You won't believe it! This doomgod has been cheating all along!

[Nine Inch Heels]

4 hours ago, Vorpal said:

That's exactly my point, and why I reckon additional proof is needed for astounding feats. Or do you guys think that records should only have meaning to the 50 people who are "in touch"?

Ancalagon has already streamed UVmax runs he was looking to record and submit the DSDA. Accusing him of cheating, while you yourself say that you actually cannot even judge the demo in terms of how it's been played is absolutely nuts, and as far as I'm concerned borderline stupid.

 

BS threads like this one, made by people with unqualified opinions, is why we've lost Okuplok in the past. Do you numbnuts actually ever learn?

[dew]

1 minute ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

BS threads like this one, made by people with unqualified opinions, is why we've lost Okuplok in the past. Do you numbnuts actually ever learn?

BS reactions like this one, made by people who baselessly consider their opinion to be above the rest, is why threads get closed and warnings get issued. Signed, a numbnut.

[Player177]

@Vorpal so what do you think? Still convinced? And what about the several things that made the run suspicious besides the fact that it takes a lot of time and focus to successfully pass all maps? I don't know the wad and the demo, but where are the details of your research? What's fake in the D2all? Yolo strats or a lot of lucky moments?

 

[Looper]

22 minutes ago, Zahid said:

A great doomer Okuplok already left community due to such "Feel" base accusations and now these thing ought to stop...

 

Only a cheater would leave in such a fashion as Okuplok did when he was being called a cheater, as far as I know.

 

I'm quite sure that, kimoxvirus and Okuplok knew that each other were cheating, probably talking about it out loud in PMs/chat. I don't call kimoxvirus a bad player though, but Oku... sucks horse.

[Vorpal]

It's true that I was crude, and not diplomatic, and even choosing accusatory language like "probably [x]". I was/am trying to rustle some feathers to get a closer look at this run, and begging people to hook up a $30 webcam prior to their major attempts.

 

It's harmful what I did, but it's also harmful to not have any proof for bold claims, because then you have non experts like me in their Sith Lord Web Admin Thrones of Power who question circumstances around a run. I still think despite all the butthurt I have and have dealt, a happy ending is at the end of the rainbow. Like satisfy my dumbass video verification line of thought, or perform some sort of fancy speedrun-forensics, or bring me in to the fold of "people with esoteric speedrun knowledge" because it's dangerous to have an idiot admin running amok with a speedrun page.

 

It's an arbitrary line at which point to say "this or that type of run should require some form of verification", for me personally it'd be just this uv-max all business. It's also arbitrary to decide what kind of verification is "good", but faking live keyboard/mouse video for something like this would be so difficult that I wouldn't care because the effort to fake it is probably as difficult as the legit run.

 

I apologize for making an accusation, as it implies I had proof one way or the other. I'm just rubbing my neckbeard and going "Hmmmm" at this run, or rather, the circumstances around it. Dew and Memfis have taken it more seriously and I'm thankful for that, I will pore over those responses and brood about them for a while yet. 

 

If I'm proven wrong, which I think is the most likely scenario, then I'll hook up a webcam and try to make a serious attempt at an av-ep1 run as a companion to Anc's to showcase the gap between Anc and a normie (although not THAT normal, I have wasted 20 years on this game after all).

[Nine Inch Heels]

My apologies for reacting extremely poorly earlier. Now that it seems like the issue is resolved in a way, I guess I can also manage to behave like a reasonable human being more easily. It's just that cheating has ruined a few games for me in the past, and it wasn't the actual act of cheating, but rather the accusations made at the time, so I have a tendency to get too touchy I suppose.

 

I think that, when you look at these extensive runs, it's certainly a good idea to verify them in some way. That said, not everybody can stream any and all attempts they do every time, or at all even, so I think that making a stream with webcam a baseline requirement for demos might end up creating additional problems on the sides.

