Unfortunately there has not been one overly obvious resolution that the community can agree on, and we know this is not the resolution elRuinel likely wanted to hear either. However, at this time we don't feel the answer is to accept the run as is but ban the glitch, or to separate all runs that may have had any frame rate issues that could have encountered the zoomies. This solution gives us the most room to encourage the spirit of competition while also maintaining fairness to all runners in the past, present and future.

That said, we still commend elRuinel's efforts for their run from the months of grinding this time down so quickly. And we also want to not let this glitch overshadow the absolutely amazing run up to Nova Dragon as well, as the run was well on its way already to be a run for the ages. We fully understand if Ruinel and others like them still want to compare to the original time of 7:22:05, and encourage everyone to continue playing to the best of their ability to be able to say "I can beat that zoomies time", regardless of what the leaderboard may say. This category still has a lot of growth in many ways, and we look forward to seeing you all chop those times down.

In the end, this is nobody's fault but the mod team for not realizing the hard reset rules were not set in place, and we accept full responsibility on that. We will continue to consider the rules for this category as well as all others in the spirit of clarity, as it appears there still is a lot of work to be done in regards to setting an established playing field for this category and others like it. If there is anything you would like to discuss further with myself or Reverv please do so, we just ask that you respect our decisions. Thank you all.

Thank you both for your thoughts and input. The mod team has had a lot of time to discuss this, and here is our stance on the run which will be copied over from the discord:

Hello everyone, thank you for your patience while we figured out how to handle this situation and zoomies in general. We appreciate all of the input we have received from everyone both in the FF9 Speedrunning discord and directly through DMs. It has helped us out tremendously and @Reverv and I want to thank you for working through this with us.

We knew early on in this review process that we wanted to do our best to prevent zoomies from happening in the NMS category going forward, as it is implied to be a large glitch against the spirit of the category, unfortunately after extensive research we cannot say for sure what is causing the glitch directly. What we know so far is that it occurs after roughly 7-8 hours of continuous gameplay and it's effects vary and are not always obvious to the runner or the viewer. We are working on preventative measures and have already modified the ruleset for this category and other related categories to require a hard reset before the start of a run, however we are not fully convinced that this will prevent all instances of the glitch in the future.

With that in mind, we are not convinced that other runs on the leaderboard that have already been accepted have not experienced the speed glitch in some format. Although we are not encouraging the glitch by any means we feel that at this time the best solution is to allow a run with the glitch on to the leaderboard but with a time adjustment based on the duration and location of the instance.

In the case of elRuinel's run the glitch occurred for the entirety of Disc 4. We have compared this run extensively with other runs and with the knowledge that the speed glitch affects encounter chances on top of the movement speed, the mod team has agreed that one minute and two seconds will be added to the total time, making the run's final time 7:23:07. Our next goal is to comb through the previous submissions in the leaderboard in an honest attempt at locating any other occurrences of the glitch, and adjusting the times properly if need be.

(cont part 2)

All of that said, if the speed glitch were to be allowed, this will then require all high-level competitive runners and future runners interested in joining to leave their game open for 8+ hours before starting their runs, in hopes of hitting the speed glitch for a top time. We also know so little about the speed glitch, that it makes it difficult to know if it's even allowing the game to function in the same way aside from the speed. Are the encounter checks still proc'ing at the same rate? Are they only checking 1/4 of the time since Zidane is moving faster than normal? Also is it possible to reach the speed glitch faster in another way we don't know of yet, making it easier to start runs instead of leaving the game open for a long time?

We'll be opening this up for discussion, as this is a complicated situation that isn't so easily solved between a hard Yes or No. There are simply too many factors to weigh alone and between the mod team, and need to have a civil discussion with the people who run the game and see everyone's input. And I do mean a civil discussion. If there is any shade throwing or demeaning talk coming from anyone in this thread, they will receive a timeout/ban depending on the severity. Things have been known to be heated before, and we won't tolerate any of that behavior.

