I'm sure that most of you know by now that one of our previous moderators has found themselves in the middle of some controversy. Many accusations are being thrown against this individual and evidence to support these accusations are being provided with or alongside many of the posts. Much of this information is freely and easily available in the speedrunning community on social media platforms, specifically Twitter.

If you do not know what has happened but would like to, please feel free to reach out to myself, @Stormy, @Carter44 or members of the community for a private conversation on this subject.

Due to the overwhelming evidence to back up many of the claims made, we (the TLK Genesis Moderators) have come to a consensus that this individual should no longer help with this boards' moderation.

Manipulation, Lying, Skewing the facts in favor of their narrative, moderation abuse, abuse against their own staff and helpers, Efforts to manipulate, shame, or guilt anyone that dares to speedrun the same game, let alone pass their personal best time on the leaderboards, and making newcomers not feel welcome or wanted, mainly due to the accused's actions and attitude, in this otherwise great community

We looked at these truths and more of the same keeps piling in against them. We decided that this is not someone we want to represent our community nor do we want them to have the ability to abuse their moderation powers again.

We made this decision and hold firm to it. We apologize that this was not a community based decision, but action needed to be taken before any sort of backlash or abuse could take place.

If our agreed upon decision upsets you, please don't hesitate to let us know any or all of your concerns pertaining to this topic.

My personal final words on this is that I hope a lesson has been learned and that changes for the better are in their future.

We thank you TLK community for your patience, understanding, and just being fantastic individuals.

My apologies everyone, I will be closing the poll and making the changes to the board. As @PlayingWithDick stated above, the board will not be splitting, however, we will be banning the use of emulators that do not use the Gen Plus GX / Blast Em' Core and adding 0.5s to all emulated runs.

Due to the current world record run being performed on original hardware, the previous runs will be grandfathered in.

Thank you all for your patience and understanding during this time.

I personally believe it should remain in Misc. The reason is because it was originally its own category until about a month ago, when it was moved into Misc., and during this time, it wasn't very popular. The few glitches/exploits that are performed in the any% run don't really break the game to the point where we can save an insane amount of time over exploitless. The largest amount of time saved is in Be Prepared where we skip 95% of the level. We don't skip entire levels or even most of the gameplay. I see Exploitless as more of a novelty category.

If we ever happen to see a general interest in the category, I would be in favor of restoring Exploitless to its own category tab or as an extension of Easy Any%.

Alright, this has been a long time coming. I do apologize for letting this topic hang for so long as I have been quite busy lately and have had a lot of things come up. However, this thread / topic seems to be dead at this point so let's move things forward.

This is a topic we seem to be divided on and some have changed their mind on what we should do at this point. Since this is the case, we should use another form/survey to get the general consensus of the runners on what we should do with the board.

Please make sure you take the time to weigh out the options and the option that you choose is, without a doubt, what you would like to see happen. I can imagine this topic will be brought up again at some point, but the results from this form should reflect what the current consensus is.

Please remember that at the end of the day, we're a bunch of people that geek out over a lion tossing another lion from a cliff. Don't let the results of this possible change affect that we're still a community that loves this game.

Form: https://forms.gle/NKXw9r7bmwDcYtbX6

As most of you know, we've recently had results showing that emulator and hardware speeds differ from one another. Emulator speeds are, for the most part, found to be faster than original hardware. Emulator speeds also differ depending on which emulator is being used.

We do not currently know how much faster ALL of the emulators are or have "accurate" differences between emulators and original hardware. We do have some semi-roughly estimated time differences of some emulators though, thanks to @estacaco.

This thread will be to discuss what we all think we should do to remedy this issue.

Currently, we have a couple of options that we could take:

• Add time to emulator runs (depends on what emulator was used)

• Split the board to contain both "Original Hardware" and "Emulator" tabs; each with their own "Easy", "Normal" and "Difficult" categories.

Please keep in mind that we will be taking the option that is mostly agreed upon. The board will not stay as it currently is so your voice is needed in this discussion.

If anyone has any other options that we could take, we would love to hear them from you. We're trying to find the most fair, reasonable, and accurate solution to take.

Something to take into consideration while discussing is that other Genesis boards on the SRC website are also going through this same issue, at the moment. Some of them have come to their own conclusions on what the best course of action was to take.

