I just want to add that "submitted by" isn't always the actual submission date and goes off the date the run was done itself

Isn't that the "Played on" date?

"I just want to add that "submitted by" isn't always the actual submission date and goes off the date the run was done itself"

Only if you manually change it, since it was submitted by Cake Eater and not manually submitted by Buju I don't see any reason to think he waited six goddamn months to do it.

Actually no “submitted by” is the date you submitted it, “Played on” is the day you ran the game

Correct me if I’m wrong

Greetings, BulletNick, co-moderator of the Monolith leaderboards. Punchy made me aware of the heated discussion that's been brewing here lately and I thought I'd explain what has been going on.

I started playing the game around early July, but I joined the Monolith Discord in very early August. At that time there wasn't much talk of speedrunning the game, and after a few weeks I really did my best to motivate people to start speedrunning Monolith. I was one of the first people to really take speedrunning it seriously and pushed people to get together and get organised. To show my point, here is some evidence that this has been going on for a while:

Here are some screenshots of conversations I had with Foxie, one of our early runners who has since dropped out, indicating that at least since early August we were aware of the sr.c leaderboard and already had doubts about it: Now let me say that if memory serves me right (and it might not in the following claim), Foxie DID contact Buju about this topic, but nothing much came of it. This is a post I made in mid-August proposing for some way of indicating categories: That pastebin doesn't exist anymore (because it was quickly pointed out to be a terrible idea) but the fact remains that already in August I was trying to get the ball rolling. The very next day, a guy who goes by Nox did the Discord server an immense favor by creating the official unofficial Monolith speedrun leaderboards, as you can see here:

This shows that there has been sufficient interest in speedrunning the game to the point where one of our players (very generously and kindly) created a Google Doc to track all of our times in mid-August. And the board shows that during August there was a flurry of submissions. There was a lull during September-December although now there's a few newer times in there. During all this time, to the best of my recollection, the sr.c page almost never updated, never had the categories this board has, and was generally mostly ignored by the community on the Discord server, partly due to frustration, partly due to apathy.

In all this time, Buju has NEVER, not ONCE, been seen talking or interacting with the people in the Discord server, which is were almost all the speedrunners and top players (that I am aware of thus far) congregate and discuss the game, and said server includes the actual devs who continually post updates, fixes, and teasers as to upcoming content. Not ONCE did I ever see Buju come up, not anyone claiming to be the moderator for the sr.c page.

Here Buju basically proves that he has NOT been in contact with the community. As anyone who's been active on that server will tell you, speedrunning the game is one of the recurring topics when I'm around, partly because I hold pretty much all the records and actively encourage competition. So he has clearly NOT been in contact, nor was even aware of the community. Thus, his claim that there was no interest of that it was a dead game is hilariously false. He made no effort to find us or reach out to anyone. No one ever stepped up to say anything about the matter. Nor did he ever seem to catch the many, MANY videos I've done about speedrunning the game, all on YouTube and laboriously tagged to be easily found by anyone who was, say, remotely invested in maintaining the board in good shape. Nor do I recall seeing him on any streams. Basically, beyond his role as "moderator", no one has heard of him.

I personally trust Punchy to do a much better job of maintaining the board, partly because in the brief time where he's been moderator I've seen a lot more action taken to improve and work on boards, partly because Punchy has demonstrated beyond doubt to be invested in speedrunning and has already been giving me competition, and partly because he made an effort to reach out to the community and interact with people playing the game. The Discord server is not the easiest thing to find online but just asking around and talking to people will quickly point you towards there. I do not trust Buju to do nearly as good of a job, personally, as someone who has been speedrunning the game for months, always talking about it, pushing the WR, and constantly talking to people. Simply put, Buju has demonstrated, to me, at least, a complete and abhorrent lack of initiative towards his moderating job, and I do not believe he should be given his moderator role back.

But that's just my two cents on the matter.

There's no way that can be right because I just got submissions for a pac-man game that are from 8-12 months ago and it explicitly states that it was submitted at that time

I'm fairly sure that's not how it works, or at least it shouldn't display like that. Example given below:

As you can see, "Played on" is a different value to "Submitted by". It may be that if one value is missing stuff goes wrong, but I'm not sure.

On the actual topic at hand, I'm inclined to agree that the moderation of a game should not be left solely in the hands of someone who has no practical involvement in it, if there's an active community waiting in the wings. Could have been handled a good deal better though.

I'm gonna ask the runner real quick, it's possible they were editing past runs that were already on the board which would be rather confusing, I know I would've gotten a message by now if those runs were actually sitting there for 8-12 months :P

Edit: they were past runs that had their platform edited since ps3 wasn't added until recently

Disclaimer: I'm only further explaining any misunderstandings in this post.

