(In July 2019, while researching other matters, I incidentally stumbled upon the fact that Phantasy Star speedrun cheater Kevin Durden had quietly gone back and filed DMCA notices in attempt to strike the evidence against him. This included a DMCA notice against a speedrun discussion show which, among other segments featuring other players, brought Kevin on as a guest so he could address the allegations against him. The show used clips of his play with his consent, which he then used as a basis to file that claim with YouTube to have the show taken down. This particularly offended me, since an honest content creator got their work struck down simply for giving the accused Kevin the platform he requested. As you can see, I chose to preserve the evidence through other means. As far as I know, the matter has remained inactive ever since this write-up was originally posted.)
Talk of cheaters in speedrunning has flared up recently. Oddly, this doesn’t seem to be the result of a surge in actual cheating as much as it’s the result of YouTube’s terrible policies, which have acted in favor of cheaters by stifling discussion and suppressing evidence. Earlier this month, YouTube streamer and speedrun.com mod GFC saw his channel hit with a copyright strike, which per YouTube policy prevented him entirely from streaming on the platform. This was the result of him posting a video, demonstrating why a submitted Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories run by a Brazilian player named CaveiraGames was cheated. The video legally used clips of the cheater’s run under fair use as commentary, but for some baffling reason, YouTube decided to side with the cheater, despite numerous other TOS violations by Caveira. (After three weeks, the strike to GFC’s channel was eventually lifted.) Then a popular video by EZScape also discussing CaveiraGames was removed under YouTube’s privacy policy. The video was eventually restored, but no specific reason was ever given to EZScape, nor was he even notified that the video was restored. Meanwhile, Apollo Legend did no fewer than three videos on the subject, first one titled “10 More Speedrunners Who Were Caught Cheating” about a few cheaters, and then two shorter videos specifically relating to the removal of EZScape’s video.
Well, hmmm…. Turns out those all involve the same asshole, CaveiraGames. But there is another speedrun cheater actively abusing YouTube’s takedown system as we speak, and that is our old friend, Mister Kevin Durden.
A RECAP
You’re free to skip ahead to the next section if you don’t need the recap, but the story is highly entertaining, so it’s your loss.
Kevin Durden, a longtime member and moderator of the Phantasy Star speedrunning community, started getting outlandish times out of nowhere. One of the other moderators looked into the matter, and noticed peculiarities specific to only those Twitch streams, including blurring/ghosting during character movements and menu transitions. These issues were not present in any of Kevin’s other streams, including a test stream mere hours after his “live” world record. This indicated perhaps that the world record video was pre-recorded, and he merely pretended to play it live on stream. The moderator veo (also known as cyanbreak) knew this sort of ghosting was an issue with the video editor Sony Vegas, so he went to the Phantasy Star Discord and asked a general question, “Hey, my video editor sucks and I need a new one, what do you use?”, and Kevin happily replied “Why, I use Sony Vegas! Hope that helps!” (Those are paraphrased and not direct quotes.) Additionally, the run had long stretches where no controller inputs could be heard, including during moments of dead silence. In the occasional stretch where a controller could be heard, the button-pressings were a complete mismatch for what was being seen on screen, again suggesting Kevin was poorly pretending to be playing the game live. Also, a bunch of other sketchy stuff.
The moderation team of the different games quietly investigated the matter for two weeks, during which time Kevin posted yet another outlandish improvement, a new world record on Phantasy Star 3. Of course, this run showed all the same signs of video editing as the others, because why wouldn’t it? On April 7, Kevin was invited into a Discord chat and confronted with the evidence. Kevin responded by immediately acknowledging that he had indeed cheated, and remorsefully apologizing for violating the community’s trust, thus ending this story once and for all.
Just kidding!! No, Kevin denied it all, offering only the weakest of excuses and non-answers for the myriad discrepancies. The moderation team unanimously agreed all of Kevin’s runs should be removed and an indefinite suspension should be levied. Kevin consented to the removal of his runs from the leaderboard, which might seem noble, except then he decided he might as well go and delete the VODs of his totally-legit-and-not-cheated claimed world records so that no one could see the evidence anymore. (Thankfully, others saved and reuploaded them, at least for the time being.) Only one of these claimed world record VODs remained on Kevin’s channel, a 1:12 on the Sega Ages version of Phantasy Star 1 on the Nintendo Switch.
Having now been given a blueprint of what the mods were looking for, Kevin got back to work, posting a new world record run, also a 1:12 on PS1 on the Switch. This time, he went above and beyond in his verification, having an external camera pointed both at his face and at the screen. No camera pointed at his controller as he played, though. No, that would be too easy. Kevin claimed a hand-cam would be too uncomfortable. Something about him always holding his controller in the same spot, and that spot being under his desk, and being unable to simply sit further back so this one spot could be recorded. You know, innocent stuff like that. None of this stopped Kevin’s longtime Reddit friends from exclaiming such things as “Why people are questioning you at all is beyond me!”
Around this time, both veo and Kevin agreed to come onto the regular Twitch/YouTube show “This Week in Speedrunning”, hosted by Christian Sears. They each discussed the matter with Christian, one at a time, in separate pre-recorded segments, with veo laying out the evidence along with screenshots, and Kevin bringing such wild observations as “The bits-to-pixel might have been way too low at some point.” (And that is a direct quote.) Kevin also claimed to be getting lots of private messages from well-known speedrunners telling him they knew his times were real, but none of this alleged support materialized publicly.
On April 14, the morning the show was to air, veo was poking around Kevin’s previous Phantasy Star 1 VOD – you know, the one he didn’t delete with the others – when he discovered a clear splice point where the battle menu backtracks and a map animation clearly skips several frames out of nowhere. Christian played this clip at the end of the episode, without reaction from Kevin. This VOD, straight from Kevin’s channel, was for a time posted for all to see, though Kevin did soon get on the ball and delete that one as well. (Again, so much innocence.) However, even after Kevin scrubbed the evidence, Reddit user Chuckolator still had the VOD in their browser window, and recorded it with commentary to upload again for all to see.
Here’s where things got really weird. An “absolute stranger” (Kevin’s words) appeared in Kevin’s Discord, and claimed to have saved the original version of one of his deleted VODs. Kevin conversed back and forth with this “absolute stranger”, who claimed that the version they had did not have any of the skips being shown elsewhere. This resulted in Kevin making a post to r/speedrun titled “Evidence comes out showing moderator(s) fabricated the Phantasy Star splicing.” Yes, his new theory was that this was all a conspiracy by the moderators, who edited Kevin’s videos to add splices and ghosting in an effort to discredit him because he was too good at Phantasy Star. And, of course, all the original sources from his channel which would surely have proven his innocence had been deleted by Kevin, leaving it simply his word against theirs as to which was the “original”. Thankfully, Kevin is a predictable knucklehead. While certain signs of shenanigans had indeed been removed from this new “original” video, it now had ghosting everywhere, including on the split timer overlay. He literally just took one of the reuploaded copies of his VOD, with split timer and all, and ran it through Sony Vegas, without ever having solved the ghosting issue in the first place. (Remember, this was supposed to be the original VOD, and several other copies of this VOD existed as reuploads without ghosting on the splits panel.)
Kevin did finally actually come clean on his cheating and lying, suggesting he would take time to go better himself. But this didn’t mean he was done scrubbing evidence. He filed a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (or “DMCA”) claim against various uploads of his cheated game play, including against Chuckolator for uploading Kevin’s spliced PS1 VOD to Twitch along with commentary. (That strike was later withdrawn, at which point Chuckolator deleted the video voluntarily.) It was around this time that Kevin deleted his entire online presence, including from Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and YouTube. He scrubbed all evidence of his Phantasy Star career from his Twitch channel, before renaming the channel – and I’m not making this up – “propertyofleredditarmy” (which it would appear has also since been deleted). Meanwhile, on April 18, veo did another follow-up on an episode of “Speed Dogs”, hosted by cyberdemon531. veo again told the story, including events after the appearance on Christian’s show, but this time in a more casual format, relaying many of the more humorous details described above. Then, on April 20, xXAlucard posted a humorous recap video titled “Speedrunner Caught Cheating: The Story of Kevin Durden”, focusing on Kevin’s ridiculous excuses for things like the lack of controller noise.
A month later, on May 30, Vice got in on the action, posting the results of their own investigation. This piece was based on interviews with the PS moderation team and with Kevin himself, both when he was still professing his innocence, and later once he had admitted his cheating. Kevin’s participation was based on the condition that his name be changed in the final article, but that shit doesn’t fool anyone. Based on the contents of the piece, it would seem its late release (relative to the events being covered) was due to Kevin’s changing stories and general shiftiness, as well as the writer’s and editor’s realization that much of what Kevin had told them, including seemingly innocent details about his life, simply couldn’t be trusted.
KEVIN WANTS THE INTERNET TO FORGET
It was around the time the Vice article went live that something else happened, which wasn’t widely reported on. Doing my own research on speedrun cheaters, I went back to view videos I distinctly remembered covering this story – not VOD uploads, just videos covering the story – only to find those videos had disappeared. Looking into the matter more brought me to my only public indication of what had happened: a single comment on the Reddit thread about the Vice article. Apparently, Kevin went back, well after the story had died down, and threatened pseudo-legal action against three content creators, lest their videos covering the story be taken down. Kevin did this by way of posting YouTube comments on his own behalf, such as this one:
A similar comment was posted as a reply to the episode of “This Week in Speedrunning,” of which, you may recall, Kevin was an invited guest. The video of the veo interview with cyberdemon531 was also hit with a copyright strike, bearing the following text as recently as three days ago:
Now, at the risk of igniting the wrath of Kevin’s hired “DMCA Agent”, who I don’t doubt has the skilled jurisprudence necessary to adjudicate and legislate me with all kinds of serious litigations, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that these DMCA claims were completely bogus. I’ve watched each of these three videos, and in each of them, brief clips of Kevin’s game play are used with commentary. The videos by Christian and cyberdemon use only the clip of the splice point found in his PS1 run, along with some stills showing the ghosting that was first observed. The video by xXAlucard does use other clips from Kevin’s streams, mostly for purposes of showing how Kevin’s stories about how he holds his controllers are nonsense. The point being, these clips were completely legal under fair use. But of course, we are talking about the same Kevin Durden who told Vice they no longer had permission to post their correspondence, despite the fact that he was explicitly on the record the entire time.
Unfortunately for us, however, YouTube has everything backwards. Despite the law being very clear on the right to fair use, and despite actual (lower) courts having ruled in favor of YouTube content creators in the matter of fair use, the system as employed is still akin to a rubber stamp. You, the content creator, have to convince the claimant to withdraw the strike themselves, or else take them to court, or just give in and voluntarily withdraw your video. And thus the spate of bogus DMCA claims from people looking to silence critical speech, regardless of the nature of that speech nor the consequences for everyone else. (Note that EZScape’s video on CaveiraGames was removed not under a copyright claim but as part of YouTube’s “privacy policy”, but the circumstances of intentional stifling of critical speech appear to be the same in that case.)
