Before I even begin, making exceptions for certain small games in this ruling is a partial solution within itself, and will fail. Speaking of "partial solutions" and then coming up with something like that is contradictory and detrimental to the intent of an implementation like this.
I don't believe I ever said we would create exceptions for small games. The subject came up on IRC and I wholeheartedly disagree with it. It's nonsensical.
Firstly, this is still a very slippery slope. While I do support the fact that proving statistics is never a bad thing, I refuse to believe that "forcing" any amount of proof is the answer, or ever will be the answer. I remain of the opinion that encouraging, not forcing, proof (unless called out, of course) is the "best" answer. I'm not saying this way is perfect, either, but I do feel it can only get worse.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you here. It is not all that complicated to provide proof of your stats. If you're a legitimate player why not put in the tiny amount of extra effort to make sure everyone knows you followed the rules?
If we no longer trust the players, then why should requiring proof stop here? It was said in this very topic that even consoles can be TAS'd (even if it is complicated to pull off). Then why not go all the way, just require proof for all stats? That's the biggest reason I don't support an idea like this, or any similar idea - I feel it does more harm than good, and once a requirement starts, the next thing is requiring proof for all stats, or all stats above a certain level. As much as you're about to say "That's not going to happen", it will. Sooner or later, it will.
Actually, I would like to make something like this happen in the future, but that's for another thread. Our proof standards in general are far far lower than they should be. I agree that strongly enouraging proof rather than outright requiring it is probably one of the best options as far as this is concerned, but I also think there's situations such as this one where the method used to obtain a stat is iffy enough that requiring some form of verification for it is not unreasonable.
Let's say this was implemented. Firstly, not having proper site functionality for this would be silly - all a person has to do is say "I did this on console". Bam, done. No proof required unless said person was called out. Only problem is, there's already a rule that states something along the lines of not allowing anything done on an emulator that can't be replicated on a console, among other emulator specific rules. Since we're requiring proof for emulated stats, there's practically no way that someone can't just come in and post some good times, claim to do them on console with an official release of the game, and not have to prove a thing. Save for a person posting outright impossible times, that's the first thing people will hide behind.
This is a valid point, but there's also nothing to stop people from doing that right now. We've seen several BSers somewhat recently posting TASed videos and passing them off as console/unTASed runs. Why would they do that when they can simply submit a time without "proof" attached and be done with it? This rule is aimed to help curb those sort of situations. There are already no proof requirements, so this isn't really much of a strong argument.
In addition, while I also believe that this is probably the "best" proof requiring idea I've seen thus far, I still must make the case of the fact that it will reduce competition (even by a little bit). Requiring anything will possibly prevent people from competing in certain games. It could stop new members from joining. It could stop existing members from competing altogether, possibly (though not likely).
I could counter that not doing it will reduce competition even further because people outside the site who would be prospective new members will be turned off by the lack of verification here along with the simplicity of posting times you didn't get. I maintain that it's really not that hard to provide proof of your emulated stats. If requiring some standard of legitimacy is enough to turn some people off from competing here, then oh well, I guess that's the price we pay.
Next, these required proofs cannot go unchecked by the site staff. Someone, or a few people, are gonna have to do this job. While I mean absolutely no offense to the current staff (even if recent changes to said staff are about to change this next fact), the past has shown me that if we cannot properly maintain a videos section that is reasonably up to date and free of deleted, or improper, or slowed down, or outdated videos, then it follows that this will not be properly maintained as well.
The videos section is not even remotely a valid comparison. The videos section is a single page listing all videos available for a given game. The reason it's so out of date is because the system does no checks whatsoever before posting new videos, nor does it automatically obsolete old ones when better ones are posted, and the process to manually obsolete videos is a giant pain in the ass. There would be no such page for this - we'd simply request people link their proof in their stat comments. No admin maintenance required. If somebody posts a video that doesn't actually prove their stat, then somebody will probably notice and notify an admin, and in that case a BS call would be made.
It would be better to have a proper way to implement this straight into the site, but we don't have that right now. That being said, hopefully we will be able to do that in the future.
Finally, I'm not exactly comfortable with the fact that all prior stats will simply be grandfathered in with such a ruling.
Do you have a better idea? We can't fix all the stats that are already on the site, not only because it'd be an absolutely ridiculous amount of work but also because we just plain don't have the relevant information on every stat. That doesn't mean we shouldn't implement any changes going forward, though.
I'd be more in support of say, site implementations that allow a player to report what console or emulator they achieved a stat on when they submit, for example. I don't think that would be too much to ask for at all, at least compared to requiring proof.
I really don't see how that would help at all.
