This World Record Speedrun is Fake!

games done 'quick is the largest organization in speedrunning and as such it provides a special opportunity for those lucky enough to be featured many of those who make it on stream don't break a hundred viewers on their own twitch channel but at games done quick they can expect to regularly break a hundred thousand viewers what might an up-and-coming speedrunner do to make it in front of such an audience let's take a look this story begins with an email from Ron and pawn he sent me this message about how someone with an unverified cluster truck run managed to get accepted into gdq the submission was looked over by gdq staff but the runner kept this video unlisted and never submitted it to speedrun comm even though it was the world record moderators never got a chance to analyze this run he simply used it for his gdq submission and then moved on the runner in question goes by the name Connor ace and his run was accepted into sgdq 2019 as you can see but this wasn't the original plan games done 'quick initially approved another runner Ron and pawn to showcase this game at their event shortly after the list was published Connor ace asked how do I have world record in a category and someone else got accepted over me like legit my PB is three minutes faster and no ability what happened I can't say for certain that these events are connected but very quickly after these tweets were sent out the runners list was redacted and when it was put back up Connor Ace now held Ron and pawns place so what's the big deal yeah it was never verified but that doesn't prove anything it looks suspicious but that's it well even though this video was unlisted pawn managed to track it down and began analyzing the video he noticed something odd about Connors run in the center of the screen lies an icon not normally present this should appear when you have the grappling hook enabled and when you're facing something that you can grapple but in Connors run its present the entire time pawns soon discovered this is a glitch which can be easily explained it's not an indication of cheating at all however because this glitch was active the entire time we can actually use it to test Connors run for splices you see this icon continues to spin during the level transitions which means we can predict quite accurately how it should look when the next level starts pawn created this overlay which tracks the movement of the icon he tested this on every level and even had others try on their own computers all of these tests have shown his overlay to be very accurate except when it's applied to Conners run when we add this to his video we see giant discrepancies which cannot be explained by anything but splicing I was convinced by this evidence so I presented it to Connor and he admitted it he spliced the run I thought this was the end and for a moment I considered whether this video really needed to be made or not while Connor made that decision very easy because with little hesitation he took to Twitter to tell more lies after being called out he's now taken on the Billy Mitchell defense saying he never submitted this video to gdq he says this video was never submitted to any leaderboard or gdq slash marathon etc except he posted this video the exact week submissions were open for sgdq and just a day before he sent this tweet out he told me he used this video in his submission I had no idea until I timed it that it would be world record I meant to delete the video and only use it as a tenth upload for my submission but I lost the ability to edit the submission video so there you have it right there this is the only run we've ever talked about and he just said that he used that video for his submission and now he's lying about it because he knows that looks really really bad and it doesn't get any better let me show you a little more of our conversation he said I would have been accepted over him no matter what video was used since my PB was better for the record I've gotten better times than his PB on stream i said that's confusing me why would you use a splice to run them he said they were twitch BOTS and I needed a placeholder video he said I never bothered to correct anything because it did not affect the outcome of the submission process and I never uploaded it to speedrun com to take snake Athens rightfully earned world record away I said but isn't it easier to take a clip out of Avadh than splice a run and he says yes but like I said I made the video out of frustration from the corrupted video so he's saying it doesn't even matter he spliced the run because he got plenty of runs on that would have gotten accepted over pond but then why not just use one of those runts why risk getting caught splicing when according to Connor he was already the better player it takes five minutes to go clip at which Vaud but it takes much longer to splice a speedrun and for some reason he never saved any of these runs the best time he has on the leader board is a 27:13 which is three and a half minutes slower than his spliced run does this make sense to you guys it doesn't to me I think it's blatantly obvious that this guy spliced his submission and he's trying any lie he can think of to try to wiggle out of it it's so disrespectful to the guy who cheated Connor hasn't said hey sorry for stealing your spot instead he says sorry to anyone who was led to believe this run wasn't spliced he has still not come clean and it doesn't matter that he didn't submit this to the leaderboards I'd argue falsifying a GDQ submission is a much bigger deal leaderboards can be fixed but we can never give pawn his spot back I'm sure many runners value that spot at gdq more than any world record they might have having a run accepted into gdq means you get to present your abilities to the largest audience of your life this is a big deal to some people and to splice your submission is highly unethical especially as a gdq producer yeah that's right Connor actually helps with the event in some capacity he said I'm literally friends with a lot of both gdq staff and their game selection committee and i've submitted and attended multiple events I know what I'm talking about when I talk about their selection process hell I'm a producer for the event I wonder if those connections made a difference huh he was also a moderator of this game until this information came out he has since stepped down his moderator which makes no sense if you've done nothing wrong as he claims pong tried to address this last March but guess how this message was received it was the same dismissive condescending reaction that you see so often in these cases Connor accused pawn of slander others told him to stop whining what you were cheated out of your spot eight hours ago come on let it go quit whining stop causing drama that's why I hate these arguments so much because I've seen them used again and again to cover up people's lies cheating and speedrunning is a problem but a lot of them don't want to hear it from me I mean why does GDQ accept unverified runs for submissions don't they see how risky that is in my opinion a speedrun should be verified to the community standards before being accepted as a GDQ submission otherwise you're gonna have things like this happen and I'm sure for every cheater you do catch there's at least one that you didn't there's no doubt in my mind someone has cheated to get into gdq and gotten away with it I personally think speedrunning as a whole is going to need to adopt stronger verification standards if we want to avoid getting swamped by fakes but we'll leave that for another day I wanted to get pawn's perspective on things so I called him for an interview here's what he said I had been preparing for three months to submit a proper you know rung to gdq