Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"For instance, the "1996–2001" copyright date seen on the title screen in Groobo's video is inconsistent with the v1.00 shown on the initial menu screen, suggesting Groobo's run was spliced together from runs on multiple different versions of the game. Items acquired early in the run also disappear from the inventory later on with no apparent explanation."
It reminded me of a joke in Northern Exposure where Ed uncovers a thief by listing circumstantial evidence and then adding one piece of evidence that he almost forgot.. he witnessed the thief stealing a radio.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091121211238/https://speeddemo...
it's cheating for other reasons too, but it's confusing as fuck trying to figure who originally thought the record was segmented or not.
But yeah a lot of the "it's obviously cheating" comments seems to be from people not realizing that the player is allowed to re run the level and no required to go in blind, some of them may only have played it multiplayer where there isn't a save state for the game.
> There obviously needs to be continuity between segments in terms of inventory, experience points or whatever is applicable for the individual game.
> manually editing/adding/removing game files is generally not allowed
If I check the Wayback Machine, it doesn't go all the way back to 2009 when the run was done. Earliest is 2012, and there it doesn't say anything about continuity or editing/adding/removing game files.[2]
[1] https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Rules
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120701000000*/https://kb.speed...
Very specific changes are sometimes allowed by specific game communities.
Like, what would the alternative be? People would just hook the intro to the credits and win after one second.
And a little bit of 'rng forcing' using outside tools to get drops they want that they can't get and then tweak your fireball damage to make things work for the final boss.
The investigation didn't even start because they were suspicious. The team wanted to create a TAS and decided to recreate Groobo as a starting point, then optimise from there. First step of making a TAS was to bruteforce the map generation seed.
And they quickly encountered issues, and it quickly devolved into an investigation of just how "cheated" it was. Partly because for their TAS usecase, they didn't really care if the run was played on multiple versions, as long as it was still a single save file with a single map seed. But I assume it was mostly curiosity at that point.
Groobo's defence was didn't come until near the end of the investigation, and was more or less: "Yes, I did that. But it was all disclosed to the SDA judges, and they allowed it under the rules of that time".
Like even for RNG, it'd be possible to fake that on a real console, with extra hardware writing to the bus. We'd never detect that, all we'd have would be the statistical arguments of like "one in 10^10 tries" or whatever.
It could be detected by contemporary means, but no one thought about it in time, and there was no wisdom-of-the-crowds yet.
First signal is when it's from a person who doesn't have a history of consistent achievements on the public leaderboards. It's not a rule - sometimes there are extremely talented up-and-coming legit runners who go from pretty bad times to WRs in a matter of months (e.g. Derek MacIntyre in Factorio 100%), but their past runs often show steady improvements. Many fake runners pop out of nowhere, or have few/inconsistent top times/PBs.
Second, every serious speedrunning community has people who check the video recording frame-by-frame; other rules usually include a whitelist of mods, posting the save, (for games that have RNG) the seed, and (for games that have replays) the replay. Breaking the rules just outright disqualifies a run. The frame-by-frame videos usually are enough to uncover cheating. E.g. in Minecraft any%, stronghold navigation relies a lot on luck and intuition; but there are visual cues for which room might lead to the end portal, and if a runner doesn't take the split second to look in that direction it's a tell-tale sign they've already scouted the seed.
But yeah, some formerly-respected runners actually put a lot of effort into cheating, and it takes another expert runner (or even the whole community) to bust them. More in-depth for Minecraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoEQ8wtawPI
Minecraft allows the use of an external tool that extracts the player coordinates to help triangulate the stronghold (there are runners who can do the triangulation in their heads in 10-20s (check out Couriway) but that will easily be a huge difference for a WR).
Timers need to hook into the game to trigger start/stop (WR attemps are often retimed from VOD, sometimes a close tie in a 4h+ run is resolved to single frames). If Diablo runs are to be taken seriously, a tool should exist to extract/inject the seed for verification.
Edit: children have helped point out the precise notion of ethics - no exploit is unethical on its face, so long as it is disclosed, which allows the speedrun to be correctly classified and compared to others in its class.
Although following this logic I don't fully understand why TAS are allowed.
TAS runs aren't put on leaderboards against RTA runs
(the first google result I got for idspispopd did not say _which_ cheat code it was, so figured I'd mention)
Things can often start TAS only & then progress makes it possible for human execution, like OOT Max Child% guay hover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULodSWYC8TI (which then is executed in the actual run 4 hours into 5 & a half hour run: https://youtu.be/NyCklbB0ok0?t=15034)
Route's will often first be shown with LOTAD (low optimization tool assisted demo), before others start trying to execute it in RTA conditions
Yes, you are mostly right, but it’s still interesting (and positive!) that the community landed on an “anything goes so long as you are honest” set of norms.
As someone without much (well, any) interaction with speedrunning communities, it’s still fun to see how other internet communities have codified or tacitly established their operating procedures, expectations, norms etc.
You are, again here, despite trying to deny it elsewhere in this thread, claiming the “anything goes” part within the bounds of the game and within the rules of the competition is somehow reflecting on the community norms and making this “interesting”.
It’s like trying to say “Oh wow it’s so interesting that marathon runners have their own ethics; they can just run as fast as they want as long as they don’t take shortcuts”.
