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Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

Hmm... I'm not familiar with the speedrunning community. However, if I check the rules it cites, while it does say this today[1]:

> 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...

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Those sound like rules you'd file under "too obvious to even mention". It's not a speedrun if you're editing files at will.

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.

If you don't mention the rules that are too obvious to mention, someone will think they can put together a segmented speed run with their best times from each dungeon level smooshed together into one run. After all, that's a lot of good segments.

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.

Thats just not what a segmented run is. Just like any game that allows save-states, you could abuse save states to retry any part of 'the run' changing the entire save file to a different run and 'splicing' them together is splicing, which is not allowed. Tweaking fireball damage is literally hacking the game to get the desired result. Unless you find a way to perform ACE with your inputs. Which is not the case here.

Which is probably why they have clarified the rules since then. And why they have always had judges evaluate the submissions to check that the comply with the spirit of the rules.

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