When asked about the matter, Christian Sears clarified that he was able to avoid a copyright strike on his channel by agreeing to take the video down per Kevin’s request. Christian was clear in his opinion that this was an attempt to censor him by abusing the copyright claim system, but Christian has other things going on (including a major project hinted at in his final “This Week in Speedrunning” episode two weeks ago), and he simply could not be bothered with the legal hassle of attempting to fight this bogus claim.
xXAlucard echoed a similar sentiment. He believes Kevin’s DMCA claim to be false, however, it’s a hassle to fight, and you open yourself up to legal trouble if you attempt it.
As shown above, cyberdemon531’s video interviewing veo appeared to bear a copyright strike. However, since I began investigating the matter, that text changed to the more generic “This video is unavailable.” This was likely the result of a similar arrangement. Meanwhile, an alternative copy of the same episode, also from cyberdemon531, which Kevin had previously missed in his attempt to erase his trail of deception, still existed as recently as this week. That video also went dark around the time of Tuesday morning (three days ago), while I was investigating this matter. Perhaps a case of “Fine, I’ll take it down, but only if you rescind my other strike as well”?
(Note: Other instances of Kevin’s game play clips were found as part of researching this story. The content creators were quietly notified before they could receive threats from Kevin as well.)
Also, look again at Kevin’s threat posted above. Notice how Kevin invokes GDPR, a European law protecting the privacy of European citizens. Kevin is, in fact, an American, and as for his privacy, I sure hope he wasn’t dumb enough to do all this shit under his real legal name.
While the actual text of Kevin’s missives have mostly been cordial in tone, make no mistake. This is total asshole maneuver. This is akin to him stealing something from someone, and then offering to give it back if they give him this other thing instead, all while holding a channel’s worth of work hostage if they don’t comply. In the case of xXAlucard’s video, Kevin followed up the first request (which was mocked) with a threat of a massive fine if xXAlucard didn’t comply. This is all made especially egregious by the fact that Kevin himself chose to participate in one of the targeted videos and use it as a platform to (at the time) deny any wrongdoing. It should also be pointed out, there was no material risk in doing what he has done. While the threat comments did come from Kevin himself, they came by way of a new YouTube account with zero subscribers. Even if YouTube did rule against him, what’s going to happen? Would his non-channel get shut down?
We could go on and on about YouTube’s terrible practice of deferring to bogus claims, and they certainly shouldn’t be let off the hook for it. But the blame also falls at the feet of people like Kevin Durden, who choose to exploit peoples’ trust and abuse these loopholes in the first place.
WHAT’S THE DANGER OF SIMPLY ALLOWING THIS STUFF TO DISAPPEAR?
So apparently, Kevin Durden doesn’t like it that people on the Internet said mean things about him three months ago. The obvious answer to that is, “Suck it up, buttercup.” Kevin chose to violate people’s trust, and waste people’s time, in a community that hasn’t proven itself shy about reporting and discussing such things.
That said, the story has mostly run its course. So some may be asking, what’s really the harm in letting this material lapse into the dustbin of Internet history? If Kevin wishes to make a new start somewhere else, why is that such a bad thing? Well, as silly and entertaining as this whole fiasco was, this does have serious implications for the community.
(I know, I’ll be preaching to the choir a bit on this, but I do think these questions need to be addressed.)
To be clear, this is not really about Kevin, or what he does or does not deserve. Perhaps he’s an incompetent con-artist, perhaps he’s suffering from mental health issues, or perhaps both. I don’t really care if he attempts to make a fresh start of things somewhere else in life, as long as he’s not taking advantage of other peoples’ trust like he did here. Rather, this is about the ongoing efforts of a community to combat cheaters, and how evidence preservation plays into that.
First of all, let’s talk about the Christian Sears program. Christian discussed the Phantasy Star situation with both veo and Kevin separately for over an hour, but his whole show was 108 minutes long. The first half-hour was about speedrunning news in general, as part of his usual show fare (hence the name “This Week in Speedrunning”). This included an interview with Tebt, on his new world record on Crash Bandicoot 100%, as well as a segment featuring a run of Link to the Past by wqqqqwrt. In order to have his appearance which he consented to at the time removed, Kevin also forced the removal of contemporary reporting of other people’s valid world records. His perceived need to take back his silly excuses and deflections meant erasing not only the work of the YouTube content creators who chose to offer their time and energy covering his side of the story (certainly none of whom would be withdrawing their work if not being coerced into doing so), but also meant scrubbing the work and recognition of other, totally unrelated people.
This also puts a chill on any future attempts to cover cheating allegations, which are vital in the effort to keep the sport clean. In my observations, the speedrunning community has been very good about not publicizing suspected incidents of cheating unless the evidence is certain. But it could happen that a community comes forward with evidence against someone who actually is an innocent victim of circumstance. In such a case, it’s important that the accused be offered a public platform by which they can defend themselves, if they so choose. That platform should act as an arbitrator, which among other things, means not giving do-overs if one party decides they didn’t like their presentation and want to withdraw their consent. In fact, why should any content creator, monetized or otherwise, take time to cover these stories if their work can be so easily suppressed, and their channel be so easily violated?
There’s also the question of collateral damage. Kevin is obviously done for as far as Phantasy Star speedrunning goes. But what if he goes and finds some other speed game and submits runs under a different name? What if he decides he wants to go be a cheater in the fighting game community? Or chess? Or Magic: The Gathering? Or hell, competitive knitting? Sure, the Phantasy Star evidence is preserved on people’s local hard drives, and that’s good, but it’s not going to help people in other hobbies who are trying to figure out what this new guy’s deal is, and not knowing exactly where to look and who to ask. This goes both ways, as speedrun moderators would benefit from those hobbyists preserving their public evidence of cheaters who attempt to cross over here. Yes, of course Kevin can simply change his Internet name if he wishes to distance himself. But preserving the public body of evidence means that he has to, and that he has to risk getting caught having done so, rather than simply spinning some story about some wild misunderstanding that blew up which the new party has no way to disprove.
This leads into another point: It’s easy to take history for granted. Sure, when you’re embroiled in it, you recall all the details. But over time, memories become unreliable, sequences of events become hard to nail down, and it becomes hard to tell what people did and didn’t know at what times. There’s a reason, in my research, I go to original sources whenever possible. But someone trying to piece things together years later will have a hard time when much of the original material is removed by malicious actors. This is exactly the sort of circumstance that allows an established liar to spin yet another new story and take advantage of yet another community.
As someone who has an interest in history, and in video gaming history, and who appreciates original sources and work done to archive and preserve such sources, and who also believes in fair competition, this story checks many boxes of things that tick me off. This is not and should not be about hounding someone to their grave. This would not even be an ongoing story if Kevin wasn’t choosing to make it one by continuing to sling copyright strikes. This is about the fact that, ultimately, this is a system built on trust. Serious violations of that trust simply must be acknowledged and amended, not by brushing the facts aside and demanding a do-over, not by coercing innocent people into expunging evidence at the cost of other people’s work, not by continuing to waste people’s time, and not by continuing to treat the people one has wronged as if they’re stupid, but by actually acknowledging what harm was done, owning up to it, pledging to do better, and following up on that pledge – or at the very absolute least, just leaving the situation altogether, and accepting that people will say bad things about you and your character based on how you’ve treated them. Failure to do so must carry a lasting reputational stain because, except in cases of legal fraud, these sorts of social consequences are the only consequences for cheating that can be enforced.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
So what can be done, both about cheaters trying to suppress evidence, and about YouTube’s silly policies stifling legal commentary on these cheats?
First, many have already taken to uploading mirrors of contested videos to alternative video hosting sites, with Apollo Legend preemptively mirroring one of his short videos about CaveiraGames on the site BitChute. As for YouTube itself, if YouTube in all its power is unyielding in its decision to remove a one hour analysis video due to a short clip of someone’s game play, there’s no shame in content creators reuploading their videos minus that clip, while making explicitly clear the reason the clip was removed. If someone is trying to suppress evidence, it should be known.
And there are other ways to preserve this media, including conversion into other media, which is where I come in to this. I keep harping on the Christian Sears interview of veo and Kevin, both because it was a thorough and professional encapsulation of the facts of the case (at that time), but also because Kevin himself participated, giving an array of fake excuses which he was later forced to admit were willful attempts at deception. It was a key piece of evidence in all this, and thanks to Kevin’s bullying, it has been scrubbed from the open Internet.
For these reasons, in addition to writing this post, I’ve decided to transcribe the entirety of that one-hour segment featuring both veo and Kevin (with Christian’s and veo’s permission, and definitely not with Kevin’s permission), which will be posted below. Note that the interview is very long, and full of lies on the part of Kevin. The point is not that it be read right now. The point is that the interview be preserved. If someone a year or two from now wants to see what silly nonsense came straight out of Kevin Durden’s mouth in April 2019, they will be able to find it. Note also that they make references to visual evidence which was shown during the interview, which I have chosen not to post. I’m not afraid of Kevin’s invisible “DMCA Agent” bogeyman, of course. But the point here is to remove any and all grounds on which any sort of copyright claim could be made. Kevin may be able to argue to YouTube that a short clip of his game play displayed with commentary is somehow not protected under fair use (even though it is), or could even possibly argue that a still shot from his game play somehow violates his copyright, but he has precisely zero claim to any copyright of his spoken words in an unrehearsed interview on someone else’s show. And hey, as a bonus, now his words are Internet-searchable. 🙂
Finally, Kevin, if you are reading this: Just stop. You know you don’t care about the proprietariness of your little bits of game play which you’re never making money off of anyway. You know your DMCA claims are just an excuse to try and make things disappear. All you’ve done is double-down and triple-down and make this a bigger story than it ever had any right to be. We’re still talking about this, mostly because you’re still making it an issue. That’s how bad a job you’ve done of making this go away. Instead of continuing to do things that obviously don’t help you, maybe start trying things that do.
FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE PHANTASY STAR SEGMENT FROM “THIS WEEK IN SPEEDRUNNING”
Christian: This next stuff, guys, is the first time we’ve done something like this on the show. There’s been some allegations of faked runs in the Phantasy Star community. I’ve got both sides of the story here, as well as some breaking news that I’m going to show at the end of it that just came out this morning that I was notified about before the show went live. So I am going to show that as well, at the end. So, I’m going to show the first clip here. This is from one of the mods, “veo”, “cyanbreak” some of you might know him by, this is his account of the evidence the mod team found for some runs in Phantasy Star that are alleged to have been faked or cheated, and we’re going to go through the evidence. And then, we’re going to play Kevin, who’s the person who these runs belong to. He came on and did a segment last night. We’re going to play his response to this as well, as well as some of my questioning. So we’re going to do that. And then we’re gonna play, after both of those segments, we’re going to play the new evidence that’s come to light since then. And you guys can make up for your minds or not whatever you think. Now, I want to preface this segment. I’m prefacing this segment since, these are the kind of talks I like to have. I do not want anyone from my audience harassing anyone involved in this situation on Twitter, on Discord, or anything else. We will not be able to do these segments if people from my audience just start going and harassing people involved in this kind of stuff. So do not, do not go messaging people whatever side you fall on telling them to go fuck themselves or “scumbag cheater” or “fuck these mods”. None of that. We can’t do those segments if you guys act like that, not that I think my audience would do that. I just have to preface it with that, guys. You can have your opinions, that’s fine. No witch-hunting or anything like that. So with that being said, let’s get this next segment going. And I know I don’t have to say that with you guys, I know my audience kicks a lot of ass and you guys do a lot of stuff that is good for the community, but I gotta say it as a preface. I have to. So I hope you guys understand, I’m not calling anyone out, not saying you guys would do that, but I have to preface that. I’m going to shut up, and we’re going to play these segments now. So here’s my segment with cyanbreak/veo and myself.
