#PastebinMonday 02/18/2019

End of an Era Or… Slight Change in Direction Edition

Hey guys, how’s it goin?

Ever since the speedrun.com leaderboards for the Puzzle League series were created, we game mods have been pretty lax with moderating them. We did not require any runs to be verified. Our little community was small enough that we knew everyone that was submitting runs and trusted them. Since then, the community has grown a great deal. I seem to find a new face on the boards every week. Yet still, we hardly had any problems that came up with the boards.

This past weekend, that trust was betrayed. A user posted WR runs with other people’s videos. You may have seen a WR Twitter bot post several new times for Pokemon Puzzle League. They were all fake. It turns out that the user had other runs previously submitted on the boards with videos that no longer exist. I took it upon myself to remove those times, as well, because there was no telling if those original videos were not also stolen.

From now on, new submissions to the Puzzle League series leaderboards will have to be verified. Some games already had verification required, but this has now been extended to the entire series. Our game mods are reaching out to other community members who will volunteer their time to verify runs. It’s a decision that’s been long overdue, I think. I've always considered the leaderboards to be my baby so I can't help but feel some culpability in not doing this for so long.

In stream news, some community members, myself included, engaged in some Pokemon Puzzle Challenge racing this past Friday. For whatever reason, we got fascinated with grinding Easy mode runs. Quite frankly, it has given me the itch to do lower-level runs. This week, I will scratch that itch and see if I can improve my times for Easy, Normal and Hard mode, maybe S-Hard also. I might keep it going until I get sick of it. I don’t have that many attempts in Normal and Hard mode yet.

In other gaming news, I have recorded all of my commentary for my GDQ submissions of PPC Intense and Tetris Attack V-Hard one-handed. I will likely spend several hours over the next few days editing them and uploading them to YouTube for GDQ staff consumption when submissions open on Saturday. I’d like to think that my track record at GDQs would let me get both games in. Now that I think about it, I also have ideas for a couple of other games I could make work with far, far lesser chances of getting in. I might be really busy offline in the coming weeks.

That’s my life story for the week. Until next time, everyone, thanks for reading!

--Cards