two before I recorded my submission I was reaching out to any % runners because I had this idea where if I got in under knowability percent then maybe we could get the run expanded on gdq so that it's a cluster truck block and you get to see both of the runs because they're very different and it would be really interesting to see them back-to-back so first I reached out to snake athon one of our moderators who is just a great guy and he said he's not into traveling so I reached out to Connor next eventually I got him to say yeah okay if you get in and you can convince them to do that thing then I'll participate and if I get in on any percent then I'll pitch the idea of you doing the knowability percent so we had that sort of you know gentlemen's agreement then I did my run submitted it early and I believe it was the last day of gdq submissions that Connors runner showed up and his run included a run against mine in my category the knowability percent category which was like a slight you know it felt immediately like whoa dude but we had an agreement but you know he's got the right as a runner to submit whatever the hell he wants if he's got a knowability percent run he wants to submit fine fair enough but there was so much else about his submission that was just like it felt wrong in addition to the agreement that we had that he didn't bother to mention to me oh I'm going to submit against you he gave gdq a 27 minute run estimate and as a knowability percent runner i felt that that was a negligent time like trying to guarantee in this incredibly RNG heavy category that you can do it in 27 minutes when I believe at that time the world record was 24 and a half minutes seemed ridiculous you're gonna be on stage and all this stuff so there was that there was the question that lingered in my mind why in the you know month and I have two months between submission and gdq's acceptance hadn't Connor uploaded the world record video because this run that he'd submitted to gdq would be a new world record so it's like surely you want gdq if they check the leaderboards to see that you've got the world record and more so to see that your old PB that's still standing to this day of 27 minutes and 14 seconds you've just guaranteed them you can do it in a sub 27 your PB on the leaderboards doesn't even match that so surely you want to upload that right with all those like what seemed to me to be valid complaints about the estimate time and why isn't this on the leaderboards and what about this twitch % no ability % offering that you've never run before I brought it to the community just to like you know voix tear my own just to present it to them and say am I crazy and the response that I got was kinda yeah like people came out of the woodwork who had never seen on our discord server before or at least you know I'd never seen them in the channels that I am on as a speedrunner in landfall games discord server to back up Connor and and say that you know things work this way they don't work that way and so it doesn't matter that he submitted a 27 minute estimate this doesn't matter that doesn't matter that doesn't matter the only thing that mattered according to the people who showed up was who had the faster run who had the better PB which we now know that the PB he submitted was fake so I look back at those and go wow you were all arguing for me back then and didn't know it because apparently I was the faster runner or at least the one who didn't have to edit together multiple runs in order to create a faster let's say yeah the response from community and discord was equally disheartening and really I think that more than anything kind of kept me awake at night was that not only did I feel very slighted but there was just no no acknowledgement by any of the other people who I would respect in the leader bird community or in the speedrunning community who said yeah that is kind of out of place you know I'm uh I'm a youtuber I'm a live streamer I'm an entertainer by profession so my income depends on getting people to show up to the shows and engaging them and from twitch subscriptions and patreon donations and having this run at gdq would have meant what many speed what everybody knows about the gdq bump it would have meant that being on you know gdq people would have looked into me they would have you know tracked me down to my youtube channel on my twitch channel and they would have started showing up and it would have turned into you know money to pay my bills to keep the lights on and because of what connor did it went a different way I was very you know like at this point in time I am looking down the barrel of a hard winter because I know that the Bills in winter are going to get higher my electric and gas bill are going to go up to two hundred and some dollars a month and I'm watching that my bank account is getting smaller and I'm not putting the money back from you know support from my community and if GDQ if I had gone to gdq that wouldn't be I'm almost certain that wouldn't be a problem and there's also the possibility that you know I might have blown up what you have in terms of the records that he you know how he went to explain himself sounds very much to me like a man saying yes I cheated I'm sorry but I'm not sorry because it didn't matter and no one was hurt and as the person who was hurt emotionally psychologically and economically I I don't accept that as an apology or as an excuse you know it would be different if the response was yes I'm sorry I did some horrible things this is just awful I I wish I hadn't done it and I'm going to try and make amends that kind of a thing but instead it's yeah I treated but it doesn't really matter I'm a faster runner than he is I would have gotten in even if I didn't splice the video that's that's not an apology that's that's an excuse just play the game fairly play the game fairly when you're playing the game and you're recording it with livesplit and play the game fairly wing you're submitting to gdq you know the other runners are submitting time estimates they have confidence in that they know I can run this 99% of the time at gdq and come in under this time and Connor submissions have been roundly times that he cannot meet and he just keeps going back to gdq on the minutes let's just play play all of the games fairly care about the other runners the other community the other parties involves this massive charity event that's trying to help people care about them enough to just be honest in your dealings and now that this has happened and this has come out one of the biggest like the the best thing that could possibly come of this because there's hard to find anything good that comes of this except for the feeling of exoneration I have but the best thing that could possibly come of this is if gdq decides to change their policy and demand that a run be verified by its community on the speedrun boards before it's submitted or be some other kind of run where it's not about the time where it's like showing off you know what the live presentation would be like or something like that but you know the fact that they accepted the run and it creates the gap for speedrunners to just splice stuff together send them something never upload it to their boards it's never confirmed never verified they get in do the run other runners who did the work and you know deserve the the opportunity to run in gdq don't get in that's what I would hope for is that gdq will look at its at its review policies the last thing I want to say is go give pawns twitch channel a follow he got cheated out of his spot and he cracked this case totally on his own if he hadn't figured this out no one would have so huge credit to him let's see if we can help him break 3000 followers alright guys that's all take care