[Segment begins]
Christian: Hey guys, what’s going on. Today, I’m joined by veo, who’s a member of the Phantasy Star community, and they’ve had some interesting stuff happening on the leaderboards involving suspected cheating, and how the mod team has handled that sort of stuff. So we’re going to go all through that today. veo, how’s it going? Thanks for joining us today.
veo: Hey, it’s going good. Thanks for having me on.
Christian: Not a problem. Alright, so, what happened essentially?
veo: Ummm…. So, it’s kind of a long story, but I guess I’ll start from the beginning, and kind of just give a general idea. So, Kevin recently got a, you know, a ridiculous time in Phantasy Star 4. It was a 2:47. And this kinda made some people scratch their heads, because the previous world record was 2:49, and it used a route that like, basically nobody else did except for one runner, shout outs to TSG, the only runner still doing Shadow Blade. But um, yeah, so nobody has even come close to touching that time. And then Kevin gets like a 22 minute PB, and beats it, and gets world record. So some people were kind of scratching their heads. Someone messaged me and said, you know, Kevin got three good world records in two games. All of them got ridiculous RNG, and all of them were the first run of his stream, so you should look into this. And I said, okay, I’ll look into it, because that is a pretty big coincidence that all of those happened, like first try.
Christian: Right.
veo: And in such a short time span. So I started looking into it, and we started finding all these things, these weird inconsistencies between his world record runs versus his normal streamed attempts. Stuff like video quality, and sound, and stuff like that. They were all different in his world records, but they were all the same like, you know, the same as each other in his normal runs. So we were like, oh, what’s going on with that? We started investigating more, and eventually we came up with this big list of things that were suspicious. We… All of the moderators, we talked, we confronted Kevin. We did a proof call with all of us, where we showed him all these things and asked for an explanation. We did not… His explanation was deemed insufficient. He didn’t explain enough things and a lot of things he just kind of gave us “I don’t know, I can’t explain that, whatever.” So we made the decision to remove all of his runs and ban him indefinitely from the leaderboards. And that’s kind of a big… I skipped over a lot of the stuff there, it’s summarized very much, so if there’s anything about that process that you have any more questions on, I can go into detail.
Christian: Yeah, so let’s go over some of the details. So the runs in question that were being brought forth happened on, they were on Phantasy Star 1, which happened on March 20th, and then there was Phantasy Star 4 which was March 26th, and then Phantasy Star 3 was done April 3rd. So in the span of fourteen days, three world records were set.
veo: Yup.
Christian: For anyone wondering on the specific dates. And the times and everything, there’ll be a link down below on the YouTube video of this, and I’ll throw it over here in Twitch chat as well, of all the documents that you guys need to see if you want to follow along as we go through this stuff. There was a Reddit post made that some of you are aware of. So let’s go through some of the details on what made these suspicious, aside from the fact that within the span of three weeks, three different games had very… good, I should say, world records brought in on the first attempt of the stream. So that was the first red flag, but what about the runs themselves was making you guys have to question this even more?
veo: Sure. So, I’ll talk about it, but before I get started, I just want to say… So before, when we were doing all this, most of the evidence we found, we never found any hard evidence of splicing, but we did find very convincing evidence that he was playing back a pre-recorded video on stream. No evidence of splicing, but if you’re playing back a pre-recorded video on stream, you can kind of presume where that would go.
Christian: Right.
veo: And the reason I bring this up is because one of the moderators, Jiseed, he was the moderator for Phantasy Star 3. He knows a lot about that game, and he says he has found hard evidence of splicing, things like load times, like transition times, and some sound anomalies. But since he hasn’t given any details, I’m not going to talk about any of that stuff today.
Christian: Okay.
veo: Because I don’t know the exact specifics behind it, I just know he says he’s found these things, and he’s looking more into them. So instead, I’m just going to talk about what we found. And the first big one was his video quality on his stream. His… All of his world records, this is for all five of the suspected spliced runs. I know we only talked about four, the Phantasy Star 1, 3, and 4, but there was actually another one that was heavily suspected on Phantasy Star 2, but it wasn’t a world record, so we haven’t been focusing on it as much. It was just like a ridiculous PB for someone on their first attempt.
Christian: Right.
veo: So yeah, the big thing was the video quality difference. All five of these suspected runs had extremely heavy ghosting in the video. And you can bring up image one, if you want to demonstrate that.
[Image #1 comes on screen. Six screenshots, the top three show a scene in a town, the bottom three show a boss fight.]
veo: So what you’re going to see is, if you look at… So, okay, I’ll just go through the image. The image on the top left, this was just taken from a random attempt at the game. And you can see it looks pretty clear. He runs an emulator, so it looks great. The second one in the middle, this is a clip from his 2:47, the suspected world record. And it’s important to note that this was not, like, a video he uploaded to YouTube. This is taken from his live stream, so… If we’re to presume that this is not an edited video, something he’s doing in OBS is causing this blurring and this ghosting. And I’ve had people message me, and they say that, like, you can’t do that on accident. (Laughs) It’s just, like, OBS video encoding doesn’t work that way. But, the main thing is, the main point here is that, on the top right, this was a stream that Kevin did right after the world record, like an hour later or something. And as you can see, the ghosting is mysteriously gone. It’s back to its normal quality. And you can compare the two on the top left and the top right. They look almost identical, except for one of them is in a slightly different position, because they’re two different screens. I didn’t get the exact same screen shot. But the quality’s important.
Christian: I have a question I need to ask for this image. The blurring, does that occur only when the character’s moving, or does that occur just when the character’s sitting stationary and the… just the images are all distorted?
veo: Only when there’s movement.
Christian: Okay.
veo: And then on the bottom, you can just see the same thing demonstrated in the two suspected Phantasy Star 1 runs. On the bottom left, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. It’s a random attempt of his. And the two on the bottom middle and bottom right, those show ghosting in the menu, on his world records.
Christian: And this is still on image one?
veo: Yes, still on image one. I’m looking at the Darkfalz images.
Christian: Yup. Okay, perfect.
veo: So, when I first saw this, my assumption was that he edited the video in Vegas. And I didn’t have any confirmation of this. But you can bring up image two. This was an experiment I did.
[Image #2 comes on screen. Three screenshots, looking at the same town scene as before.]
veo: So, on the far left there, that’s the post-world record testing stream that I talked about, where he started his stream up like an hour after he got the world record to do some testing. And that’s what it looks like, it looks nice and clear. In the middle is, again, the suspected run. This is the blurry run that we just talked about. And on the far right of this image is… This is something that I did as a test. I downloaded the post-world record testing stream VOD. I plopped it into Vegas and just rendered it at 60fps. I didn’t change anything. All I did was plop it in Vegas, render it. And if you look, you can see that the ghosting effect that appears on that video after I ran it through Vegas is identical to what we saw in the suspected run. So I’m heavily convinced it’s Vegas, and then, just to get one more confirmation, (laughs) I, uh… (laughs) I posted a message in the Phantasy Star Discord general channel and I just said like, “Oh, I’m looking for a new video editor, what do you guys use?”, and Kevin responded like 20 minutes later saying “I use Vegas.”
Christian: Not good. Not good for him.
veo: No.
Christian: Circumstantial, though. So let’s continue our inquisition, and see… see what’s going on. So there’s some video evidence that suggests that an editor has been used. What else? We’ve got other stuff, like split timers and controller inputs with audio cues and that sort of thing. Let’s go into those and see where the case gets built from here.
veo: Yeah, sure. So, on the controller input thing, I think it’s best to start here with his 1:12 Phantasy Star 1 run, because I think this is the most gratuitous example of lack of controller inputs. So, what I’m talking about here is, obviously, when people play games on stream, a lot of the time you can hear the controller over their microphone. But this is almost non-existent in any of Kevin’s world records that were suspected. And there, like… When they do… When they do…. When you do hear controller sounds, they’re not really matched up with the game. It sounds like he’s just mimicking them to try to make it sound like he’s playing the game. But let’s start with the Phantasy Star 1 1:12 run. This run, he messed up, and his game sound is not available for the first thirty minutes. So for the first thirty minutes, you can only hear background audio. You can only hear his mic audio. And, despite the fact that in his older attempts you can hear him mashing through dialogue and things like that, if you boost the audio on… the mic audio on the 1:12, even with no game audio in the way, you can boost the audio like 1000%, you will not hear a single controller tap for the entire thirty minutes. You can hear doors opening in his background. You can hear the TV on. You can hear all this stuff in his background, but not a single button press from his controller. And we saw the same thing in the other suspected runs. Very few button presses. In the Phantasy Star 4 one, one of the spots where you can hear button presses is in the Edge, the very last dungeon. What he probably did was, since we suspect that he spliced in a perfect Edge walk, no encounters in the Edge, he decided this was a spot where it would be pretty easy to mimic the inputs, because he knows exactly where he’s gonna go, and there aren’t any encounters, so he just tried to mimic it. The problem is that, the timing is all messed up on these input sounds. You can’t hear, like, you can tell that some of them come before the movement, some of them come after the movement. And the timing is never the same. Like, sometimes they’re like fifteen frames after. Sometimes, they’re like four frames before. You know. It’s constantly changing.
Christian: Now, I need to play devil’s advocate here. Is it possible he’s pressing other buttons in addition to the movement buttons while this is happening?
veo: Unlikely, because there aren’t really any other buttons you could be pressing at that part. If you press A or C, it opens the menu. If you press B, nothing would happen. But I don’t see any reason why he would be pressing B during that walk. (Long pause) So do you have any other questions about that, or do you want to move on to the next thing? Because that’s pretty much…
Christian: No, I think that’s it for, just for the audio aspect. Because it was mostly focused on the controller inputs. Now, is there… I guess there is one follow-up question. Is there any audio in the game that suggested splicing?
veo: I’m not good at audio analysis. I did try to look at it, but I didn’t find any inconsistencies. Like I said though, Jiseed has said he’s found audio inconsistencies in the Phantasy Star 3 run, but I can’t comment on that because he hasn’t really released exactly the specifics or the evidence of that. I’ve just heard him say that he’s found it. So…
Christian: Okay, cool. Let’s move on to some more of it. The split timer inconsistencies.
veo: Okay. I actually didn’t even consider this at first, but bich [bichphoungballz] mentioned it and it was a really good point. So, if you’re splicing a run, you’re probably going to, like, start the stream up with the video already playing, and you know, some delay on the menu while you, you know, quote-en-quote “get ready”, you know. You’re just waiting for the video to go. But the thing that’s important is, you don’t know when the run is going to start, because you’re not there to press the button. You’re just waiting on the video to do it. So what that means is, you have to react to the video pressing the start button and then start your timer afterwards. So this is really clever by bich to think of this. We looked at when he starts his timer on his different runs. And on his normal attempts in the past, if you look at all of them, he always starts his timer exactly when he starts the game. But in all five of his world record runs, there’s a delay after the game starts, before his timer starts, which we thought was, you know, very suspicious, considering all the other stuff as well.
