So, I once had the opportunity to witness (what I hope is) a rather uncommon ocurrence on speedrun.com which I had a formed opinion about, but I realised it'd be rather interesting to see what takes other people have around the issue.

To avoid possible drama and tensions I'll keep names about the game and users involved vague because it's not my main point of interest. ;)

Anyways, there was this runner (hereafter called "Mr. X") that currently had WR for the Any% category for this game. However, for whatever reason (not pertaining cheating or any foul play, mind you), Mr. X. decided to delete the vod for this run (as well as runs for other categories, but I digress), which later prompted the run's removal from the leaderboard. So far, so good.

Months come and go, and it's now been 6 months since the incident, with the runs long gone. Mr. X decided to show up again on the discord and the mods didn't outright tell them off, so all seemed good. Much to their dismay however, when Mr. X re-uploaded their old run a few days later, it got rejected.

Turns out, the rules had changed during the 6 month period Mr. X was inactive, removing one of the allowed emulators from the rules (and this change was done way before they came back), and it is this specific emulator that was used for their old run.

So here's the issue: given that it's an old run, Mr. X thought they could just re-upload it and all would be good. My personal take was that, given that they deleted it themselves (i.e. not the mods) and then later re-submitted it, I was of the idea that it was perfectly fine for the run to be held to the new rules.

As I previously mentioned though, I realised that perhaps this may not be the same conclusion everyone would reach, so I got curious and thus made this thread. What are your thoughts and would you have handled the situation differently?

PS: Just to clarify, I have no hand moderating this particular game and the situation has been a cold case for quite a while now, I'm just interested in learning about other points of view :)

EDIT: I forgot to clarify this, but other runs that were performed with this particular emulator have indeed been grandfathered in, pending a re-timing of said runs to avoid unfairness to future runners.

I've had a situation like this happen in a game I mod, and we allowed it. Reasons being:

1. If the run would have stayed on the board, it would have been "grandfathered" in.
2. The run was a known run, that took place before the rule change, with the mod team being familiar with the run as well as yt dates checking out.
3. This was a trusted runner.

Where the case may be different:

1. This emulator was found to give advantages in runs, and all old runs with this emulator were archived or removed.
2. This was not a trusted runner.

Imo from an outsiders pov, if this emulator gave an advantage to old runs, then those runs should be archived or removed, grandfathering these times would be unfair to new runners.

[quote=Viper]Imo from an outsiders pov, if this emulator gave an advantage to old runs, then those runs should be archived or removed, grandfathering these times would be unfair to new runners.[/quote]

I agree that keeping them as-is would be unfair for new runners, and I forgot to clarify that while other runs done with that emulator have been grandfathered in, they'll certainly be re-timed to reflect the rule change and to have a level playing field. Added that to the original post now!

Thanks for the input!

Since you mentioned retiming the runs. In some cases (e.g. if retiming is not an option for some reason) it might be more fitting to create a misc-category archive for the affected runs with the questionable emulator.