In fact that is not how marathon running works. If you take certain drugs that is frowned uppon, even if you are honest about it. Similarly you can’t break the legs of the competitors. That is heavily frowned uppon even if you are honest about it.
These are not obvious. There could be a full-doping version of marathon running but there isn’t. There could be a combined martial art&marathon running competition where you try to hurt your opponent without getting hurt while running a marathon distance but there isn’t.
There could be a doping-allowed marathon, indeed, if anyone actually wanted that. And that still wouldn’t demonstrate any unique community norms or change my point at all.
You seem to be proving the other poster’s point that people interested in marathons landed on a class of rules that is specific and that nobody wants the alternatives.
It’s the difference between that and the speed-running community’s “anything goes, we’ll just classify it” rules that people find are finding interesting.
The point was that speed runners are not operating with different ethics than any other competition, or society in general. “Anything goes” isn’t accurate as a description, and the top poster maybe didn’t realize that suggesting that exploiting game glitches somehow represented flexible ethics might be a bit presumptuous and patronizing, and also incorrect. It’s interesting to me that people would assume otherwise.
Sure. First, I'm going to leave 'assault' because I think it sort of changes the mapping between marathon running and speedrunning in an analogy-breaking way and adds ethical concerns that aren't really relevant to the point and practically don't exist for speedrunning anyway. I understood what the poster was saying, but I think it's not a great example.
Second, I'm going to suggest that like speedrunning, a marathon run is really against the clock. This isn't strictly true, but it's true enough for the analogy to work.
With all that in place, the apparent universality of 'no doping' is half the point. There are no marathons where you can choose to dope or not dope and they simply categorize you that way. Doping has a fair chance of ruining a career and disqualifying the participant from future marathons.
The other half of the point is that it doesn't have to be this way. We could have separate marathons for dopers, allow them to race together with non-dopers but categorize them differently, or even have specified paths to run but no organized marathon and allow people to get creative in speedrunning them. We could allow people to find shortcuts on trails to improve their time and then categorize them differently from those who follow the proscribed path. Yet we don't do any of it.
In contrast, speedrunning does allow this sort of activity. Tools are okay, but now you're categorized as TAS. You don't have to 100% the game, but now you're doing an Any% run. This does not exist in marathons. You can't take a short cut and get an "Any%" time, for instance.
Simply put, if a speedrunner finds a shortcut it is celebrated, but if a marathon runner happens to find a path down a vine that saves him 10 minutes of running, he's a cheater. These are two different ethical systems.
> The point was that speed runners are not operating with different ethics than any other competition, or society in general.
As you can see above, I disagree with this statement. I haven't read all the sibling and cousin posts, but neither the poster you responded to nor the top poster said the ethical system was bad; in fact both found it interesting. Both the marathon system of ethics and the speedrunning system of ethics seem to have the same moral or ethical basis in fairness, but the approach is different and therefore is the ethical system.
> “Anything goes” isn’t accurate as a description, and the top poster maybe didn’t realize that suggesting that exploiting game glitches somehow represented flexible ethics might be a bit presumptuous and patronizing, and also incorrect.
This is not my interpretation of the top post and I think it's extremely ungenerous. He expressed surprised that a system designed to work around the rules still develops a system of ethical rules. His edit then points out that honesty is a core tenet of the ethics of the group.
I can see why you’re dropping assault now, since it undermined @krisoft’s argument. It was a mistake to defend it. And as for doping, you agree with me that anti-doping rules are universal? Okay so marathoners don’t have different norms than other sports, or at least you’ve run out of examples.
I disagree with your equating of TAS and doping. But that’s mostly irrelevant anyway. There is no ethics of TAS outside of a competition that disallows TAS. The only ethics we’re talking about is the ethics of cheating, which is universal; whether or not the agreed upon rules were broken. It’s the same for speed runners as it is for marathoners.
I have only read the edited post and don’t know if in addition to the addendum he also edited the original post. If that is the case then there may be context here I don’t have, so feel free to educate me there, but I stand by my interpretation of what I’ve read here. I think you might be confused and trying to make this personal between us doesn’t convince me otherwise.
BTW, you lobbed an ad-hominem with “extremely ungenerous” which is why you got my retort that was edited out. Maybe you didn’t realize you were already making it personal yourself?
Personally, I think you’re confused about the difference between rules and ethics. Yes, we’re talking about different sets of rules. But we have not been talking about different sets of ethics. The difference between a speedrunner’s shortcut being good and a marathoner’s shortcut being bad is rules, not ethics.
Then you edited your post completely to essentially attack a point that wasn’t really mine, that you wouldn’t see the way it was actually meant, and that I was already conceding for expediency since you yourself claimed you didn’t understand. I posted to you because regardless of who posts you seem to not understand their point of view and want to “debate” about things they didn’t say or if they did say them they didn’t mean them the way you took them.
You’re doing this in several response not just to me. But I’m sure it’s just because I don’t understand the intersection of rules, ethics, and morals. I’m just confused.
Have a nice life.
Yes. That is what I'm saying. Thank you for repeating it.
> assault is both against the rules and also straight up illegal.
This is coupled. What is or isn't assault depends on the rules of the sport. What is absolutely a-okay in boxing would be considered assault in other situations.
If there would be thousands and thousands of people with long history who think it is just and right to do a kind of marathon where they stop occasionally and have a kickboxing match on the side of the road then it would not be considered assault to participate in it.
