[Hattes]

To an extent I think that streaming has solved this problem, compared to the days of people just submitting videos that they recorded by themselves. Streamers might fake a single run to get a record, but it would be a huge amount of work to fake all the progression they had to go through to get there.

[wild_preference]

This just isn't true. Recently there was a Super Meat Boy cheater who was discovered due to analysis of a persistent animation across the game that wasn't lining up due to video cuts.

Pretty flimsy system (and far from "solved"), and it lets cheaters steal glory for the months or years it takes to catch them which threatens the legitimacy of the sport past a critical mass.

Moderators/judges are on the wrong side of a trapdoor function because of the amount of analysis it may take to verify a single video, and they aren't professionals in the field of video analysis.

I don't see how "all progression" is relevant here since you don't need to be a streamer to speedrun much less to submit a well-doctored video with a time that beats other people.

[Hattes]

I know of the Super Meat Boy example (I've seen the Apollo Legend videos too). Was that run streamed live?

[wild_preference]

don't know, but my point is that it took a rather serendipitous global animation to expose them. There are people who think speed runs should require footage of the controller for the sake of a consistent analysis medium, and I'm sympathetic to them for the sake of the legitimacy of the sport at the expense of accessibility.

And to respond to your question, you can livestream a pre-recorded video so it doesn't matter. Some guy livestreamed a record breaking run of Yoshi's island or something but got cocky and streamed his controller, and someone trivially discovered he was miming it, pressing or skipping inputs after they were seen in the video. The Super Meat Boy wasn't doing that.

[dezgeg]

I would have previously thought so too, but recently there was a cheating incident in the GTA speedrunning where already a top runner started cheating: https://old.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/98utvr/grand_thef.... So for a year there was apparent progression to be seen in the streams, but it was all/most due to modifying the game files to gain advantage.

[topmonk]

I agree, but furthermore after you get to a certain level of skill, you pretty much have a free pass to cheat if you like.

To wit, I don't think many people suspected Billy Mitchell of cheating until there was undeniable proof of that fact.

[bhickey]

> To wit, I don't think many people suspected Billy Mitchell of cheating until there was undeniable proof of that fact.

Not so much. Billy has been suspected of cheating for ages. His live play is completely at odds with his WR runs. As of the early/mid 2000s he just wasn't very good at Donkey Kong when compared with his contemporaries.