[Memfis]

But I think we can all agree that it would be cool to see a live video of Ancalagon playing. :)

[Nine Inch Heels]

2 minutes ago, Memfis said:

But I think we can all agree that it would be cool to see a live video of Ancalagon playing. :)

 

[Memfis]

Ah, I meant like with the keyboard and everything shown. Or does he do that too?

[Nine Inch Heels]

I think he shows an input diagram, but not his actual hands.

[GoneAway]

"it's also harmful to not have any proof for bold claims, because then you have non experts like me in their Sith Lord Web Admin Thrones of Power who question circumstances around a run"

 

It's not our job to cater to people making baseless claims. You can also find people on YouTube accusing zeromaster of cheating because they played doom and nightmare is obviously impossible to complete without dying.

 

Luckily people like Andy have been in charge of tracking demos.

[Grain of Salt]

52 minutes ago, Vorpal said:

bring me in to the fold of "people with esoteric speedrun knowledge"

 

The thing is, we can be pretty confident in the legitimacy of the skills of the current "unbelievably skilled maxers" (as Memfis put it) because a lot of them are active streamers. Besides Anc himself, Zzul and Nevanos also stream a lot, and they are in the top 1% of players imo. If you watch these streams fairly regularly, the application of skill involved in Anc's av d2all doesn't seem at all unsual (not to detract from its accomplishment or anything).

[Tristan]

6 hours ago, dew said:

Here's anc nearly destroying av32 with fast monsters on the first attempt during the legendary TNS pain rotation back in 2012. Knowledge is key.

 

Lest we forget, his ping sucks too. Like 300+ or something most of the time. He carried us through Plutonia Nightmare as well with that. Insane player.

[Vorpal]

3 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

apologizing

 

I won't accept your apology! But that's because I didn't take it as insulting, it was a dagger but it was also truth that I'm not as versed in speedrun-fu, which is a fair point that... I think I was even the first to bring up in the argument heh. I'm not innocent in the dagger department, either

 

I do like to argue though, which probably comes off as an attack where lines are being drawn and cannons being aimed (btw my "fat loser" comment was not toward anyone here, it was a humor attempt at saying "we're better than those mario 64 scrubs"). I'd still like to argue about verification, even if it gets heated, and we can still have a beer together afterward. 

[Kaido]

Wtf?

[SleepyVelvet]

Hmm, i wonder if people should TAS specifically to avoid being accused of cheating.  That way, one can meticulously scrub out anything the looks "too lucky"

 

also, webcam recordings?

 

But what about those of us who only play well naked, should we stream to pornhub in case of "camera slip-ups"; or should we video archive all our web-cam recordings separately, and only bring them out in case of accusations?  Furthermore, I hear gggmork plays by mashing his genitals onto the keyboard, which is how he got so good in the first place, (You need more than ten "fingers" on the keyboard if you want to be as good as him at keyboard-only).  What about players like this, huh?

[Vorpal]

42 minutes ago, NoisyVelvet said:

Hmm, i wonder if people should TAS specifically to avoid being accused of cheating.  That way, one can meticulously scrub out anything the looks "too lucky"

 

I get that you're being tongue in cheek, but it's not really a joke. Rule #1 of being a magician/salesman/comedian/haggler/politician is to give the audience something that makes them feel smart before you go in for the big leap. Anyway, I have sortof tried to avoid drawing conclusions with the actual gameplay, the points I mentioned early in the thread were mainly about the CIRCUMSTANCES are making it difficult to believe.

• virtually no AV history 
• starts with the hardest possible achievement
• low number of attempts
• port choice is odd if you don't want people questioning
• no cam

 

But yep I get the slippery slope / arbitrary nature of  "ok, yeah, verified!" - for me as a Person Of Doubt, the keyboard cam (no I dont care about your face/bewbs) would be quite satisfactory. The not-enough-bandwidth argument isn't valid imo because you can just record locally and upload at your leisure. I also don't think every run ever needs to be re-analyzed and every run in the future needs proof, just future amazeballs runs (what's amazeballs? yeah more arbitrary stuff, but max-all runs are in the amazeballs category three out of four doctors agree).

