Personally, I feel like making saves is a crucial part of the learning experience, but that being said, I see no reason to deny pretty much any resources.

Been a while since I replied on here, but the obvious overwhelming opinion is to leave all the old records. I think commenting with something akin to "legacy run" could be useful, but I'll leave them as is for now.

Well it's been about 2 weeks and the majority seem to agree, so I guess it's official. Mods be sure to uncheck "Automatically verify run" whenever you submit.

Expect an awesome community.

@Btrue: Yeah, again, it's more about just getting two pairs of eyes on everything. Like I said, I don't expect anyone to try to auto-verify their run to cheat, it's more about catching simple, easy-to-make, mistakes.

There's no real prompting reason why -- there wasn't an incident or anything -- I just think everyone should play by the same rules. If leaderboard mods can always auto-verify their runs then, theoretically (AND I'M NOT SAYING I THINK ANYONE WOULD DO THIS), one could cheat and submit invalid runs. Or runs without video. It also helps to catch mistakes people might have missed in their original run, like maybe accidentally starting/stopping the timer early/late. Or misclicking and submitting the wrong time, date, etc.

Enacting this rule would mean every single run that is submitted always has at least two eyes on it: the submitter and the verifier.

@Toji: As stated in the OP, in order to make everyone play by the same rules.

@BTrue: Can you elaborate on why you're not in favor of it?

I like Timmi's idea of placing a comment on the run stating specifically that it was verified by mods during its livestream under legacy rules.

This is an idea I've been floating around for awhile and have mentioned to some of you. I think we should disallow leaderboard mods from automatically verifying their runs when they submit. This way, everyone adheres to the exact same rules; other mods would have to verify the runs. To do this as a mod, simply uncheck the "automatically verify run" checkbox when submitting.

Thoughts?

Currently, video proof is required for all runs and has always been required for all WR runs. However, there are several WRs on the leaderboards with no video proof attached. We need to decide whether to keep these runs as-is, delete them, or keep them with some stipulation.

I would like to propose removing any WR runs that are not the ONLY run of their game/category. For example, the KHFM Any% (Beginner) run by Saiyanz would be removed, but KHFMHD 100% (Beginner) by SpaceBoundBear would remain in tact since it has no contesting runs. I realize this can be a controversial topic, so let's get some discussion going and please remember to keep it civil. Remember to remove your egos from the topic, especially if your name appears on the list below.

Edit: My feelings on this proposal are not crazy strong, but it's the first I came up with.

Runs any ruling on this matter would affect: ¤ Kingdom Hearts Final Mix - Any% (Beginner) in 5:06:22 by Saiyanz ¤ Kingdom Hearts II (JP) - All Worlds (Beginner) in 5:27:38 by KHfan169 ¤ Re:Chain of Memories - Sora's Story (Beginner) in 2:38:53 by D_Winds ¤ Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix - Silver Crown (Level 1) in 10:25:46 by Bl00dyBizkitz ¤ Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix - Cavern of Remembrance RTA in 5:47 by Bl00dyBizkitz ¤ 358/2 Days (JP) - Any% (Beginner) in 4:43:41 by Drazerk ¤ Birth by Sleep Final Mix - Any% NG+ (Terra) in 1:16:58 by SonicShadowSilver2 ¤ Birth by Sleep Final Mix - Any% (Ventus, Beginner) in 1:56:03 by Yukonuko ¤ Kingdom Hearts Final Mix HD - All Worlds (Proud) in 4:21:53 by Zetrile ¤ Kingdom Hearts Final Mix HD - JJ 100% (Level 1) in 8:31:05 by DJSALTYNUTZ ¤ Kingdom Hearts Final Mix HD - 100% (Beginner) in 18:12:17 by SpaceBoundBear ¤ Birth by Sleep Final Mix HD - Any% (Terra, Standard) in 1:55:25 by KHfan169 ¤ Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix HD - Any% (Critical) in 4:45:51 by Bl00dyBizkitz ¤ Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix HD - Gold Crown (Critical) in 11:05:56 by Rain_Airou ¤ Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix HD - Platinum Trophy RTA in 31:24:46 by ChoiceTick

Ok so since this thread has gone cold for over 2 weeks and there is a clear majority in support of video proof for all, the current rule of requiring video proof for all games (EXCEPT DDD) will remain in tact. Unless there is strong opposition, all runs previously verified with no video proof will remain on the leaderboards as "legacy runs." This brings up the interesting question, however, of what to do with current WRs that have no video. Do we delete them? Continue to allow them? Make a note in the run's comment? I'll bring up a separate thread ( http://www.speedrun.com/kh/thread/mdog3/1#e3xb0 ) to decide these questions and link to it from here once I have. Please consider this thread closed and do not reply to it anymore.

