We discussed it and agreed.

Categories Split. Thanks for the research @sp0ck1

No. Either you're here to run and your opinion means something.. or you're here to jerk us around and your opinion means nothing.

If you want your opinion to be heard... post from the account you are running from. Creating an alt to troll a board is even worse than someone doing it unknowingly lol.

Did you seriously think that would help your case? What you are admitting to could even be considered a bannable offense depending on the circumstances.

Sorry, but keeping things as a single difficulty keeps everyone competing on the same level without fragmenting the leaderboard. "Hardest-only" works perfectly for the classic MK's and like I said, adding "weaker" difficulties isnt going to "reduce" spam, it's going to increase it lol.

I don't know how your logic is supposed to work here .. if the game is on an easier difficulty then easier strategies are going to viable. If the hardest strategy is already very easy then there is no point in adding easier difficulties.

I just checked your forum post history. You've been harassing leaderboards to add Extra Difficulties for years and you have not submitted a single speedrun to this website. So I highly doubt you would submit anything regardless.

Please stop bothering leaderboards with your nonsense unless you are actually going to commit to being a part of their community and/or speedrun their games.

I encountered this recently on some of the boards I and a couple friends moderate. We found that randomly for some reason the search stop recognizing the "title" of the games we were moderating, however it still recognized the URL of the games we were moderating as a search result.

e.g. "Street Fighter Alpha" had the URL: speedrun.com/sfa, searching "Street Fighter Alpha" showed nothing but searching "sfa" revealed it.

We were able to come up with a workaround by copy/pasting the title of the game into the URL and making it match 1:1. Doing so fixed up the games so they were always fully searchable like normal, albeit by making their URL's a little more convoluted.

For those just looking for a game that is not appearing, try searching for whatever you think the moderators might have made its URL (often an abbreviation or just a single word of the game name).

Hope this helps others in some way.

I don't see how adding any other difficulties is going to help towards "reducing" spam.

I am willing to create a category within "Category Extensions" which will ban the use of excessive "Turtle Kicks" though, if that will interest you. It's something we've already talked about to an extent internally already.

So.. Upon further investigation, it would seem that some of the roms you can use on fightcade/mame/real hardware do in fact have different gameplay than that of 30th Anniversary (mostly with the AI). Unfortunately this means it is unfair to pair Fightcade with 30th even though they run at the same speed.

What we have decided to do is calculate the difference in time between fightcade and mame/real hardware and penalize them accordingly. Mame/Arcade/Fightcade will be merged back into the same leaderboard. I have created a program which calculates the time difference to make this easy for us to do for each run on the leaderboard.

However due to the innacuracy of Fightcade, we will no longer be accepting any fightcade emulated runs PLEASE USE MAME.

As of today only MAME runs will be accepted. Please be advised. We do not require INP (as of yet), but you may provide one if you do not wish to capture the emulator window. Otherwise, the normal rules for emulators apply.

So.. Upon further investigation, it would seem that some of the roms you can use on fightcade/mame/real hardware do in fact have different gameplay than that of 30th Anniversary (mostly with the AI). Unfortunately this means it is unfair to pair Fightcade with 30th even though they run at the same speed.

What we have decided to do is calculate the difference in time between fightcade and mame/real hardware and penalize them accordingly. Mame/Arcade/Fightcade will be merged back into the same leaderboard. I have created a program which calculates the time difference to make this easy for us to do for each run on the leaderboard.

However due to the innacuracy of Fightcade, we will no longer be accepting any fightcade emulated runs PLEASE USE MAME.

As of today only MAME runs will be accepted. Please be advised. We do not require INP (as of yet), but you may provide one if you do not wish to capture the emulator window. Otherwise, the normal rules for emulators apply.

So.. Upon further investigation, it would seem that some of the roms you can use on fightcade/mame/real hardware do in fact have different gameplay than that of 30th Anniversary (mostly with the AI). Unfortunately this means it is unfair to pair Fightcade with 30th even though they run at the same speed.

What we have decided to do is calculate the difference in time between fightcade and mame/real hardware and penalize them accordingly. Mame/Arcade/Fightcade will be merged back into the same leaderboard. I have created a program which calculates the time difference to make this easy for us to do for each run on the leaderboard.

However due to the innacuracy of Fightcade, we will no longer be accepting any fightcade emulated runs PLEASE USE MAME.

As of today only MAME runs will be accepted. Please be advised. We do not require INP (as of yet), but you may provide one if you do not wish to capture the emulator window. Otherwise, the normal rules for emulators apply.

Category has been added - currently under the Misc tab.

Currently only supporting Normal difficulty right now, however if someone does a Hardest difficulty run of it, we will add that too.

After it was brought to our attention that emulation speeds may be innacurate to real hardware, I did some testing. It turns out that specifically both Fightcade and 30th Anniversary run slightly faster. However MAME is pretty much accurate to real hardware.

You can see my comparison of this here:

(Yes I know I mis-spelt Anniversary lol)

The footage clearly shows that fightcade, while innacurate to real hardware, does match the speed of 30th Anniversary, which is also innacurate to real hardware.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

After it was brought to our attention that emulation speeds may be innacurate to real hardware, I did some testing. It turns out that specifically both Fightcade and 30th Anniversary run slightly faster. However MAME is pretty much accurate to real hardware.

You can see my comparison of this here:

(Yes I know I mis-spelt Anniversary lol)

The footage clearly shows that fightcade, while innacurate to real hardware, does match the speed of 30th Anniversary, which is also innacurate to real hardware.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

So, after a lot of digging these are my results on the emulator speed issue: https://www.speedrun.com/sf3ts/thread/jaiqw

Please move all discussion over to that thread.

I am locking this thread now since the matter has been discussed/resolved and it has since gone a little off-topic.

