Discussion of rule proposals for No Manip
Scotland

There's been a lot of discussion about the leaderboards again as of late. Part of the discussion has focused on what rules would demarcate the two, although of course this has not been the whole discussion.

Universal claims like 'of course it can be done' and 'it's impossible to define RNG Manip' are not convincing anybody. Therefore I suggest we discuss concrete proposals for rules here, purely from the point of what certain rule proposals fail to prohibit and uninterrupted by the broader conversation.

I would like this discussion to stay on objective matters. Therefore please no rule proposals involving appeals to 'intent', since this cannot be pinned down. Of course it could be decided that rules need not be objective, but that is a separate matter and beyond the scope of this thread.

Lastly this thread is primarily meant to help inform the general conversation, rather than a place where final rules are decided or any such thing.

m13, TOTOzigemm and 3 others like this
Victoria, Australia

Well, I guess I'll start things off, I'm not saying that this exactly works, but it's been discussed that RNG manipulation be looked at by means of what is done in order to perform it, so we should maybe ban for instance advancing the frame counter by going back and forth between the Random Sort option, as a starting point, console resets should also be looked at, although I often find myself resetting console in a run to avoid a duel I've started by mistake or something like that, but obviously, if it's banned that can be worked around. While neither of those completely rules out any form of RNG manipulation, they're both great points to start from, and any other objective qualities of any RNG manipulation are something that should definitely be looked into, I would suggest banning the use of 3d duels, but they can be pretty epic and a fun way of finishing off a duel against someone that's been walling you, so I'm not too sure. I'm also not sure how much they're even used in the current RNG manip run.

Pennsylvania, USA

1.) Ban console resets within speedruns. As soon as your timer starts, resetting the console is not allowed until the timer stops.

2.) Ban the use of 3D duels except on Nitemare (swag points at the end of runs cannot be taken away, and it does not change anything anyways)

3.) Banning random sorts is too drastic, as accidents can absolutely happen. I think banning any more than 1 or 2 random sorts before any given duel is better. That way, if an accident happens, you do not lose your run. Or say something like "Any more than 1 random sort is not allowed before a duel. If you DO perform more than 1 random sort before the duel, you MUST lose the duel or your run is invalidated." This way, accidents are prevented, BUT if someone REALLY fucks up on accident, they can still save their run (albeit losing time).

I think that, if these three rules are implemented, it will make it MUCH more difficult to perform RNG manipulation. One thing to keep in mind is that there is simply no way to define it so that it encompasses 100% of all RNG manipulation. The only thing we can do is make it really, really fucking hard for potential cheaters to cheat without us noticing.

I was also thinking of creating a rule that bans idling during runs at the menus for a certain amount of times, but I really do not think that rule is plausible. But maybe it is. Maybe something like banning sitting at any menu for longer than 10-15 seconds? This way, those who want to go AFK during races or something can still do so, but they have to sit AFK INSIDE of a duel (seed does not advance with time during duels, so sitting for any amount of time staring at your opening hand would not help RNG manipping) rather than at menus. But again, I am not sure whether this would be good to implement, so discuss.

Implementing these three things would indeed make it very difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. And that is all we can really hope to accomplish, yeah?

Victoria, Australia

I think those are all completely fair points, the only thing I'd refute is the AFK thing, but before I did, I'd ask, does the seed advance after the end of the duel? IE. on the card drop screen? Or are walkaway strats in jeopardy there, because I often go afk for extended periods on a card drop screen, one way or the other, but more to the point, I think that especially in the longer runs, life has a tendency to happen when playing yugioh; I don't think it's fair to ban a run in such a long game because they had to go help their dad carry the shopping inside, or whatever.

EDIT: I also think it's pretty important that if we're deciding on rules like this, we need to make sure everyone is completely crystal clear on whether or not the rules are going to apply to old runs. I'm in favour obviously of grandfathering any runs done before rules are set, since people weren't to know, I think I did a 3d duel in my PB just now at one point, probably more than one honestly, so if my PB is b& because of it I'm going to be h*ckin PIST

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Scotland

On random sorts, yeah I see no objection to banning spamming it. Banning random sorts completely is in my view out of the question (and wasn't what Grig suggested anyway) simply because people often deck edit by doing Numerical -> Random -> Type. It should be noted that one random sort only saves you 40 frames of waiting anyway, so allowing 1 or 2 doesn't really change anything. Defining an appropriate limit of random sorts isn't difficult.