> Maybe you should read some marathon rules
Doesn't appear that we have a disagreement on marathon rules. So why would I?
My point is that in marathons the people running and organising them have very specific ideas about what is or isn't a valid kind of marathon. "Doping-allowed marathon" is not a thing, even if all participants were honest about it. "boxing while distance running" events are not a thing.
The norm "anything goes as long as you are honest about it" has two parts. Part 1 "anything goes". Part 2 "as long as you are honest about it". You think part 2 is the curious thing. What I'm pointing out is that Part 1 is the curious thing. In most kind of competitions people are a lot lot more picky about the circumstances which they feel "okay" to compete under.
> There could be a doping-allowed marathon, indeed, if anyone actually wanted that.
And that is my point. People don't want that. People are repulsed by the idea and feel a strong disdain towards others who would participate or organise a "doping-allowed marathon". If such an event were ever contemplated very likely there would be protest and pressure on the organisers to abandon the plan. Do you agree with that?
In other words in long distance running they do not have a norm of "anything goes as long as you are honest about it". Not because they are not honest, or don't require honesty (part 2). But because they all agree to a sufficient degree that "anything does not go" (part 1). Therefore the curious thing is part 1 in speed running. That they celebrate, and consider to be appropriate, a much wider variation of circumstances than in other competitions.
Outside of fighting sports, assault is default illegal and considered unethical, and there are very few exceptions for it. Importantly, a sport’s rules must make an explicit exception for assault because it’s illegal, otherwise assault is not allowed. Marathon isn’t a fighting sport, and like any sport it does not need to state that assault is not allowed. Marathon’s ethics on assault match society’s ethics on assault, and therefore the marathon does not have unique ethics when it comes to assault.
Boxing is an interesting example, one where the sport’s rules do bend social ethics. Speedrunning is not an interesting example, as glitch exploits and tool assisted speedruns aren’t considered unethical outside of competition - they don’t harm anybody. The only ethical question anyone’s raised so far about speedrunning is whether the speedrunners have followed the competition rules, or whether they’ve cheated.
There is chess boxing, which is perhaps similar to your idea of a boxing while distance running event. People have suggested doping-allowed sports https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/30/sport/enhanced-games-olympics...
Looks like the people in the article objecting are people who make a living doing sports, so perhaps unsurprising. The primary objection to doping is that it’s unfair to competitors. I’m not sure the general public would be repulsed. Whether doping is generally unethical is debatable since outside of competition, the main harm a doper does is to themselves. Some ethicists consider self-harm a type of social harm, but it’s different than directly harming others, and challenging the right to self-harm may raise ethical questions about freedom of choice. But, if you’re right about people considering doping to be generally unethical, then that means it’s in the same bucket as assault, and so does not help support the idea that speedrunning represents unique or flexible ethics.
Anyway, there are no competitions where anything goes, they all have rules. Most of the rules aren’t based on ethics, they’re just rules. When rules do bend society’s ethics, I agree it can be interesting. When rules don’t bend normal ethics, then we’re only talking about a different competition and not a case of flexible ethics. I think video game speed running falls in that latter group, and I haven’t yet seen any examples or reasoning here that demonstrate otherwise.
Because I think what we are talking about here is not ethics. Do note that I haven't used that term at all. What I'm talking about is the participants shared sense of "what goes" and "what doesn't". What I'm talking about is norms. Norms of the activity. vanderZwan uses the word "ethics" in quotes, but from the context, and the quotes, I think it is clear that it's not about literal ethics.
> Anyway, there are no competitions where anything goes, they all have rules.
Of course. The observation is about what kind of things are okay according to the shared sense of the participants. In some activities this space is very narrow, in some it ends up much more expansive. In my observation it seems speedrunning has a more expansive notion of "a-okay rules" than what I have experienced in other activities. I find this interesting. You don't find this interesting.
It sounds like you want to litigate this and convince those who find this interesting that it is not interesting. That's a fool's errand.
This is why I said your argument is a straw man in relation to mine. I am and always was talking about ethics, because that’s what the top comment said. The top comment used the word “ethics”. You jumped into a conversation about ethics and without being clear until now and tried changing topics to the ill-defined “norms”, which is why we have some miscommunication. I assumed incorrectly that your use of norms meant ethics, because we were talking about ethics from the start.
> It sounds like you want to litigate this and convince those who find this interesting that it is not interesting. That's a fool's errand
SMH You’re here debating too, I didn’t ask for you to misinterpret and try to contradict me. I’m not trying to convince you about what you find interesting, I’m pointing out that speedrunning is not interesting from an ethical point of view. I don’t think it’s particularly interesting from a norms point of view either, but you do you. I don’t feel like you’ve even demonstrated that speedrunning competition rules represent norms at all, your argument is making more unstated assumptions.
Yes. In quotes. Which I think means something other than ethics without quotes.
> You’re here debating too,
I'm not really. I'm chatting with you and others. Not everything is a debate.
> I’m pointing out that speedrunning is not interesting from an ethical point of view
And you won that argument. Your internet points will be transferred to your permanent record within one to two days.
You’re absolutely right that not everything is a debate, but your very first sentence in reply to my comment was argumentative, and it was followed by several more. Feel free to reflect on that.