Bloody, just to clarify: Muffin was referring to the question around whether to still allow runs that unintentionally OPEN the Clear Bonus chests, but don't use the cards from within. I think we all sound in agreement of allowing a run in such manner to still be considered "Any%" and not be forced into "Any% w/Clear Bonus" until the player equips the rewarded card(s).

Muffin's post basically summarizes all my thoughts on the matter, so chiming in as a +1 for separate categories.

As far as what happened with Rebel, as I understand it, what happened is that he had a memory card with only a completed Sora's Story save file on it and was able to open the "clear bonus" chests. That might mean our understanding of the requirements needed to open these chests is slightly different (no 2FM/RR save data needed, only Sora's Story), but definitely still makes them two separate categories.

I don't know enough about the requirements, but I hope someone does or can clear up the weirdness.

I lurked on this thread for a couple days as I've said most everything I've needed to say so far, so I'll keep this post brief on just a couple clarifying points:

1. The "arbitrary cut-off rule" was NEVER enforced on the google doc for as long as I used it. Many mods would add times instantly if they were watching the run live (and is clearly evidenced by BB's 2.5 run which stood as WR without a video for over a year I think). I'm including myself in the guilty party as one of the mods, but it was never suggested to me at all that there was some cut-off line.

2. Split VODs and VODs that drop parts are fine imo for initial verification unless you have some reason to suspect cheating. Once again, mods should be checking at bare minimum the beginning & ends of each video though, as well as some random spots throughout. If cheating is suspected later, we re-evaluate.

3. I think removing legacy runs with no VODs is completely unnecessary, but don't have any incredibly strong feelings against it if that were the way we decided to go for some reason.

4. @Salad, the difference between a cut-off line calling runs "good" vs. "bad" and one runner calling their time "bad" is that the cut-off line is decided by the ENTIRE community and thus reflects the opinions of us as a collective rather than those of one individual.

Thank you to all the new/prospective runners for giving your opinions, as you are the ones this discussion will most affect.

Timmi, can you retitle this thread and reword the OP to be just about video proof? Afterwards I'll make a subforum for "General Issues/Requests" and move this in there. That way people can make individual threads for individual requests in the future, too. The topics that spawned on this thread have already been resolved it seems, so I don't think we have to worry about popping those out into individual threads.

Real quick at the top of this post I wanted to thank Kiwi for chiming in. Hearing from prospective runners helps shed light on new angles we might not have properly considered and I know it's not always easy to comment when you think that your opinion will carry no weight with the audience (I've had a few viewers mention this to me before).

Additionally, I'd like to quickly note that for anyone who hasn't seen it, I made a guide a few days ago on "what you need to stream" from the bare bones to the higher end. It's linked on the "HOW TO GET YOUR RUNS SUBMITTED TO THE LEADERBOARDS" thread and will be in the OP on that thread as soon as I can get White to see it. Here it is again for convenience (I'm very open to suggestions for changes, especially by handheld runners): http://pastebin.com/mWHreqap

Now, onto the rest. I actually never would've drawn so many parallels between Smash and speedrunning, but it is a pretty decent analog. Smash started out as a tiny community of people playing a game they loved and now it's turned into a gigantic (probably multi-million dollar) industry. Competitive League of Legends, Starcraft, and Counter Strike have all done the same. Maybe not everybody feels the same way, but I would love to see speedrunning go in that direction! It's so much more amazing when you're passionate about something to see it be successful, especially in the eyes of "outsiders." I want the speedrunning (and KH) community to grow as large as possible and part of that is becoming more "professional."

