It has recently been discovered that the FPSFix mod which we decided to allow for PC runs a little over a year ago has effects beyond what we initially realized, particularly on machines with AMD processors. Below are the results of the investigation into this done by MrTyton:

"Ok, so good news and bad news.

There is a difference when utilizing FPS Fix. However, this seems to be localized only to AMD processors. As best I could tell, there is no difference between Intel, Intel w/ FPS, and AMD - the difference only arises when utilizing AMD w/ FPS, resulting in about a 4-5% speedrup in constant movement when compared to AMD, and transitively to any utilization of Intel.

Doom timer does seem to be affected by this as well - while I lacked any direct comparisons between AMD and AMD w/ FPS, by the transitive property described above the results should be the same. I am unsure as to whether or not it affects other battle issues (including, but not limited to, result screen, stagger duration, etc).

These conclusions are brought from 7 computers, 3 Intel 4 AMD. While I would have liked more data, I made did with what I did - I was unable to perform any statistical tests. The thing that I was looking for were increases in the differences between sequential events occurring, in order to try and account for slight differences in movement/inputs. If an increase was consistent over a long period of time, then this helps to eliminate random noise.

A small amount of the differences between AMD and AMD w/ FPS were due to base AMD having a large increase in sub-60 FPS. However, I do not think that this would have accounted for all of the difference seen.

Why is this happening?

Well, the likely cause is due to the removal of the framepacer, and AMD instructions operating differently than Intel instructions, such as a floating point difference. What these differences are... I'm not sure, sadly."

We now have to grapple with the question of what to do with a mod that has allowed quite a few people to have a better experience running the game, but is also causing some to gain an advantage beyond what is possible in the unmodded game, and which is hardware dependent and thus not attainable for everyone.

Potential ideas include straight up banning the mod, having runs with it hidden by default (similarly to emulator runs on Pokemon boards) or having some kind of leaderboard split. Furthermore, depending on what solution we go with, we will have to think about what to do with existing runs on the board. I will post my own opinions on these issues later.

Obviously this situation sucks for everyone, but please be civil and respectful to others' opinions on this matter. Thank you.

A few weeks ago an issue was brought up in the FF discord regarding the ease with which certain cheating methods could potentially be used for FF9 on console. A community vote was undertaken to decide on a potential rule change to prevent this, and based on this it has been decided to require a hard reset before every attempt. The rules for the relevant categories have been updated.

You can read the details in this pastebin: https://pastebin.com/rfjm6pf2

If there are any further questions, feel free to bring them up here or in the discord.

Seeing as the #finalfantasy IRC channel is hardly used nowadays and I and others thought it'd still be nice to have a general instant messaging platform to discuss strats and whatnot, I took the liberty to make us a Discord server.

Permanent invite: https://discordapp.com/invite/0tjIC3eQA7VqjACE

See you there. ;)