On 3d battles, I have no objections to banning them outside of Nitemare, where as GFC says it doesn't matter because the drop is useless and it will do nothing to save you from BEUD or anything. The absolute most it could theoretically do is change the RNG so Nitemare doesn't fuse MBD, but if you had the knowledge of the current RNG state required to know to do that then you could most likely achieve the same result with dumps or fusions, and if someone can get into that position then there are far bigger things one could do.

For console resets, I will bring up that crashes are possible (at least I think so; has anyone actually had a crash from Dark Hole/DCJ and not just a stall? (EDIT: yes, someone's told me they have)). I don't think this is a reason to not ban console reset, but I bring it up because someone could conceivably have a problem with it.

For idling, I see no reason for allowing idling outside of places where it makes no difference (duels and library screen basically, EDIT: password screen is fine, also Egypt overworld interestingly enough). Of course someone could idle mid-duel and load up say my program to find a drop manip or a draw predictor or whatever. This would be harder to do much with if duel idling was restricted to the drop screen, but how much the existence of this line of attack matters to someone will vary.

I do contest the claim the above makes RNG manip difficult, because of starter deck manip. One could go a bit further and then manip a Beast Fangs from Seto too. Random sorts and 3d battles would not be essential, since you wouldn't be going for something as rare as the ranges Final 6 manip uses or winning MBD from Heishin with a starter deck. Furthermore, if someone wanted to slide manip under the radar they would be far more likely to do something like this anyway, so in my view all the rules do is ban the current strats.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Pennsylvania, USA

I meant that it would make things more difficult to do RNG manipulation without detection. Not necessarily difficult, but more difficult (than it is now). Of course there are ways to do it otherwise. But the only thing we can do is try to cut off as many options as possible to make things more difficult. I believe my suggestions do indeed make it more difficult.

Not sure what else could conceivably be done here without looking into people's minds.

Victoria, Australia

on that note, I think it's also very important that it be stated that RNG manipulation is not allowable, and if you are considered to have done things with the intent of manipulating the RNG in your favour, the run is invalid, I know we wanted to avoid topics such as intent, but ultimately the choice to allow or disallow a run is up to the mods, so there should be a clear way of banning runs where, none of the actual set in stone rules were broken, but it's obvious to everyone that they manipped.

This way if we can pin it down to a point where it's really difficult to do any form of RNG manip without being really obvious about it; we've effectively prevented a problem from ever arising.

Also, what are other people's views on the whole, grandfathering runs thing?

Pennsylvania, USA

I mean, I think all prior runs should absolutely be grandfathered. A lot of the things we are considering banning here are somewhat common things, so removing runs that do them would not be a good idea imo.

Victoria, Australia

https://puu.sh/AkBgw/5336b05ded.png

I'm not necessarily saying that it's reached that point with the things that have currently been discussed. I'm just saying that should be the goal, because it's going to be impossible to completely ban RNG manip on objective terms

Victoria, Australia

so basically what you're saying is even if it's fucking blatantly obvious that someone has intentionally manipulated RNG, if they haven't done it in one of the ways specified the rules are shit for not catching them and the mods can't fairly ban them, even if it's stated that intentionally manipulating RNG is disallowed, and the final say is up to the mods, and everyone universally agrees that it's completely obvious that that's what they're doing?

Nice opinion.

I guess we also better ban running the game altogether, because otherwise it's impossible to prove someone hasn't modified their console/disc/emulator to guarantee good fights/drops/etc. like has been done in the past, without either someone admitting it, or that person fucking up in their hack and getting the glitch card, so better to just never play yugioh in the first place since someone might cheat.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Victoria, Australia

I've stated several times that I don't know how RNG manip works well enough to know what would be, but what we need to try to do is get it to a point where any attempt to manipulate RNG would be blatantly obvious to the people who know how it works, outside of the specified set in stone rules. And if we can't do that, oh fucking well honestly, how good the rules are isn't what's going to determine whether or not people try to cheat, people are what's going to determine that, and if you really wanted to cheat in yugioh I can think of a lot of better ways of going about it than fucking RNG manip, especially learning to RNG manip so efficiently that people can't tell.

Scotland

I'll comment on one thing since it's at least a somewhat technical matter. Part of the problem is it is (in my and Gcah's view) impossible to ban enough things to get anywhere close to the point where RNG manip can always become 'obvious'. And in the absence of rule proposals that would achieve that, the claim that you could do it feels very hollow.

Now you could of course hold the view that this doesn't matter. Or you could hold the view that of course it matters. That is beyond the scope of what I intended this thread to be about however, so I'll ask everyone to kindly move that part of the discussion elsewhere.

