Sunday, June 28, 2009

Cheaters aboard!

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

A week ago, I praised our new player, Stimich, who managed to break almost all the time trial records on Portal: Prelude. Today, it has come to my hears that there could be a problem. Some fellow speedrunners warned me about some suspicious details on Stimich's videos and I decided to give it a little investigation.

After a few hours of research on the Internet with my friend Google and with the help of one of the former Prelude record holder, I indeed found quite a few suspicious details. First, this guy is commenting out on a video named "How To Cheat In Portal Without Cheating" where he actually states that he's trying to cheat. Then you can find all of his Portal time trials on some weird website named "Cheat Grabber". And finally, when you take the time to download and decode his time trial videos, there's a problem.

Here's a random part of his video where he's just moving his aim from the ceiling to the ground in order to shoot a portal.

As you can see, in a normal situation, it takes something like 8 to 10 frames to move like this. But at the beginning of his video of the 12th room, there's a little problem.

On this section, he's moving the same way almost 4 times during half the time needed. He's even changing his aim from front to behind in one frame. I slowed it down to 1 fps and one of the shots he turned and shot in 1 fps and then the next frame he was aiming directly back where he was before. This is just impossible to achieve, even with superhuman powers.

This cheat can be categorized as a Tool Assisted Speedrun and it's such a shame that people are trying to cheat us for no reason on a free mod. That's not like if there was some prize for the winner. On this Youtube page, you can find a demonstration of a Tool Assisted Speedrun, and as you can see it's perfectly invisible for the game, but not for the eye. As a conclusion, all of Stimich's scores are going to be deleted from the ladder and replaced with the previous ones. Stimich is also banned from any future ladder entry, unless he proves his innocence.