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Comment by sesm | Hacker News Reader

So, the speedrun author claimed it was RNG-edited, but it was level edited instead? The author could easily refute that by providing the RNG seed. I think every run that claims to be RNG-edited should post RNG seed for verification. If the author claimed that the run was unedited and it was 'just luck', I'm surprised that anyone believed him in the first place.

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> So, the speedrun author claimed it was RNG-edited, but it was level edited instead?

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.

Which is fully valid video genre. But not a valid record. Spliced runs as videos show casing best what a specific scene can do is great tool to promote scene. But those should never be presented as records.

Well apart from not being completable run...

At that point, that isn't even a "run" anymore, spliced or otherwise - it's just a gameplay compilation video. Which is fine, like you said, but only as long as you don't call it something it's not.

> I think every run that claims to be RNG-edited should post RNG seed for verification

If I understood the later parts of the article right, that's now basically a standard or nobody believes you.

And it encourages the community to create a “fixed-seed” category for the game, which would generally have a fastest known seed with a fastest known route.

The copyright notice mismatch is suspicious and the missing items is a dead giveaway away and should have made it ineligible alone.

I would agree with you but SDA is very picky with what they will accept as evidence against a video, since the changing inventory doesn't affect anything it could have been a mistake in replicating the segments when optimizing the run, but would not actually have affected things. In the end it was a combination of the inability to reproduce the level with item drops and the impossible end fight that got them to decide to pull the record.

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