> Your internet points
Doesn’t using snark kind of undermine the claim that you’re just chatting? I would have loved to actually hear some definition around and justification about norms and get to something interesting. I finally feel like what I (and top comment) said was understood correctly and don’t have to keep trying to explain it.
Although the games I've done are very niche and have small moderation teams.
For a given game there are often multiple categories. With rules for each. Some forbid some exploits, some complete game as fast as possible some 100% it.
When a new tech gets discovered there might be a debate if it belongs to certain categories or not.
Speed running communities generally don't care what exploits you use, as long as you are up-front and honest about it. The idea is to have apples-to-apples comparisons. You did a 100% run with no exploits? Cool, let's compare that to other people who also ran that category. Your friend did an any% run with save file manipulation? Also cool, let's compare that to others in the category.
If you modified your save file mid run, but tell everyone else that your run should be compared against other runs that did not modify save files, that's clearly dishonest. The problem isn't the part about what exploit was used; it's the part where he lied to the community about which category it should be classified.
Also, the core aspect of speed running is speed: the amount of time it takes you to complete the game. If you are modifying save files outside the game after you start a run, you need to record that time.
That is, precisely, a set of ethics!
> There really isn't an "ethics" of what exploits are allowed or disallowed.
It sounds like there is: disclosed exploits are allowed, while non-disclosed exploits are disallowed. This is very clearly a set of ethics. It is different than that of industry, where generally speaking trade-secrets and non-disclosure of methodology is often considered critical to business success, short of establishing protected IP; in academia, disclosure is putatively the norm but there is plenty of partial disclosure of methodology rather than complete… etc.
> The problem isn't the part about what exploit was used; it's the part where he lied to the community about which category it should be classified.
That puts it very precisely, and also highlights his unethical behavior in the context of speedrunning’s norms around ethical representation of achievements.
Your original comment talks about the distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" exploits, and the juxtaposition of ethics and exploits. My point is that this framing is a misunderstanding of speed running norms - there isn't actually a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" exploits. And this undermines the poignancy of the juxtaposition. I even refute your assertion that speed running is fundamentally about exploiting - some of the most fun categories or glitchless.
I assumed you meant the original comment in the scope of behaviors that could be triggered by the game's code. So it seemed to me that there was a misunderstanding: "illegitimate exploits" simply isn't a thing in this scope, given honesty around the recording.
But now I see you make the distinction "disclosed exploits are allowed, while non-disclosed exploits are disallowed". Yes, lying is a exploit, in a larger sense. It wasn't clear to me that this was the intended original meaning. So sure, in this scope it is valid to talk about illegitimate exploits.
Frankly, I'm still not sure this actually was your original intended meaning, and it feels like I got strawmanned into an argument about the semantics of the words "ethics" and "legitimacy", when my original intent was to add clarity around the culture of speed running. Any further debate about the philosophy of language is getting too far off topic.
Oh, and your edit about "children" is rude.
Huh, this reminds me of speedrunners and speedrunning being called “cheaters” and “cheating” by new-to-speedrunning viewers on speedrun streams. (Really, they’re just interested in the glitchless categories.) It seems to be a fairly common first reaction and this thread helps put that in perspective.
> Oh, and your edit about "children" is rude.
That’s presumably not how they meant it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43060190
Hah, I have made a misunderstanding again! I guess the philosophy of language _is_ on topic for this thread :P
There are run “categories” for any given game. Super Metroid’s arguably most prestigious category used to be called “Any%”, referring to the required item collection percentage as distinct from 100% or Low%, and now it’s called “Any%, No Major Glitches” because someone discovered that you can go out of bounds with the X-Ray Scope and a door. It specifies “major” glitches because the run otherwise makes heavy use of (among others) a “minor” glitch called Mock Ball, which lets you move in morph ball form at regular form running speed. Ultimately, the community has to agree on what is major and what is minor but it’s usually moot until a new exploit is discovered.
It is interesting and it makes a whole lot of sense once you look at it from this angle. The categories actually have pretty rigorously defined rules precisely because there is so much competition involved.
Speedrunning is a spectator sport, so spectators ultimately determine which categories are the prestigious ones.
TASes break every rule and are pretty cool.
There's still rules in TASing, just a different set of rules! Specifically, you have to submit a file containing a sequence of controller inputs that completes the game when played back in an accurate emulator (or a replay device connected to the controller port of an original console running the original game).
I co-authored the current fastest TAS of Super Metroid: https://youtu.be/m-Gt57ur7OA?t=2m30s We completed the game in under 2 minutes of gameplay by exploiting a race condition in the game's sprite animation system to start an exploit chain leading to full arbitrary code execution (full writeup: https://tasvideos.org/8214S ).
We used all kinds of tooling to create the run: a recording emulator with savestates, slowdown, and frame-by-frame input editing, scripting tools, debuggers, disassemblers, and memory viewers. We used memory editing tools during development to test different scenarios without having to set them up in-game first, but the actual run you submitted is completely "pure"; just an input file that beats the original, unmodified game.
And just like real-time speedruns, TASes are split into categories too. Here's the world record TAS with major glitches disallowed, by Sniq: https://youtu.be/Rr9gdQ-VkO4 Whereas our ACE TAS is more like a CTF challenge than anything else, Sniq's run is a masterpiece of gameplay that shows how far the game can be pushed beyond the current human limits. But again, it's still a true run of the game; the only difference is that you submit an input file instead of a realtime performance of the run.
