I have seen a lot of YouTube videos that show speedeunners getting caught cheating.

I don't understand. The whole fun of speedrunning is getting better. I consider it kind of like bragging rights. You can't be proud of something you really didn't do. You only end up hurting yourself.

I look forward after work to practice and try to get better. I just will never understand the Billy Michells of the world. I really don't care about being number 1. And if I am ever number 1 I would want someone to come along and beat my score so I can try and beat the new score.

Speedrunning to me never ends. Always trying to get better and have fun doing it.

What do you guys think?

I doubt you'd get someone in this thread that actively disagrees with you, as cheaters don't normally want to make themselves known. I do agree with you though.

I feel the same way that you feel. It only ends up hurting the person that cheated because they know that they didn't do their run legitimately. For me its not bragging rights its to be the best at the games I played both as a completionist and as a speedrunner however I am more or less a completionist. BTW.. Billy Mitchell never actually cheated his runs are unassisted even if he did play on emulator. At best he just broke the rules and didn't play on a real arcade board. There's a difference. Sounds like you are into preservation of competition meaning keeping the competition alive for the next runner so that they could take first place and you can take back the run sounds fun. I'm the exact opposite, I like to train like a machine and master the ins and outs of said game first before I begin to speedrun it (completionist) and then try the submit the fastest time even if it takes me years I won't submit a run until I'm pretty sure the games time reached the end of its life. I basically like to compete against the machine and not other players but that's just my style. :) Also I wouldn't put much attention into those youtube videos of people "caught cheating" because you never can be to sure about those either because it might turn out that they didn't cheat after all. There's definitely more than one issue here, the people calling out the players that actually do cheat vs the players that might have cheated just to get attention. I've seen youtube videos where the whole channel was devoted to "exposing" other players rather than actually doing something productive with their time or for their audience.

That's because turbo/autofire isn't considered a tool. Back in the old days it was used as apart of a controller and "legalized" in old school tournaments this was before your time (not trying to be rude just trying to be helpful and add some overall insight to all of this). This was before SDA ever existed as well and speedrunning itself along with high score tournies were pretty much more localized then anything and we didn't have internet forums such as these back in the day, well they were called bulletin boards. Not everyone had the internet back during those days. Also the Japanese legalized turbo/autofire in their tournies because the masters that played for high scores in manic and bullet hell shmups such as dodonpachi realized it was proper for scoring competitions and was much needed to get a real high score and it helped optimized runs to full capacity. Now if you take the "word" cheat and define it it means unfair advantage. Heres a good example of that..If I were playing a game on mame and you were also playing a game but on the real arcade cabinet and If I beat your score, did I cheat to obtain it? Absolutely not I just played on emulator to accomplish it it would require still the same amount of skill to try to pull off. So did Billy Mitchell himself cheat? Nope. Also when mentioning runs on youtube and comparing them with runs done in an actual competition they don't really compare unless you are trying to argue who had the better gameplay I guess if ones a speedrun and the other isn't. At the end of the day turbo is not a tool though because its widely used among shmup pro's in the hardest genre of gaming and console controllers were made with it in mind. Hope this helps! :)

Either way, if you don't do your run legitimate, it'll most likely be denied. Unless you made your illegitimate run so smooth with no issues.

That's why we have people who know how to identify an illegitimate run. With action replays and TASes considered to be illegitimate speedruns (which they are), they can identify whether it's done by a computer or done by a human who messed with the game using a hex editor if they're using an emulator. For an example of how a GTA runner changed the games' code to change his vehicles' speed, see here: ).

I'll never understand why people cheat in their runs since there's no way you could possibly be happy with it as compared to doing it legitimately. I think the real question here is what happens when you pull off a run so perfect (depending upon the game of course) that people suspect it of being a cheated run but there's nothing to really go off of to tell that they cheated and let's say they didn't, then what? Just about anybody out there could throw out tool assisted runs with rerecording to make a perfect play. Then again if they are using an emulator just make them submit a input replay file to prove that they didn't cheat.. it would be hard to circumvent replays since that would require reverse engineering the emulator itself. I know of a couple Japanese sites that enforce this method and it works for playing on emulators. I know there are other issues though such as latency etc how well certain games run on certain emulators. Keep in mind I don't play GTA so my knowledge of those games is almost nonexistent but it looks to me that it sucks to have to keep the game online in order to play it, I've seen videos on youtube where hackers would join the speedrunners game and just kill em or is that information out of date and not correct anymore? Has that been patched??