ESS Adapter argument

So... the ESS adapter is in the news again, and people are discussing whether or not to ban it. In favor of banning it, I've seen a lot of really good points. It's an additional piece of hardware that doesn't come with the game. It modifies your controller inputs in a way that shouldn't be possible. It makes aiming and ESS easier than they would be otherwise. It removes the additional skill normally required to do these things on the VC version. It gives players who have the adapter an unfair advantage over those who have it. These things are all true. At the very least, there is a strong argument in favor of all of them. And the counterarguments don't seem to be very strong - they seem more like after-the-fact rationalizations than persuasive reasons for allowing it; arguments that you probably wouldn't think of unless you had a pre-existing desire to allow it in the first place.

This is all true. And this is how I thought of things for a long time.

What I want to do here is explain why, despite this supposedly clear-cut case, people nevertheless want to allow the adapter to be used. Without this background knowledge, the arguments in favor of allowing it may seem nonsensical and based on nothing but wishful thinking.

The root of the problem goes back to around 2009, when the Wii VC version of Majora's Mask was released. Prior to 2009, version differences weren't really a huge issue in the Zelda community: for OoT, people used either the N64 or GC versions depending on controller preference, and ESS wasn't a very important trick (since HESS was not yet a thing). The two versions were more or less considered as fast as each other, so it didn't really matter one way or the other which one you used. (The Wii VC version was considered identical to GC since resets weren't used in RTA runs at the time.) For MM, things were mostly the same, although the GC version of MM had its own problems that made it actually slower to run on than N64.

This changed around June-July of 2009, when two things were discovered in Majora's Mask. In no particular order (I can't remember which came first, but they were within a couple weeks of each other): HESS was found, changing ESS from almost a novelty trick to a rather important one; and it was discovered that the Wii VC version of MM (which had been released a couple months earlier) was VERY significantly faster than the N64 version because of lag and loading times. So much faster, in fact, that using VC was essentially a *requirement* to be competitive at all.

At the time, Jiano had been working on a MM any% segmented run on N64; and another runner, SoulCal, was (by pure coincidence) trying to do the same run. (Direct simultaneous competition in speedrunning was extraordinarily rare back then - think of it as two people incidentally working on the same TAS at the same time independently.) Jiano, who didn't have a Wii at the time, was running on the N64, and SoulCal was running on VC. As the two were comparing their segment times, it became clear that SoulCal was saving insane amounts of time because of using VC, and this was how it was discovered that VC had a huge advantage. As a result of this, Jiano quit doing the segmented run and switched to running MM any% single-segment (aka RTA, before savewarps were allowed), which wasn't being run by anyone else.

As I said before, at this point there was no real recognized difference in loading times between the different versions of OoT: this wasn't discovered until several years later, for some reason. It was assumed that N64 and GC were about even, with N64 having more lag but GC having a delay every time you paused, and VC being more or less the same as GC but with slightly less pause lag. During the end of 2009, there was a spark in interest in OoT running with the introduction of ILs and racing, and the community was split more or less 50/50 between N64 runners and GC runners, with a couple people occassionally using VC for ILs.

Generally, the GC runners were people who had really bad and worn out N64 controllers, and for a few months both me and Jiano were among those runners who used GC for that reason. I had no real issues with the GC controls, but Jiano slowly grew frustrated with them, and by around January of 2010 he had given up on using VC for his next MM run and decided to get a new 64 controller and stick to N64 for both games. Meanwhile, I came to the same decision once I got a new N64 controller for Christmas and experienced for the first time how much better N64 controls were with a good stick. Other runners, like ZFG and Narcissa, stuck with GC.

Keep in mind that, at this time, the GC/VC controls (harder aiming, harder ESS) were seen mostly as a handicap. Not everyone agreed that it was a big deal (some people actually thought GC/VC controlled *better*) but the people who did think it was a big deal saw it as a handicap and a dealbreaker, not as a "challenge" to be overcome with practice. A lot of people, myself and Jiano included, were of the opinion that ESSing on GC/VC was so prohibitively difficult that it wasn't even worth attempting. It wasn't that running the game was "harder" with GC/VC controls (although that is also true). It was more that the broken control setup was preventing you from running the game to its full potential; in exchange for faster loading and less lag, you were accepting an artifical handicap that put limitations on what was humanly feasible compared to the original version of the game, resulting in it being less enjoyable and the run quality itself being worse. Lots of people, myself included, thought that was a bad deal.