EDIT: One more thing, RNG manipping in this way would actually be one of the simpler ways to cheat. Changing drop pools and enemy deck pools is completely detectable with current knowledge, and splicing has to be done very carefully to be undetectable (and I do mean more care than just the video editing aspect).

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Wisconsin, USA

I don't really like the idea of banning random sorts in principle, but it makes sense given the circumstances I suppose.

Scotland

I decided to make a video demonstrating starter deck manip and Seto 1 Beast Fangs manip to make the point.

There are some obvious points to raise so I'll pre-empt them: the menuing is bad and I scan through the deck pretty quickly. Neither of these were an attempt to hit a specific seed to start the duel on, I just did it naturally and didn't bother spending much time on it because I just wanted to get into a Seto duel. I just went with the first duel I got into and turned it into a not egregiously suspicious Beast Fangs drop. You could easily do this with any range of seeds so you wouldn't need to delay going into the duel. Furthermore, you could experiment with the duels you go into to find even less suspicious ways of playing the duel (although I argue most of the plays in that duel can be justified by imperfect play).

I'll also note that this was very easy to find (hell uploading the video turned out to be the bigger hassle) and I only used my manip tool for this, which has been publicly released.

Victoria, Australia

idk man why doesn't someone make a mod for the game that completely randomises the position of the seed counter at console-on and we can just force everyone who wants to play that category to run on emulator, that's looking like the only thing that'd keep y'all happy at this point

Victoria, Australia

or alternatively, just have it be a rule that you have to stream/record your game on the main menu screen, like, at new game or whatever, for at least x amount of time (10 minutes, 15 minutes, something like that), and include all resets after that point in the video, or something like that, at that point it should be pretty impossible to know what seed you're on, right? Which should in turn make any manips almost impossible as well?

I feel like this wouldn't inconvenience a lot of people much at all, most people only really join races, and the people that do attempts, well, I know myself anyway, I generally speaking start up the game, then move about my house, get something to eat/drink, take a piss, etc., then come back to it and start stream, so if I just had to start stream before all that and put a BRB on there somewhere, that'd be no big deal at all.

Scotland

Making a long delay at the start would do nothing to prevent you from knowing the RNG state. However, it would make resetting to try and hit a deck significantly more inconvenient, especially because to my knowledge there aren't any bands of good decks one could go for to make it nice and easy (whereas a range for easy modes or drop manip is much easier to find, due to how the game does the calculations). At which point it comes down to how determined someone is to cheat in this way, and that's not a technical question.

Another thing to consider is the attack of learning the RNG state mid-run, and creating a Dragon Treasure or whatever manip on the spot. This is absolutely possible, given one can learn the RNG state from the player's draws. Clicking on a tool is inconvenient mid-run, but a brb or doing it during an A TEC are two possible approaches to disguise this. How much one should consider this a problem or not is a subjective matter so I won't go there.

Victoria, Australia

right, I guess I was coming from the perspective of like, if you don't know what's in your starting deck it should be a lot harder to do manips, so we should target the deck manip first, but I guess I didn't really think about like, disguising using a tool to learn the RNG state with a BRB or something

Bristol, England

I have been thinking about what to write in this post for a day or two now, when I began to think I was sorta in a "just in case this does become a split category with separate rule-sets I need to make sure the rules aren't outrageous" mindset. However after thinking about possible rulings, including those which have been proposed, I'm afraid I have nothing to truly contribute other than rulings I would not agree with.The first thing would be the banning of 3D duels, even though they do not provide anything more than entertainment in "no manip", I believe we cannot simply ban an in game feature like this, people have been using this feature long before manipulation was a known viable option, and simply banning something just because it can be used to manipulate RNG seems absurd to me. Next thing I would like to address being "manipulated runs being obvious to tell", though I doubt this point is taken seriously much at all, I just want to say there are things that I believe would be classed as "non-obvious manipulations" and probably even things that people would think that are manipulated that aren't. To quote GCAH:

"So we're going to start deciding whether runs are manipped based on if they just look like it? Kanek got two MBDs in 4 duels, or something. Cheated? Redhotbr got two quick Megamorphs in his recent PB. Cheated? If someone starts with a really good deck. Cheated? If someone gets good luck and beats Heishin in campaign. Cheated? Or does it only count as cheated if they got a 'good' drop from him? You're talking about a massively subjective and opinion-based ruling approach to runs."

What I'm suggesting is that we can't have someone/a group's opinion on a run's legitimacy used as a verification factor. I suppose to some extent we kinda already are doing that (with how easy it is in this game to modify a game ISO) but I have no intention to dig the rabbit hole even deeper on that.