Also, if anyone would like to assist in finding the correct timing method for emulation, I will create another thread where we can post our findings.

Thank you all for your patience.

Edit:

Form: https://forms.gle/NKXw9r7bmwDcYtbX6

Update: We currently do have two moderation spots open. We will still be conducting a poll however, the option to add both, @EIGHT and @Stormy, to the Moderation team will be available.

@EIGHT currently in the IL boards specifically, a runner is allowed to create a save state for IL's. This rule was implemented the day the IL's went up. I'm in favor of keeping the "Run begins from pressing start" rule, simply because this makes it easier on the runner to have a solid starting point.

Here is a copy of the IL specific rules in case you need to review them:

[quote]Level select is required for this run. To get to level select, go to the "OPTIONS" menu and press these buttons in sequence:

"RIGHT, A, A, B, START". Please make sure you have the difficulty level "EASY" selected within the OPTIONS menu after you've made your level selection.

You can use a save state to load to the title screen.

Complete the level from start to finish.[/quote]

Ok, so we have an open spot for another moderator and would like to invite anyone that wishes to fill this position in this thread.

If you decide you would like to become part of the TLK Genesis Moderation Team, please leave a post below with the following information:

• How much time have you spent running TLK Genesis/Mega Drive? (Months/Years and doesn't have to be super consistent)

• Reasons you believe you would be a good fit for the moderation team.

• Do / have you moderate(d) any other board here on SRC? If you have but left or removed yourself, please leave a reason why unless you do not feel comfortable sharing that information.

• How often are you involved with the community? Do you see yourself continuing to be involved with this community for the near future and beyond? (Not forever obviously)

• Any extra details that you would like to add.

As soon as we have our list of nominees, I will create a poll and the link will be hosted in this post and I will also be posting it in the TLK Discord channel.

https://forms.gle/EF3K4FChHkFmbPdQ6

Polls will be available until December 22nd, 2020 @ 8:00 P.M. EST

Good luck to all.

I apologize that I have to do this however, I would like to request the removal of an inactive super moderator from The Lion King Genesis/Mega Drive leaderboard.

Username: @The_Retro_Challenger

Last Online: 4 weeks ago Last Submission: February 13, 2020

Pertaining to The Lion King Genesis/Mega Drive leaderboard:

I can not remember when the last time they verified a run was or when they were really involved with the board. They have been extremely difficult to get ahold of including when moderators needed to be involved in certain situations and this has been going on since about a month after I became a moderator (which has been about a little less than a year, I think). Other members of the community have also mentioned to me that they have also attempted to reach out to Retro and either were waiting up to a month for a reply or never received one at all.

I think that we should start to use milliseconds for run times. We're getting fairly close to optimization and it will definitely help distinguish placements. I don't really see any cons with this, at the moment.

I agree that the lower times (5th to 10th placements) should be the ones to have the Milliseconds added however, it might be beneficial for every run to have milliseconds added. I'm fine with either, though.

I see the issues with verifying on stream on some level but not to the extent of it calling a moderator's credibility into question. At the very least, it would show a fair judgment on each individual's runs. As I stated above, I still somewhat see an issue with it.

I would love to have had the time to verify runs sooner than I have been able to but saying I allowed them to "pile up" is incorrect. I was still making an effort to get those runs verified not allowing them to just sit there and always did them in order from oldest to newest.

Yes, runs did get to 17 for a single week. The way you've worded this makes it seem like every week there were tens of runs to verify when this simply is not the case. I did not "sit on dozens of new runs", as you claim. I had to simply wait to verify them.

Technically, I am not the sole moderator.

I would have modded other users to help if I had the power to do so. I am not the Super Moderator and he is currently fairly hard to get ahold of. I did not think to go to the src mods directly so yes, I made a mistake by not thinking about that.

I really have no issues with more mods on the board, it will be a relief to know that there is help and I've been wanting to get more people on board but as mentioned above, I really had no way of adding them.

I'm honestly not sure of the reason behind the decisions. I was contacted but not really given a reason. I was shown a list of users that would be recommended and asked if I would like to add to that list. I did add to that list and heard nothing else other than that all the candidates would be contacted. I'm not sure if I was shown the full list of candidates because one of the users selected wasn't on that list.

But as I was told, "Welcome to the TLK community".

