California, USAIf you have concerns about a run, the most appropriate thing to do is message a mod, rather than going straight to a public accusation. Even without pre-verification required on submissions, we still take action on runs that break the rules, once we're aware of them. If you have concerns about someone on the moderation team, talk it over with another mod you trust rather than casting vague aspersions on the "direction" we are headed.
The framerate issues during eden's run started from the very beginning when they faced off against Ceres Ridley, and were explained at the time as emulator slowdown issues caused by their PC. You're asking for honesty, and I believe eden was being honest and transparent about the nature of this run.
The runs eden has submitted to the leaderboard were done on Switch. I'm not sure why they needed to do this run on emulator instead of Switch, but that question may have been answered at some point in the run that I just haven't watched yet. Either way, it is the prerogative of HexSpeedruns which runs to showcase on their channel, and those runs don't need to conform to leaderboard rules unless they're submitted to the leaderboard.
Ultimately this sounds like you take personal issue with eden, and found reason in this run to justify your feelings. There's no reason to make this sort of public declaration about the state of the community using disrespectful and misinformed comments about a single runner as the basis of your logic.
According to this review, the RetroN 5 uses Retroarch, so as with running Retroarch on PC it all depends what core it's using. https://www.retrorgb.com/retron5review.html
Assuming there's no way to tell which core it's using, then as LucentW said I would suggest just starting with a known-good emulator on PC. Versions 1.50 and later of Snes9x will run on just about any system, and if you have a good PC then you could even run Bsnes. The behavior of those emulators is well-known, and your runs will be directly comparable to those of the community.
I would encourage the mods to read the site's Moderation Rules, which have been in place for years, even before the sale to the current owners.
https://www.speedrun.com/knowledgebase/moderation-rules
"A minimum effort requirement is reasonable. It is recommended to at a minimum accept a first playthrough done in one sitting with an intention of playing the category quickly. Runs that are clearly not making an effort to beat the game's category quickly may be rejected."
While this is a recommendation, it still stands to show that a time requirement is not a common practice on the site. This will discourage runners from continuing to improve to the point that they're allowed to submit their run.
Even without being codified in the rules, this happened to the Zelda 2 community for several years. The community was almost entirely made up of experienced runners, and no new runners would submit runs because nobody wanted to be in last place. Some would continue doing runs until they were finally "good enough", but many got discouraged and simply stopped running the game.
Along comes prolific multi-game runner GreenBomber, who does a handful of runs, submits his 4.5 hour 100% run to all categories it was eligible for, including the usually heavily-glitched Any% category with a WR of about 18 minutes at the time. Suddenly new runners start posting their times cause they'll no longer be last place, and the community finally starts growing.
SRC now has the Verifier role available, I would encourage the mods to add Verifiers from the community if they need to lessen the workload per person, rather than limiting submissions.
Thanks to everyone that responded, we had more than 120 responses from community members with a wide range of experience and perspectives. We'll take the time to read through the responses before we come to any decisions.
Based on some of the discussion regarding leaderboard rules that took place in the discord server recently, the leaderboard mods have put together a survey to help gauge the community's stance on these topics. Please fill out the form if you'd like to share your perspective: https://forms.gle/fM6TkM3yMxynzcrX7
On the Category Extensions board we have two categories that enforce a specific route that has minimal sequence breaks:
Nintendo Power%: https://www.speedrun.com/super_metroid_category_extensions#Nintendo_Power
Club Nintendo% (100% route): https://www.speedrun.com/super_metroid_category_extensions#Club_Nintendo
I haven't watched or done a Club Nintendo run yet so I don't know that route. But Nintendo Power% does have a couple instances of strange logic, like I would expect the items at the top left of Bubble Mountain to require Grapple or Space Jump for a casual player, but the route grabs those items right after Speed Booster.
For the Any% leaderboard we also have the "Route" column, which is based on the boss order. The KPDR route is the "normal" order -- Kraid, Phantoon, Draygon, Ridley -- and that one uses only basic sequence breaks, skipping Spore Spawn for early super missiles, a simple walljump for Wave Beam, and getting across the Moat with a shinespark.
Plenty of runners will choose to not use one or more of these in their early runs (I got Grapple in my Any% runs until I hit about 1:15), but there's not really any interest in optimizing "no sequence breaks" as a separate subcategory like there is for KPDR as a route.