For another example, I used to bowl on a club team back in college. When I started, I knew nothing about bowling besides the fact that I thought it was fun! My top time was like a 180 using house balls (the stock equipment at the alleys). But the more I got involved in the club, the more I enjoyed learning about it and how so many people took it seriously when the end goal was just to have fun! My first tournament I was practically shaking with excitement and a large part of that was from how "official" and "professional" everything felt. You had to wear the right uniform, shoes, not apply anything to the surface of your ball during a match, and follow the accepted etiquette. ALL of these things were part of what made it competitive. If my toe went over the line, it was a fault and the throw didn't count. The games that counted towards your official average were only those that could be verified at tourneys and the like. If I were back home playing with some friends just casually, we wouldn't care about ANY of that shit. But that's a completely different environment, and to this day I can't take the game seriously if I'm in that environment; instead I dick around with trick shots and whatnot. Which is fine! But it doesn't have that competitive feel that drives me to improve, and I wouldn't expect anyone to consider my "high score" to be "that one time I rolled a 280 with the bumpers up."

Competitive hobbies are riddled with rules and proof and rightfully should be.

Plus, getting into the habit of recording your runs is never a bad thing! You never know when you'll want to look back on that time in your speedrunning career and admire how much you've improved! One of my favorite streams of Biz's was when he restreamed his first 1.5 run after he got WR. It was so unbelievably awesome to see how he started out making a million mistakes jut like the rest of us and then worked his way to a WR.

I still just don't see how someone could get "too demoralized to do a first run" just because it'll take 30 extra minutes of setup time and $9 if they don't have a webcam to point at the screen. Additionally, I've started offering my assistance in setting up recording whenever I reject a run with no video. I just had my first person reach out today and he didn't make any complaint about it being unfair. That's obviously not to say that doesn't mean they may have thought that way, but instead of thinking we were just turning them away from the community, they instead decided to pursue setting things up the "right way."

Last note: I've said before that I also would be fine with DDD being the one exception to the rule until capture cards become less expensive, accurate emulators are made, and/or the community grows to a larger point. $300 is of course excessive.

I see nothing wrong with that. :)

All that being said, I do very much genuinely appreciate you following up on the discussion, as almost nobody else has so far once opposing points have been made.

After re-reading my point about 40 one-off 5 hour times, I agree with you bl00dy, there's no harm in having that and we should definitely be inclusive to those people. I never meant to belittle or insult anyone with that statement, it was simply written at 5:30 in the morning and probably should've been thought out more.

I do think you're being quick to reject the "cut-off line proposes good/bad times" point though. I've had tons of people tell me they felt their time was bad and thus didn't submit it to the leaderboards and my response is always, "You should anyways! Completing a run at all is something to be very proud of!" If people are already feeling like that now, having a cut-off line would only exacerbate the situation. For people like you and me who have been running for a bit now (you much longer than me of course), seeing our time as "bad" is a big motivator to improve. For someone who's new to speedrunning, it can be a daunting mountain that seems insurmountable. When I first started running, I never got the impression that there was a line between "good" and "bad" times. Eventually after doing several runs I started to learn about some common goals like "sub 3" and whatnot, but there was nothing calling my times bad. A defining line of skill on the leaderboards BY DEFINITION does exactly that. It calls some runs good and lots of others bad.

I'm also curious as to your thoughts on the various other points I've brought up about arbitrary cut-off lines in this thread. Things like how do we decide? Is it rank-based or time-based? When do we deem it necessary to change it? How often? How do we enforce this on the leaderboards (there's no technical way to do it within the site)? What about edge cases? I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I will never be in favor of an arbitrary cut-off line.

As for your point on recording, I haven't been doing this since I was 14. I've been doing it for a year and a half. I can clearly remember doing my first run, and it wasn't all that hard to set up. I downloaded OBS the day before, added the game feed, and put in my stream info and did a 5 minute test stream. Then the next day I did my run. Hell, I even recently described how to setup video capture to someone over Twitch chat. Thinking it's some long complicated process honestly puts a bad statement on what we think of the intelligence of the average runner. We've all seen how terrible Spike is with computers. If he can do it, anyone can. ;)

Without video proof, it's also impossible to enforce if the run was done segmented or RTA. My first attempt to go somewhat fast in 1.5 was not knowing strats, using an online stopwatch, and pausing the timer to cook dinner like 2 hours in. I didn't expect anyone to just believe my time on faith, so I made sure I had some cheap recording equipment before I wanted to do my first run that I would care about. To re-iterate, there is NOTHING stopping people from doing offline runs and comparing their times to the leaderboard, even segmented! I think it's a completely fair request to require a recording for their name to show up.