Enter TASBot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rha61Y3_Voc
It's a really cool project. In case "just" running a TAS on a real console through some wired up controller... Nintendo DS is also supported: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHQCJX0RzS8
It's such a funny and rewarding escalation of the really impressive world of TAS.
This process had already been going on before, but you have this progressive sequence of the speedrun getting harder to play and harder to watch. You see some spliting out to restricted categories but even those aren't all that popular, but also something else that's recently become really common particularly in the communities for these games that have been optimized to death: randomizers. Shuffle around the positions of the necessary items, or the map itself, and you have something that's fresh for viewers and people who've played the game forever, an extra aspect of chance, usefulness of skills and familiarity with parts of the game that wouldn't otherwise be relevant... but it does split the community even more.
(The debate was sparked by a runner proving that the trick was humanly possible, raising the spectre of someone actually pulling it off in a world record run, which would force all subsequent world record would-bes to replicate a trick that would kill 99.99% of runs, execution of which depending on the vagaries of how different controllers poll inputs in addition to nearly inhuman levels of sustained, frame-perfect inputs).
Fairness: generally speaking the competition wants to be fair. Part of this is just having a consistent set of enforced rules, but it also comes down to decisions about timing and allowing or disallowing certain tricks: if how fast part of a game is depends on how fast your hardware is, for example (whether by a trick working or simply lag), then most communities will try to eliminate this effect by banning hardware-dependent tricks or adjusting timing rules to remove loading times.
Competition: At the end of the day speedrunning is a competition around a game, so there's a general resistance to modifying the game itself, or e.g. use of external tools to assist the player beyond what was intended by the developer. But that will sometimes be compromised if there's some aspect of the game which badly affects other goals.
Fun: At the end of the day, speedruns are something that should be fun and rewarding to play and watch. So if the optimal run of a game becomes unfun to play or watch, then generally something will be done about it, whether by banning the trick which is unfun or by allowing something which alleviates the pain point (sometimes this even verges into health concerns: some pokemon games, for example, have very long runs with a huge amount of button-mashing to get through dialogue quickly, and RSI is a very real concern which means that turbo controllers which automate that are sometimes allowed). This can go as far as patching the game to remove particularly unfun or RNG-heavy parts, though it's rare.
And of course you can have different categories which will focus on different aspects of this, especially as different runners and watchers will have different ideas on what is fun: apart from what counts as 'beating the game' (any%, 100%, 'true ending', whatever), there's different levels of what other compromises are allowed. And it can get pretty contentious: from hardcore 'play the game as intended' purists to arbitrary-code-execution TASers, everyone has a different idea about what they enjoy in the competition, and different games can have strengths in each area of focus.
This is not at all the same thing as the Astros scandal. Astros didn’t break the agreed upon rules (edit: I’m wrong - human sign stealing was allowed, but electronic sign stealing was not). Groobo did break the agreed upon rules.
There is no “own notion” of ethics here, and it’s presumptuous and incorrect to suggest that exploiting games during a game exploit competition somehow reflects on ethics and makes the cheating “interesting”. Cheating and ethics in a competition is defined by what the agreed upon rules are. Perhaps ironically, your comment is developing it’s own notion of ethics.
They did. Using electronic devices to communicate during a game (I guess besides the dugout phone) is banned. They were watching the video feed in the clubhouse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Astros_sign_stealing...
Sheesh, didn’t expect to re-litigate WS‘17 on HN today… I concede that there was at least some gray area in the codified official rules and the 2001 directive around electronic transmission, but it very clearly was a violation of the norms, IMO, and the Giants-Dodgers binocular incident in the 50s and its reception is good precedent.
> There is no “own notion” of ethics here, and it’s presumptuous and incorrect to suggest that exploiting games during a game exploit competition somehow reflects on ethics and makes the cheating “interesting”.
That’s not what I was suggesting was interesting to me. What interests me is the social phenomenon that is what the actual members of the community deem to be acceptable or in this case unacceptable, how the the community works to identify violations of norms, and then handle with the fallout.
You cited the exploiting as the one and only reason that cheating is interesting here, and explicitly implied that it’s somehow different from other kinds of competition. After this new comment, I don’t see how to interpret your top comment any differently.
This community competition didn’t do anything differently than any other competition. Someone entered the competition claiming to be adhering to the rules (https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Rules), they flagrantly broke the competition rules, tried to hide their cheating, and people got upset when it was uncovered. No different than any competition cheating, I don’t see what you’re implying about what people deem to be acceptable, or norms. The norms here are no different than anywhere else.
As far as I can tell, I did not… this is what I said:
> it’s very interesting to see how a practice that is fundamentally about exploiting generally unintended mechanisms within a system design still develops its own notion of ethics, legitimate and illegitimate exploits, etc
Removing extra clauses:
> it’s very interesting to see how a practice […] develops its own notion of ethics, legitimate and illegitimate exploits, etc
Oh, “fundamentally about exploiting” is just a “extra clause”? Hahaha.
Your sentence intentionally juxtaposed game exploits with ethics. If you disagree with that, you’re contradicting yourself and not me.
What’s left over is still the part I’m objecting to. Nobody developed their own notion of ethics, the community has the same competition ethics that practically any competition anywhere uses.