SUPERMETROIDFTP has a playlist of a segmented 87% run here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuSvjvyMNAllhG9VIFnY2_TesCJAalu1m
As strizer said, the copyright claim is for "The Cannon of Samus", which is a song that samples from the Super Metroid title music. This sometimes causes SM videos to get flagged, but you can (and in my opinion should) dispute those claims, because your videos don't actually contain the music claimed.
That said, on Twitch I've personally only ever been flagged on my broadcast vods, I've never had a Highlight flagged. You should be submitting Highlights to the leaderboard and not broadcast vods, so hopefully that will take care of the issue anyway.
On the Category Extensions board there's a category called True Completion, which requires 100% items, and several other objectives, including defeating Ceres Ridley with 100 shots:
https://www.speedrun.com/super_metroid_category_extensions#True_completion
The newer versions from Nintendo have flashing toned down in order to reduce the risk of seizure. To the best of my knowledge they didn't change the ROM to make that happen, I think that's emulator-side. You can see in Zelda 2 when you die that screen just turns pink instead of flashing white-and-red.
The behavior you see from Mother Brain when attacking the baby with tons of etanks to fill is normal, as seen in this Max% GT Code run from Zoast:
The missile behavior you saw on the Switch also matches the original game, both your Missile count and your Max Missile count are both set to 0 at the end of the opening cutscene:
As far as we're aware, the only real differences between Virtual Console versions like the Switch and original SNES are that Spacetime Beam is very stable on Virtual Console where it's unstable on console, and there are two obscure glitches used in Low% Glitched categories that crash the game on Virtual Console.
Zsnes is inaccurate enough that it's not allowed for speedruns, so it's been a long time since anyone's really investigated the game's behavior on that platform. It's possible that it has different behavior after the reset, I'm not sure. I did play around with Spacetime Beam recently on Zsnes just to see if the game-end-glitch works the same way -- it doesn't.
I'll also note that if you use Zsnes even for casual play, you should be real careful what roms you use. The program has a major exploit that's gone unpatched for years, so if you download a malicious rom, it will allow code to be run on your computer. https://www.reddit.com/r/alttpr/comments/8gfgr9/please_dont_use_zsnes/dycxhcl/
Yeah, the Snes Classic can hook up to your computer and use the autosplitter through qusb2snes.
You can find details on the #tech channel in the community's discord server: https://discord.gg/rT2fWZt
And it's legal to do so for submitted runs, by the way.
This seems to have been taken care of by the site mods, that user is now banned.
We don't require verification because if someone does try to claim top times without proof we will quickly remove it -- not necessarily within an hour, but quickly all the same.
But the alternative is that we need to verify each of the hundreds of runs submitted each month. If someone submits their newest sub-hour PB for Any%, why should they need to wait for a mod to wake up/get home/etc for it to go on the board?
The problem isn't region restrictions, the problem is the literal speed at which the console runs the game. Even without restrictions, a PAL console would run the NTSC version of the game at 50fps, and the game would run at 83% speed.
There is a hardware mod you can do to make a PAL console run NTSC games at 60fps like normal, but I don't know the details.
If you want a SNES-style controller, 8bitdo is probably the most common third-party brand. Several people also use USB adapters to use original SNES controllers or SNES Classic controllers on emulator.
If you're willing to try other controller styles, personally I use a Logitech F310. I really like the dpad for running SM, and the controller is also very good for playing modern games that use joysticks. It only costs $20 brand new, and I just replaced mine after two years of pretty hard abuse doing runs with it, and before that I had one that lasted about ten years of casual gaming.
The one place I can think of involving softlocks and mockballs is Aqueduct in 100%.
A few people have done it, but I'm not sure if any were on WR pace.
For a game with this many people submitting new PBs every day, requiring mods to verify every run would simply be busy-work. It's much easier to just moderate runs after-the-fact if the runner tries to claim a top time with no video, or a dodgy video.
A fake WR only gets submitted a few times a year, and stays up for a few hours at most. I think the tradeoff is acceptable there.
There's a newer version of the Practice Rom available: https://smpractice.speedga.me/
I'll update the Resources page, thanks for pointing it out.
