Some of his recordings are clearly autofire, but there are a great many that are borderline, they are not chronic enough for analinp to say it is autofire but inphist gives some very unlikely results, where the length 1 frames are 30-40% of the presses.

What shall we do with these? the "could" be called as autofire, but where do we draw the line when it comes to InpHist. clearly i've seen no unquestionable recordings that even came close to having 30-40% of presses in the 1 2 or 3 frame lenghth pressings....

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2000

Answers

Make a list, examine them, and wipe anything remotely suspicious. I'm down to a zero-tolerance level for Krol's recordings, particularly since he adamantly denied he had more than two--one week before he tested positive for over 40 autofire/slowdown .inps. I'll post that e- mail if anyone is curious.

I haven't looked at InpHist's results for his games, but I would suspect that he more likely used slowdown vs. autofire, as this seems to have been deliberately done in most of his recordings, and I doubt very much that ALL of them can be attributed to a 'slow computer.'

If I was lord-tyrant of MARP, I would wipe all of his recordings and make him start from scratch. Krol's INPs on games like Frogger are so disproportionately high when compared to the other players at MARP that it has to be obvious that he's cheating. If I could score 400+K (or 600K, like a certain .inp that was wiped last week) at Frogger I'd be on the first plane to Vegas this month to make some easy cash. And Frogger is only the tip of the iceberg of the games we can't currently prove that he cheated on.

Gameboy9 and I have occasionally discussed a challenge system (using tg3 or the likes thereof) that would be fair to all of MARP's competitors and allow us to remove some of the controversy surrounding certain scores. Maybe a 75% threshhold like TG has, and only applicable with just cause to challenge? While it seems like most of our questionable players have either reformed (Lamat, lagavulin, MVDV, Game Guru) or disappeared entirely from MARP (Krol), the problem remains that we still have several bogus scores on the site that MANY players are aware of, and yet we have no method of removing them.

The Krol situation here has long been a pet peeve of mine, and in some ways a personal crusade. That's not necessarily for the best when you're an editor; even less so when you're trying to be an impartial Rules Coordinator. I'd really like to start hearing what other Editors have to say about this subject, Krol, and the possibilities of suspending or banning players that do not respect the site's rules. Because of inaction in the past, we've already had one scandal with a player having a disproportionate voice to the rest of MARP's population, and insulting sveral members of the MARP community in the process. You all know who that was, and the impact it had on players and morale at the site.

This subject is something I feel very strongly about, and is an issue preventing some of the world's premier players from submitting to MARP. MARP is THE premier MAME high score site--we all know that. Let's endeavour to keep its credibility above the others, or we might as well be submitting screenshots for the general public's approval.

Sincerely, Quinn A.C. Nicholson (Q.T.Quazar)

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000