Christian: Right. It’s an anomaly based on past behavior.
veo: Yeah, exactly.
Christian: Is that in all three of these runs, or just in a few of them?
veo: All five of them. The two Phantasy Star 1 runs, the Phantasy Star 3 and 4 runs, and then, I actually haven’t watched the Phantasy Star 2 run, so I actually shouldn’t say that there’s five, because I haven’t watched the Phantasy Star 2 run at all. I just heard other people talk about it. But, yeah, it’s possible that one also has it.
Christian: Okay, so I just want to get into this so people in the chat understand a little bit about what’s going on. So there’s a note here. You guys can see this. We’ll link it again just in case, but… On PS4, the game always started after the timer, within a range of 3-20 frames. So that’s pretty quick. If you’re pressing two buttons in tandem, that’s a pretty adequate response time. But for the world record run, it started after 190 frames, which is like, multiple standard deviations away, which should mean that something’s up, for those of you that are up on your statistics at all. That should cause you to consider why this is happening, especially in all five runs. That’s a very… That’s statistically… If Tayman’s here, he could explain it, but that’s statistically important for an analysis like this.
veo: So, yeah. All those things are the kind of things where, alone, they don’t really add up to much, but the fact that all three of them occur on all of the suspected runs is very suspicious, you know. I can’t even, like… Like the fact that these three weird things, accidental things that he claims are accidental, that they can happen only five times ever, and those five times that they happen are on extremely unlikely runs. You know… It’s like winning the lottery ten times. The chances of it just seem way too low to be a coincidence.
Christian: Gotcha. Alright. So there’s a few other things that we can talk about here. Where do you want to go next? Where do you think we should go next? Is there any more big important things for the records we should go over? Or are we free to move on to other stuff, now?
veo: There’s all the stuff in the four section, but most of this is all just, like pretty minor stuff. These were just, this was just kind of like the “Oh, these are weird” observations that didn’t really pan out into any, like, real proof. Stuff like, see, 4G is just outrageous RNG. That’s not proof of cheating. Like, obviously people get good RNG all the time, but, you know, the fact that all five of his runs have, like, extremely unlikely RNG was just, something to add on to the pile of all the other suspicious stuff that’s up with the runs.
Christian: Right. Now… With the game that was missing audio for twenty or thirty minutes, do you guys require audio be submitted with runs in order for them to be counted on the leaderboard?
veo: We’re actually a pretty small community, so we really don’t have that strict of standards for video submission. The run was accepted at the time, without really worrying about the audio that much. And I think, probably, our proof standards will go up as a result of this. We just never really thought that someone in our kind of, like small tight-knit community would try to cheat. I mean, it was just unexpected.
Christian: Okay. But, you guys are… You obviously caught it, or caught what you suspected is cheating. Do you think this can definitively be called a case of cheating, or do you think it’s just, there’s enough circumstantial stuff that something had to be done?
veo: I mean, obviously you can always say, like, you know, it’s never certain. Like, you can always say that it’s all just a coincidence. As unlikely as it is, it is possible that it’s all a coincidence. And I guess I’ll concede that. It is possible that all this stuff is a coincidence, I guess. But as a mod team, we had to decide whether or not it was, you know… We had to make a decision, you know. And we all decided that this was just way too unlikely. And so we made the decision that we did.
Christian: Okay. Now, how did you guys come to that decision? It says here you guys had a private discussion about all this. Was this all the mods from all the games involved getting together and saying like, okay, here’s what we found in tandem, and what should we do with this evidence? How did you guys go about the process of, like, coming to what to do?”
veo: So the way we did this was, we created a private Discord server for the mods of all the Phantasy Star games that Kevin was suspected to be cheating in. And we talked about it for a while. Eventually we came to the decision that, once everybody, or most people were all available at the same time, we were going to have a group chat with Kevin, a group voice chat, and try to ask him about some of the stuff, and see if he has any good excuses.
Christian: Now, before you go on, was he aware you guys were doing this? Was he aware that there was a cheating… I guess, allegations being made against him, or was he just “Hey, we need you to come into this Discord server”?
veo: No, we didn’t tell him what the purpose of the channel was, or anything about the fact that we were investigating him. We didn’t want him to try like, deleting evidence, deleting VODs, which he did after we… After we came out with the allegations, he has deleted his VODs, but we’ve reuploaded them, so…
Christian: Okay. So you guys still have the evidence in hand then.
veo: Yeah, yeah we do.
Christian: Okay.
veo: But yeah, so we decided to do a private chat with Kevin to ask him about this stuff. It wasn’t all the mods, unfortunately. Some people had plans, so they couldn’t be available for it.
Christian: Right.
veo: But it was most of us. I think the only people who weren’t there were Jiseed, who is a Phantasy Star 3 mod, and KrusKader, who is a Phantasy Star 1 mod. Everyone else, me, Tyler, Starbird, and… can’t remember…
Christian: You called in the heavies for this one, is what you’re saying.
veo: Yeah.
Christian: So how did the call go? What was that like, for both sides?
veo: So basically, what we pretty much did was, I took the lead from the moderator side for the most part. I would present a thing to Kevin. I would say, [inaudible] about you run, do you have any explanation for it? And… Most of his explanations, like I said, as a mod team we decided they were insufficient. And the reason why is because, pretty much every time we brought something up to him, he would try to give, like some kind of like, lazy explanation for it. Like, for the ghosting stuff, he just said “Oh, it happens when I have Internet issues, or video encoding issues. They just happen sometimes.” And so I said, you know, I would respond back with… this kind of, you know, flimsy argument, I would say like “Well, how come it doesn’t happen immediately after your world record, you know? You streamed your world record, and then in an hour again you booted up the stream and now there’s no problems. These problems only seem to happen on your world records. Do you have any explanation?” And then he would just say “I don’t have an explanation. I don’t know why that happened.” And so that’s pretty much how all the points go. We would go through each point, explain to him why we’re suspicious of it. He would give kind of like a, you know, a weak answer. Like for the controller inputs, his answer was “The pro controller’s really quiet.” And… (laughs) And then we would just point out how it doesn’t make sense, because, I would say “Oh, it’s too quiet but you can hear your controller fine in every other run in the past. So, what’s the deal here?” And then he just says “I don’t know.” So that was pretty much how it went for every point. He didn’t really answer anything definitively. He gave some addresses to the questions, and then would just back down and say he doesn’t know why it happened, or what was going on, when pressed further. And so, we… After the call was over, we… He left the server, we all stayed in and talked about it. And yeah, we did a vote and the vote was unanimously in favor of removing his runs, removing his moderator status, and indefinite suspension from the leaderboards until we decide he, you know, deserves to come back or whatever.
Christian: Did you guys do the vote anonymously, or did you just go around in a call and say like, “How do you vote?”
veo: Yeah, it wasn’t anonymous. We didn’t do it anonymously. We just stayed in the Discord call, and everyone just like, said what they wanted to do.
Christian: I would say, in the future, to do it anonymously so you don’t get any…
veo: Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.
Christian: Just to make things a little bit more transparent. So you don’t get any pressure from other people, implicit pressure that might not be stated but it could be implicit just to vote the way someone else is going.
veo: Yeah, I feel you.
Christian: But, there was some evidence, I don’t think we covered this one. I want to talk about this one a little bit before I dig into questions on this. The timing issue on battles, with the load times. I don’t think we brought that up before we jumped into this part. So I’d like to just get a little rundown on that. What happened with that one? I think it’s 4E… No, that’s not 4E, that’s… Well, you know what it is, so I’ll let you handle it.
veo: So that was one of Jiseed’s Phantasy Star 3 observations. And, like I said, we… He hasn’t given us any of his, you know, his work on that yet. So, I don’t know exactly what it’s about. As far as I can tell, he said that the transitions in and out of battles are inconsistent on his world record, and don’t match what it would look like playing in real time. It’s like a loading time issue.
Christian: Okay, perfect. So you guys made the vote, and then you made Kevin aware. What was his reaction? Was he angry when you guys brought him into this call? Was he… What was sort of his, candor I guess, during this discussion?
veo: He was mostly calm in the call. And he was cooperative for the most part, as well. He did, what I kind of call, the “I got caught splicing” defense, which is where you deny any wrongdoing, but you don’t explain anything, and you also say “If you want to take down the runs, I understand.” Because you’re like, you don’t want to put up a fight, you know you got caught, but you also want to maintain your innocence. And I feel like that’s what pretty much every splicer has done, you know. And so he did that, he said “You know, I did these runs legitimately, they’re real runs, but [inaudible] take my runs down, I understand.” And he was pretty calm about it. We did take his runs down, so we took his suggestion, and we also banned him. But, yeah, so he was pretty calm about it in the call. It’s been kind of a shitshow on Reddit and stuff, though.
Christian: r/speedrun is… It can be a nice place, it can be a very bad place.
veo: (Laughs) Yeah…
Christian: Now, one thing I want to ask about is, did you guys look at any other communities and how they handled cheating or going about catching cheaters or like best practices for catching cheaters or verifying runs? Did you guys look at how any other communities handle that, doing this one?
veo: Yeah, we did. bich specifically did a lot of that. He would… bich has a lot of influence because he’s a really big streamer, or relatively big for speedrunning. So he was able to talk to a lot of different community leaders, and get information from them on how they, you know, how they’ve caught splicers and how they dealt with the situation. And that was part of… We definitely used that information just to find things. I think that was how we thought to look at the timer, the timer delay thing. I think Bich got that suggestion from… it might have been the Mega Man community. I can’t remember, but I know he did talk to the Mega Man community about a splicing incident in one of the Mega Man games. I forget exactly which one.
Christian: Perfect. That’s the stuff that I super-like seeing the communities working together for establishing ways that moderation should probably happen. There’s a larger discussion to be had here about moderation on speedrun.com I think, because there’s no qualifications to be a moderator. I’m not saying you guys aren’t doing good jobs, or other mods aren’t doing good jobs, but there’s just no accountability for moderators in any way that I see on speedrun.com. It’s just, whoever’s a mod’s a mod, and that’s how it is.
veo: Yeah, you’re totally right. And I kind of alluded to this earlier, but Kevin was a mod for Phantasy Star 4 when this happened. So, like, you’re right, there’s just no accountability or anything.
Christian: Yeah, like, it’s not whether someone’s doing a good job or not, it’s just that I think the system could be vastly improved. Now, again, this is a hobby. Everyone, chill out before you crucify me on Reddit. This is a hobby. I get that. But I think we can do things a little bit better moving forward, which is why I like having these discussions. Now, there’s another interesting thing about this. After all this happened, Kevin posted another run to r/speedrun, claiming world record. Are you guys aware of this? What have you done with it? Have you said anything about it?
veo: Yeah, we talked about it for a little bit. Obviously we decided we’re not going to accept the run, we’re going to uphold the ban. So the thing is, yes, so he did this run, and there’s a few things I wanted to say about this. First of all, is the run, you know, legit? I don’t know. He did some measures to try to make it pretty legit, pretty real, that, you know, to try to convince people that it was real.
Christian: What were these measures?
veo: I haven’t exactly seen them. I know he had two webcams, but neither of them were a controller cam, so I don’t understand what the purpose of that was.
