Hello,

I've recently submitted a run as X Sonic for the Greenflower Zone Act 2 level and it got rejected because I also had the X Pack addon activated. I don't think my run should have been rejected for 4 reasons:

1. Nowhere in the rules or guides could I find that addons other than the strictly required ones aren't allowed to be used in conjunction with the character addon, as long, of course, as the additional addons do not influence the performance of the character

2. X Sonic is commonly used along with two other addons, which are the X Pack, which provides additional levels especially designed for X Sonic, and another addon, which I didn't activate and allows you to modify the character's color. Thus, I believe that these addons are reasonable to activate when playing with X Sonic, since they do not affect, to the best of my knowledge, X Sonic's performance

3. In the 5 previous runs that I submitted as X Sonic, for Greenflower Zone Act 1, I also had these two addons activated in that same order (first X Sonic and then X Pack) and all of them got validated, so there is a consistency issue. Either the current run should be taken down and all others should be reviewed for that same issue, or both current runs should be accepted. I think it would be a serious issue removing an already verified WR without any proof of cheating nor for any broken rules

4. Having those constraints discourages people to submit new runs. Currently, there already aren't that many people speedrunning this game (at least with X Sonic in the category extensions) and I believe that these rules do not contribute to bring in new runners. In fact, many people have posted amazing runs on Youtube, but not on speedrun.com

I understand that the imp file cannot be read if not all addons are added in a specific order), but those additional addons and their order could be specified in the submission description (I must admit that I did not think of specifying that order when submitting my run).

By adding a redundant addon, I understand it gives more work to the people who verify the runs, but not wanting to do the work to the detriment of accepting a legit run isn't acceptable in my opinion, especially if it is an official WR. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that's the reason why my run got rejected and it's not my intention to accuse anybody of wrongdoing, except for the inconsistency.

It would be a shame not to accept a WR just for a redundant addon being activated.

We appreciate your ire with this, however the combination of mods that are irrelevant for verification purposes was causing issues and we needed to tackle it somewhere, and unfortunately that was with this most recent run which was causing issues with our verification methods.

If you really wish for us to be consistent, we can remove your other runs also, however this was the one that caused issue for our team to verify and was thus removed and we have no plans to reinstate this run. We apologise that this may seem strict however it's too much effort to try and cater for people adding too many files into runs as possible that frankly do not need to be there. This mod is not necessary to do your runs in Green Flower Zone, thus won't ever be considered. If this was a necessity like Momentum Mod runs (which are currently banned on this board due to too much variance, but if they were not) that would be another matter, however as it stands it's causing too much hassle and too many people are doing this.

We must reiterate that this must be annoying, you put the work in, however our team simply cannot keep attempting to verify runs that simply do not load properly because of mods being loaded that do not need to be there. We will happily update our rules to reflect this and make it more clear however runs have been rejected in the past and continue to for this reason.

Also to fully empathise, the mod you loaded specifically had a different MD5 hash code than the mod should have to be legal. We're not sure why this is but that is an instant ban for verification purposes.

Good luck in the future, we understand that this is a lot but we know you'll improve this time and we wish you the best of luck.