Just tossing my two cents in here. I'm a heavy lurker in the forums here, in the discord, and in many of the other RE7 runners streams. I've seen a lot but said very little. I disagree with flaming/harassing anyone, to the point that it is 4 of the ten rules in my own discord. I haven't watched Psarthex's knife wr run, so I don't know if that is what he was doing or not but I disagree with that action if he was. I also don't agree with the call for Punchy to step down or be fired, which ever version was said in that vod. Without Punchy we would live in run verification hell. I mean, we had a console ng+ any% wr, the most competitive category on console, sit for multiple weeks waiting to be verified at one point. As for Psarthex, I've followed and lurked in his streams for a while now with the occasional comment and we've shared a number of strats/ideas/thoughts for RE7. I wouldn't have handled some of the situations that have occurred in the last few months the way he has but I'm fairly passive and neutral about things so I wouldn't have had my feathers ruffled.

However, what the real issue is here is communication. In the topic that sort of sparked this whole thing about the run category suggestion, for example, I completely agree that the "hacks" or "cheat" category is a bad idea, as Punchy said in the post. I don't personally think the individual sections category thing is necessary but lets look at how that part was discussed. Snooze suggests various sections of the game be run as their own category, specifying sections, after Psarthex had suggested a guest house% in jest, but with a note that it was a serious suggestion. The first mod response was [quote]the thing you are describing is known as 'practice'[/quote]Psarthex and Snooze don't really get any information from a response like that. This was followed by some users commenting and arguing amongst themselves and then Psarthex responding by saying [quote=Psarthex]That 'practice' can be called 'Individual Level' [/quote]which I would take as an argument for his reasoning even though I don't agree. Now, I've seen the comments above talking about how Psarthex went and made a snappy comment, posting the meme that he did, but it seems lost on everyone that Punchy responded with [quote]"That "practice" can be called "Individual Level""

I mean, no it couldn't smartass. Because the point of the name "Individual Level" is the word "Individual". It's individual, measured only in a vacuum. Maingame is not measured in a vacuum.

there is no part of RE7 that is not effected by considerations you have to make for the parts of the run before or after it.

Jack's Birthday is a game of Individual Levels. Main game is not. [/quote] Now, I'm sorry but why was it necessary to call him a smart ass over that comment. This type of communicating to the community is going to get people triggered. This is what causes someone to get angry and is likely part of what triggered Psarthex's reaction. And then the last comment after Psarthex posted the meme, [quote]I verify literally almost all of the runs lmao.

psar, literally all you've ever done is act like a dickhead to every single person who moderates this game endlessly and wondering why you're not gaining much traction with anything. Just stop posting.

I'm sorry being told how it is makes you uncomfortable and bitchy. And serious lol if you think my moderation has anything to do with the activity of the game. I'm also pretty sure this is still the most active game on sr.c so you're wrong on multiple different levels.

P.S Your stream layout and thumbnails are garbage and verifying your runs is physically painful for me. [/quote]

The only time prior to this, on these forums at least, that Psarthex has made direct comments to the mods in any derogatory way, if you could call it that, was in the muted audio discussions and he was making points that many runners were making and calling out what he viewed as hypocrisy with Xer1an's run because he wasn't aware of the decisions that were made, on discord, by the mod team about the audio. There has never been anything posted on this forum that explained that Xer1an's run was the last accepted run with muted audio and music because it was decided that AFTER that WR run any run submitted with muted audio or music would be rejected. The rules just were changed, and a post was made that said they were going to be changed, but no mention of why Xer1an's run remained. So Psarthex is a dickhead because he called out what he couldn't know wasn't an issue. So does that logic mean that I am now an asshole/dickhead because I am voicing a dissenting position to the mods? And why does his layout /thumbnails need to be attacked by a mod?

What else I find important from these two topics specifically, still regarding communication, is the things left unsaid. In the category post, the 3rd comment was from me, asking about the potential for a VR category. I presented information to explain why I thought it would be a good category, mentioned some potential negatives, and did so in a relatively polite manner. In the audio post from 3 months ago Biohazard11189 asked about if having his BGM set to 0 would be considered an issue with the audio rule because he had been running the game with his BGM set to 0 as that is how he prefers to run. Both of these legit questions received no response, not from anyone from the mod team. But there was time enough to mock Psarthex, call him an asshole, call him a dickhead.

