Good day to any DS speedrun enthusiasts that stumbled upon this very post, where i'll finally try to do something that should've been done ages almost a year ago at this point.
To anyone who is unaware what the main issue at hand is when it comes to speedrunning this game, here is the link - https://www.speedrun.com/dont_starve/thread/spnpi To sum it up shortly, PC version of the game introduces an opportunity to anyone to edit their world seed and there's seemingly no good method to prove legitimacy of just about any submission at this point in time. This thing was known and even discussed a bit way back in the day, which led to the same thing i've done few months ago now which is splitting categories to seeded and seedless. But at the same time ages ago it wasn't quite a known feature and/or maybe implemented properly so eventually boards removed the said categories split since there were little to no runs at the time and none of them seemingly messed around with any of that. After some time i was abruptly left moderating this game on my own to my surprise, but there weren't that many runs throughout the years so it didn't look like there were gonna be that many issues when it comes to keeping these boards together, although even few years back i would definitely prefer to have more knowledgeable people as co-mods by my side seeing as i never quite intended for this to be my main game by any chance. Normally one wouldn't be exactly cheerful when saying that the amount of submitted runs throughout the years is low, but at times this felt like such a burden that i definitely felt this way more often than i did the other way around. That, obviously enough to some people, left to my piss poor rate of approving/rejecting the few present submissions, which i can't really be excused for no matter how much i apologise, but trust me, i'm really sorry, especially if that upset some people. As for the end of this wall of text called backstory, all i can say is that i tried to reflect upon my lack of activity that i mentioned and improve in that matter around april 2019 when i finally got rid of some of my irl issues which coincided at the time with the re-introduction of the issue that i mentioned in the beginning and was hoping would be long forgotten, but wasn't unfortunately. This was a huge mood killer, to say the least, and while i slowly got through whatever was submitted at the time later on, after i got a warning from one of the site mods, i obviously couldn't be sure myself whether any of the submission were legitimate or not, with the exception of at least one person that being @BorisTheCheese . Now i'm extremely unsure on what is the future of these leaderboards may be, or what is there to do to resolve this issue, other than trying to contact game devs and hoping they'll miraculously be willing to do something about this, which is while pretty much the only logical thing to go with right now, i haven't done because of apathy when it comes to simply looking down on these boards. The other obvious thing though which i should've done ages ago as well is try and ask for help from the very few people who were more or less active in the last couple of years and are far more knowledgeable people when it comes to this game and its DLCs. Coming up with better rules/categories and all that would be much easier if there would actually be proper speedrunning community present even if it would consist of 2-3 people. So this is what i'm gonna try to do right this moment: @MisutoM @BorisTheCheese And @Anyone else interested in speedrunning this game and who has a decent experience with it I need some serious help with moderation on these boards, i'm really hoping that it's not too late to ask for that and there'll be someone willing to step up and provide the help needed to brainstorm the way out of this unfortunate predicament. I would be willing to give the two people that i mentioned a moderator position in advance, but speedrun.com doesn't allow that unless they have enabled "Require e-mail authentication" in the settings, so i'll just post this trainwreck of thoughts for now and see if there's gonna be any feedback in the coming few days, if not i'll be attempting to make a contact myself, no matter how awkward that may be, it's the least i can do at this point. As the final note if anyone wants to contact me after reading through all of this you can do so by either DMs on srcom (now that those are a thing), adding me on discord, or DMs on twitch. I promise to reply to any on topic messages asap, which is something i need to mention since that usually isn't my strongest suit either, so to say.
I don't log in here very often but stumbled on this.
You mentioned something about contacting the devs for a solution. I did so here about a year ago:
They said there is no way to do this for don't starve on PC. Bizziboi later added that hamlet was technically not seedable at the time, but it has since been updated and seeds are now consistent.
DST does seem to be less consistent in seeding i.e. suspicious marbles and boons may be different and in different places but the world shape is still the same (which may be why a certain poster has nearly all the single player DS first records and hasn't posted even 1 DST run). That said, the files of DST can still be messed with in many advantageous ways, such as editing drop rates (like 100% lazy explorer from ancient guardian, 2 yellow gems from dragonfly, and an additional eyeball from Klaus being of particular note in a speedrun.) So there is no way to verify that files haven't been tampered with. This is trivially easily done on PC and could potentially be done on cracked/jailbroken console versions too if someone were desperate enough to work that hard to cheat.
Not to mention Klei is still actively patching bugs that are useful in speedruns and adding bosses to DST. With no stable and consistent version for speedrunning one patch may have a distinct advantage over a later patch (for example, in my 10 hour DST run we used a bug allowing for a much faster shadow chess pieces fight which is now patched, that likely saved minutes.) Also that is a 10 hour speed run minimum since bearger spawns between day 74.75 and 76.25. Even if the 10 hour run were popular it all comes down to how lucky do you get on bearger spawning closer to 74.75.
Certain cheats could be detected, but would require a lot of effort on the mods part. Extra damage or reduced boss hp could be checked by watching every fight in detail and double checking the math against how many attacks it takes in game. For every. single. battle. Player speed could be checked with frame by frame analysis for the entire run (as a mod could be made to increase your speed after day 20 by a small amount so it wouldn't be easily noticeable. Could also be made to increase player speed when the map is open making it extremely hard to notice) And certain cheats could never be verified. There is no way to confirm that drop rates weren't changed. There's no way to detect if a world was seeded. There's no way to confirm that random values weren't changed (such as forcing bearger to spawn as early as possible). Even seeded runs could have these undetectable cheats enabled.
Because the files are so open and easily changeable there is nothing we could do. Make a mod for speedrunning to verify files are default? The mod is also open source and could be changed to fake that files are verified. Play on consoles of iOS/android? Cracked and jailbroken versions exist and could be used as a way to alter files exactly like on PC. Show files before and after the run? A mod that hides mods from the mod list already exists and could be used to hide mods that change files during the run and revert them after. The code is just too open and easy to modify.
It feels bad to say it... But I think Don't Starve runs are just dead. They are fun to do, to compete against yourself, but the potential for cheating is just too high and there is NO way (as confirmed by the developers of the game) way to prevent or detect cheats of this nature. I wish I could say anything optimistic for the future of runs since I love this game and had a lot of fun running it, but it's really just not possible to fix.