Since there seems to be a general agreement on requiring an input display for runners that use an emulator, I plan on updating the rules to include this on Saturday, August 15, 2020. There will be a grace period of 3 days after the rule has been implemented in case a run has been submitted that does not contain an input display or in case a runner did not know of the updated rules.

I will need more input on @PlayingWithDick's idea of only requiring it for the top 10 slots. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it in all runs but I am fine with just the top 10.

As for the verified emulators, it looks like we'll still need more time to decide. I feel that as long as we allow emulators that don't allow / can disable the use of L/R, then we'll be set.

I will still be watching this thread for any concerns or questions regarding either rule.

@8BitsOfJoy I was planning on doing testing after I got this out in the open and see what everyone thought. If the reaction from everyone was positive, I was going to start doing testing on some emulators. If you would like to, or if anyone else would like to help in that process, please feel free. It would definitely help with making sure we are accurate with our findings.

@Akiteru thank you for bringing that to my attention. I don't think I knew about the "No Movie" thing or forgot about it. That's a good idea but why would it not be in our best interest to allow a hard reset? I mean if it already has "No Movie" displayed on screen, would that be necessary?

I do see it being somewhat necessary as someone could just edit "No Movie" into the recording.

There are many Emu's out there so I think not allowing BizHawk simply for it having so many tools, might be the best course.

@Stormy Yeah, I think it should be included in all of the categories.

@Dick, I do agree with that. It should be more for the top spots but still, a cheated run is a cheated run no matter the position.

How does everyone else feel about it being mainly for the top 5 - 10 positions?

@cajink87 Yeah, it would only be for emulator use. I'm not sure if there even is a way to display inputs on a console other than having a second camera for your controller. Natively, the console doesn't allow L/R so there would be no reason to make console users have an input display.

Due to recent events, I would like to propose two new rules for this leader board. I'm sure many of you will agree with me that, at least one of these changes, would squash most of the doubt of any individuals' run and it will keep the board legitimate.

• A live input display must be visible and the buttons must be mapped correctly within the recorded video if emulation is used.

An input display, which is not very resource heavy on PCs, would show us what buttons are pressed and when they are pressed. We could tell from that tool alone if a L/R input was used. We could also verify that the buttons are actually being pressed by comparing the movements of Simba and the timing of the buttons. If an individual is found pre-recording video and splicing in an input display or trying to fake an input display in any way, it will be grounds for removal/banishment from the board. At that point, it would obviously be deception.

I do see one problem with this method, though. Someone could potentially map their left or right direction button(s) to a secondary button in their emulator and not map it to the input display. This wouldn't be as obvious but just because an input display is on screen doesn't mean we won't be looking for illegal moves.

• Certain emulators will be banned for certain functions they contain.

OR

• Only certain emulators will be allowed since they do not contain certain functions.

As an example, we'll look at BizHawk. Bizhawk is not just an emulator but it contains many tools that could be used for cheating. One of the major tools in BizHawk is the ability to make TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedrun) videos. Using this emulator would be sketchy in itself but emulators with known TAS functions should not be allowed.

Emulators that allow you to enable L/R inputs should be banned. BizHawk is an emulator that allows L/R inputs. Kega Fusion, for example, does not allow L/R inputs. I have tested L/R inputs on Kega myself and what it does is prioritizes left over right. This basically means that if you hold left and right at the same time, you will always just move left. There is also no way to activate the use of L/R inputs on Kega.

I have not yet looked into all of the emulators but I will look into as many as I can if we agree that this is a good way to go about it.

The problem that I see with this method is that I am not sure how to verify that a verified emulator was used. The only way I can think of is that the entire emulator window must be captured, not just the contents of the window. If anyone has any ideas or knows a good way to verify emulators, please let me know.

Please leave some input on any concerns or even some additions that I may have missed in this post.

I honestly 100% agree with everything that was said in this. There's no reason that the leaderboard shouldn't make these changes. It was also interesting to know he just has a copy and paste response for any changes that want to be made seen on the board.

I think there should be another mod on this board honestly. The rules on speedrun.com even say that we should aim to have at least 3 qualified mods on the board. I don't see a reason why we shouldn't vote another person in. I would say @Nichole would be a great person to add as a new moderator.

The new rules look fine to me. I would also add that the timer must be visible on screen but that should be common knowledge.