Another way of looking at it: Imagine spending months getting good at a game, and eventually mastering it and being able to perform difficult tricks on command. Then imagine, suddenly, a new release of the game comes out, one which is required if you want to be able to compete. Now imagine that, as soon as you start playing it, you can't do any of the things you used to be able to do - not because of any actual difference in the game itself, but because the console just happens to read inputs in a way that limits your ability to control your character as precisely as you could before. This is the exact situation that people like me, Jiano, and other N64 runners at the time were put in: from this perspective, the control setup feels like an artificial handicap that cripples your skill level for no good reason. Telling is that it's just a "challenge" to overcome, just like any other skill-based trick or version difference, is just going to sound like you're over-optimistically trying to make a bad situation better by choosing to think of it in a more positive way.

Around June of 2010, Jiano did eventually go with VC after his N64 controller broke and it became apparent that getting sub 2 hours in MM single-segment on N64 would take much more effort than he had the motivation to put in. Around this time, I got into MM and stuck with the N64 version, confident that I could push the time much lower even without the lag/loading advantage and get an overall better run as a result. However, there was a LOT of pressure to use VC, and the thought that I was losing so much time due to a version difference bothered me a lot. Since I was the only one running the category at the time, though, I felt it was better to get a run with better play quality and more HESSes than to do a worse run with faster loads and less lag, so my final run was done on N64.

For a while, N64 vs. VC didn't matter too much, since direct simultaneous competition for records was still pretty rare, and Speed Demos Archive tended to factor out things like loading times when comparing runs anyway. But once competition increased, and leaderboards began to dominate the scene, version differences became a problem again, since runs were being compared based on the final time alone, and not based on play quality. Lots of people (again, myself included) wanted the leaderboards separated based on console, but lots of others disagreed and thought only the fastest time should matter. To compromise, leaderboards had various filters that could be applied based on console, region, etc.. But still, the growing mindset was that only the fastest time mattered, and it still felt shitty to have to choose between optimizing final time and having good controls.

The solution, which I came up with sometime in mid to late 2011, was to fix the problem altogether by allowing people to have the best of both worlds. The RaphNet adapter for using N64 controller on a Wii made ESS and aiming a bit easier just because the N64 stick was less sensitive physically than the GC stick, but the controls still felt clunky and broken since the VC mapping wasn't designed for the N64 stick. So I figured, what if we modified the adapter to fit the VC controls to the N64 stick and make it feel just like the N64 version? That way, we could run on VC with a good control setup - optimize for the fastest time, without having to accept any handicaps as a result. Eventually, this new adapter did get made, along with a GC controller version for those who didn't like the N64 controller.

These days, however, it isn't always seen this way anymore. Probably largely because people have (somehow) learned to ESS on VC with the "bad" controls, people have started to see the control setup as a normal version difference that simply requires more skill to deal with, rather than as a handicap that directly interferes with your playing ability and partially cripples your skill level. These two perspectives are irreconcilable, and I'm not sure it's clear that one perspective is necessarily more valid than the other. But without realizing that these two differing perspectives exist, it's easy to just assume the other side is being irrational or stubborn.

Personally, I think that the ESS adapters should be allowed. Not because I don't think the concerns people have about them aren't valid - I'm sympathetic to almost all of them - but because I see the adapters as a solution to a longstanding problem that's plagued N64 zelda speedrunning for years. By allowing them, we can accomplish the following:

(1) Better runs overall - playing on VC will no longer result in worse play quality; we'll get N64-quality runs for all consoles without modifying the game itself or allowing anything that isn't already physically possible
(2) More enjoyment - people who switch from N64 to VC won't have to enjoy the game less or be frustrated by not being able to control their character like they used to be able to
(3) More people playing on the fastest version - people won't be discouraged from playing on VC because of the bad controls, meaning you won't have as many otherwise-capable runners being essentially locked out of competition simply because they're playing on a bad version
(4) Less division between consoles - since you'll have more runners playing on VC in categories where VC is faster, the WRs will be more competitive and you'll get better runs as a result, as opposed to people settling to compete for "N64 WR" when they would otherwise want to compete for overall WR
(5) More level playing field - people who have spent years running the game on N64 can easily switch to VC when it becomes faster while still retaining their N64 skill, without having to spend months getting used to a different control scheme (and thus being at a disadvantage to people who are more used to VC's controls)

I'm sure there are other benefits as well, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Above everything, allowing ESS adapters would make it so that version differences don't need to be so divisive anymore. Instead of fighting over version differences and forcing people to give up their preferred control style (which is a HUGE deal to a lot of people) in order to compete, we can start focusing on what actually matters in speedrunning: tricks, glitches, routing, going fast, and having fun.