I'd like to know if these people that are submitting runs with no video have ever even tried recording. I've stated it elsewhere before, but I am more than happy to help anyone who has difficulty setting it up, which I doubt there is much given its simplicity. My guess would be that the more likely scenario is people are just being lazy. Who's to say they followed any other rules on the leaderboards? Maybe they didn't even start their timer in the correct spot, or used a save file. Just because they have a higher time shouldn't mean we hold them to different standards; it's insulting.

Finally, to go to your rebuttal to Bran, you said "at the bare minimum all you needed was to buy a structure deck to play, which is probably less than $20 nowadays." All we're asking is that someone points a webcam they already have at their screen (free) or buys an EZCap (less than $10). It's not that hard and if people really have an issue with that then they should honestly, to use your terminology, "get over it if it's bothering [them]." I have yet to hear from a single person who has brought up a legitimate reason for why they can't record.

Oh also, on the demotivating part, I always try to leave an encouraging note whenever I have to reject the time of a new runner, rather than just rejecting it with "no video" or anything like that.

As someone who's learned and done runs of several games without submitting my times to the leaderboards, personally I find knowing my rank on the leaderboards and seeing my name to not be much different. That being said, I've obviously been running for a while now and that's probably affected my attitude.

I'd like to bring up the example of Zetris. Zetris did offline runs of 1.5 for over a year (IIRC) before he ever started streaming his runs. He never submitted his times, but he said he knew about the leaderboards and would check them regularly. Imagine if he submitted one of his PBs back then around 3:02, which would've been top 15 at the time I think. It would be very hard to believe it was a real time from a completely unknown runner. To me, that would be far more discouraging than if I had a 4 hour first run get rejected. And having an arbitrary cut-off time wouldn't help that. Suddenly someone's taking this run that I've poured my blood and sweat into for a year and calling it less valid than someone who did one blind run. Having video proof be a requirement for everyone puts everyone on the same playing field.

And flipping the scenario could still have the same effect. I've given this example before in this thread but I'll repeat it here. When you start running a game, every improvement feels great. You know your time isn't the best, but there are segments you feel really good about and eventually PBs that you feel will be tough to beat. Having an arbitrary cut-off line for video proof implicitly calls all runs below that time "good" and all runs above it "bad." So now my 3:10 I've worked at for a few weeks (or months) is still so bad that I don't even need video proof, even though I felt really good about it and thought it would be hard to beat. This could discourage me from continuing at all. At least if video proof is required for all, I know that's a requirement going in and everyone is on the same playing field.

As for the "greater barrier to entry" point, I hardly see it as such. When you already have the console and the game, buying an EZCap and playing off your capture feed is like walking the last 10 feet of a marathon. Not to mention you can simply point a webcam at your TV if you already own one. Nobody's requiring you to buy splitters or extra cables; I played off my capture feed for months. If $9 is really what's deterring someone from running the game, then like Timmi said, they probably wouldn't have stuck around anyways and we'd just have 40 more one-off 5 hour times.

As for editing/uploading being complex, Timmi covered my thoughts. I NEVER edit any of the videos I upload to YouTube as I don't own any video-editing software. The most I'll ever do is use YouTube's built-in editor, and even that's very rare. I simply start my local recording when I want to start the video and stop it when I'm done. And uploading is literally just a drag-and-drop.

As for white's point about how it doesn't eliminate cheating, Timmi covered most of my feelings on it; it's not to eliminate cheating, it's to deter it. Additionally though, requiring video proof isn't just for the immediate verification, it's also for later investigations. If someone submits a run with a video that a mod verifies and then is later suspected of cheating, we can go watch the full video and make an informed decision and potentially remove it. If a run is submitted without a video and gets verified, we have no way to check on it later. For the record, I personally check the start and end times and click a few random spots in the video for every run I verify. It would of course be absurd to expect every mod to watch the entire multi-hour video for every submitted run, but they should all at least make sure the timer is started and stopped correctly and get a rough idea of the runner's skill.

As an anecdote, I've personally had to reject about 5 runs with no video proof due to not being able to verify their times which were submitted as believable-enough times, but were claiming to be WRs.