Christian: One was a capture of him, I believe. One was a capture of his screen.
veo: Yeah. So neither of those really tell us anything in regards to cheating. I think the other thing was, I think someone told him at some point to open up the… the Switch menu, and he did it to confirm that it wasn’t playing back a video, so… I don’t know. I haven’t seen that part. I haven’t really had time to look at it because it was so recent. So I haven’t really examined the run yet. But yeah, so… Is it real? I don’t know. I would say, if you asked me, I’d say it’s probably real, it’s probably legit. But there’s two main things I want to say about this. First of all, I mean, why should we trust this anyways? It’s just like… It’s really hard to have any trust for any of his runs now, especially since we basically gave him a checklist of “Hey, here’s everything you did wrong when you were splicing before.” And so, it’s entirely possible he could have just said “Okay, this is all the stuff I did wrong, so I won’t get this wrong this time.” But, I mean, like I said, I’m pretty sure the run is real, which brings me to the second thing I wanted to say, which was… Kevin was always capable of getting the world record in Phantasy Star 1, which is what surprises me so much about why he decided to do this. Because… The world record was 1:13, and Kevin had a 1:14 before any of the splicing happened. So he… And the 1:13 wasn’t particularly optimized, so I know he’s capable of doing it. And it’s probably proven by the fact that he just got it. But I don’t think that the record exonerates any of his past runs, especially because… (laughs) This is really funny to me. The way he gained so much time in his spliced runs was by cutting out a bunch of items that help a lot for the final boss. The Laser Shield for Noah, which boosts his defense by a ton. The Silver Tusk for Myau, which lets you kill bosses more consistently near the endgame. And he just cut all these things out, and since he had to do so much less grinding, he got an easy 1:08. But, obviously, it’s extremely unlikely to beat the final boss with those strats, so… (laughs) When he started doing attempts again after getting called out on cheating, he mysteriously drops these extremely risky strategies and just starts playing the game normally again. Which kind of leads me to my point. I’m kind of disappointed that he cheated at all because I know he was capable of getting the world record, and he knew he was capable of getting the world record, but he just went the lazy way out, and now it doesn’t matter if he gets the world record because he’s banned. So…
Christian: Gotcha. Well… That… This is certainly an interesting situation. Now, are you guys talking about length of the ban at all? Is this going to be a six month thing, a year thing? You said indefinite, but is there going to be a time where you guys post about how long the ban will be for?
veo: Yes, so, “indefinite” in this case pretty much just means “We’ll figure it out later.” But the thing that we kind of… The idea we kind of had was, you know, we’ll unban him when we think he deserves it. And… I guess it’s kind of like… We never banned him from the Discord. We just banned him from submitting runs. He’s still allowed to participate in the community as much as he wants. So it was kind of a thing where like, you know, play nice, participate in the community, and you’ll get out on good behavior. We’ll unban you if, like… you know, you’re still being active in the community, and still being a productive member of the community. And if he did come back, we told him that he would be required to have extra measures to ensure that his runs are legitimate.
Christian: Hand-cam is my biggest thing. That’s what surprised me, when he posted that record run and he said he’s using two cameras, I said okay, great, hand-cam. But one of them wasn’t hand-cam. And his reason for not using hand-cam was it’s uncomfortable for him to sit any way except the way he sits and the way he sits means he can’t have hand-cam because he can’t get a camera down there. It’s like… okaaayyy…. You’ve been accused of, like, some pretty terrible shit, and the easiest way to disprove this is to just use a hand-cam, because… I don’t see how you could fake a hand-cam. I haven’t figured out a way to do it, and I’ve thought a lot about it.
veo: The only way to cheat a run with a hand-cam, I feel like… There’s probably a few ways, but the easiest one would probably be to modify the game itself. That’d be the only way you could do it.
Christian: But… You have to have everything edited so perfectly, that every single one of your button presses is accounted for, and just like when you’re going through shit frame-by-frame, it’s really easy to tell if something’s being pressed or not. That’s how Lee SDA got caught, when he was doing the Yoshi’s Island stuff. I get push-back on this a lot. People say “Well, Lee had a hand-cam, and he wasn’t caught cheating.” It’s like, no, that’s specifically what led to him getting…
veo: That’s how he got caught.
Christian: That’s how he got caught, because someone took the time to analyze his hand-cam and show, yeah, he’s not doing this. So like, his… Lee’s methods of cheating and trying to prove that he was legit are what led him to being caught, which was specifically hand-cam. So like, if someone has a hand-cam, and they get proof-called, I think that’s probably definitive proof that they’re not cheating. Proof-calling is one I didn’t hear you talk about. Has anyone decided to do that in any of his runs since then, just say like, hey, can you open this menu or do this specific input while you’re playing right now?
veo: It’s actually interesting that you bring that up. Yes. Kind of. Nobody did it, like particularly, like nobody specifically said like “Hey, I’m proof-calling you, do this.” But during the Phantasy Star 2 run, MrStarbird said… So there’s a glitch in Phantasy Star 2 where the sound can cut out, and… It always cuts out, actually. It always cuts out at this one part. And if you leave the sound, the game has a chance of crashing. So what people do is, there’s a way you can bring the sound back by just pausing and unpausing over and over again, like four or five times. It brings the sound back. So [inaudible] the sound glitch, he said “Oh, I don’t know how to fix this, so I’m just not going to do it.” And MrStarbird posted in the chat, “All you have to do is pause and unpause four or five times.” And I didn’t see the response, because like I said, I haven’t looked much at the Phantasy Star 2 run. It’s probably the one I’ve analyzed the least, just because it’s not a world record. But Starbird said that he would not fix the sound glitch, he just said he wasn’t going to do it. And then again at the end of the run, when he got his PB, MrStarbird… Obviously we’ve been in contact with him because he’s one of the moderators so he knew about our suspicions and stuff. So at the end of the run, he says, “Hey, can you reset during the credits?”, and Kevin just ignored him. So we have no explicit proof-calls, but… Starbird tried to, you know, kind of poke at it before we revealed to him that we were suspicious and, yeah, he didn’t follow the orders.
Christian: So I’d just like to say that, if you’re going to proof-call someone, make it explicit that you’re proof-calling them. If you’re just telling them commands, that… Because to me, that doesn’t mean that they weren’t able to do it, that just means that maybe they didn’t think they were being proof-called, and they were just doing whatever, so… And like, it’s not a big deal to be proof-called. If you’re being proof-called, don’t freak out, don’t start screaming. Just engage with the person that’s proof-calling you and then find a place to do it that doesn’t lose you any time.
veo: Yeah, exactly.
Christian: It’s more-or-less like the easiest thing. I’ve talked with wq [wqqqqwrt] about this before. And a lot of people, I know a lot of people don’t like wq, but I think his stuff on cheating’s pretty good, and he’s been proof-called before in his streams. He pretty much always obliges, unless he thinks the person’s trolling him. But he uses hand-cam as well, so it’s hard to… It’s hard to accuse someone that uses hand-cam of cheating, so… or it’s harder, which I think is a really good thing. I think hand-cam’s probably, like, if you’re really serious about speedrunning, I think that hand-cam’s probably like the thing you should be using, just for integrity purposes. Now, I know some leaderboards, like the Mario Kart 8 leaderboards, one that I run, they don’t allow… I shouldn’t say they don’t allow, they don’t require video proof if you’re outside of the top five runners.
veo: Okay.
Christian: Which I find interesting. I’ve brought that up to them before. Because there’s like a whole debate on digital times versus cartridge times. Because cart load times are slower on the Switch? And I said, well, we can just do this easy by just editing out the load times or normalizing the load times across all hundred different Nintendo Switches and just saying “We’ll take this much time off.” And no one wants to do that. And I said, but look, we only have to do it for the top five runs because no one… because those are the only ones that need video proof. But… not a popular solution, so I kind of shut up. But… To me, it wasn’t a big deal, but I’m not a mod there, so whatever. So there are things, like proof-calling I think is a good way, especially for like cheaters who are trying to reform, I think proof-calling’s fine to do to them. I mean, don’t sit there every ten minutes just saying “Hey, can you do this, can you do this, can you do this.”
veo: Yeah, obviously.
Christian: Enough that they get the point, or they know they’re going to get fucked with if they’re trying to splice or do something shady again. That’s more-or-less the point there. So… Is there anything else you want to add to this segment before we wrap up?
veo: Umm…. Not really. There’s some other stuff to it, but it’s all kind of messy drama stuff that isn’t really worth it, that isn’t really worth going over too much. Just stuff like… yeah… Like I said, the agreement was kind of that, if he participates in the community and remains a productive member then we would consider unbanning him. Unfortunately, he’s been doing a very bad job of that. (laughs) He’s been kind of pestering everyone in DMs all the time, like professing his innocence. He got his… I’m assuming he got his friends to kind of brigade some of the Reddit thread. The people in some of those threads were like… They’ve never posted on r/speedrun in their life and their making up posts that say like “Moderators are colluding against Kevin”, and it’s just… Yeah, messy, and… We’re just not having a lot of fun right now. We hoped this was just going to end as soon as we announced it, and instead it’s continuing, much to our dismay. We just want to get this over with, but it doesn’t seem to be happening as quick as we wanted it to.
Christian: Hey, well you’ve got guys like me asking you guys for interviews to talk about it, so…
veo: Yeah, and we’re glad to try to get any clarifications out there as well. We wanted this process to be as transparent as possible and… yeah, so I’m glad to be able to get on a platform like this and kind of explain how we came to our decision and stuff like that, too.
Christian: More than happy to have you. This is the stuff I love learning about, and seeing how different communities do things differently. I think it helps other communities while trying to figure out different strategies for detecting cheating. Now… There is a counterpoint to having discussions like this of, well, you’re just teaching splicers how to do their job better.
veo: Yeah, I understand that argument. But also…
Christian: I understand it, but I also think that, like, there’s a lot of questions I didn’t ask specifically for that purpose, so…
veo: Yeah.
Christian: There are ways to detect stuff that I won’t ever go over on the show just because I don’t want that knowledge to be public. So… There is that, guys. So don’t worry guys, we’re not giving away all the secrets of verification over here, making it easier for them to cheat. So that’s about it for this segment, though. I’ll wrap up. Anyone you want to shout out who was involved in this process that was a big help to the community, that sort of thing?
veo: Sure. MrStarbird, bichphuongballz, Jiseed, KrusKader, TylerTheDriver, all the mods, thank you so much to everyone for helping with the investigation and helping to figure out how we’re going to handle the situation. Can I shout out a marathon?
Christian: Sure.
veo: Blast the Process 3 is starting next weekend. It’s a Sega marathon. Anything that’s published or developed by Sega, or is on a Sega console. It’s all Sega games, starting April 19, running all the way through the weekend. And yeah, it’s gonna be a cool marathon. If you like Sega games, come check it out.
Christian: Perfect. And I’d just like to add for clarity that the video playing in the show here was not one of the cheated runs. It’s one of…
veo: It’s one of my crappy PBs.
Christian: It’s one of veo’s runs, so don’t… I should have said that at the beginning rather than the end, but I don’t think anyone will get confused. And I’ve said it for clarity now. But that’s it for this segment, guys. Stay tuned for more.
