Before I start, I want to say that I’m well aware of how this looks. As another runner with a run in validation, I’m going to look like I have a vested interest in this. But even before I submitted that run I’ve had questions about CVivian’s time, and how it could be so obscenely far ahead of everyone else. After some deliberation and discussion with friends who are also running the game, I feel like I have enough of a case to at least mark the WR run as suspicious.

More than anything, what makes CViv’s run so strange is the sheer jump between her time and the rest of the field. Watching it she seems to make absurd reactions that seem impossible to replicate – for example, look at about 5:22 on her Hard Mode run where she dodges dozens of enemies in seconds without ever slowing down. This could be driven by luck, but there’s a deliberate nature to her movements that implies she isn’t just swinging around and hoping for the best.

Of course, the first question that should be asked here is ‘how exactly could CViv have been cheating’? For this, I have my own experience to go on. See, the current release of Downwell isn’t exactly stable – for reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, it runs at a much slower framerate than intended. I’ve had to use the beta in order to get the proper 60fps experience.

What’s important about this slowdown is that the in-game timer is directly linked to the framerate. That is, if the game is running at 30fps instead of the intended 60, the timer will take twice as long to increment. This isn’t random slowdown either – it’s constant, consistent, and therefore predictable.

With this in mind, there’s a very simple way to cheat for Downwell runs. You play the game on a lower framerate than intended, making dodges and skips that wouldn’t be feasible in a real life run. Then you speed up the footage so it’s in time with the intended 60fps, and the video looks entirely legitimate. I tried this out as a test, and I got a 6:53 on my first run, only nine seconds away from CVivian’s record.

There is, of course, an obvious flaw with this plan – the audio. Playing back a sped up video in this manner would have all the music and sound effects clearly out of key. Conveniently, both of CVivian’s world record runs are muted, a fact which only makes me more suspicious.

There are a few things that would potentially allay my fears on the matter – more footage of CVivian’s play, for example. Unfortunately, the two WR runs are the only footage from her I’ve been able to find, and even those seem a little sketchy. They’re both allegedly from tests of her stream overlay recorded offline, which also means there are no witnesses who could vouch for their legitimacy. I think one ‘accidentally silent’ WR in this manner would be understandable, but for her to do it twice (and the hard run is upgraded to 1080p, no less) seems extremely off.

So, to summarise – the WR run for this game is vastly far ahead of the competitors, is lacking in precedent from the runner, seems to show reactions that exceed human capability, and doesn’t include the audio that would rule out an obvious method of cheating.

This isn’t enough to mark the run as illegitimate, I admit. But I feel there’s enough precedent that I’d at least want CVivian to back it up with some extra evidence. I want to see a run from her that is at least in the ball park of what she accomplished in that WR; her IGT was 6:44, so I’d acknowledge anything around 7:15 or lower. If she can perform that sort of run live, with the game audio running to show the frame rate hasn’t been messed with, I’m willing to withdraw this complaint.

Apologies for taking up so much of your time. Hopefully this case has some sort of base in reason and isn’t me rambling off of my head.

Honestly, I always wondered if everyone trying to run the game was just "bad" (although to be fair, what can I say? I've never been able to beat it). But there are some seemingly obvious connections that you've made that I'm surprised I never made before. I'll also add that something about the comment where she was "paying the pizza guy at the door" doesn't help her situation. As it stands now, I'm on your side for this.

The lack of audio makes them sorta questionable yeah. At those kind of times the run becomes gambling with when you can freefall or not, hoping for lucky stage patterns to fall through. No way you can react when speed reaches a certain point. You can see what the run becomes like from trying to get a good world 1 time freefalling as much as possible. You grind stage luck and need good reflexes to compensate for any obstacles.

I didn't question it either since there was a lack of competition. Her runs do still have a lot of human mistakes and slowing down (Limbo, constantly picking up air in Aquifer when not even close to running out)

@zaarock: I think it's important I clarify that I don't think this is at the TAS level of speed. My theory is that she's still playing the game, just at a level slower than intended. As a result there are still mistakes in the run in spite of its otherwise absurd performance.

Honestly the Aquifer segment was weird, in my opinion. Hanging around to grab extra air is a great way to lose time, and given the amount of time and practice it would take to grind out a record like this I figured she'd have a better grasp how just how often she needed to stop for bubbles. This overly cautious play seems more like someone who's trying to play the game normally than someone going for a world record speedrun. There's a real Jekyll and Hyde feel to it, and it's strange that a run with so many weird imperfections like that still manages to annihilate everything else on record.

You can remove them, I'm not great at the game, and the times should be fairly easy to beat. I've put quite a bit of time into this game, and I see where you're coming from. Since I'm not in the position to further verify my runs and I'm not into playing this game anymore (I got carpal tunnel syndrome briefly because of this game), you can remove them.

I want to be clear that I have not, and never have, cheated in any way.

I hope you guys don't think bad of me for this move, I don't really care enough about competing in the game to actually handle this in any other way. I'm not really sure what to do other than remove them. In fact, I'll just remove them myself seeing the amount of confusion that they've caused.

(BTW, I really did order pizza, which was the reason I had been doing practice runs anyways)

I'd also like to add that your argument hinges on three assumptions:

A: That I cheated in your specific method. B: That you cannot cheat and preserve audio. C: That I'm bad at cheating and submitted a 480p mess of video as the "best I could do".

All of that, on top of the original assumption that I did cheat. I guess I forgot that nobody has ever TAS'd a run with audio before.

As the person who vocally brought up the possible illegitimacy of the run in the first place, I'm going to note that the past few weeks has been a lot of practice on the parts of multiple runners as part of a speedrunning tournament. Some of us have been comfortable with seeing how regular we can get with arm spin (seeing that the goal of the tournament is to be the first to reach the boss between two players RTA,) a few of us have been outright pushing the boundaries of just how fast we can possibly go.

Finn was the first person to come up with a reasonable explanation as to how the world record run could have been obtained, given that they had been playing on the Beta branch of the game due to the standard branch having incredible slowdown (which would have been disastrous to play with during a RTA race.) They achieved a run a few seconds shy of the previous WR simply playing casually with the slowdown.

Given their feedback and the feedback of others that were experiencing slowdown with the game during their play, it has been proven that the sound continues playing normally while the framerate drops significantly. I personally found it suspicious that there were no clips on Twitch displaying the run, which would have otherwise solidly proven that the run was being legitimately run at full framerate. After discussion of the possible evidence, Finn contemplated the best way to approach the moderators about the run status, incidentally achieved a #2 time during this period, and then posted here.

In the light of the records set by Billy Mitchell, Todd Rogers, and recently Lee_SDA (Yoshi's Island record holder) being exposed as fraudulent, it's hard to assume that any records are proof without sufficiently solid evidence. Acting this defensive doesn't help the case any.

My original response was: "I see why you think I cheated, I honestly saw this coming and was surprised the runs were even accepted. Remove them if you want."

This was seen as MORE suspicious than defending myself. I see this situation as a lose-lose. Offering one such way to cheat which would produce the side effects of my run is not a valid argument. It's like knowing the answer to a math problem before solving it, and then saying "yeah the process makes sense because the answer is X". You're rationalizing the result, not the problem. Since I cannot offer any more evidence than the videos themselves, you can remove them.

It is 100% possible to cheat in this game while preserving the sound, and if I really wanted to have a cheated WR run in a barely run game, I could have made a cheat run look far more legitimate than my actual runs. I'm sorry that my runs have caused confusion, but like I said, I am willing to offer information I know about the game to aid you guys in beating my times.

Other than this, I cannot defend myself any further.