This is in response to Mooseman_Videos's pastebin which you can find here: https://pastebin.com/3TwhX2GG

You start off making some solid points that I wholeheartedly agree with. The financial burden of speedrunning equipment is an extremely important thing to consider, and perhaps I didn't say enough about it. However, from there you make some extremely big assumptions.

        > Case and point, it is all but required to own a turbo to be competitive in SMRPG for something as trivial as textboxes, and that spending additional money is pseudo-required to speedrun the game.

Sure, that's one potential interpretation of the SMRPG leaderboard, but a different, and I'd argue more likely, interpretation is that getting your hands on a SNES turbo controller is so affordable and nice for the speedrun that there's no reason not to do it. We’d need someone who runs the game to comment to know for sure, but let’s take a look anyway.

Try filtering for runs that don't use turbo. (disclaimer: I'm not actually super familiar with SMRPG as a speedgame, it just happens to be a go-to example of turbo in speedruns since they've allowed it for years) It's more work than I have time for right now to do a proper comparison, and it's made more difficult by the fact that there are currently only two active runners, but there aren't that many people submitting non-turbo runs within the last few years.

There's also a difference of just over two minutes between the records with and without turbo, and they're set by the same runner with more than a two-year gap, which is plenty of time to account for an increase in skill/optimization, so it's simply not true that turbo is even pseudo-required.

To further cement this point, on SMRPG's speedrunning Getting Started guide (https://sites.google.com/site/supermariorpgspeedruns/beginners-guide), they link to where to buy good turbo controllers, and even just looking at flat rates, I'm seeing prices as low as 2,000 yen (~$20) with free shipping, and combining that with the suggested proxy for shipping from Japan only adds a few dollars. That seems to be right around the prices I can find on ebay for OEM SNES controllers, or maybe just slightly more.

        > Speedrunning is not something where you can leave time on the table. The recent Summoning Salt video of Wii Sports is a perfect example of this that I think everyone reading this can relate to. Even a minor cutscene difference has caused changes in who had World Records and showed how the financial and logistical difficulties of getting into speedrunning can cause serious an real problems.

This is also a valid point, but an irrelevant one as I see it. The baked in assumption here is that using turbo is saving time, which does not need to be the case. In fact, there are communities who’ve made it so that turbo actually loses time as they've implemented speed caps on how fast turbo can go. (https://twitter.com/RoriMasters/status/1465770008492007428?s=20, https://twitter.com/ironically_quo/status/1465021040132866058?s=20)

So to sum this part up, hardware cost is absolutely very important, but so is accessibility for those physically disabled, and those often conflict, requiring reasonable compromise. A very affordable controller that doesn't give a competitive advantage seems to be a great compromise as I see it. This is only one example, and of course sometimes there won't be a good compromise (see my point about N64/GCN controllers), but I'm not arguing to allow turbo in 100% of situations, just where it makes sense. My goal is to have turbo be seen as a potential solution to long-standing problems instead of something that’s just banned on principle. Just because a solution doesn't work in one case doesn't mean we need to ban it in all cases.



Your next point is about mashing as a skill, and I think you're misunderstanding my argument. At no point did I say that mashing isn't a skill. In fact, I very much believe it is. But we don't need to value every single skill, and my argument is that as much of a skill as mashing is, the downsides of it outweigh the upsides of measuring it as a part of speedrunning.

Your point about innovation is true, but it applies in such a small minority of cases. In Paper Mario, the game I speedrun, there’s no innovation to be found to make mashing action commands not require us to push the A button as fast as possible. You can’t innovate your way around text mashing in games that have it.

I'm not familiar with high-level Tetris, but the fact that they found a way around mashing is great! That community has a better alternative and probably shouldn't use turbo because of it. But again, I think this point is both correct and mostly irrelevant:

        > The skill in mashing isn't always a matter of "push button fast", it can also be how to best optimize it for an individual situation and in that regard I think its clear that turbo takes away from that skill.

Again, I'm not arguing to allow turbo in 100% of situations. If a solution exists that makes turbo unnecessary for a speedgame, it's completely reasonable for that community to continue keeping it banned and I never stated otherwise. That does nothing to solve the many situations where there simply is no alternative.



Your last argument is about this being in regard to leaderboard requirements. I find arguments that go along the lines of "speedrun whatever you want! you don't need a leaderboard to validate you" to be a bit disingenuous. Again, it's not incorrect. You absolutely can speedrun whatever you want, and if the speedrun you want to do isn't on a leaderboard, by all means please run it anyway.

But the problem with this argument is that it ignores the social aspect of the leaderboard in speedruns. You may know people who don't care about the leaderboard, or maybe you even don't care yourself, but that doesn't invalidate the feelings of those who do. In general, we as humans like to be part of groups, and a leaderboard is an official representation of being part of a group.

Plus, I'm not sure how changing the distinction between "accessibility in speedrunning" and "accessibility in leaderboards" changes anything. For those who don't care about leaderboards, they can already do whatever they want. This discussion only even matters for those who do want to be on the leaderboard, and many people who do would also like to be able to use turbo where it makes sense.



So with all of this said, I take issue with your conclusion:

        > In closing, the leaderboards should be built around making speedrunning accessible for the most people possible and in a way that makes it easiest to be competitive. Largescale acceptance of turbo controllers is contrary to that objective. The number of people who would be positively impacted would be dwarfed by the number of people who would have to make monetary and playstyle changes as well as stomping out innovation in dealing with mashing and doing it effectively in a speedrun.

This only holds true if turbo is suddenly allowed for 100% of speedruns in 100% of situations, and that isn't at all what is being argued, at least not by people who care to listen to both sides. In situations where affordability or competition presents reasonable tradeoff, allow turbo. If it's not, don't. The beauty of speedrunning communities is that they can all make that decision themselves, and I've demonstrated that in at least one existing example, it is a good tradeoff. The same thing applies to innovation with mashing. If there's a good alternative to turbo, ban turbo. If there's not (which is usually the case), allow it.