[geo]

10 hours ago, Vorpal said:

Worst case scenario: 1 guy on the internet thinks another guy cheated at a video game

Worst case scenario: he gets murdered for being a witch!

[Nine Inch Heels]

2 hours ago, Vorpal said:

virtually no AV history

That is a point that I think is very hard to sell when you consider that AV is one of THE WADs everybody plays eventually. It's one of those classics along the lines of scythe for example. Anc most likely didn't need to route the WAD much for a D2All in addition to what he knew about it already before the whole thing got started. And this to me seems to be one of your main talking points, if not the biggest one of them. That said, I think that argument never really had much of a firm basis.

2 hours ago, Vorpal said:

starts with the hardest possible achievement

I think rd sorted that out pretty well already.

2 hours ago, Vorpal said:

low number of attempts

The number of attempts is not out of the ordinary at all. If you've ever seen Anc or any other higher level runner prepare a run, you'd know that long before people commit to their maxrun attempts they practice certain fights and situations that might make or break a run. You don't commit to such a marathon when you're not certain that you've a reasonable chance to bring a good result home to begin with. This also gets further underlined by some of the clear times for individual maps, which are the result of less risk intensive play than a single map UVmax would entail normally.

2 hours ago, Vorpal said:

port choice is odd if you don't want people questioning

I don't think this is a valid argument when you look at it from the angle that Anc's run eventually ended up with a more conservative playstyle that was taylored a lot more towards keeping the run alive rather than keeping the run at the absolute highest possible speed.

2 hours ago, Vorpal said:

no cam

So here's my take on it: At some point you probably need to consider how much burden you want to place on a runner as far as verification is considered. None of the runners earn much, or anything at all, because UVmaxing Doom is not something that gets many clicks anywhere. All the runners record at their leisure, for fun, and the sport of it. What do you think is gonna happen, when you create an environment that is less "friendly" than for example the DSDA?

 

You're basically saying "Do this thing that you do for recreational purposes in a way that I am happy with, otherwise I might publically dub you a potential cheater".

[tchkb]

1. I'm pretty sure Anc used iddt here (not that I hold it against him, I'm the one person in the community that thinks iddt should be allowed) and some of his alleged attempt counts are suspicious to me (probably because I'm like a dozen skill levels below him), but otherwise there's nothing implausible about his achievements.

 

2. Doom is actually a pretty easy videogame. Few degrees of freedom, very simple aiming, very simple (if random) enemy behavior... the list goes on. Speaking this from personal experience - I used to be pretty good at a few video games with similarly low skill ceiling into a "decently good" level, yet sucked really badly at everything else no matter how much effort I put into them. The fact we're not swarming in doomgods is because classic Doom lost a lot of popularity when singleplayer gamers/speedrunners started becoming much better on average (late 00s-early 10s).

 

3. I agree that streaming should be standard whenever going for prestigious world records, it is in virtually every other speedrunning community. You don't actually need a webcam to validify your inputs - I've recently bought a headphone with mic that, when set to record all sounds without cutoffs, neatly captures all my key presses thanks to my very loud keyboard, making it immediatelly apparent that the inputs are legit. Even without visual or even audial keyboard capture, merely streaming the attempts instantly makes accomplishments much more believable.

 

That's all I have to add.

[Bob9001]

That's the thing when it comes to proof, is a .imp file not enough proof of a legit demo?
 

Yeah I know you can use macros outside of a Doom port which would still make a demo 'legit' but not really and that would be evident in the movement similar to a TAS.

 

But yeah you can't just straight out call people cheaters? Especially someone like Anacalgon, who holds many records across a lot of wads. As for having to verify speedruns like other games, well that's one of the things I like about Doom speedrunning, being you can just not record on stream and still submit demos. It's a difference from other speedrunning communities.

[GoneAway]

The whole argument is completely pointless. If someone wants to cheat they can just stream a bunch of attempts and then play back the cheated demo. All you would do by requiring such a thing is create a wall that blocks out some players.