Channel: Apollo Legend

Views: 3,645,876

Rating: 4.8872218 out of 5

Keywords: Speedrun, World Record, Games Done Quick, Apollo Legend, Video Game, Gaming

Id: rbGE_LCYG24

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ALT-F-X]

Connor's response from his private twitter.

[u/JSamson321]

I'm surprised there's so many people siding with Connor here. I don't particularly like Apollo Legend, and feel it's a little weird roninpawn was relying on his channel 'blowing up' after GDQ and solving all his financial problems, but you only have to watch a few minutes of it to see Connor is the one in the wrong.

1. Submitting the same run when he agreed with roninpawn to submit a different category (asshole level; 2/10)
2. Splicing a run together so he could submit an estimate lower than roninpawn (asshole level; 4/10)
3. After roninpawn got accepted instead of him, Connor goes bitching on twitter that his "wr" (spliced) is 3 minutes faster than roninpawns PB, why wasn't he accepted??? until GDQ updates the schedule to make him the runner instead (asshole level; 10/10)

None of that is speculation, until he made his twitter private you could clearly see how it all played out. Just based on those points alone, even if you ignore all the other stuff that has been said/done between then and now, Connor is the one in the wrong and now he's playing the victim.

[u/EZScape]

You have to have an amazing personality and be good at your game to gain a large audience off GDQ, and tbh I don't think it should be the main reason for attending or submitting, but w/e. I've actually tracked these statistics out of curiosity and I think the most followers I've seen someone get from their run alone was 1000-1500 followers including the YT VOD. But reminder that this is the MOST you can expect to gain. Other runners who had nothing wrong with their runs get only 30-50 follows.

As for verification standards I think it would be good for GDQ to at least glance at leaderboards before accepting runners, especially if their published pb is slower than the runner's estimate like seen here.

[u/Feather-Light]

It's really interesting to read this thread as an absolute outsider.

I don't speedrun. Never have. I've only played an MMORPG for the past four years. But I'm a girl who likes video games and I watch quite a bit of YouTube, so it's normal for me to see all the Summoning Salt, Bismuth, and EZScape videos on speedrunning history and such. This includes Apollo Legend too.