Feel free to join the discussion in the FF9 Speedrunning Discord: https://discord.gg/QWHrEen8Ha

But you are also welcome to discuss here in this thread if you do not want to enter the discord as everyone's opinion should be heard.

Thanks,

RoamingMyrk and the FFIX mod team

Hello everyone!

As some of you know, ElRuinel recently got an incredibly good time of 7:22:05 in Any% NMS (No Major Skips) HD PC reaching new heights for the WR in the category. Upon review of this run, it appears that they encountered the "speed glitch" which has a possibility of occurring when the game has been running for longer than 8 hours. Normally, this isn't an issue for most runs as the glitch is not only rare (and seemingly random), but also means that a runner must not have force quit during a bad encounter in Desert Palace or bad boss fight the entire 8+ hours of play time. With this speed glitch, they were able to speed through the entirety of Memoria and Crystal World, with faster movement speed, and assumedly also able to have less encounter checks for the rest of the run.

Now, this brings us to a conundrum, as this glitch is not mentioned in the Category Rules of Any% NMS, but has been previously known about by some other runners of the category and HD PC in general. For instance, the Category Rules for All Bosses HD PC does have this stated clearly in the rule set:

"Mandatory game reboot: Due to FPS instability after 8+ hours, the game must be fully rebooted from Steam at least once every 8 hours to avoid unintentional speedup of the player character. You can reboot the game for this express purpose, but there are many opportunities to close out the game with Alt+F4 at convenient times such as unwanted encounters and frog catching segments. Please include a timestamp for this in your submission notes."

Some other runners in the Any% NMS HD PC category have viewed this speed glitch as unintended for the run, long before this appeared in ElRuinel's recent PB. However, since it has not been displayed in the rule set for the category rules anywhere, how is a newer runner supposed to know about this glitch? For the current listed ruleset on SRC, nothing has been broken. While they have not done so yet, if ElRuinel were to submit their current PB, it would be accepted given the current Category Ruleset, since they abided by all of the given Rules in the category.

Originally, my initial first instinct was to agree that the speed glitch should not be used, and that runners must perform a hard reset at the beginning of their run to showcase that there is likely to be no intent of performing this speed glitch for the remainder of the run. However, that brings up several red flags, and not something so easy to enforce in the current leaderboard. After reviewing all 71 runs under any% NMS HD PC, only 18 of the 71 runs have a visible hard reset in their VOD, before beginning their run. All other 53 runs either start from the title screen, start New Game from a Game Over, or their VOD has been deleted and cannot confirm. Now I have not been able to scrub through each of these VODs and verify if there was a hard reset in the middle of the run OR speed glitch usage, as that will take far more time to comb through every single VOD up there.

Something else that would bother me about this, is that if someone were to encounter the speed glitch by simply playing longer than 8+ hours but still abiding by all of the rules of the category including the theoretical preliminary hard reset, are they just not able to submit? For instance, what if the runner takes 11 hours to complete their run, and reach Crystal World when suddenly Zidane boosts across the screen? Does that mean they aren't allowed to submit? Should there be a grace period of "Oh, Zidane is moving faster than normal, I must close the game and Continue and take the time loss before moving on"? This would mean that the runner now has an unknown "hard timer" to complete the run before the scary "speed glitch" catches up to them and ends their run, which to me would be frustrating as a new runner wanting to learn the game.

Overall though, the Category Rules for Any% NMS and other HD PC categories likely need to have more clarity and overhauled, especially regarding the aforementioned "speed glitch". Should it be allowed in Any% NMS? Should it be placed into a separate category like "Zoomies%"? Should it be allowed in Any% with skips, considering that is already abusing menu buffers and other fun tech outside of Boosters? What about Segmented HDPC, should it be allowed there (sorry Niebl, you'd have to start all over)? And if the speed glitch isn't allowed in the end, what will happen to ElRuinel's run? Do we just say "tough luck bud try again", despite having a great run up until the speed glitch anyway?

(cont part 2)