 

I can't figure out where this level of pettiness is coming from. I can't believe you actually believe your reasons make sense, as everyone has already shown they make no sense at all. It's just not even a discussion. Is it a pride thing? Have you decided to be the saviour of doom speedrunning? After this fiasco you've lost all semblance of authority and you won't get it back. These reasons will just be a punchline thrown around the community for years.

[Grain of Salt]

3 hours ago, tchkb said:

2. Doom is actually a pretty easy videogame. Few degrees of freedom, very simple aiming, very simple (if random) enemy behavior... the list goes on. Speaking this from personal experience - I used to be pretty good at a few video games with similarly low skill ceiling into a "decently good" level, yet sucked really badly at everything else no matter how much effort I put into them. The fact we're not swarming in doomgods is because classic Doom lost a lot of popularity when singleplayer gamers/speedrunners started becoming much better on average (late 00s-early 10s).

 

Every sentence of this is wrong.

[Memfis]

7 hours ago, Vorpal said:

port choice is odd if you don't want people questioning

What are you talking about? Prboom-plus has been "the only port that matters" in the demo community for like 10 years. Everyone uses it because it's easily the most convenient tool for anything demo-related.

 

Were you expecting doom2.exe? Vanilla recording is pretty much dead. Almost nobody cares about outdated Compet-N rules anymore, accept it. People prefer playing in nice resolution with no sprite limit, no visplane crashes, etc.

 

Btw, if Ancalagon wanted to fool you, he could have easily said that he indeed used doom2.exe (although that would have been more suspicious since he has never recorded in vanilla). Demo files contain no information about the engine other than the prboom-plus footer, which can be edited out by anyone. It's same with the number of attempts. If he was afraid of getting caught, why didn't he name a higher number?

1 hour ago, kraflab said:

I can't figure out where this level of pettiness is coming from.

I think I can. Vorpal is a huuuge AV enthusiast, he contributed a few levels to it himself at an early age, he created an expansion for it 15 years later, he maintains the site now, etc. He is very passionate about it, you could say it's a part of his identity, so how can he sleep knowing that the most prestigious record on the official webpage might be cheated? :)

[GoneAway]

AV is a wad with no competition, that hasn't been treated with enough interest by the modern runners to have any prestigious records.

 

Not saying people haven't done demos and there have obviously been some awesome achievements, but we're not talking about preserving the sanctity of some grand competition. That kind of thinking is hopelessly stuck in the past.

[Player177]

It's a pity that there is no reasonable analyze of Anc's over 4 hours long demo itself. Apparently this is really unimportant for the subject although it seems there are so many experts and fans of this wad. Is it really no one from considering themselves as specialists of AV is interested to share his thoughts in a written form about how they see the whole route and gameplay in details? Or, first of all, it is necessary to prove the authenticity and roughly speaking phrase like "Anc would still be able to do the thing" doesn't mean much?!

[Player177]

   "This is a great achievement reached in suspicious circumstances" - I have to just agree with this central message! How to argue if under a serious consideration the curcumstances are indeed controversial and should be criticized because even knowing the Anc's excellence, experience and efficiency the suspicion can't be removed completely, in fact. And not everybody wants to turn a blind eye on this.
   Vorpal, as far as I can tell you didn't change your opinion and that's fair cause after all lets pretend that you want to record AV D2all. How would you do that? How to approach this mentally? Do it with an extra cam or the same way as Anc did? You don't really think that nobody wouldn't belive you if you would beat his time!? And that's even without a camera. Or maybe you won't even want to move a finger since someone still won't belive even in a camdemo or for another reason :)
   For the future I ideally would have preferred to record only an extra camdemo as well and only on an worthwhile things. I would like people to perceive this adequately and only in a positive way. This will save from any insinuations. But on the other hand applied entirely this is a destructive fantasy! It's contradictory with the spirit of the community. In addition, we rather follow our older comrades. I'd say to myself go with the flow at this point as I'm not a superhuman and dont wanna fell foreveralone divorced from the system and established order of things. Although sometimes it is worth recording such camdemos for example, when you want to set a bar, guarantee authenticity or put conditions on a competitor. And what's so horrifying about this?! This makes more sense well of course if you want to prove something to almost everybody.
   And finally yes, now I understand even more how much is a true authenticity worth! Doom is such a fucking tough game when it comes to real speedrun. It's just scary. Everyone in their own way finds a method to deal with this to stay afloat.  