I've seen where you've said that the mods are people, doing this for free, but you are choosing to make that sacrifice and should be willing to deal with the bullshit that comes with being in charge. Some people will come at you with well rounded comments/responses and others will be less pc. It doesn't mean you have to be happy with that but when it comes to responding to the community on things maybe take the high road and craft a response that isn't attacking or degrading the person even if they are acting in your eyes like a petulant child. The mods have said multiple times that RE7 brought a new wave of speed runners that have never run anything else, and often I see negative comments about those very people, the ones that made this game have almost as many runs in 5 months as Super Mario Bros. currently has.I mean, 6 of the 9 WR holders started their speed running with this game. Maybe have a little more patience for people.

As for the things said and done outside of discord and these forums, I don't know a lot about it because I don't care to get any more involved than stating my position here, which is more about the communication than this drama but obviously is heavily drenched in the drama, but I know if I had my forum posts locked/deleted here and I wasn't on the discord and wanted to discuss things I would probably venture outside of these places, to Twitter or Twitch, to try to speak with someone, since src messages and the Not A Hero DLC seem to be of the same meme.

Yeah, I acted like kind of an asshole in that thread for basically no reason. Complete fuck-up on my part, I forget I represent more than just myself sometimes. More or less just boiled down to the fact that it opened with an idiotic suggestion so I kinda wrote the whole thread off immediately. RE7 gets a lot of people who've never speedran a game before who suggest a lot of completely moronic things for the boards (the "music allowed" category still being my favourite) so I tend to just be extremely short and to the point with them because we are often inundated with a lot of it. The fact that I respect Psarthex a negative amount didn't help either, so I also just blew him the fuck off since his posting track record up to this point has also just been largely pointless hostility to mods.

as for the VR suggestion and the BGM thing I kinda just...flat out didn't notice either of them? I don't know how VR is substantially different, so I couldn't really help with that or know if it's justified in its existence, that'd probably be Carci's field.

For whatever it's worth though, in no way shape or form does me fucking up that one thread validate or justify the way I've been treated after the fact. Does not even slightly justify it and anyone suggesting it does is truly the worst kind of person. I reiterate that these are the sorts of things you just lose your account for in other communities, but I think you could actually literally kill someone and get away with it in speedrunning because the self-policing is totally non-existent.

Really, what it currently boils down to, is this.

[quote]I am aware that the rules and ToS on speedrun.com are not clearly defined[/quote]

This has to start existing. We need a higher-order call on whether or not it's a ridiculous free-for-all in terms of behaviour like it is currently (this would be completely insane and open to all sorts of abuse, like right now) or whether or not some type of behaviour is in fact, not ok to post to represent the website and by extension the community.

I understand that's not an easy thing to concoct given that making rules for basically the entire speedrunning community is probably extremely daunting.and not even slightly the position this website anticipated being up in. But it's becoming necessary since the lack thereof is being abused at this very moment.

[quote]Without Punchy we would live in run verification hell.[/quote]

I also kind of just want to point this out because he's right, whoever's calling for my removal probably doesn't realise how badly that would shoot yourself in the foot since I verify like somewhere between 70-80% of the runs that pass through on my own because the entire reason I joined the mod team was because I was pissed off about how slow runs were getting verified. I just clicked through the most recent 5 verified runs and 4 of them were me. And it's basically always like that. Anyone with access to backend mod statistics on sr.c can double check that, I definitely do my damn job.

incidentally sgdq is next week and I'm going and so is carci so if run verification basically entirely dies for that week, that's why!

I don't want what I said above to be interpreted as it justifying in any way you being flamed/harassed or that I find that behavior acceptable. As I said, I don't agree with that, at all. I stated above, I haven't watched that run, and honestly I probably won't since it seems to be such a hotbed of drama, so I don't know with my own eyes and ears what was said or done in the run. I have read what you have said in discord and what Psarth has discussed with me since this kicked off. But I don't have any intention of being involved in that specific drama. The examples above are just the recent things which happen to deal with you and Psarth but are examples of the communication. That is what I mean to be the take-away here. Also, I believe the audio BGM thing was posted and locked before you were a mod so I wouldn't expect you to have dealt with that. I do understand that things get missed sometimes but sometimes those things are important to a person, and I'm not talking about my VR suggestion.

I'm not excusing any of the runners in how they act, they are their own person, but in the role of a mod you are a leader in this community. Psarthex also is a leader, as a WR holder, and I think he also should think about how he represents himself in that role. I'm not saying either of you, or any other mod or WR or top position holder can't use the colorful language we've been blessed with in the forums, I'm very found of using that language myself, but, this warzone mentality of attacking one another needs to go. Maybe I'm too far gone into the hippy "love everyone" approach but it's a lot easier to be nice to each other and be decent human beings than to have this kind of crap happening. As for sgdq week, first, good luck on your Shuriken run, as long as they stay on schedule I should be able to catch it live right before work, second, I can verify runs next week if you all would like. It can be just for the week, so things keep moving. I know the runs, if you're interested in discussing that more, (any mods) message me on discord.

