Before I start, no this is not the new "emulators should be banned" thread.
Today I finished a run of Sonic 2 using savestates and uploaded to Youtube. If I was a douchebag who wanted to cheat I could reference that video when submitting stats and no one could BS call me because nothing in the video indicates cheating.
Except it's completely ridiculous.No one in their right mind who had played Sonic 2 for more than 10 minutes would think this run was made at least without using some form of cheat. The entire speedrun community would be unanimous in thinking that the run isn't legit.
TSC operates on an honour system and if someone comes under suspicion of cheating they are required to provide proof. This proof is then analyzed by moderators and whomever they might ask for help. I have in the past helped out a number of times in trying to help ban people who are under suspicion. This includes audio, video and gameplay analysis. After I have determined the most likely emulator the game is being played on (if not console) by using telltale signs, I re-watch the video a few times, sometimes slowed down, to try to detect frame skips to look for a splice, unlikely frame perfect inputs (like counting the number of frames some suspicious spindashes take) and a number of other things that might differ depending on the emulator. This is all made harder by YT compressed, 30fps, low quality recordings I might add. If everything checks out and there's several stats submitted, you can look at other videos the person has submitted and do the same thing. All this work can take hours if not a whole day put together.
If that checks out, the only thing left to do is to analyse what the person is actually doing during the run and weigh it all together to see if it's reasonable. For IL's this is very hard almost to the point of pointless but sometimes someone uploads a supposed single segment full game run and submits the times in that run to TSC or other sites.
This is an example of when this was successful in detecting someone cheating who later got caught from another video and admitted it. He denied that the full game run he used for submission was cheated but his credibility was already lost. The community of different games have also used this form of analysing gameplay to determine whether a run is in fact "
too good to be true", most notably on SDA.
I've been told that an SDA reject for cheating can be valid proof for a BS call, but this does not apply to emulators. It could also probably be extended to other sites like speedrun.com, but what happens if the player only submits to TSC?
A few months ago I sent
this to an admin who requested my help who then forwarded to a second admin. I admit that it's quite passive aggressive to the point of not being an objective analysis anymore and while I don't want to put full blame on frustration I think it's important to note that I've tried to help a growing number of times fruitlessly and this BS call in particular took an unusual amount of time. After a month of silence I requested response but still I have received none whatsoever.
The video in question has since been taken down after being made private shortly after it caught knowledgeable peoples attention but I have a download of it saved on my computer. The few other prominent runners I have asked all agree it looks mighty suspicious with just a quick glance. The stats are still up.
So my question is: How rigid does proof need to be in order to be considered valid for a BS call? Would my video really make the cut? At what point can we trust the knowledge of top runners without obvious proof? What can we do to prevent this loop hole to continue to happen? Hell,
this guy is not banned but
admitted to cheating just months prior using exactly the same setup I did in my video. This is a big issue to me with this site and I think a clear line has to be drawn
somewhere.