[Vorpal]

7 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

So here's my take on it: At some point you probably need to consider how much burden you want to place on a runner as far as verification is considered. None of the runners earn much, or anything at all, because UVmaxing Doom is not something that gets many clicks anywhere. All the runners record at their leisure, for fun, and the sport of it. What do you think is gonna happen, when you create an environment that is less "friendly" than for example the DSDA?

 

I don't agree that fun comes into the equation for a marathon maxkill, agony and self flagellation more like. I dont think "well I'm not going to earn anything from this" has anything to do with anything either. The environment that I am starting to piece together is that, modern players don't care about competition and just want to summit a mountain as a personal challenge.

 

I'm glad you addressed my points, and I'm ready to concede some of them, but no the "lack of AV history" is pretty minor and almost irrelevant, I've really been trying to harp on the camera bit [IF ATTEMPTING TO SHOOT THE MOON].

 

3 hours ago, kraflab said:

AV is a wad with no competition, that hasn't been treated with enough interest by the modern runners to have any prestigious records.

 

Not saying people haven't done demos and there have obviously been some awesome achievements, but we're not talking about preserving the sanctity of some grand competition. That kind of thinking is hopelessly stuck in the past.

 

This and other comments like it just seem more insulting to Ancalagon than my feather-rustling, diminishing the run as not that difficult and that dozens of people could do it next week if they wanted. And yeah I guess it is funny to watch someone in 2018 realize that doom speedrunning isn't grand, and just dont take times/achievements seriously.

 

3 hours ago, Memfis said:

I think I can. Vorpal is a huuuge AV enthusiast, he contributed a few levels to it himself at an early age, he created an expansion for it 15 years later, he maintains the site now, etc. He is very passionate about it, you could say it's a part of his identity, so how can he sleep knowing that the most prestigious record on the official webpage might be cheated? :)

 

I view myself as more of an AV apologist heh. I'll accept all the jabs though, as punishment for starting this off less-than-peacefully (not out of malice, but ignorance).

[GoneAway]

5 minutes ago, Vorpal said:

This and other comments like it just seem more insulting to Ancalagon than my feather-rustling, diminishing the run as not that difficult and that dozens of people could do it next week if they wanted. And yeah I guess it is funny to watch someone in 2018 realize that doom speedrunning isn't grand, and just dont take times/achievements seriously..

You're completely missing the point. It is you that is failing to celebrate an achievement and instead deciding to put it down, and put many more runs down considering your blanket, ignorant statements. I'm not sure why this is so hard to see. Do you honestly think this circus act is "taking times/achievements seriously"?

 

No one was more excited about ancalagon's achievement than me. That's one of the runs I requested the most from people skilled enough to achieve it.

[Vorpal]

14 minutes ago, kraflab said:

You're completely missing the point. It is you that is failing to celebrate an achievement and instead deciding to put it down, and put many more runs down considering your blanket, ignorant statements. I'm not sure why this is so hard to see. Do you honestly think this circus act is "taking times/achievements seriously"?

 

If someone doesn't understand our ways REEEE DESTROY THEM!!! I've outlined my frustrations and positions a couple times hoping they'd get picked apart (2 posts so far have) and the rest has been ad hominem / mockery, so maybe if I change strategy and ask

 

why ARENT you guys concerned about proof? (thus far, runner past-history is the metric currently carrying street cred)

or what is proof? 

or is proof relevant?

Is the default position to assume all runs are legit?

Is there a private circle that analyzes runs as legit/not? 

 

I'm not trying to be snarky or make implications with these questions, I'm dead serious and curious