I wasn't aware of the controversy surrounding Apollo Legend and his defending rwhitegoose's anti-Semitic comments until following links in this thread. And to be sure, Apollo Legend's antagonistic, petty attitude towards his targets and rwhitegoose's anti-Semitic remarks as well as cheating his own speedruns are reprehensible. Bleh. But all the Connor defenders bringing up character issues with Apollo Legend to defend a blatant cheater is... pretty dumb and pathetic. It's a literal ad hominem fallacy, attacking a person's points by bringing up all the shit they did.

I was very curious what the community on reddit's reaction to the video would be so I intentionally searched for this thread and read through it. Very surprising to see such ardent Connor defenders here. Do tell me how can you do such mental gymnastics as to exonerate someone who cheated with such blatant proof before you? Some people say Apollo Legend is a liar, is a bad guy, yada yada. But surely you're not so dull as to entrench yourself to believe that clear screenshots of Connor are fabricated by Apollo Legend. I hope.

It's strange to me how people are so willing to forego their logic and reasoning just to see someone they like as morally unblemished in their mind. To stick one's fingers in one's ears and go lalala I can't hear you and immediately and automatically refuse to acknowledge or listen to what someone they don't like has to say is willful ignorance. And I think this is why the public at large, uninvested people in speedrunning like myself, often see speedrunning in a negative light. The Connor defenders here are very much like the CaveiraGames defenders, petulant, tantrum throwing children who are triggered and go attack whoever dares to expose their overlord. Unreasonable, willfully stupid in the face of proof that contradicts their beliefs, and just unpleasant. Hopefully these toxic people snap out of their mindsets so the speedrunning hobby as a whole is not perceived by society at large with ridicule and mockery.

[u/zacheadams]

in the title next time, can ppl put the actual game name - it didn't need to be clickbait, it could have said

The World Record ClusterTruck Speedrun is Fake

and it'd have been far more informative

[u/Riokaii]

The GDQ bump doesnt really exist for like 95% of runners who attend the event. That's a huge myth/misconception that I think shouldnt go uncorrected. Getting into a GDQ will not suddenly make a career on twitch a viable possibility for you in all likelyhood.

[u/FiremanPC]

I personally always thought that GDQ Submissions were about showing that you could provide good commentary and run the game decently. Heck I don't even recall the submissions saying a full run was required, you could just submit a highlight video.

This, however, makes it even weirder to splice a full run and pretend you have a world record (which, funnily enough, Connor mentions himself), but it worked, so hey, I know what I'm doing next time. Fake time and fake video :)

[u/h0we]

I've had some pretty successful GDQ runs in terms of followers/retention after the run, and I can assure you that I still struggle to pay my bills.

[u/mithie007]

Okay. The very fact that it took Apollolegend, somebody whom you all apparently loath, to expose a cheater should be very sobering to you guys. Nobody here apparently gives a shit about Roninpawn.

When Roninpawn himself pointed out Conner's run was bogus in his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaGR69un7Is did anyone from the community give a shit? Of course not. But when Apollolegend does it, all of a sudden, everyone is up in arms defending Conner from a supposed slander conspiracy.

Hey, newsflash people, if you want this community to grow, you have to start treating everyone the same. Providing a fair and healthy ground for people to do and share these runs is at the core of what speedrunning is about, or have you all forgot about that?

How about you guys treat everyone with the respect they are due? Everyone here is talking about conner this, conner that, apollolegend this, apollolegend that, NOBODY here gives a FUCK about Roninpawn, who is really the one real collateral victim out of these whole shenanigans. Or are we saying it's okay for Conner to cheat and screw Roninpawn over because he's got more e-celebrity creds? Is that what we're all about now? Some speedrunners can get a fucking pass because they're more popular?

Right now, our community is being challenged. There's a potential cheater who stole a spot at GDQ with a faked run. This should be a BIG accusation, and it should be the community's job to police itself, not Apollo fucking legends. Am I saying this accusation is true? Well, I don't know. But I know for fucking sure it's real easy to prove the accusation false - just post the run Conner submitted to GDQ. If the run is NOT spliced, and beat out Roninpawn's time, then guess what? That's all the proof we need that Apollolegends is full of shit and Roninpawn can go fuck himself.

But is anyone here, people who consider themselves to be core parts of the community asking or pushing for that? NO. Y'all are too busy condemning Apollolegends for whistleblowing. Get your shit together, speedrunners. We're better than that.

And - oh yeah - Conner - just post the fucking submission if you are as innocent as you claim. That will lay pretty much everything to rest.

And all you guys saying "oh yeah, a GDQ appearance isn't really a big deal, so Roninpawn is blowing this way out of proportion," Fuck right off. Come here and say that the next time YOU are invited to GDQ and have your spot pulled at the last second by a cheater.