[Segment ends]
Christian: There we go, guys. So that was side one of it. That was the stuff with veo. I see him in the chat. Up next, we have Kevin’s side of the story, and then, at the end of that segment… It’s pre-recorded. I do say that’s the end of the show. That’s not the end of the show. Do not go anywhere at the end of that segment. We’re going to show the new evidence that’s come to light since then. So that being said, we’re going to go ahead here with Kevin’s segment. I hope you guys enjoy this long segment on today’s show just as much as you have anything else. Let me know in the comments or in the chat. So here we go with Kevin’s segment.
[Segment begins]
Christian: Hey guys. We’ve got the other side of the story here. We’ve got Kevin here, who is a runner which has the allegations against him of his Phantasy Star runs. Kevin, how’s it going? Thanks for joining us. Thanks for doing this.
Kevin: Not a problem. It’s going great, thank you.
Christian: Perfect. Alright so…
Kevin: I guess I should… I was going to say, it would be great, but I mean, obviously everything surrounding it. But that’s fine.
Christian: There are things that need to be addressed. So let’s go through these things one at a time. So the first allegation… Everyone that wants to follow along, if you can’t read what’s on screen, we’re just going through the Pastebin that was put up by the mods of the Phantasy Star community. So we’re gonna run through that really quick, and get Kevin’s responses to everything in there. So the first one, that everyone wants to see. And the dates to all these runs and everything are up on there along with the times, so if you guys are wondering about the times on this thing, it’s right up here on the very top. So let’s run through the first one. “1: Significant ghosting in video quality differences were present in all three record runs that are not present at all in any other streams or attempts. One example can be seen here.” [Not shown] There’s a link. “A: An addition to this is that ghosting is a known property of editing with Sony Vegas, which the runner has talked about using in the past.” So here they’re saying, for those that aren’t aware is that, the runs that were removed were edited with Sony Vegas because of a property of the images known as ghosting. It blurs some of the images while the game is running and the player is moving. And Kevin’s going to give his rebuttal in response to that now.
Kevin: So I should, I guess, preface, obviously, in saying that obviously my stance on this is that I did not do any of this. Before I (laughs) start going into any explanations behind all this. So for this one in particular, I really, when I was having the discussion with the moderators and, we were doing this, I mean, over the course of maybe 45 minutes or so, my… I’m trying to think of what my explanation was at the time, but I could only assume that it was some type of encoding issue, because I have all my encoding software, obviously Streamlabs and everything, is all installed on my NAS. I could only assume at that point that, with as much read-and-write as my NAS was taking at the time, something must have happened with either, you know, either the bits-to-pixel might have been way too low at some point. That was my initial thought behind it. So really what it came down to was, me saying it must have been a NAS encoding issue. And really to them, and to anybody listening on the outside, that doesn’t make any sense. So I really didn’t have a good explanation at the time. And to this day, I mean, really, what I’ve talked about with some of the Streamlabs engineers at this point is that, there is a very likely scenario that could cause this where you either have too low of a bit rate, too high of a B-frame, your key frames might have been messed up, and it could cause the ghosting effect that you see. I didn’t realize this, I looked up some stuff on Google and it looked like that was pretty common. You tend to see it in high-FPS games, and you also tend to see it when you have a high-FPS monitor, where your emulator, especially in this case, but that doesn’t really explain the Phantasy Star 1 issue because that wasn’t an emulator. Could explain it with a high-FPS monitor or a high refresh rate monitor since I use a 144hz monitor. This could sound like I’m just trying to BS the whole thing at this point, with just using too many words, but feel free to cut me off if it makes no sense at this point, basically.
Christian: I want to get your words in, but I do have a question about that. During that run, what do you run your bitrate at through OBS?
Kevin: So, typically, you could have seen it in all the VODs, I mean I’d always been complaining about getting FPS hiccups. And I swear, this isn’t like a politician answer dancing around, I will answer everything. So typically, what I do is, I run it at 6000kbps. That seems to be pretty sufficient. My bandwidth is on a gigabit connection. That’s never been an issue before. My CPU can definitely handle it. My GPU can definitely handle it, using endbank. But for some reason, I have seen it where it just defaults to software encoding for some reason. That happens. So what I’d typically done is go into my settings each time, try to fix it so there’s no FPS issue with the emulator. Because that was a big issue, and you can see it from a lot of my old VODs, where I was talking about like “Oh my gosh, this is ridiculous, like, I’m getting FPS stutter” on, you know, a Genesis game that’s running at 60 frames per second, or 59.9 depending on it. So I was always just kind of tinkering with encoding settings, every single time. A few days would go by, I’d change encoding settings again, try to fix it, still nothing, so I’d just stream with those settings. I’d try to fix it again, sometimes it would stick, and that’s just kind of what it was. And we’d kind of go from there. I don’t know if you heard Discord popping with PMs, but I was getting them… some just now.
Christian: No, I didn’t hear anything on my end.
Kevin: Okay, cool. I’ll just ignore those. Um… So yeah, basically what Streamlabs and some of the techs and engineers are looking into right now is, they’re trying to basically replicate what I was getting. What they think happened is that, when I was doing some of the settings and doing… like, scrolling through the settings. I don’t know if you have this issue with Streamlabs, but… or I guess you use OBS from what I can see…
Christian: I do, yes.
Kevin: Typically, when you scroll through the settings, if you’re clicked on a drop-down or you’re clicked on like a numeric integer value, if you scroll, it could actually just scroll the value. So there was a chance that, you know, I had B-frames set to 2, I could have scrolled and not realized it and scrolled it to like 20, which according to them, and I have screenshots if you want or contacts there if you want to talk to them, they said that could cause the exact same ghosting issue that you see. So that was my… And I actually just found that out today. So that’s when I was like, wait a second… Alright, I guess that could explain some of it. But yeah, my initial explanation was that everything was running off my NAS. It must’ve been an encoding issue where it couldn’t, you know, do a quick enough read-and-write. Because I’m also, you know, doing local record to the NAS, and everything’s reading off the NAS, the emulator’s playing off the NAS. So my guess is that there’s just way too much read/write going on.
Christian: Okay, now… The technical stuff does make sense to me. I work in software development, so this stuff doesn’t go over my head. But I do… I have some more questions. Are you going to release the talks you’ve had with the developers from Streamlabs in the interest of transparency, or is that something…?
Kevin: Yeah, of course! No, no no no. No, I mean, as soon as everything’s done with it. I mean, whether they come through and say “Yeah, this is how we were able to fix it” or “We couldn’t actually replicate it”, yeah, I have no problem releasing the whole thing. It’s totally fine.
Christian: Okay. And then, just to wrap up, I want to wrap up but another one on this one. This is something that is known to happen with Sony Vegas, and…
Kevin: Oh, absolutely. I totally saw that.
Christian: Now, have you used Sony Vegas in the past? Because that’s brought up right here, right in front of the… right in the beginning of the point #1.
Kevin: Yeah, so no, I own Vegas 7. I’m sure that still does it. The last time I used Vegas to actually do any type of editing was when I was doing my drum videos for YouTube, so… (laughs) any… any uploads or anything to YouTube has all been just the actual mp4 that I output from StreamLabs.
Christian: Now, from a mod’s perspective, can you see why that would look a little bit suspicious.
Kevin: Oh, yeah! No no no. And that’s exactly what I told them. That’s… and… I mean, they can totally… agree with what I’m saying right now at this point that, when they came forward with this, I told them I had absolutely no explanation. I realize how incriminating that looks. And I’m… That’s why I was more than willing to have them take down all of the runs. Because, again, as a moderator, I want to make sure that the integrity of the board was maintained also. There’s no reason why… You know, any type of run with any type of speculation behind it, especially obviously with the PS1 run where there’s no audio. I mean I don’t think that should’ve been approved to begin with (laughs)… to be honest, if there was that many issues with it. And really, at that point, I mean, it really could’ve been addressed. Um… But yeah, I mean, with them taking down all of the runs, that’s… that was totally… It was my proposal that, hey, we need to… Obviously, there needs to be some type of remedy behind this, you know. What we can do is, I can have you guys… or you guys either just remove all the runs from speedrun.com. That’s totally fine. What I’ll do is, I will go back and I will add all these extra layers of verification. So basically my idea was/is, if you want to tell me to do something during stream, like with a controller input to show that I’m still playing, or you know, if it comes down to it. I mean, obviously, at this point I’ve added two extra webcams, one on me, one on my screen, showing the livesplits also so you can see everything in real time. Basically, I want to make sure that these… the runs were legit and valid, and basically I thought there was no speculation behind everything. So proposing that they all get taken down because of, obviously, this number one is the big glaring issue in my eyes, and I don’t want any part of that. So I want to make sure that it was completely, like a non-issue.
Christian: Alright. Now, you brought up, like the stuff with the added verification. I want to get to that, but I want to run through these last…
Kevin: Yeah, of course.
Christian: …these next three things first, then we’ll get to the added verification for the last run. Because you did get another world record that was posted on r/speedrun. We will talk about that.
Kevin: I did.
Christian: So let’s talk about #2. “Controller inputs can be heard on many stream attempts, but are absent in world record runs.” Obviously, they’re referring to the five submitted runs, the three world records in specific.
Kevin: Yup.
Christian: “Despite the fact that the background can be heard through the mic. A: One exception is found during the PS4 run in the last dungeon, where inputs suddenly appear after not being present at all. Coupled with that, the inputs showed no consistency. The inputs and movements were 1-3 frames apart, 7-8 frames apart, and sometimes 13-17 frames apart. Sometimes the tap preceded the movement, and sometimes the movement preceded the tap.” So… What do you say to this? Because this one’s… This is how they found Lee SDA out, or part of him, for his Yoshi Island runs.
Kevin: I wish I knew who that was. I’m sorry. I really don’t follow the speedrunning community.
Christian: Okay. He’s from a while back. But he got caught…
Kevin: Okay.
Christian: He was using hand-cam. He faked runs with hand-cam. That’s actually how he got caught, because his inputs weren’t lining up with what was happening on the screen.
Kevin: That’s actually kind of hilarious. But… Sorry, go ahead.
Christian: Yeah, so, number two. Is there a reason for this occurring during all of these world record runs?
Kevin: Umm… So as far as being able to hear the actual inputs, so… This is one that I actually take kind of issue with, especially because I saw a tweet from somebody who’s since removed it, and I only know it was tweeted because somebody copy-and-pasted it to me and linked it to me. They basically said that there was no game audio on the PS1 run, but you couldn’t hear any of my controller inputs. So, when you have a noise-gate filter, I mean, obviously you do this quite a bit, so you know all about noise gates. So when you have a noise gate filter on your mic, and you play with your controller basically on your lap under a desk, and you play with a controller that makes literally zero noise when you push the buttons with like the joints of your fingers like I do, there’s no way that’s ever going to get picked up on mic. And, I did the exact same thing with an open mic setup, during my world record run on, when was it, Thursday. And I kept asking everybody when it was really quiet, you know, “Can anybody hear my inputs? Like, I am mashing like a fiend right now. Can anybody hear anything?” And everyone in chat was like “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing.” So, as far as being able to hear any controller inputs, I take kind of issue with that. Now, as far as being able to hear different controller inputs, I can only attribute that to using two different controllers. One is an X-Box One controller, one’s an X-Box One S controller. The X-Box One S controller has very, very, very loud taps… with the d-pad. So, if I’m like scooting back in my chair, and that controller is no longer under my desk anymore, there’s a good chance that that’s going to get picked up by the gate, or it’s going to get past the gate. They’re that loud. And… I mean, this is basically where we’re sitting when, like… when their issue took place. So I’m sure you can hear this right now. [taps controller]
Christian: Yup.