When you do something nobody did before or are faced with a moral dilemma you've no prior experience with it's often unclear whether what's "Good" and what's "Bad" in some general sense and so the reaction may be based on "vibes".
Dick Fosbury's weird jumping style? No rule against that, but equally the committee could have seen it and said "No, that's not OK" and forbidden it by the next event. They did not, Dick seems like an athlete, this is a new technique, fine by us - and today everybody serious uses this style (the "Fosbury Flop") or one based on it for jumping.
Modern Contract Law mostly comes back to "Carlill v Carbolic Smokeball Co" in the 19th century. This is about a quack medicine (Carbolic Smokeballs don't prevent Influenza) but the legal question was: If you specifically advertise that if people do a thing (use your Carbolic Smokeballs) and an event happens (a customer catches Influenza, "flu") you will pay them a lot of money (£100 in the 1890s) - well can the advertiser say they didn't mean it when asked for the money? Mrs Carlill seems like a nice lady, everybody hates people selling quack medicine, so obvious Carlill wins - but setting out explicitly why she wins forms the basis of an important part of modern civil law. That advert is an Offer, the choice to buy and use the Carbolic Smokeballs was Acceptance, she caught flu, therefore now Carbolic Smokeball Co. owe Mrs Carlill £100.
If you've ever heard about why people would buy a seemingly worthless thing for $1, or about the peppercorn rents, or wondered why you're told you "agreed" to a bunch of legal stuff you don't care about and haven't actually read - that all comes back to Carlill v Carbolic Smokeball Co. Maybe if she'd been an awful smug Karen trying to get paid for moaning and they were selling a pretty good (but not 100% effective) cure for flu, judges would have instead figured out why she does not get paid and our case law would have turned out very differently.
[Edited to fix typo]
Also this models what we were discussing. What exactly the rules were for contracts drifted over time as people's intuitions and experiences changed, things that everybody just accepted as normal in 1825 seem insane in 2025 - when I was born there wasn't yet an Unfair Contract Terms Act for example - if you didn't read carefully maybe you're trapped in a deal that any fool could see was abusive, but the courts can't fix it.
For example I'm glad the Unfair Contract Terms Act (and its successors exist), but I would have considered it a formalisation of existing, inconsistently applied, principles. As I see it, the magic of common law is that actual decisions can depend on which way the wind is blowing at the time, while keeping vague long-term ideals.
The concept clearly had some support in the Doctrine of Fundamental Breach. Perhaps you were already born in time for e.g. Canada Steamship Lines Ltd v The King (1952) which limited the ability to include exclusions for liability in a contract, in a way that that wasn't codified until the Unfair Contracts Terms Act.
Anyway I think we don't substantially disagree, and I think it's valuable to have a range of reasonable conceptualizations of the same history.
(Edit: I know I goofed here) Calling people children for correcting your assumptions breaks HN guidelines, please review: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Whether video game exploits are ethical was never a question.
I'm pretty sure that's an abbreviation for “children comments”.
For example, I only watch glitchless speedruns. That's what I'm interested in.
People who are interested in speedruns including glitches want all of them to be disclosed though.
That is true of all racing. From NASCAR and F1 to the Olympic 100m, everyone operates on the bleeding edge of "the rules" ... at least that's where winners play.
For example in rock climbing there's no cheating, only lying.
There's nothing wrong with hangdogging a route (relying on the rope/gear to rest while ascending a route) but if you then tell people that you redpointed the route (climbed the route start to finish without relying on the rope/gear) then you're a liar.
My favorite was publicly declaring that all PS2 replay files for Super Monkey Ball 2 can’t be trusted after a public demonstration as to why. Closely followed by Brain Age shenanigans. Interesting but not surprising to see the name on this story as well.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-0eM0413N8w (SMB2, declaration near the end after the run)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uXFiKuK5M30 (Brain Age)
Tool assisted speedruns are remarkable to me because creating the authoring tools is hacking in the classic sense.
And then there's the sheer insanity of exploiting broken game logic to gain arbitrary code execution solely via controller inputs. The most elaborate demonstration of this that I know of was given at AGDQ 2017, eventually injecting a video player into Zelda on SNES and streaming the video through the controller port: https://youtu.be/7CgXvIuZR40?si=KR5hAv-iJHjWv8vL&t=1076 Ars Technica went into a little more detail about that feat: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/how-a-robot-got-super...
Guinness being in this area at all is bizarre to me, but it probably sells books.
It's obvious when you think about it that these sorts of categories are meaningless. What is the fastest violinist? Surely this has to include both speed and _accuracy_. How do you measure accuracy over speed?
>We are the global authority on all things record-breaking
GWR website when you search "first person to":
>1 to 20 of 1691 results found
Now how do they propose I break those?
It's as if Steve Woodmore started slurring words and claimed an even faster Guiness record. The difference is most of us have great hearing for words, but not so great for music.
" It's worth noting that this is no longer a category that our records team monitor - the record has been rested. Our records managers are no longer able to monitor fastest musician records as it has become impossible to judge the quality of the renditions, even when slowed down. In terms of monitoring the number of musical notes, it is not clear if all notes have been played fully. "
If I understood the later parts of the article right, that's now basically a standard or nobody believes you.
