, is there a way to see if Emu runs can be submitted with RTA now?

If not, how about suggesting that Emu runs can be submitted if you add 20 seconds for any% and lets say 35 seconds to 100% (middle between the mentioned 30 - 40) as a possible solution?

Just wondering since I've seen other communities do something similar such as the Link's awakening.

Thanks!

The main thing that's changed is that we've found that bizhawk with mGBA core (and some specific settings that I don't know off hand) is a lot more accurate than VBA, which is what people used to run on, for the most part.

Emulator RTA is still disallowed because, well, no one's really bothered to test whether or not it's completely accurate, and in the interest of fair competition we can't just allow it on a feeling. That's my stance on it, at least. I'm not sure how you'd go about testing it.

It'd also be virtually impossible to check whether or not people are using the correct emu, core, settings, etc for every single run, not to mention they might perform differently on some computers. Bizhawk (and/or the mGBA core?) still gets updated once in a while too, from my understanding.

Adding an arbitrary amount of time to your real time afterwards is a silly patchwork solution that doesn't really help anything. Then people could just purposely pick an emulator that runs fast for a better time, and we'd essentially be discouraging going for accuracy. Depending on what emulator is used, how much time it saves can vary a lot. It gets further complicated by the fact that it might only gain time on specific things (like say, door transitions and whatnot), and those probably vary between runs.

Unfortunately, GBA emulators have just historically been pretty inaccurate, but at least there are people working on accurate emulators now. We might see something in the future.

Thanks a lot for the info Eagle!