After it was brought to our attention that emulation speeds may be innacurate to real hardware, I did some testing. It turns out that specifically both Fightcade and 30th Anniversary run slightly faster. However MAME is pretty much accurate to real hardware.

You can see my comparison of this here:

(Yes I know I mis-spelt Anniversary lol)

The footage clearly shows that fightcade, while innacurate to real hardware, does match the speed of 30th Anniversary, which is also innacurate to real hardware.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Makes sense to me, if its arcade perfect port, might as well be in with arcade.

Well .. I did a bit of searching and found this:

According to this comparison Retroarch with FBA core (should be the same thing Fightcade runs on) is actually almost dead accurate. Online Edition does appear to be slower .. so that may be where the difference lies - it could be that the port iself is innacurate to real hardware.

ShmupMame is also innacurate, but actually slower - not faster. However ShmupMame is notorious for having speed issues, nobody uses it in speedrunning AFAIK. The developers for the main MAME cores are usually pretty anal about speed accuracy, so I can't really imagine it being innacurate, unless the Emulation project was left incomplete or something .. but I doubt that is going to be the case for something as high profile as SF3.

Edit: I just noticed that he had to specify a specific setting in Retroarch. Hmm this may actually require some further investigation after all. I'll do some more thorough digging when I get home from work later.

30th Anniversary has its own category (under misc) as set up by Nerdy years ago when he first set up the categories. I haven't really investigated and compared differences between the versions though, I'm unaware of how different it actually is (maybe it should be considered same as arcade?)

I don't believe you are entirely correct about emulators though. They don't increase the speed of the game, they increase the framerate. OG Arcade hardware runs at 53 fps (roughly) and emulators bump that up to 60 fps. However the way they do this is not to simply redraw every frame faster ... instead they actually draw more frames to compensate. This produces technically more "smooth animation" albeit not really noticeable to the naked eye, but it keeps the game speed intact and accurate to the original hardware.

At least this has always been the case with other arcade games emulated.. I was unaware of there being any specific inaccuracy in SF3.

Unless there is something specifically wrong with SF3's emulation I don't see us banning emulation, sorry .. but if you pay attention to the above posts about WolfMame. It's a very good alternative to curbing fears of illegitimacy.

Just to add to this, here is the guide I wrote for recording a WolfMame INP for Mortal Kombat Arcade: https://www.speedrun.com/mk1/guide/euoqg

@Jck This is something we are definitely considering. At the very least, it's something every Arcade runner should be doing by default if they want to really protect their runs from scrutiny (not every moderator out there is as lenient as we are lol).

If we did enforce it, we might employ it as we have done over at the Mortal Kombat boards, where it is only required under a certain time threshold, so as to not put too much unduly pressure on new inexperienced runners. Sometimes newer runners can often struggle to get their head around the INP recording process.

Frankly though, I don't know if we are even at a point where the run is optimized enough where we can determine an appropriate threshold.

At the very least, I do highly recommend everyone try to get familiar with WolfMame and the INP recordings, incase it becomes a thing we enforce in the future.

I apologize. I admit, I did get a little heated.

I will say that I am very confident that the CPU is in fact just as exploitable as it is in the current WR holders run. I'm not sure exactly what you've tested and how you've tested it. It may only be with Akuma, it may only be on JAP 990512 No CD. It also does depend on which opponent you are facing, theres a few that you specifically want to avoid because they are harder to exploit (Oro, Yun/Yang, Ken, Remi come to mind).

But in general, Yuuno's run simply exploited jump in punches/kicks to chain into shoryuken/tatsu/hadoken as the main strategy. I took this and changed it to something much simpler (jump in punch > MK > sweep - for the most part, but with some variation sometimes). If done right you can get it very consistently .. maybe not 100% .. but upwards of 80-90%, sometimes u do derp out on round 1/2 and reset, but if you persist and grind enough you can get it throughout the entire run (up to fight 8, as mentioned previously).

That's the assessment I made when I originally investigated, which also prompted me to challenge the WR myself. I got really close with relative ease (2 sessions of about 3-4 hours grind each) and was satisified that the strats were doable and the run was reasonable. Don't get me wrong, I'll be back to beat it soon .. (hell all this comotion definitely lit the fire once again). It's just that I had satisfied my own confidence in the run to leave it be for a while.

Edit: I should also clarify that at this point in time that I had analyzed Yuuno's video extensively already and debunked the claim that the missing transitions were "evidence of splicing" as seen in my video comparison which clearly shows no time was cut and no frames were lost. This in conjuction with me studying the strats he used lead me to conclude that the run was legitimate.

My issue with removing the time comes from the basis that: A. I am confident it is not cheated for aforementioned reasons. and B. Removing it on such a light technicality just seems really dirty. Especially since it gives me the "fake WR" as a result. The board is still young, the current WR run is destined to be obselete in the not too distant future anyway. Having the new rule in place should keep things clean moving forward and hopefully keep everyone happy.

We may not see eye to eye on some priorities but I do recognize that as a moderator its my duty to uphold the communities interest and try to protect the integrity of the leaderboard. I just think that a lot of people tend to underestimate the damage that is done by removing a WR time from the leaderboard needlessly, and thus its something I do not take lightly.

Anyway, again .. I apologize for the remarks I made in my previous post, and hope we can move forward from here.

We have discussed at length and we have decided to disallow the further use of ANY modifications, including but not limited to the Black Bars fix for fightcade and color/visual modifications.

Please note - this rule is only effective moving forward from today. No runs will be removed from the leaderboard in its current state, however FUTURE runs will be rejected if they use modifications of any kind.

We are really just trying to maintain a sense of authenticity with the runs, no current runs are suspected of being illegitimate. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.