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Comment by tribby | Hacker News Reader

super impressive stuff. I'm generally unfamiliar with speedrunning, but I am familiar with the billy mitchell controversies, so I'm surprised that people accept the legitimacy of streamed runs. wouldn't it be trivial-enough to fake?

tangental: my personal favorite mario-related feat is sethbling injecting flappy bird into super mario world manually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0

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To an extent I think that streaming has solved this problem, compared to the days of people just submitting videos that they recorded by themselves. Streamers might fake a single run to get a record, but it would be a huge amount of work to fake all the progression they had to go through to get there.

I agree, but furthermore after you get to a certain level of skill, you pretty much have a free pass to cheat if you like.

To wit, I don't think many people suspected Billy Mitchell of cheating until there was undeniable proof of that fact.

> To wit, I don't think many people suspected Billy Mitchell of cheating until there was undeniable proof of that fact.

Not so much. Billy has been suspected of cheating for ages. His live play is completely at odds with his WR runs. As of the early/mid 2000s he just wasn't very good at Donkey Kong when compared with his contemporaries.

I would have previously thought so too, but recently there was a cheating incident in the GTA speedrunning where already a top runner started cheating: https://old.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/98utvr/grand_thef.... So for a year there was apparent progression to be seen in the streams, but it was all/most due to modifying the game files to gain advantage.

This just isn't true. Recently there was a Super Meat Boy cheater who was discovered due to analysis of a persistent animation across the game that wasn't lining up due to video cuts.

Pretty flimsy system (and far from "solved"), and it lets cheaters steal glory for the months or years it takes to catch them which threatens the legitimacy of the sport past a critical mass.

Moderators/judges are on the wrong side of a trapdoor function because of the amount of analysis it may take to verify a single video, and they aren't professionals in the field of video analysis.

I don't see how "all progression" is relevant here since you don't need to be a streamer to speedrun much less to submit a well-doctored video with a time that beats other people.

I know of the Super Meat Boy example (I've seen the Apollo Legend videos too). Was that run streamed live?

don't know, but my point is that it took a rather serendipitous global animation to expose them. There are people who think speed runs should require footage of the controller for the sake of a consistent analysis medium, and I'm sympathetic to them for the sake of the legitimacy of the sport at the expense of accessibility.

And to respond to your question, you can livestream a pre-recorded video so it doesn't matter. Some guy livestreamed a record breaking run of Yoshi's island or something but got cocky and streamed his controller, and someone trivially discovered he was miming it, pressing or skipping inputs after they were seen in the video. The Super Meat Boy wasn't doing that.

It's possible to fake streamed runs, e.g. by miming over pre-recorded spliced/TASed runs, but Kosmic has played at live events where this would be impossible, and there's no doubt that he has the skill to do this legitimately.

Billy's live performances were miles away from his spliced runs. The live performances of top level SMB runners are in line with streamed performances. Some communities are moving toward controller cams to show each button press.

Would it be fair to say similar scandals have happened in actual sports (PEDs, judge corruption)? Cheating is often caught and corrected in the speedrunning community.

As a regular fan of MMA and occasional watcher of boxing, I can't think of a single example of the sports' governing bodies overturning a corrupt result, even in the Olympics. Occasionally judges will be fired later; that's it.

PEDs are enforced almost sporadically; I wish they didn't bother.

Edit: By corrupt result I meant corrupt or inaccurate judging.

Cormier vs Jones 2

That fight was overturned due to Jones popping for PEDs, not due to improper judging.

When I said "corrupt result" I meant corrupt judging. Sorry I was unclear.

Because after all, it's still a game and this is still just about having fun. Until someone starts losing real money from video game fraud, there's no incentive to turn a friendly competition into a thing where you feel like you can't trust anybody.

Oh neat! I knew about the credits warp, but I didn't know about flappy bird. Thanks!

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