Kevin: Probably. Okay. Um… Now, if you can hear it right here… [silence]… then I’d be surprised. [silence continues]
Christian: I’m not hearing anything.
Kevin: Exactly. So… (laughs) I mean, I realize in hindsight that you probably… that looks really sketchy (laughs)… I’m like, I could just not be pushing the button right now.
Christian: Yeah, I don’t have you on cam either, so I don’t know how much of a… how much this test verifies…
Kevin: Yeah, I don’t know what that really does. Umm… But yeah, that’s basically the difference behind it is, if I’m using the X-Box One S controller, those d-pads are really loud. If I’m using the X-Box One controller… and really, it just comes down to interchanging them, based on how I’m feeling at the time, or which one has batteries. That’s really what it comes down to. Now, as far as the delay goes, I’ve talked to countless streamers at this point who have all had the exact same issue with audio delay, with either, you know, the audio from their mic is like, two seconds ahead, or it might be two seconds behind. One of them, I could tell you who it was who told me this after the fact, but I don’t want to name drop on stream without your permission obviously…
Christian: No, we shouldn’t bring any more people into this than we’ve got already.
Kevin: Yeah, exactly. But basically, it’s been confirmed by some top streamers that they’ve had that happen with their streaming setups all the time. So that kind of confirmed that for me. So… I don’t know if that answers most of the question. I hope it does. But that’s kind of what it comes down to.
Christian: Now, the issue that they had was that the movements and the inputs were apart. Now, I’m going to give a little bit of credit on your part here in that it might be hard to verify this, just due to how streaming works. It could be something that just is, there’s an audio lag, this one… The audio point to me, if in a perfect world, like sure, that would be a big, big problem, if we all had thousands of dollars of audio equipment and Internet connection showing perfect stuff. This one here, it… To me, it adds a bit of suspicion, just given all the other stuff. I don’t think any one of these on their own makes a strong case. They definitely make a case, but together I think is where they get most of their power, and I think…
Kevin: Yeah, no I agree.
Christian: …that’s what it more or less came down on. So even if like… Let’s say… Well okay, I gotta be careful how I say this, because I’m going to piss a bunch of people off (laughs)… Hypothetically, let’s say that the runs are cheated, and… or not cheated, sorry… and all of these are present. I still don’t think it can be put on the leaderboard, just because this many discrepancies like this… It would preclude it in my books. I’m not sure how they moderate this community, but obviously they’ve taken the stance that they should be precluded because of these discrepancies. The audio one though, it could go either way. I’m not a judge on this, but in my eyes, this one could go either way. Let’s move on…
Kevin: And I think…
Christian: Sorry, I’ll let you finish up, and then we’ll move on to the next one…
Kevin: Okay. Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, also with the fact that, you know, on any given stream you’re dropping 900 to 1100 to 1500 frames. That could easily play into it, too. I don’t want to be the one who’s just throwing out excuses or anything at that point, but…
Christian: Well, no. You’ve got to make excuses, because you’ve got the allegation against you. So…
Kevin: Yeah, I agree.
Christian: It’s sort of on your… The ball’s in your court, because the case has been made for your rebuked stuff.
Kevin: The case has been made, and the community has largely spoken.
Christian: Yeah, well we’ll get to that after. So let’s get to point three. “Split timer starts also showed inconsistencies. On stream attempts…” let me get this right… “On streams of attempts, the timer and game started within a handful of frames of each other 100% of the time, and in the same order. This was notably off in each record run. Example: For PS4, the game always started after the timer and within the range of 3-20 frames. On the WR run, the timer started after the game by 190 frames. The numbers for the other games are different, but the same pattern exists. Anything invol… Star: Anything involving frame counts were found by using MPC-HC and VLC with the ‘Jump to Time’ extension.” So what’s this one? This one… So this one just seems to indicate, for those that aren’t aware, that a video was started of the game being played, and then the timer was hit. That seems to be the allegation here. Instead of pressing Start on a controller and then hitting whatever key you use for starting your timer, which would be much faster.
Kevin: Yeah, so what I… What I use to start the actual timer itself is the number 1 on the number pad. One of those… I told them (laughs), and it sounds stupid, but I had number lock off, so… I didn’t realize it. I pushed the friggin’ 1, and nothing happened. Couldn’t figure it out. And then just hit number lock and pushed it again. I figured, at that point, you know, when I submit the time, we’ll just add a second or two to whatever the final time was, because I’ve seen that happen. Like, “Hey, you… You split late or something on the final boss, so we’ll reduce the time of your run by one second rather than just invalidating it.” So I figured that’s what was going to happen with it, and I figured that was fine. As for the other ones, I mean… I… (laughs)… I guess I just don’t sit on top of the key when I start the run, because it’s usually just one or two seconds off anyways, and I’ll just fix it later. I don’t (laughs)… I never thought it was that big of a deal, to be honest. Apparently, it is. And I guess I can see issue with that now.
Christian: So the logic that they’re going to be using, and that any mod’s going to be using here is that, if I have to start a video by clicking on my computer and then press the 1 key, it’s going to be different than having my hand over the start button on a controller or A, whatever button starts your game, and 1, which I can press in tandem at the same time, to keep the game going, essentially when I start the run. That’s going to be the counterpoint here. And the argument would be, well, if you’re clicking starting a video, and then you have to take your hand over and press the button, that’s going to be longer than pressing it, trying to press it with each hand, one on a controller, one on a… one on a number key. And that would add the extra frames.
Kevin: Yeah, I mean, I can definitely see the logic in that. I mean, if… (laughs) I guess my… my point in return is that, I mean, if you’re using some type of video software to play a video back, wouldn’t you see something? Like… I don’t know, I guess wouldn’t you see some type of overlay, or some type of… I don’t know. Like, that’s what I’m trying to think of.
Christian: It depends on how you do it. If you start the stream just on the start screen, with the video already running on the start screen, then there’s no way to… there’s no way to say this wasn’t done like that, or this wasn’t a video being loaded in.
Kevin: Yeah, I guess so. (laughs) I mean, all those VODs that… I mean, I don’t… want to be that person I guess, but every single VOD of those was always, like emulator starting up. But… I don’t know. (laughs)
Christian: I gotta ask the questions. I gotta ask the questions, sir. I gotta ask the questions. So… That’s the argument I would make as well, in this situation, for the extra frames. So let’s move on to number four then. This one’s long… This is fucking long. We’re not going through all of these. We’ll go through the…
Kevin: (laughs) That might take a while.
Christian: Yeah. Let’s go through… What was the one we were going to go through? Uh… What was left. Load times. Load times, I think it was. Is that one in here?
Kevin: I mean, as far as load… Well, was there load times in there?
Christian: There was one about load times somewhere.
Kevin: I know there was one about frames between battles. I know there was that one.
Christian: Yeah yeah, that was the one. Frames between battles.
Kevin: Yeah. My only retort to that is that, there’s so many frame drops that there’s… I have no idea what would even be considered one. I mean, if there’s one or two frames after a battle or one or two frames before a battle that are either there or not there, with the amount of times you drop frames during the course of a stream, I mean, I feel like that should be a non-sequitur at all. (laughs) I really do.
Christian: There’s a lot of ones in here…
Kevin: I get it, but…
Christian: No, I know what you’re saying, but there’s a lot of ones in here that, given the other stuff, just… Some of them have to be thrown out. Some of these have to be thrown out. I think the RNG one, that’s G down here, “Outrageous RNG”. Look, I run personally a game that’s entirely RNG. It’s like, the world record’s just on the hitch of luck mostly, once you’re at the level I’m at. So there is, like, getting lucky. Now, like… If Tayman’s here, he’s a statistician. We can get Tayman to go through the statistics on this stuff, if people really want it to happen, but… This stuff can happen. I don’t think this one here’s a particular strong point, about the RNG in different world records. So that one to me just, I don’t think that… I think it should just be focusing clearly on the methodologies of cheating. Because if something’s being spliced, it’s for RNG or something, it’s being manipulated and it’s for RNG, obviously the RNG is going to be good if they’re splicing. So I don’t think we should worry about the RNG itself. We should worry more about the methodologies of detecting that sort of stuff. Were you proof-called at all during any of these records? Did someone come into your stream and say, “Hey, can you do this real quick?”
Kevin: Ummm…. I honestly can’t recall. I’m sure there was at one point, though. Like “Hey, you forgot to equip something” and I did. But I’m sure there was at one point. Because every single… every single world record that I had, and I mentioned this time and time again, that like I had always done something really stupid, which should have actually killed the run altogether, but… either it just kept pressing forward, or somebody told me to do something to correct it. Like “Hey, you should’ve bought that”, or something like that.
Christian: Okay.
Kevin: This one last Thursday, though, that’s a different one altogether.
Christian: Let’s move on to the next… the next part, the next run that you submitted. Or, I guess you can’t submit right now, but the next run that you did for world record in Phantasy Star, what is, 3? Or 2? I’m not sure.
Kevin: Ummm….
Christian: With the added verification, that’s the one I’m referring to.
Kevin: Okay. So the one I did with added verification was Phantasy Star 1, and that was… last Thursday… I believe. So a few days ago.
Christian: Now, what were the methods for added verification you used? What were the precautions you took?
Kevin: Um, so what I did was I added two webcams, one again on me. You can’t see the controller obviously, because it’s under my desk 99% of the time. I didn’t think that was going to be an issue, and I still don’t think that’s an issue. And the other was showing another webcam, which shows one of my screens that has the game on it and then part of another screen that shows the livesplits and then the streaming software. If you want to get really crazy, you could probably zoom into the, like streaming software side and see exactly what all my sources are. So that was one. And then as… Basically as, you know, the run was going on, I was constantly holding up my controller showing that I was actually pushing the inputs that I should be, which I guess in hindsight doesn’t really do too much if you’re supposed to be mashing in that section anyways. But when the stream was done, I went straight to the Switch dashboard showing the time, then showing my watch showing the time and date, then showing my phone showing the time and date, basically anything I could possibly think of, and talking to every user in real time that was chatting in the stream.
Christian: Now, I’ve got to dig in on this one. Because if you had the extra webcam, and you pointed it at another monitor, why not just throw it down on your hands to just definitively prove that this isn’t spliced?
Kevin: Uhh…(laughs)… I guess, good luck seeing it, is my retort to that.
Christian: What do you mean?
Kevin: I… You… I mean, I can’t see my controller when I play. Like, it’s under my desk, is what I’m saying.
Christian: But… I mean, given the circumstances, couldn’t you just back up a bit from the desk and have the cam pointed down?
Kevin: Well, I could… I mean… I’m going for comfort. I do realize this is sounding ridiculous at this point, and… Someone did bring up that “Why don’t you just add a controller cam?” I feel like… and my response to them was that, if somebody really thinks at this point that I’m doing something during a stream, or not doing something during a stream, then they can call it out mid-stream, and I will do whatever they want with that controller. I mean, like I will… and I mentioned this in the Pastebin, if it’s at a loss of time, I’ll do it mid-stream so they can see that I’m actually still playing this game. Like, that’s… that’s kind of how ridiculous it was.