It's worse than that - it's a bunch of separate video clips spliced together to give the appearance that it's a playthrough of the entire game, but which couldn't actually play out that way in a single game. Not just because the RNG doesn't match up, but also because the character is gaining items and levels between the splices which they never actually earned through gameplay.
Well apart from not being completable run...
You can replay these online, or with TTYREC. Also, the fanbase has values, the gameplay has conducts to reflect what kind of behaviour did you follow ingame.
You can play as a vegetarian, or as a pacifist, letting your pet bash and bite everyone.
OFC locally they can hack the game, but these are mostly done from developers to test the game, not for "serious" gameplays.
I wonder if you could train an AI on it and just have 1000 of em running to get the best records
And it was not easy at all.
From the article:
> "My run is a segmented/spliced run," Groobo said. "It always has been and it was never passed off as anything else, nor was it part of any competition or leaderboards. The Speed Demos Archive [SDA] page states that outright." Indeed, an archived version of Groobo's record-setting Speed Demos Archive submission [link to archive from 2009-11-21] does say directly that it's made up of "27 segments appended to one file."
> But simply splitting a run into segments doesn't explain away all of the problems the TAS team found. Getting Naj's Puzzler on dungeon level 9, for instance, still requires outside modification of a save file, which is specifically prohibited by longstanding [link to current rules page] Speed Demos Archive rules that "manually editing/adding/removing game files is generally not allowed." Groobo's apparent splicing of multiple game versions and differently seeded save files also seems to go against SDA rules, which say that "there obviously needs to be continuity between segments in terms of inventory, experience points or whatever is applicable for the individual game."
This doesn't really look like good reporting. First, we're comparing an archived page from 2009 to the rules as they're reported today. But the rules page from 2009-11-28, ten months after the submission, says this ( https://web.archive.org/web/20091128190935/http://speeddemos... ):
> System modification: You are not allowed to modify your system or use extra hardware such as GameSharks and Game Genies. These devices let you alter game parameters and can give you an unfair advantage. The only allowed extra hardware are modchips and boot disks used for playing imports, and official add-ons. For example, the PS2 HDD is allowed, while the HD Loader is not.
> Game modification: Removing or altering a game disc/cartridge/files while the game is running is forbidden. Examples of this are the crooked cartridge trick in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and the CD streaming trick in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. If you're not sure what this rule means, think about it this way: don't mess with your system while playing the game, and don't modify the game itself at any time.
> Games that allow you to save your progress and continue later can be done using segments. You can retry segments as much as you want, in order to optimize them. Keep in mind that the purpose of segmentation is not to make life easier for you or to reduce the amount of time it takes you to produce a run. A segmented run implies a higher level of risk-taking and a lower tolerance for mistakes. Use as many segments as is optimal to achieve the fastest final time.
The continuity-between-segments requirement is not present in the 2009 rules. And not only does the prohibition on editing game files not exist, there's a clause stating it's allowed while the game isn't running. Why might the game not be running? Well, if you're doing a segmented run, you're expected to save and quit the game, restarting it later.
This raises some questions:
1. Are we allowed to set our system clock to a time in the future? The rules appear to specify that we aren't ("you are not allowed to modify your system"). But that part of the rules is heavily focused on altering the hardware, making it unclear whether the system clock is supposed to count in that category.
2. Are we allowed to change the random dungeon generation seed stored in our savefile between segments? Now the rules specify that we can! ("Removing or altering a game disc/cartridge/files while the game is running is forbidden.)
3. The summary of the modification rules says the opposite of what the rules themselves say. ("1. You are not allowed to modify your system; 2. Altering game files while the game is running is forbidden; 3. In summary, don't alter the system while the game is running, and don't alter the game at any time.") What's up with that?
4. Can two segments of a segmented run come from different savefiles?
Second, the original submission doesn't just state that it's a segmented run. It also says this:
> Once more I'm here to cut down the time almost in half and it's due to even more luck manipulation, even more glitches, and even more sexiness. The most important thing is that I manipulated Naj's Puzzler to drop from the earliest monster possible.
The implication is that there is some form of RNG manipulation in Diablo 1 that would have been allowed, but the actual form of manipulation that groobo used wasn't it. If that's true, the article should have covered what would have been allowed and why this was different. As written, this looks more like the journalist didn't bother reading what groobo said about his video.
Third, the article almost glosses over what appears to be a much more significant problem:
> Groobo's final fight against Diablo, for instance, required just 19 fireballs to take him out. While that's technically possible with perfect luck for the level 12 Sorceror seen in the footage, the TAS team found that the specific damage dealt and boss behavior only matched when they attempted the same attacks using a level 26 Sorceror.
While there isn't an explicit continuity requirement in 2009, the difference between fighting a boss at level 26 vs level 12 is large enough that I'm comfortable assuming it violated an implicit requirement. I'm also curious about whether your level is displayed on screen - which would imply that the video isn't just segmented but assembled from edited frames - or not. This finding appears to have been glossed over because it's not in the original report on the video. But the journalist should have exercised better judgment.
Arguably, it is implied by “the purpose of segmentation is not to make life easier for you”. In the present case, the segmentation not only makes it easier, it makes the run possible at all in the first place.
I don't agree with that; in context, "the purpose of segmentation is not to make life easier for you" is a warning that it takes more time to create a competitive segmented run than it does to create a competitive single-segment run.