[quote]I don't want what I said above to be interpreted as it justifying in any way you being flamed/harassed or that I find that behavior acceptable.[/quote]

No, sorry. That wasn't aimed at you, but there enough people in this thread who have implied as such and I want to make it known I think that is total bunk and not even remotely a position that should be entertained. You don't counteract a wrong by doing a wrong several orders of magnitude worse.

Hello, I have slept on stuff.

Let's review.

http://www.speedrun.com/run/y675djqm

This run was the initial reject for missing audio for the last 3 minutes. I wasn't sure what to do with this and thus deferred to Carci's judgement and his judgement was...bizarre? Which has pointed out multiple times in the thread. I went with it because Carci's been moderating leaderboards before I even joined speedrunning entirely so I defer to his judgement when I don't really know what to do, since I'm kind of a guest mod for this game while he mods the entire series. I also went with it partially just out of zero trust with Psarthex since the last time a run with partially muted audio was mistakenly accepted (one of my own, incidentally), he started a thread more or less deliberately to pick a fight with Carci over it, so I didn't feel like being the subject of that. Shit started anyway so I still feel like I was literally never going to win with that run, but whatever.

Carci has admitted this judgement was a mistake and I was never especially comfortable with the judgement in the first place and zenix was straight up against it, so I don't see any reason it should stand other than pointless stubbornness. The audio rule in general could probably do with revision, I have literally never liked it. I'll take responsibility for going with a weird judgement instead of challenging it. Even though the thumbnail is still a petty veiled insult against me but it's obscure enough that basically only I understand it, I'll still verify it now, otherwise I'll probably forget during SGDQ.

This is a sidenote, but whoever's pointing out Xerian's WR being full of missing audio, the rule was made precisely in response to that time because it wasn't desired to have another WR with that many holes in its audio. It was actually initially rejected from the boards entirely at the rule's inception and I seriously fought for its inclusion on Discord for literal fucking hours (because Xerian honestly didn't his make his own case very well) and was actually eventually successful in getting it placed. This also all happened before I was placed as a mod, so it doesn't relate to my own moderation, but just so people understand what I actually did for that one.

As for the second run with the ridiculous harassment in it, I'm firm on not posting that one. It's ridiculous, over-the-top and I have no desire to encourage or validate that type of behaviour even a little bit. I myself have actually posted runs to this board where I am blatantly shittalking RE7 moderation in it over the audio rule because I fucking hated it at its first inception, the difference is that it didn't directly call for the harassment any particular person. I can bantz, but to that extent is ridiculous. Ultimately, that winds up being sr.c staff's call as and when they ever get around to implementing a clearer global content policy, which has been necessary for sometime.

The "mute the bits of audio where I'm shittalking" compromise I'm not really especially happy with either because I know just enough French to know that if you wanted to just mute anytime you're talking about it, you'd have to mute like half the video. The audio rule clearly has some leeway about it but that's probably not going to cut it. I honestly think you could probably re-do the run sans ridiculous toxicity faster than sr.c could implement clear guidelines on this sort of thing.

That seems fair enough. But again (and seriously), I wouldn't have to mute half the video, I don't know how's your French but I'm literally talking about my personal life and school anecdotes with the chat for like a big half of the run. And just to be clear, I suggested to mute those shittalking part because I understand that it's not a decent behavior to have. I shouldn't behave like that in the first place, clearly. Grudges aside, I can both understand how you are feeling about that and how, for me, it was nothing but a little roast and, for the end of the run, a way to talk to you directly through the video.

So yeah, honestly I won't WR a third time in the category, it's too RNG and boring. The best I can do is edit the video to mute those shittalking parts (except that one where i shittalk my former Highschool Spanish teacher in French, she's not part of SRC community and she doesn't know about Youtube), because the way I see it: You already verified the run, thus you know I didn't cheat, so it's technically ok with the rules, however I mute those parts, the run has already been verified as legit gameplay/audio by a mod... So yeah it clashes with rules in a way, but only for those who don't know. And I can even write as a description something like "Run verified as legit with full audio, muted parts are deliberatly muted because i'm a dum dum poo poo head and was toxic towards moderation during the run."

