Lags wrote:How about a verified status? You gain it by live streaming or filming yourself clear or score something. Like Pazzys' vids where you see the keyboard, his hands and even hear the input sounds?
Streaming or filming each attempt in order to attain that big score record is a big hassle for normie players. But doing it once or twice to gain a verified status would be okay. But I think providing inp files and replays would still be important for record integrity on top of that.
Pazzy is a bizarre case. He was completely capable of streaming and did do so several times, but he had this weird aversion to doing serious run attempts on stream, blaming nerves or something to that effect. He didn't seem very open to discussing it with me and quit talking to me after I joked about the possibility of scoring runs being cheated due to his aversion to playing on stream. I can't prove it, but I feel the thing with him uploading runs with a hand-cam might have been a jab at me by attempting to remove any lingering doubt about his legitimacy without having to stream.
I'd argue the mindset of any streaming just being an added hassle to verify your score is a huge problem in the community. I've seen nothing like Pazzy's case, or any complaints at all about what a huge hassle streaming is in the speedrunning community. People actually seem enjoy the whole verification process for what I talked about above with how streaming serves to bring the community together. I've even seen cheese(SM64 120 star WR holder) talk on-stream about how he wouldn't be running the game at all if he didn't have the opportunity to stream it and interact with chat while doing so.
The verification status thing seems a good compromise to me. It wouldn't really address the doomsday scenario Banana outlined of a prominent player streaming some practice and then splicing together a WR tier score, but it's still far better than no verification at all and I could see it easing attitudes towards streaming. If no one likes the idea of streaming every run, I can get behind something like that.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I don't think the intent of this thread was to demand this place turn into Twin Galaxies or MARP and demand verification for literally every single run, even the relatively low-scoring or non-clearing runs that absolutely nobody would remotely bother to suspect. Requiring that all scoreboards split scores by "verified/unverified" adds a discouraging element that will make it difficult for casual players to participate. Streaming equipment such as capture devices and cameras can be expensive to setup especially if you play on PCB as well as console since you may need different capture setups for each. If we really want to add a "verified/unverified" tag to scores, sure, whatever, but it's fixing a problem that doesn't exist in my opinion. It can also be a pain in the ass to make sure you're streaming prior to every single run, especially if you have to resort to a camera phone to do it of course. Naturally, if you know you're at the level where you're posting massive scores edging towards a world record, you'll probably already be trying to record the runs for posterity because you know claiming such a score has a far higher burden of proof!
There's frankly no reason to assume the average player posting scores in cheating, and the people who really care about scoring are only going to be concerned with whether the top-tier scores are actually legitimate or not. In many cases, the player is known and has been seen streaming/playing live at some point and thus their skill level can be vouched for when they post subsequent scores. The only time anyone suspects a score as cheated is in a very unusual circumstance, such as an unknown player suddenly appearing and posting near world-record scores.
Perikles' situation is an unusual one. He is not an average player. He's posted several massively difficult clears in what is a relatively short span of time, with nobody having seen any "in progress" runs of his progression in learning a game, or having seen him stream or play in-person. He is a player who is posting many runs, several of which of an extremely high difficulty, so he's received a request for a live demonstration just to settle any suspicions. His response, or lack thereof, raises serious questions about the validity of those runs in question. I think there's still a decent chance his skill is legitimate, and he's just an unusual player in terms of being able to learn the games rapidly, but his responses we know of, and otherwise continued silence are making it seriously difficult to maintain faith in him.
For the most part, this sort of situation isn't a regular occurrence and there's no real reason to suddenly demand the entire forum's scoreboard section changes how it operates so that literally every single run that's posted be treated as "suspicious unless proven innocent" and generally the serious players who've raised doubts about Perikles have not started demanding this for the scoreboard section as a whole because they recognize it's pretty easy to judge if scores are reputable or not based on a player's reputation (in terms of if they've ever been seen playing live). And now that I think about it, I can't think of a single time there've been any suspicions about a player's skill level or the legitimacy of their runs where seeing them play on a stream hasn't immediately cleared them of any suspicion. It seems like for the rare case where player skill could be in doubt that's a pretty reasonable bar to set for validation to assess a player's skill is in line with their reported clears or recordings.
No matter how you slice it, this situation is going to leave a huge impact on the community. Assuming Perikles doesn't respond before the deadline, you're looking at all the people running scoreboards having to decide what to do with the hundreds of scores from the most prolific poster in the history of this board, who might have been cheating the whole time during his 5 year run here. People have cheated in speedgames, but how many cheaters have managed to work their way into such a prominent spot of their community and left this much lingering doubt and debate in their wake?
To even have a situation like this happen in the first place seems indicative of a huge problem in how we verify scores and a strong argument in favor of a formalized verification system. As you allude to, such a system already somewhat exists as most people posting exceptional scores generally are expected to provide video evidence for such. The proposals for a verification system essentially only serve to refine and formalize something that already vaguely exists. I don't think having players get the equipment to stream would be a big leap from having them get the equipment to record videos. It also should be noted that none of these issues apply to the majority of players here, who mostly play PC/MAME/PS4, where streaming boils down to nothing more than configuring an app and hitting the "stream" button.
Perikles is not an average case, but he's not a one-off either, as the somewhat similar case of Sikraiken demonstrates. These are two extremely prominent players who have exhibited behavior that the current system of verifying is not equipped to deal with. It's obviously terrible if they're cheats and have been able to get away with it for as long as they have, but it seems even worse if they're legitimate and some of the earlier theories in this thread prove true of them being offended by being asked to provide proof under the auspices of cheating accusations. Far from carrying the assumptions that every score is cheated, I'd argue a verification system would ease up any stigma that might exist around asking for evidence by turning it into standard procedure rather than an implied cheating accusation.
I don't think casual shmup players would or should care about whether or not their score has a "verified" tag next to it. FWIW, though, the leaderboards on speedrun.com have a more stringent system than anything proposed so far of every submission requiring personal review by a moderator well-versed in the game before being added to the leaderboards, but it works great and speedrunners actually seem to enjoy and take pride in the whole process that goes with verifying their runs. I'm not saying such a system should be adopted here or that it would even be viable to do so, but it does show how a community can operate fine while maintaining strict standards for verification. Far from just existing to catch cheaters, the verification system of speedrunning also serves to ease any anxieties that might exist about the legitimacy of the boards(which some people expressed in this thread as a result of the Perikles situation), give people an opportunity to pre-emptively shutdown any doubts that might exist, and also encourage streaming behavior that's healthy for the community regardless of the verification aspect that goes with it.