Hey, I've got recently an interest in speedrunning this game (mainly "all bosses" category) and ended up in the forums and saw the discussions about the problems with this game. Are the same problems still there, since those threads are 5 years old?

Hey there, the problems aren't really there anymore since the moderation has changed and we've worked hard to fix most of the issues that were present beforehand. That said, we're still kind of in a transition period (The DST, SW and HAM leaderboards have all been reworked, but this board hasn't been tidied up yet and we don't have ownership of ROG yet).

As you can see we have a lot on our plate still, but thanks to the new moderation the boards are in the best state they've ever been and now is arguably the best time to start speedrunning DS/T (that said, the singleplayer leaderboards are kinda dead due to a general lack of interest in DS in general, but DST has had more activity in the past 3 months than every other year combined).

If you'd like to stay in contact with the mods directly, we have a discord server: https://discord.com/invite/HhGVQ3puyF

ok that is pretty darn cool.

Ok, so there was some mod changes- I'd completely given up on my run getting verified after about 3 years, and suddenly they all verified within a few days. I remember all of us stopping vanilla DS runs because one user in particular dropped a bunch of nearly impossible rng-tastic wrs in all the categories at the same time- no streams or anything just yt videos. I think he just figured out how to manip the rng or get the same seed and just knew exactly which direction to go in each video, and it kinda took the fun out of it for the rest of us rollin the dice. I've forgotten just about everything about how to run this game, but it's pretty cool to see the popularity picking back up.

Vanakyria wasn't a cheater, the previous moderator vastly exaggerated how suspicious they actually were

I didn't say anything about cheating, but the way it was done just killed all the fun. I've ground runs in another game to perfection and ended up regretting it because nobody wanted to play it anymore. If you're going to grind a run to death, at least share the experience with the community so we can follow the journey- I think we were all a bit annoyed bc it felt like this game we'd been passing our pbs back and forth with just got crushed by someone who just showed up, dropped all wrs then vanished, and it felt like a bully stomped on a sand castle we were all building together, then left. I know that's not the truth, but that's how it felt.

If you find a way to manip the seed, that's fine- there's plenty of other games that do it- but part of the community aspect is sharing things we learn and ways to make it better.

That said, while redlof might not have been suspicious, there were definitely those of us who were, and it did have some red flags of spliced runs that I'm not going to list out here.

To preserve some of the knowledge from a past era, after some playing around, we did find that if you crash the game after you started, it creates a save file with the rng of that playthrough. When you restart the game and select that save file, it goes through the same load screen and cinematic as a new game. As long as you crash the game before the end of day 1, you can explore around all you want and still have it look like you started a new game when you select the game the next time through. There's even the perfect moment at the end of the load screen where all the sound and animations stop that we concluded would be impossible to tell if spliced or not.

Again, that's not proof of cheating nor representative of my current view- that was years ago and I don't see DS in my forseeable future. I like that it's getting more attention, and I definitely do not want to stir up an unwinnable argument.

TLDR; Whether or not Vanakyria cheated is irrelevant; it was dropping all those perfect runs at once without sharing the experience of grinding for it or how it was done with the rest of the community that pulled all the fun out it.

that just makes me wonder why you didn't just try to take the "records" yourself, none of vanakyria's runs were spectacularly fast and quite a few of them were in categories that had either no runs or had records that were extremely easy to beat even with terrible RNG by just using the correct strategies

no offense but it just seems to me like you're being unfairly harsh on someone who just used the leaderboards for their intended purpose, vanakyria didn't "kill" DS/T speedrunning, the incompetence of previous moderators did

edit: I just went back to double check and indeed only 3 categories that vanakyria submitted runs to were categories that I could, in good faith, consider to have been somewhat contested at the time (quacken, sw best ending and ds best ending). Every other category either had 0-1 previous runners or hadn't been seriously attempted until that point

also I find your sentiment about vanakyria not sharing their progress to be illogical because you can clearly see in their page that they had a fair amount of runs that became obsolete after they tried a different strategy (e.g. their tiger shark speedrun), complaining that they didn't want to be part of your community seems odd to me because you yourselves decided to discourage them from submitting any more runs in the first place despite there being no evidence of foul play, you could've just as easily been welcoming to vanakyria instead of shooting yourselves in the foot by rejecting one of the very few people who were interested in running DS at the time

Nice to see this finally being sorted out.

I pretty much stopped running this game after there were accusations that my runs weren't legitimate, and the mods at the time stopped verifying anything as a result (not just my runs).

@oddtom If you believe Vanakyria cheated any of their runs and have anything concrete to justify that position, you are more than welcome to provide that to the moderation team and we'll look into it, but we've been aware of the attitude of previous individuals towards Vanakyria for years and have never seen anything that was particularly suspicious in their videos; the current landscape of DS/T speedrunning is very different from how it was back then and nowadays we are aware of vastly more ways in which a player might attempt to cheat but Vanakyria's records seem perfectly realistic considering the context in which they were achieved and we don't have any reasons to think otherwise.

The previous moderator of the DST leaderboard (which I will not name) took it upon himself to spread lies about Vanakyria for years, claiming that they supposedly achieved world records in 23 different categories in spite of the fact that Vanakyria didn't even have 23 Don't Starve videos (and a third of thse were repeat categories that just improved upon personal bests), not to mention lying by omission by making it seem like Vanakyria achieved an inhuman task when in reality the vast majority of those categories were either nearly empty or had records that were extremely easily beatable with new strategies (for example, the "All Bosses" category in Vanilla had a single 3 hour run that was easily beaten by Vanakyria by 2 hours by simply using a different character).

The previous moderator accused many different runners over the years of cheating with laughable evidence, choosing to be extremely abrasive and intimidating towards any newcomers who just happened to get a good run, and overall acting like an insecure person who couldn't tolerate the idea of someone potentially challenging their old records, and this was a major contributing factor towards the huge lack of activity in DS/T speedrunning for a time period of years that it's only barely managed to recover from.

I could go on for hours but you get the point, the words of the previous moderator could never be taken seriously and that includes their nonsensical claims about Vanakyria's achievements which basically never held any weight; they never had a logical foundation, they were simply the product of personal grievances which he bullied everyone else into believing by typing long essays in which he used absolute statements that implied FAR more agreement about Vanakyria's status than there actually was (e.g. the phrase "a confirmed cheater" to refer to them). The previous moderator's actions caused nearly irreversible damage to the community and moving away from that period is something that I take very seriously, which is why I should be clear that we do not in any capacity believe Vanakyria was guilty of foul play and our stance on that won't change unless you can provide better evidence than "there are red flags of spliced runs".