These rules were written to apply to console games, which typically didn't have a system clock, or didn't use it to affect gameplay. (It's also not clear that it was even known at the time that the system time was used as the RNG seed.)
> 4. Can two segments of a segmented run come from different savefiles?
Generally not. Otherwise, a "run" would degenerate into starting the game, saving at the first opportunity, then loading a save which has almost completed the game and finishing it from there. That's clearly not a meaningful or interesting competition. The expectation is that segments are used as "checkpoints" in what could have, in principle, been a single-segment run.
For some games where there's very little state saved - e.g. if progress through the game consists entirely of how many levels you've completed - there's some room for bending this rule. For a game with complex state like Diablo, though? Absolutely not.
> Generally not. Otherwise, a "run" would degenerate into starting the game, saving at the first opportunity, then loading a save which has almost completed the game and finishing it from there. That's clearly not a meaningful or interesting competition.
This doesn't make any sense. If you can do that with two savefiles, you can also do it with one savefile. Start the game, save, end your segment, play through the rest of the game without recording it, save, start your second segment, and defeat the final boss. Voilà.
That doesn't work because the segment following another segment must pick up where the earlier one left off, which is just as possible with multiple savefiles as it is with one.
It's legitimate, for example, to play through segments 1/2/3/4/5, then go back and redo segment 2, and then continue on from redone-segment-2 to an all new redone-segment-3, which has lost all pretense of existing in the same timeline as the original run did.
Even then that could be pretty dubious, depending on the game - you'd need to demonstrate that your redone-segment-3 ended at a game state indistinguishable from the end of the original segment 3.
2: No, because then you could just give yourself hacked items (items are based on their item seed) to one-shot Diablo. Where would the limit be if save editing were allowed? Why go down all the stairs when you could just change your current level to the last one by editing the save?
3: The rules are guidelines for what you can expect your run to be rejected for, not an exhaustive list. The discrepancy is probably just a case of the rule specifically targeting issues that have come up, while the summary simply states that, in general, any modification is not allowed. I don't see the conflict, just apply both. After all, if you were allowed to mod the game, you could just make the win condition talking to Pepin when you first enter town, and now you can beat the game in a few seconds.
> The implication is that there is some form of RNG manipulation in Diablo 1 that would have been allowed, but the actual form of manipulation that groobo used wasn't it. If that's true, the article should have covered what would have been allowed and why this was different. As written, this looks more like the journalist didn't bother reading what groobo said about his video.
The simple rule is that you can use any manipulation as long as it relies only on the game itself. This includes starting the game at a specific system time.
Some of Groobo's claims are simply impossible to achieve through RNG manipulation in Diablo. For example, item drops are predetermined at game start and are not influenced by the runtime RNG. The only way to alter them would be by using a tool to modify the game’s memory. In one of his older videos, such a tool can be seen running in the taskbar. He also admits to using one to skip through levels while searching for a good level set to run. While that isn't a problem in itself, the tool must be off during the actual run. Evidently, it wasn’t off for the final fight, and that's also the only plausible explanation for the item drops seen during the run. If he knew of a legitimate way to manipulate drops, he could simply explain it to clear things up.
This TAS demonstrates a lot of what can be done within Diablo's mechanics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiwoqd4arI0 - Boot the game at a specific point after Windows startup to get a perfect shop. - Enter a new game at a specific system time to generate ideal levels. - Split gold to manipulate RNG. - Wait for the monster AI to advance RNG.
For full details on all tricks used, you can read this article: https://tasvideos.org/9396S
> While there isn't an explicit continuity requirement in 2009, the difference between fighting a boss at level 26 vs level 12 is large enough that I'm comfortable assuming it violated an implicit requirement. I'm also curious about whether your level is displayed on screen - which would imply that the video isn't just segmented but assembled from edited frames - or not. This finding appears to have been glossed over because it's not in the original report on the video. But the journalist should have exercised better judgment.
The level is only shown when opening the character panel, which does happen a few times. However, you can also estimate the level based on the amount of mana consumed by spells. He is evidently level 12, but his damage output matches that of a level 26 hero. Most likely, this was achieved by modifying the base damage formula used to calculate fireball damage.
If you check the source article, you can watch a recreation using an unmodified game with a level 12 hero, where the fight desynchronizes, and the hero dies. In contrast, when fireball damage is artificially enhanced, the gameplay remains synchronized throughout the fight.
https://diablo.tas.bot/#Artificially_Enhanced_Fireball_Damag...
From what I understood, Groobo had come to the understanding that 19 fireballs would have been enough with perfect RNG based his calculations using number from various strategy guides.
A lot of what happens in this run can be explained as him simply wanting to create the perfect run but making bad assumptions regarding what could actually be done legitimately and ending up with an impossible run instead.
Cheaters. Their motives. The attempts to expose them. The creative and not-so-creative ways they cheat. The equally creative ways they are caught. The border between trust and distrust. The psychological need for fame and belonging. Honor. Hierarchy. Tradition. Breakthroughs.
Technology. Strategies. Outside-the-box thinking. Advanced analysis. Statistics. Reverse engineering.
The psychology of the player. Persistence. Stress. Pressure. Adaptation.
Carl Jobst's youtube channel of course is recommended. But also 'Summoning Salt', and 'Bismut'.
Come on, it saved people a lot of time.
Nobody prevented people from doing diablo speedruns.