Mods
5 years ago
Alberta, Canada

Am I correct to assume that costume mods, reshades and filter mods are allowed? I would assume full model swaps would be a no? be weird seeing people run the game as Mr. X or a licker in t-pose or something stupid.

Washington, USA

I believe that no mods at all are allowed. That includes audio overhauls, new character models and reshades.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Alberta, Canada

there's already at least a couple runs on the leader boards using modded costumes or shader mods (IE Vignette removal)

Edited by the author 5 years ago
United States

There shouldnt be any runs on the boards with mods on them at all..But yes they are banned. There was a thread about Vignette etc so there is a possibility of that being discussed. But atm, I would play as tho it is banned

Edited by the author 5 years ago
NuZ likes this
United Kingdom

I personally think there should be a "use common sense" approach rather than a hardline stance against all mods. Obviously anything that confers an advantage, makes it difficult to confirm the run is legitimate or is likely to get the run video stricken from the platform it's hosted on shouldn't be allowed but I'm not sure I understand the problem with someone swapping Leon's model with Chris's.

United States

The thing is normally trusting people to not mess or put anything else as well tbh or at least how I feel about it. Otherwise I wouldnt care as much for it personally.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
United Kingdom

Well...sure...but you're already trusting people not to cheat and I just don't see how denying people the ability to replace a character model helps you in any way verify that they're not cheating in their runs. It's not like you can enforce file verification to ensure people are running vanilla files and aren't tampering with them in ways that aren't immediately obvious.

Pennsylvania, USA

Nobody here is denying anyone the ability to replace a character model and run the game. They just can't submit runs to this leaderboard, because that's what the agreed upon rules are.

Personally I think it's something worth revisiting once we know more about how mods in general interact with the rest of the game (especially audio stuff because I kinda need Mr. X Gonna Give It To Ya). The entire point of enforcing a "no mods" policy is to ensure everyone is running under exactly the same conditions, and if mods like graphics and audio swaps only change the way in which you're experiencing those conditions, they should be fair game IMO. But as @Soulless_Persona pointed out, you're opening Pandora's Box the instant you open the door to any mods, and frankly I don't think there's enough interest in model/audio swaps for someone to do the work to see if those impact any other factors in the game.

NuZ likes this
Georgia, USA

I think the X Gonna Give It To You mod is the least likely to be acceptable. Moderators have already mentioned that they require game audio and a copyrighted song could get the video claimed on YouTube or have portions of audio muted on Twitch.

United States

Anything that blocks the audio from the video will be rejected...This is there just in case they have to looks closely at the audio files etc to make sure that there is no splice in the run. Several runs have had to be looked at this way to ensure that it is not edited especially with certain WRs in many games

Greater Manchester, England

Cherry picking which mods can be allowed is an endless battle. It's better to just ban them all.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Squirrelies and NuZ like this
United Kingdom

You can't realistically enforce the policy. For example I could replace Leon, Claire, Ada etc with Tofu's model. I could then submit a Tofu run and you would never know I had broken the rule. The only way for you to verify it is to see it in the video and in that scenario it would not be apparent. You effectively have an arbitrary rule that you cannot enforce properly. You could say "well someone will replace them with low poly models in order to gain a framerate advantage"...and yeah...they probably would...so should we be banning people from using the '98 costumes? On PC we currently have a mixed 60/120 leaderboard filled with people with varying system specs. Some people are playing on 16:9 monitors, some people are playing on 21:9 monitors. I bet someone, somewhere, is playing on a 4:3 monitor. Some people are playing at 1080p, some are playing at 1440p. On the console side with have a mixed leaderboard with the enhanced consoles that can mostly hold 60FPS...and the base consoles that really can't. The "exactly the same conditions" ship sailed a little while ago. Not to mention that I fail to see how swapping out a character model would impact those conditions in any meaningful way; thus why we allow the costume swaps and don't force everyone to run the same costume.

