Please push null ms runs to the bottom, not top
1 year ago
Friesland, Netherlands

I moderate the ODC boards. When a run has no ms specified (null value), that run will be scored a higher position than a run that does have ms specified.

This is unfair, because this allows runners to gain positions simply by not showing the MS on the in-game timer. I feel rejecting these runs goes too far, but now I have to put an ugly '999' just to push a run to the bottom.

M_CBL_ and Urinstein like this
Somerset, England

It's not unfair? 1.000s is faster than 1.500s, putting 999ms is unfair, it also makes the leaderboard inaccurate If they don't have an in-game timer then where are you getting the run's time from? If you're retiming it yourself then put the ms

Edited by the author 1 year ago
Gaming_64 likes this

[quote]This is unfair, because this allows runners to gain positions simply by not showing the MS on the in-game timer[/quote] If this is the issue, you could mandate choosing the option to show ms on the in-game timer, at least for runs below a certain cutoff point. Make an announcement of the change and enforce the rule going forward (not retroactively), and it shouldn't cause many problems.

Iowa, USA

[quote] This is unfair, because this allows runners to gain positions simply by not showing the MS on the in-game timer. [/quote]

Then ban not putting milliseconds on the in game timer.

Gaming_64 and YUMmy_Bacon5 like this
Basque Country

whatever the time is from the user, the verifier is supposed to retime the run correctly, and either all the runs in that same second get miliseconds, or no one does if some users are faster for not having miliseconds over others that have it, is just an organization issue in the leaderboard

M_CBL_ likes this
Australia

I 100% agree that when this happens, almost every time I would prefer the ones without precision to be preferred less. Not that it should really ever happen ideally - but when this scenario exists (which it does) - having no precision should always be preferred worse than having precision

Basque Country

it straight up shouldn't happend in first place, i don't think is something the SRC staff should modify in the whole site to fix that also would carry a problem, if any run happened to be added without miliseconds because of an exact retiming of no miliseconds (ex.: a run of 12,000 seconds exact), it would be marked as worse than all the runs slower in the 12 mark, while it is faster than all of them that could be also fixed, as you can just put "000" in the miliseconds, but it is as well a subconscious error that could happend anytime

verifiers job in the site is, indeed, verificating the runs in the leaderboard, including retiming all of them correctly, adding or removing miliseconds in each case, and they should control their leaderboards don't have this type of errors report to mods any case that you find like that

Edited by the author 1 year ago
Somalia

[quote=YUMmy_Bacon5]It's not unfair? 1.000s is faster than 1.500s, putting 999ms is unfair, it also makes the leaderboard inaccurate[/quote]

[quote=KilleDragon]that also would carry a problem, if any run happened to be added without miliseconds because of an exact retiming of no miliseconds (ex.: a run of 12,000 seconds exact), it would be marked as worse than all the runs slower in the 12 mark, while it is faster than all of them[/quote]

Neither of you understands the op. There is a difference between submitting a run as exactly 12.000s and submitting it as 12s. So you can still accurately submit a run that happens to be exactly 12.000s long, even if a 12s submission is ranked below all other 12.xxx runs.

[quote=KilleDragon]verifiers job in the site is, indeed, verificating the runs in the leaderboard, including retiming all of them correctly, adding or removing miliseconds in each case, and they should control their leaderboards don't have this type of errors[/quote]

This is not only stupendously entitled, that every single run should require retiming for milliseconds (top runs maybe, but not every run on an active LB), but in some PC games it is straight up impossible, as they use load removers and very often loading times that accumulate slowly across the run cannot be (easily) visually confirmed. So it becomes anywhere between incredibly impractical and entirely impossible to retime them manually (OP specifically mentions ODC, which uses ingame time and runners seem to forget to turn on the millisecond option for the IGT). And in those cases, if the runner decides not to show their milliseconds in the video (if there even is a video, some boards only require video below a certain time threshold) and also will not provide them themselves, the reasonable solution is to just assume that they are not any faster than all the confirmed times. Lastly, the idea, that one should just make milliseconds mandatory for everyone and remove runs that do not have them, is extremely pedantic and shortsighted. Usually submissions with small technicality problems are from people new to speedrunning. Often times they submit one run and will never be seen again, other times they will soon improve their time and eventually learn to submit their runs properly. There is no need to make a whole deal out of a run that is places well in the bottom third of a busy leaderboard and no need to greet those people with an immediate rejection of their run, when OP's solution to this specific problem is so simple. We're playing video games here and video games are supposed to be fun, so it makes more sense to put some effort into accommodating those people as opposed to putting much more effort into alienating them for very pedantic reasons.

Edited by the author 1 year ago
Somerset, England

[quote=Urinstein]There is a difference between submitting a run as exactly 12.000s and submitting it as 12s[/quote] I understand that there is, and I never edit runs as having 000ms since I don't want 000ms to show on the leaderboards

Edited by the author 1 year ago
Gaming_64 likes this

[quote=Urinstein]Lastly, the idea, that one should just make milliseconds mandatory for everyone and remove runs that do not have them, is extremely pedantic and shortsighted. Usually submissions with small technicality problems are from people new to speedrunning. Often times they submit one run and will never be seen again, other times they will soon improve their time and eventually learn to submit their runs properly.[/quote] The new runner aspect is why I suggested that the mandate could specify a cutoff point. That said, Deepest Sword has a "show ms" rule for all runs without too many issues, and it gets more runners than ODC.