For the same reasons I am against banning the use of 3D duels, I am against banning multiple random sorts, though these things may not be particularly useful, I believe people still deserve the option to do so in non-manipulated runs. I also saw something suggested about having a certain amount of "red flags" in a run before it becomes unverifiable, a red flag being something we could deem to be an RNG manipulation tactic. I am very against this as firstly it would be absurd to check through an entire FM run taking note of "red flags" (which could be considered very subjective), and if any individual hits a particular arbitrary number of these "red flags" having to reject their run. I just think we can't use anything that is opinion-based to verify a run, and the idea of "red flags" are entirely based on someone's opinion of what manipulation looks like. Idling on certain screens has been put forward as something to ban in runs too, I think that one is absolutely obscene, you cannot simply stop someone from going afk mid run. So I assume the response to this point is "we aren't stopping them, it's just where they leave themselves in game when they go afk that we are trying to stop, there are places where it makes no difference to idle", but I simply refuse to ban a run, that could be legitimately attained, because he went afk in a section of the game that isn't permitted. Sometimes people need to go urgently afk, and I will not penalise people for that.

I also want to mention a common flaw in the arguments of banning specific in game features, for example 3D duels, just because it could be used to aid RNG manipulation. The flaw is that there are so many things in the game that could be used in the same ways that it would be absolutely absurd (not just to me) to ban, like the use of "suboptimal" guardian stars. If you will not ban things like that why ban 3D dueling? The response I have seen to this point is that we cannot take an "all or nothing" approach, but I suggest that we can, and in fact we should, and the result should be nothing. We should not ban these things, and we should not separate RNG manipulation on the leaderboards.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
MrDevious, Arkild and 2 others like this
Alberta, Canada

I have an idea if people are fine with going the modded ISO route.

Usually the thing that dictates how Manip runners can obtain drops is through doing certain duel actions to manipulate how the duel goes, considering that, during the duel, the seed that determines RNG remains frozen and only advances in intervals instead of constantly. This is why we do random dumps, fusions, 3D battles, etc. to guarantee the certain drop that we want, as well as being able to completely manipulate the final duels, since the only time the seed advances automatically is between each duel for relatively short intervals of time.

The only thing that makes this possible is the fact that the RNG seed stops advancing during duels instead of constantly moving. If this seed continued to move during the duel, other than a TAS, it would be near-impossible to successfully manipulate anything other than the starter deck (which is something that current non-manip runners do anyway when they reset console or exit to menu for decks; regardless of RNG seed awareness, this is still RNG manipulation as you are working around this mechanic for a desired result).

The best way for there to be a true separation, with the current state of the game, is to create a modified ISO that still continues to advance the RNG seed constantly while in duels instead of it stopping. This way, duels can't be performed without TAS-like execution to get drops that are needed or easy modes from hard duelists. The only thing that you would be able to manipulate would be the starting deck at the beginning of the game, since that only relies on one well-timed input from the Enter Your Name screen instead of multiple well-timed inputs during duels.

So using this modified ISO would mean the following things.

  1. If this is going to be a category, it absolutely has to be miscellaneous, as it's being run off of a modified ISO instead of the actual game.
  2. The current runs on the Any% No Card Duplication leaderboard would have to remain on that leaderboard, as they are not using the modified ISO and therefore cannot be replicated on the modded one due to the RNG seed.
  3. As stated before, RNG Manipulation still exists in the game and is used by those claiming to be "no manip" runners from simply resetting for a desirable deck, regardless of whether or not they are aware of the exact result. Because of this, it's not entirely accurate to have a flag for "RNG Manipulation Yes/No", since it's being used in some degree.
  4. Starter deck manipulation would be the only thing humanly possible to perform on this ISO for RNG Manipulation, but because of the easy degree of difficulty to land one correct input, it would not put anyone at too much of an "advantage." If anything, this could be a gateway for some people who are not using RNG manipulation to partake in learning more about it, and go to the main game to do Manipulation runs.
  5. To further prevent any potential manipulations later into the run, a rule of "All runs must be single-segment; resetting your console at any time invalidates the run" can be added. This can cut back on seed clusters for easy modes for manipulating the Final 6 or even Meadow Mage for MBD. (Thanks to GCAH2006 and GenericMadScientist for brainstorming this point)

This is the only compromise I think is possible for both parties to get pretty much what they want, and I hope it's a way for us to have our middle ground. People who are running Manip clearly want to complete the game as fast as possible, and people who are running No Manip clearly want to gamble and play without having to conform to the fastest possible strategies.

Hdot12 and MrDevious like this
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