As for Carci, "bizarre" yeah. Let's not talk about that

[quote]So yeah it clashes with rules in a way, but only for those who don't know[/quote]

See, while I personally would be largely fine with that, the problem is it gets dregged up months later by people who've missed the context. Like, you can see it in this thread with people discussing Xerian's run being accepted despite having a shitload of audio missing, because they don't know the context of why it was rejected and then accepted because it all largely took place on Discord.

[quote=Rossrossy] And lets not forget Xerians run which had more muted audio and also music over it violating TWO of the rules set was accepted, the response for that was "Runs AFTER this one are now rejected if they have anything other than game and mic audio". If this was a serious issue in the past then why the hell wasnt it a defined rule from the start? It's like you just make up stuff as you go and dont think anything through at all. [/quote]

If you're referring to that post in particular, I think his point wasn't to blame you in particular, nor drag this up again on that thread because he doesn't understand or didn't have the context of that. As he said he's been around here silently for a long time. So I think he just wanted to express this in particular: [quote=Rossrossy] If this was a serious issue in the past then why the hell wasnt it a defined rule from the start? It's like you just make up stuff as you go and dont think anything through at all. [/quote]

Again moderation issues / communication issues

But yeah, you could be right about other people anyway

Just additionally, something I'd like to address just for the sake of explanation:

[quote=rossrossy]Plus the part where it was muted it'd be almost impossible to cheat on, i mean you can literally see there is no cuts or anything there.[/quote]

Even someone only slightly preficient in video editing can match something up perfectly to the frame with splicing. That is the entire point of having audio, because it can be quite literally impossible to tell off of video alone. Any cutscene, any loading screen, anything where there's a still frame or fixed animation for several frames would be an easy job for someone who knows what they're doing in an editing program.

Almost (if not all) detections of cheating in the speedrun side of things as a whole have been purely through audio. This is because audio is harder to piece together than video and there is always, always a trace audio has been tampered with. Not the case with video.

Like, this entire discussion has sorta been done and all that, I just wanted to explain for the sake of clarity. The entire reason that particular ruling was fought for so strongly, is because if one of these runs got submitted in particular (muted audio, and was in fact a cheated run) there is nothing any of the mods could do to 100% say it was a cheated run. So rejecting it would be hypocritical because it'd quite literally be a guess, and accepting it would lead to a cheated run being on the boards. Audio being on the run would mean regardless of whether or not it's detected on verification there is a trace left behind of cheating in the frequencies, always. It would be found and confirmed, eventually. Without that, it is simply a guessing game, and simply leads to witch-hunting mentality.

~

Looks like you're starting to solve everything by yourself, am I right ?

@Rossrossy Well, generally when new leaderboards are created, (in my personal experience) we don't really envision those kinds of scenarios in advance before opening them up. In literally NO leaderboard I've helped run, I've only mostly dealt with missing footage and missing audio. Nobody's ever played music in the background of their runs on any video I've moderated, and I didn't see a need to put that there until I noticed a large influx of runs which added their own soundtrack. We should be able to define this shit very early on so as to not step on peoples' toes, but it's difficult to do so when the categories and rulings more or less have to be done on the fly when the game is released and hundreds of people are submitting runs. Nobody even thinks about video integrity until there's an epidemic of shit.

As FurryWulfz/Liv just said, audio is just as important to detecting any potential issues with a run as video. Especially on Twitch, where peoples' computers and internet connections are being relied on to make hard copies of their videos (nobody records locally like they need to and they just make Twitch highlights and rely on those for preserving their shit instead), so there's always SOMETHING missing. Nobody knows how to do it any other way, because Twitch inadvertently simplified the archival of long videos (including speedruns), and I came from a place where you needed to have EVERYTHING almost completely intact (just raw video and audio) to even be able to submit to a leaderboard. Consequently, I've gotten more lenient on runs being submitted in that regard, because shit just straight up happens, but I still maintain that I need to hear the audio in sync with the game and that there be no interruption of the video (or the run) aside from minor framedrops no more than 3-5 seconds in length. But said framedrops are 100% because of internet streaming hiccups and not because of the computer itself; local recording through OBS literally eliminates all of those issues.

I can't expect everyone to be a content creator, but I also think that a certain standard needs to be held in order for games and communities to get the reputation they deserve from the outside. It's just weird to open a WR run for a huge game and have the whole thing be plastered with memes and music. It's one thing for the person to be talking about their life, but when you have WR you're actually representing the rest of the community with your video because you're in the #1 slot.

I've been in the speedrunning community for a very very long time and most people still don't understand that the actual material "record" (or WR) is the video itself and not the number on the result screen or the split file. That's really what I've fought for at the end of the day.