If a runner gets a run rejected for a small technical point like that, they learn their lesson quickly.

Basque Country

@Urinstein not sure i understand entirely, but your main point is that some speedgames just don't have the chance to be retimed accurately up to the miliseconds? welp, in that case, just retime every run without miliseconds, just up to the second what is bad is mixing in a same seconds runs with miliseconds and runs without miliseconds; either miliseconds for everyone or for no one, depends of the nature of the category and the game (of course there are also cases of "just miliseconds under 5 minutes", which is completly fine, the problem comes when you mix with and without in the same second)

Edited by the author 1 year ago
Somalia

[quote=KilleDragon]@Urinstein not sure i understand entirely, but your main point is that some speedgames just don't have the chance to be retimed accurately up to the miliseconds? welp, in that case, just retime every run without miliseconds, just up to the second[/quote] Worse than that, my point was that some games are absolutely impractical to retime even to the minute, because the load remover will remove frames worth of time every 20s of gameplay in a 90min run. So the load removal is imperceptible, but adds up to create an entire minute of different between people just because of hardware differences, so even if you could theoretically retime those runs manually by counting the loading frames, it is not gonna happen because it would take 10x longer than the duration of the run. That is why load removers exist. (example CrossCode: https://www.speedrun.com/crosscode#Any_NMG) Or another example would be Mirror's Edge, where apart from normal loading screens and main menu time a lot of load times are hidden in elevator rides, so you will see the load removed timer pause, even though it looks like totally normal gameplay, I would personally not know how one would retime that manually. (https://www.speedrun.com/me).

Some PC speedruns, due to their use of load removers are quite simply, not feasible to be retimed at all, not to milliseconds, not to full seconds, and perhaps not even to the minute, except maybe in very special cases where it's be worth the exorbitant trouble. So the idea that every run that gets submitted to a LB should always, in every case be retimed, because "it's the verifiers job" is anywhere between totally impractical and literally impossible.

[quote=hahhah42]The new runner aspect is why I suggested that the mandate could specify a cutoff point. That said, Deepest Sword has a "show ms" rule for all runs without too many issues, and it gets more runners than ODC.[/quote] Having a cutoff point for milliseconds would still require OP's solution. And I would say there is a qualitative difference between a game where 90% of submission are under 8min and where 90% of submission are under around under an hour. I doubt people are thrilled to spend another 40min to do the same thing again with the ms option enabled, when the simple solution is to just default them to an invisible .999s.

[quote]Having a cutoff point for milliseconds would still require OP's solution.[/quote] Or they could refrain from listing ms for any runs above the cutoff, like the SMB1 leaderboard does. After all, if you can't determine with certainty which run is faster, why not just leave them tied?

Besides, looking at the ODC leaderboard, the highest point on the leaderboard where this applies is 24th/25th place runs. However, the 24th place run doesn't have a difference between its RTA/IGT (perhaps due to its age and the rules being different at the time?), so it was almost certainly faster than the 25th place run that your simple solution would place above it. (It doesn't have a working video anymore, so I guess that can't really be checked.) The same thing seems to apply to many of the other runs without ms in the upper half of the leaderboard, so defaulting them to losing ties seems like it'd be exactly the wrong approach to me. It'll explicitly favor newer but slower runs over the older, faster runs.

Basque Country

@Urinstein okey that's goddamn insane, i feel like that's literaly 1 single case you found and no more than that case lol but anyways, if they want to retime it to the minute, retime it to the minute, it literaly doesn't matter the only point is that all the runs should follow these same rules; in that case, you want all the runs retimed to the minute, just don't retime a run with seconds if all the runs in the same spare of time is retimed to the minute

just retime all the runs in a category with the same precision, is the whole point

Minnesota, USA

this seems like a mess that should be cleaned up regardless of the solution as long as it's fair to everyone. what you suggested isn't fair: for example, if a player submits 1m 00s 000ms and you change it to 1m 00s 999ms, this is making an assumption that the run is slower than any other time submitted within 1m 00s with ms, which isn't necessarily correct.

as it stands, the leaderboard rankings appear really arbitrary when some runs have accurate IGT, while some runs have real time copied to IGT, and some lack video and are impossible to retime.

here's my suggestion: scrap ms from all runs and let ties be ties. the rankings still wouldn't be perfect, since some runs are still using real time in the IGT column, but it would be better than what's currently there. but the takeaway is that times on a leaderboard need to be accurate within reason for the rankings to have any meaning, so if it's not reasonable to time every run with ms, don't use ms at all.

Somalia

[quote=KIlleDragon]i feel like that's literaly 1 single case you found and no more than that case lol[/quote] I didn't need to "find" that, it's literally a game I moderate lol I also mentioned Mirror's Edge as a game, where loading times are hidden in the gameplay and not visually confirmable, so it's literally 2 cases lol

Of course you wouldn't know what it's like to run PC games with load remover when all you run is a different 2min web game every month, so maybe take my word for it when you have no idea, instead of assuming I'm cherrypicking for no good reason.

Basque Country

@Urinstein ok im so sorry for underrating your knowledge in PC games having no idea how they work but my point stands in how the retiming just has to be the same for everyone in the same spare of minute/second/milisecond or hour if you want (and i could discuss about my runs experience but i think i will pass)

Edited by the author 1 year ago