Yes, that run was verified months later, along with Punchy's run. The reason was because at the time it was submitted, I wasn't comfortable adding an unknown version category because future runners wouldn't be able to ensure they are properly competing with other runs in the same category. I have a background at TASvideos.org, where the players and admins are adamant about competition being accessible for anyone who sees any run. There, the game's ROM hash is included with the submission partially so the next runner knows exactly which version of the game was being run. In the case of this game, many changes were being made which drastically affected the balance, so I felt this was important. I explained this to the runner, and he and I spoke with the developers to try to get version numbers added, but they weren't interested and were continuously making changes that affected runs greatly. There weren't any other submitted runs of the Steam release at the time and I was busy IRL, so I didn't pursue it further.

Within a week after I made my original run, I was hired for a full-time job where I've had to work many extra hours, so it's true that I haven't had much time for running games any more since then, and I still don't have much time. I worked overtime today too.

In the end, considering BulletNick's fervor and initiative in handling the leaderboards, I'm perfectly happy with him handling it all, like I said in a post earlier. I just hope version numbers are added as a variable to the leaderboards when they're implemented, which the developers have said today in Discord that they'll do.

There's been a lot of misunderstanding surrounding this whole situation, but I hope this clarifies the last bit of it. Punchy, please try to be a little more patient and understanding in the future. Nice runs, by the way. BulletNick, I apologize for not spending the extra time to seek out your boards. I really didn't know about it and was banking on being contacted while I was running my busy schedule IRL.

Something worth remembering is that verification date should not be the be all and end all, as any edits made by the mods (in cases of the first mod making a mistake, etc.) will change the verification date.

[quote]I wasn't comfortable adding an unknown version category because future runners wouldn't be able to ensure they are properly competing with other runs in the same category. [/quote]

See, here's the thing with this. You didn't ask anyone doing runs whether or not this was worth holding up everyone over and if you had, you'd have probably found (as I did) that the answer was a resounding "No" because basically nobody considered this to be an especially big deal for the game. The balance changed, the runs basically didn't.

because of this, you held up an entire community for six months over a change none of them actually wanted

I tried to explain this to you before and it went nowhere but you just keep repeating it.

also please dude I have a full time job as well don't even start with this it's literally a 10 minute run, in the time you've spent posting about it you could've completed runs in like 5 different categories

@Klashik I'm afraid that's also not true. I just tested that hypothesis on a run, adding and subtracting a second to the runtime, and:

Clearly the verification details have not changed. I do recall seeing the phenomenon you're referring to happening, but I don't know what triggers it, as generic changes to time don't seem to. It's irrelevant in this case as Buju straight up said he just didn't verify it for months.

Jesus Christ! Just make Buju a regular mod. Problem fucking solved!

Then wouldn't there be more conflict? I mean one wants versions of the game and the other/rest don't think it's necessary for the board

If that's a worry, then he can just be reinstated as a Verifier. Verifiers cannot change any game settings or parameters.

alternately, no

you don't have any right to stay attached to a board like a leech just because you snagged it first before the game even bloody came out, that's incredibly dumb. This thread is incredibly dumb. That wouldn't solve any problems at all, please stop offering your mind bogglingly bad hot takes.

he let a run sit in verification for six months and otherwise did basically nothing with his mod status, why the hell should he get it back. He's pretty much been undoubtedly shown to not be suited for it while those populating the board with runs are completely fine with the current arrangement. This is pretty much the best outcome possible, so y'all can stop worrying about it.

if the other dude has a completely different outlook on the game to the rest of the community don't reinstate him as a mod, keep the demo 5 category up and allow him to verify those runs if needs be but tbh the submission rules there are a little annoying (60 FPS with no framedrops? my PC isn't that good and I can't exactly predict how the capture will go, if it messes up and drops a few frames suddenly my run is invalid?)

This entire controversy has made me try the game out though lmao so if anything goods come out of all this it might be that

[quote]keep the demo 5 category up[/quote]

I did. I didn't plan on removing it, that'd be kind of spiteful.

[quote] tbh the submission rules there are a little annoying (60 FPS with no framedrops? my PC isn't that good and I can't exactly predict how the capture will go, if it messes up and drops a few frames suddenly my run is invalid?)[/quote]

I dropped that from the ruleset almost instantly because yes I agree it's dumb.

also I want to repost this in like, concrete letters that are ten foot tall, he has a "different outlook" on a game he has never ran

can i be mod