Christian: So you’re going more the proof-calling methodology than the hand-cam one.
Kevin: Yeah, I mean, I figure two webcams is more than sufficient. Especially when it’s showing the screen and the actual stream being streamed live.
Christian: Well, I think it helps, but I think that, like a hand-cam I think almost definitively would prove that nothing crazy’s going on.
Kevin: Yeah, but like you said with the other runner, I mean, it could be a faked hand-cam at that point. I think if people are going to…
Christian: Well no, Lee’s hand-cam wasn’t fake, though. Lee’s hand-cam was not faked. He just wasn’t doing the correct inputs. He put a hand-cam on to make… to lead people to believe he was doing what he was actually doing, but under analysis it came out that his hand-cam was… He was just playing along to a TAS, and he had inputs that were coming in that were not, that were not registering.
Kevin: Ohhhh. Okay, that’s actually really funny.
Christian: And that’s what got him caught. So… I don’t see how you can fake a hand-cam. That’s what I’m saying. It’s a definitive proof. Unless you’re going to go through painstakingly, and play through perfectly with… with a game that has input logs shown so you know what’s coming up, so you can just do that, and then edit the hand-cam so it matches up with that, I don’t see how you could do that and fake a run. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why hand-cam, to me, is definitive proof that nothing crazy’s going on.
Kevin: Yeah… And again, I mean, if it came down to it, where people absolutely required a hand-cam for me to speedrun, then… (laughs) I don’t know, I mean, this is… like, such a niche hobby for me to even do, like at this point. Like… I told… most everyone knows, in the community… I mean, I’ve been in the community for a few years now. I mean, most everyone knows that we just had our third kid back in January and I’ve been on paternity leave, so that’s why I’ve been able to focus way more time to these runs and doing stuff at night, like while every kid is sleeping. Like, as soon as I go back to work, there’s a 90% chance that I’m cutting back on speedrunning altogether. Like, I work 60 hours a week. That’s… That’s not gonna be cut back so I can speedrun games. Like, if people want a hand-cam, I’m just going to play games casually on stream again. Like it’s… or just speedrun occasionally. Like, the hand-cam to me is just ridiculous at this point. If people want to question what I’m doing on stream, they can do that, but, like I’m not adding a third web-cam, basically.
Christian: Well, I don’t think they’d ask for a third cam. They’d just be asking for the one pointed at the monitor just to be turned and pointed down.
Kevin: Yeah… I don’t know… I don’t… I don’t want people just… you know, staring at my crotch for three hours on stream.
Christian: That’s… I hear about it a lot, because I’m a big hand-cam advocate. But I… That’s the thing I hear a lot, is that “Well, it’s crotch-cam.” Like, well, yeah it is, but it’s also a verification method.
Kevin: Yeah. And again… If it meant more to me, like… Again, I have no problem re-running all of these. Like, I just enjoy playing the games, so I’m going to keep running them. Like, obviously I can’t submit, and that’s fine. I’ve heard that I’ve been indefinitely suspended, and I’ve heard that I’ve been temporarily suspended, and that’s fine. I’ll keep speedrunning them because they’re fun to me. Like, if people want to give me crap for not having a hand-cam, then, you know, they can do that.
Christian: So yeah, let’s… So let’s finish up with that and move on to what came of all this. So what was the final decision by the moderation team?
Kevin: Umm… So like I mentioned in the Pastebin, basically, the proposal was that… And again, on my own volition, I was more than happy to have them take down all of the runs from speedrun.com. I think it ended up being 23 or 25 runs, with four or five world records included in that. So basically, everything dating back the last like year and a half or something. All of those would be taken down, and I’d be removed as a moderator from Phantasy Star 4 on speedrun.com, and I’d be removed as a moderator from the Discord server, which is… I mean, it’s whatever. Because really, how often do Discord moderators really do anything? So basically, it came down to that, and that I would be either temporarily or permanently suspended from uploading runs in the future until, you know, they could further verify things, I guess. No criteria was really given, no time frame was given. Obviously, they were like, you know, “If you want to keep running the game on your stream, that’s fine,” you know. “We can’t stop you from speedrunning a game. But you won’t be able to submit anything.” So even though, you know, the world record came up again on Thursday, I can’t submit it, so… I mean, I guess it’s just one of those like off-SRC world records, I guess.
Christian: So that’s the state of affairs now. You’re just waiting for a final judgment on…
Kevin: Yeah… Yeah, I mean, it’s… It’s waiting but… I don’t expect anything any time soon. I have a feeling it’s going to, if anything happens, it’s probably going to be within like six months or a year. I have a feeling they’re pretty adamant on… on where their stance is. Um… And they figured, you know, if this happened once, it’s going to again kind of thing.
Christian: Have you talked with any of these guys…
Kevin: But it does sound kind of incriminating when I say it that way. Uhhh… Sort of? I guess? I mean, I still definitely support everyone in their stream. I mean, I still pop into their streams and say “Hi” and “Good luck” and everything. I have nothing bad against any of them. But it definitely seems like some of them… are… harboring some… feelings regarding it? With being pretty antagonistic on their own, whether it’s their own Twitter, Reddit, or whatever it might be. And basically just trying to, you know, do as much slander as they possibly can, it seems like. Some of them are definitely cool. I mean, I have no… Even the ones who are kind of bad-mouthing it, I have no problem against any of them. They’re all still good guys.
Christian: Alright. Well, Kevin, thanks for coming on! This is the first time we’ve done something like this on the show, and I’m happy we got to do it, to get both sides of the story or the situation, whatever you guys, whatever everyone wants to call it. I guess we can go “situation”. It’s a history first for the show for this kind of thing, and I hope the feedback’s good on it, because I’d like to… I don’t necessarily want to moderate these kinds of discussions between mods and… well, I guess the people they choose to moderate. But I think these sort of things help the community grow and learn from, like how these sorts of decisions are made, from both sides. And so, again, thanks for coming on and for your time.
Kevin: Yeah. Not a problem. Have a good one.
Christian: That wraps up this week’s show, guys. Links down below. Follow, join my Discord, blah blah blah, you guys know the drill. See you guys next week.
[Segment ends]
Christian: So, the show is not wrapped up! The show is not wrapped up! We’ve got… We’ve got a little bit more to do. Like I said, we’ve got some new evidence that’s come to light. So I’m going to play that now for you guys. So a video analysis was done of one of the runs, and I’m going to show it now… on stream, with audio for you guys. So… audio… I haven’t had time to balance the audio, so it might be a little bit loud. I’ll try and keep track of it. I guess let’s bring it up now.
[Still image from video comes up]
Christian: And this is from the mod team. So I’m going to let you guys listen to this, and then you guys can decide. And I did have some follow-up questions for this video, so there is… I’m going to talk about this a little bit more after I let this play.
[Clip begins]
veo: Alright, so I think I found a splice point… Well, I don’t think, I know I found a splice point. So right here, on the Gold Dragon, you can see… I’m going backwards right now, I’ll start going forwards at this point. So it’s at… Look over here, at this name. It’s Alis. He presses attack, it goes to Myau. And then it just cuts back to Alis in one frame for no reason. And if you’re paying attention to the screen, you might notice the other proof that this is a splice point, which is right over here, if you look at the map. So I’m going to go back a little bit. I’m going to rewind. And if you look at the map, these rings go outward from the player. And apparently Kevin didn’t know that, because right here, when it switches from Myau back to Alis, you can see a clear cut in the animation of the ring. This doesn’t happen anywhere. This is a splice, so…
[Clip ends]
Christian: So… What can we do with this information here? So I asked about… I asked some follow-up questions about this one, just because I wanted to be 100% sure that this was what it was claimed to be before I featured this on the show. So what question did I ask? The first one was this: Let me… I’m just pulling this up now, so I get everything right… So I said, “There’s no possibility this isn’t a splice? Like, there’s no way this could occur otherwise?” And this is what happened. So… the party member name and the map animation, they both jump at the same time, besides a splice. Now, you could just say, well like, could a frame drop cause this to happen? Because that… It is possible that like, there’s a drop in the video because of a frame drop. So their response to that was, “If you dropped exactly one frame, that could account for skipping from the names between Myau and Alis in one frame, but the map animation wouldn’t have moved so far if that’s the case. The map animation jumps ahead almost a full cycle.” So the map animation… So like, let’s say the name moves ahead, there’s a frame drop and the name moves by… It moves ahead and we miss the one frame of the transition. The map has moved more frames than it would have during just a single frame drop for the name transition. So that’s the evidence there. That was my follow-up question, and that’s where it stands now. So, the mods are making their… Some of them are here in the chat. This was found, really like… I was down in the gym, getting a work-out in before I came up to do this stream. So this came in really late. I wasn’t going to show it at first, but it’s… It was… We had time to do the questions about it, so I was fine showing it. So this is the mod team’s evidence of a splice being shown for this game and for one of these runs. So… Some of them are here in the chat, you see cyan and Starbird are here. If you guys have any questions for them, now’s the time to do it, because we are wrapping the show up. This was the last piece of the puzzle that I wanted to show. This is the one hour and eight minute run, by the way, for anyone interested. So that’s that. More of this… This is breaking, this is still developing. You get the video here first, from me guys, but that’s pretty much it for this week’s show. Let me know… I want to know what you guys thought of this segment, because I’d like to do more segments like this, but if you guys don’t like this kind of stuff, then I’ll focus more on world records. So I’d really like to know what you guys think about this, and if… if you want to see more of this stuff, because I like… I do enjoy covering this stuff, but if it’s just going to start witch-hunts, and you guys don’t want to cover this stuff or see me cover this stuff, then I’m fine going back to world records. But I do enjoy having these kinds of discussions. And I like getting both sides of the story. I won’t ever… In a situation like this, I will try not to just have one side presented. I want both sides presented, just in the interest of fairness. And, I do find this stuff super-interesting. So again, I have no training as a journalist. I never got a journalism degree from any university. So like, this is all new shit to me. So don’t… Don’t just say “Well, he’s got no journalistic integrity.” It’s like, guys, I don’t even know the rules for that stuff. I just try to do good, and I try to keep this transparent, the way I do this. So… That’s about it, in that regard. Now that being said, I’m interested in what the mods have to say about this. Like, what are they going to do with the ban, given this new piece of evidence? That’s something that’s unfolding. I can follow up on that next week, and I actually will follow up on that next week. I think that’ll be cool to do. So, that being said, thanks for the… I enjoy, like I’m really happy you guys are saying it’s a good segment. You enjoyed it. The purpose of this isn’t to cause drama. It’s just to get to the bottoms of things. And the mods state here they’re upholding the original decisions. No changes will be made to the ban. So it looks to be, about a six months to a year ban, if I’m recalling correctly. Or it’s indefinite, but usually these things work out to a six month to a year ban. So I’m going to send you guys over to someone else now. I really hope you, you enjoy this… enjoyed this segment, this show, and I hope you guys like this one. So have fun going to wq as he runs 100% Zelda. That’s it for This Week in Speedrunning.