Does this mean that my would-be 9th place Solo Song on Nacht run will be approved? The rejection reason given was "too long of a run compared to first - banned player". First place is from 9 months ago and the current 12th place run was approved 27 days ago, so it seems that there should be no issue as I am no longer a banned player.

My intention behind that submission was to make some amends for our mistakes as new players by presenting a "proper" run and I hope you can understand that.

Did you even bother reading what I wrote? I'm fine with the run being rejected, but you haven't said anything about us being banned from running the game or from the discord. I'm trying to be articulate and civil here while you're effectively ignoring us and posting gifs of Tupac.

Obviously there aren't a ton of people running anything involving Eternal, but I was wondering if the rules could use an update regarding load times between games. If you look at my current second place run, there were two loading screens that took up a total of 1m08s. If these were anything reasonable, such as 5s apiece which is still fairly high for Eternal, the run would be in 1st by a clear 15 seconds.

I recognize that there's more than plenty of RNG involved in running Gauntlet, but this feels absurd as far as things outside of my control go.

Another runner on that WaW submission here, I just wanted to take a second to clarify a few things and provide an alternate viewpoint. I'll try to be brief here, as I've already presented much of my position in the discord messages that you can see in the imgur link of screenshots that @sbeve grabbed before we were banned from the WaW discord.

First off, I'd like to quickly state the obvious - we're new. New to the Zombies and WaW community here, as well as speedrunning in general. I recognize that under the shield of effective anonymity on the internet, it can be very difficult to trust in the goodwill of new strangers. Unfortunately, I don't have anything to offer other than my sincere promise that we're legitimately new to the community. As you may be able to tell from the voices in the video submission, we're all in our early 20s - World at War was one of the first video games that we played together. The release of Black Ops 4 and its zombies gameplay has kicked off a healthy dose of nostalgia for the first zombies we played as a group, hence our desire to become involved in the speedrunning community for the game. In addition, if it's within the power of the admins I would encourage/request that you run a quick check on the IP addresses that our accounts were created from. At 2:17pm, Weekender asked if we were "Tanya and his friends" which should be fairly easy to disprove by checking IP addresses, as well as verifying that we are not duplicate accounts of any speedrun.com members.

Next, I'd like to clarify that we aren't necessarily protesting the fact that our run was rejected, but rather the reasons that it was rejected. I fully recognize that there are a large number of issues that could be taken with the recording we provided. Initially, our run was rejected because the gameplay window was too small on the screen, and I was more than happy to quickly provide an alternate recording that fixed the issue. Past that, I would not be surprised if Kzarknuckle's usual streaming overlay or aspects of our casual commentary did not meet community professionalism guidelines - if these are documented and available anywhere I would greatly appreciate a link.

Despite my own uncertainty in that area, you can clearly see that Weekender never cited a lack of video recording professionalism in the discord discussion regarding the rejection of our submission, but rather only referred to the time of the run. As far as I am aware, this is in and of itself not a reason to reject a run from the leaderboards. I'll avoid rehashing my arguments here as they're all visible in the discord screenshots, but there are plenty of examples on the WaW leaderboards of 3P runs taking longer than 2P runs, slower runs being accepted after the submission of a first-place run, etc. This point seems consistent across the entire site - with just a quick check I can see that a Celeste any% run was accepted yesterday with a time that is over 3.6 times as long as the current first place run.

Looking at the video, I believe it is clear to see that while we may be playing in a suboptimal way, we are still trying to accomplish the goal of the category and not deviating from that goal. If suboptimal gameplay was in and of itself a reason to reject runs, then all of the categories on this site would be empty with the exception of tool-assisted runs.

At this point, I am making the request that the three other runners for the submission and myself be unbanned from submitting zombies runs, and unbanned from the WaW zombies discord. I would also like to thank you for taking the time to consider my position, and encourage you to contact me either on these forums or VenocStorm#3269 on discord if you would like additional followup or if there are points you desire further clarification on.