Even if the policy is relaxed I highly doubt "X Gon' Give It To Ya" is ever going to be permitted. Unlike a model using copyrighted music is liable to get the VoD audio muted and / or taken down entirely. It becomes rather difficult to verify that the run was legit, or even happened at all, at a later date if the video doesn't exist anymore. I completely understand why that specifically is called out and would not be allowed.

Greater Manchester, England

The routes you take would make it obvious as to which scenario you were on. Also 4th survivor mode is so drastically different to a normal play through that you'd see within the first 5 seconds you'd changed the models. It's not difficult to enforce at all.

United Kingdom

All rules in speedrunning are arbitrary. So, calling a rule arbitrary to somehow demean its value doesn't really work.

That said, having a rule that bans 3rd party modifications to the game makes total sense. You don't not have a rule because someone somewhere might slip by unnoticed. Might as well remove the turbo / macro rule using that reasoning.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
NuZ and SephJul like this
United Kingdom

That's not what I said. If I submit an actual Tofu run done in Tofu with Leon's model replaced you wouldn't know I had broken the rule, even though I technically had. Like I said, unless you find some kind of way of doing file verification you can't enforce it properly. You can enforce a rule about not replacing models in that specific category but that's about it...and why bother? It's not hard to have a "common sense / verifiers discretion" rule. Like you said it'd be obvious if it weren't actually done in Tofu Survivor. Besides which, what advantage would swapping models / installing modded ones actually give you? About the only thing I can think of is making the enemies glow in the dark...but that'd be kind of obvious...

Belgium

I can understand that mods can be fun during stream and nobody forbid people to use it for fun. But here, rules must be clean and strict to avoid issue on forum and help moderators to manage the board

Plus, concerning swap model or music stuff i can understand that people cannot see why it's not allowed Here some arguments that can help to understand :

  • Even if it can be hard to proof memory/file modification, it is not a reason to authorize/promote it.
  • Mods can have UNKNOWN side effect and doing a witch hunt is too long
  • Twitch/Youtube strike about copyright, if we authorize one music how can we forbid an other one ?
  • In RE community history, most of people were ok to ban mods
  • Changing Jill model = Death Penalty FrankerZ

Hope you can understand that it's not there to bore people but have a fair and enjoyable environment to do speedrun together.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
allancg, CursedToast, and NuZ like this
Valhalla

@Liv but u use a 3rd party program to cap the framerate.

JK

/NuZ

Edited by the author 5 years ago
United Kingdom

We also use a 3rd party program, the SRT, to track in-game data.

Kappa

Pretty much what Seph said though. The intents of the rule isn't to forbid fun, it's just meant to maintain consistency on the boards.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
NuZ likes this
United Kingdom

Modding is not just about streaming. What if I want to run a mod that makes the classic Claire costume closer to the original. That isn't something I'd install "for a stream"...or "for fun" That'd be a permanent install and a necessary mod in my eyes. Not allowing copyrighted music I can totally understand for reasons I already stated.

In all my years creating, installing and playing with mods I have never seen one cause "unknown side effects". When there are issues they're not unknown and usually fairly self explanitory. Regardless the mods here are not responsible. That is down to the user to report the issue to the creator of the mod...not you. You shouldn't need to be hunting for anything at all. Either you don't see any issues with the run and you verify it or you do see issues and you reject it. Whether or not those issues are caused by somesuch mod is not something you need to worry about. Again, that's down to the user and creator to work out.

"It's how it has always been and everyone has always been fine with it therefore it shall always be" isn't really a great argument. We wouldn't progress very far as a species if we subscribed to that school of thought...and again...I really don't see how replacing Leon with Chris does anything whatsoever to compromise "a fair and enjoyable environment" and thusfar nobody has actually come forward with a logical explaination of how it would do that. If it doesn't compromise that then I see no good reason to maintain the ban on such mods. It's really as simple as that.

United Kingdom

It's also not up to Moderators to keep track of every single mod a player uses, and if it does/can cause side effects in the run.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
zgl, NuZ and 2 others like this