Hacking for luck-based purposes

hi everyone. assuming that you guys probably don't get a lot of posts like this but i really need an expert opinion/help and i was hoping this was the right place to find that.

i currently speedrun pokemon sapphire version. for those of you unfamiliar, yes, there are people out there with enough self-loathing to actually attempt something like that lol. the goal of such a speedrun is to beat the champion as quickly as possible. of course, without glitches (which there aren't many useful glitches in sapphire), this requires beating all the gym leaders and progressing through the main story of the game as well. my current best time is 2 : 19: 02 the third best time. the world record is 2:02:23, and up until now it just seemed like an insanely good run. after playing the game quite a lot now though, i have begun to question the legitimacy of the record. i would link the video but apparently i need to make at least 15 posts first, which i don't intend to do, so if you're interested in checking it out, you can search "sapphire speedrun 2:02:32" on youtube and you'll find the video by MexiricanBassMonkey.

long story short, i went systematically through the entire run, watching every fight and doing damage calculations on any critical hit or damage range that i thought was questionable. he seems to get max damage every time that it matters (that is, every time that if he got a slightly lower damage roll, it would have failed to KO the defending pokemon and wasted time), and he misses only two attacks in the entire run: 1 tackle early game after being sand attacked 3 times, and 1 ice beam in the E4 because drake's salamence used fly. it's important to note that the attack that you use most in the run is mud shot, which only has 95% acc, and rock tomb, which has a pretty bad 80% acc. thus i don't have to tell you that the odds of not missing a single one of them are pretty low.

this is where my question to you guys comes in. would it be possible to make a rom hack of sapphire in which you directly or indirectly manipulated a moves likelihood to hit? what about its likelihood to crit? there is another situation where he gets a crit on a zangoose in norman's gym that had a high probability to crit him on the next turn and kill him if he didn't crit it first. little things like this are what make the run highly suspicious to me.

of course people within the pokemon speedrunning community refuse to believe that it's fake so far, because apparently the guy has a "respectable" history with the community and most people analyzing the run aren't familiar with it and don't quite grasp just how crazy it is for him to get this kind of luck.

i'm not asking for you people to tell me whether you think the run is fake though. i just want to know if it would be possible to fake a run like that by hacking the rom to give the best damage outputs, the right crits, win the right speed ties, never miss, etc. thanks in advance.

This is a "technically not impossible" kinda thing; by my understanding speedrunners tend to grind out lots of runs so eventually, you *will* get super lucky in one of them. That said, the answers to these are "technically yes":

-Bumping up the accuracy of specific moves is trivial
-Ditto for proc rates
-Adjusting global crit rates is...trivial if you know where to look
-Making crit rates vary on a per-mon basis requires ASM knowledge but is totally doable
-Making damage variation always roll max damage is doable with minor byte edits if you know where to look
-Making damage variation always roll max damage only for the player is doable with ASM knowledge

Personally I think you're a touch paranoid- yes, it's exceptionally lucky, but that's just how probability works. Put enough monkeys at an RNG-laden game, and eventually...

thanks, i appreciate that info. that's interesting.

think what you want, but i've played this run too many times not to be suspicious of the kind of luck he gets in essentially every segment. if you're interested you should check out the run. i wrote up a pastebin detailing every damage range in the game that he hits without fail. it's much more than just no misses too--in particular, the attack patterns he gets from basically all the opposing pokemon in the run are impeccable. it's sort of difficult to explain without going into too much detail. i would link the pastebin but i can't :P

could you manipulate to say, always break through confusion or paralysis? or so that the opposing pokemon behaved a certain way?

Isn't it possible that he just used saved states, and before every attack he saved and reset if it missed or was hit by confusion or poison point or something?

that would be possible and i have considered that, but because it would throw off the timing of the sound (like whatever music was playing would stutter and start over if he reset back and might not line up with the start of the battle), so i think to do that he would have to make his save states in loading zones where the music cuts out briefly, say when you enter a building or a cave or fly or something. i think it's much more likely that he used a rom hack, especially because, when asked if the run was recorded on console or emulator, he did respond (though he did answer some other questions i had that were presented right alongside that question).

G_heinz said:

that would be possible and i have considered that, but because it would throw off the timing of the sound

Click to expand...

Not necessarily. Some emulators have internal video recording and dynamically discard footage when states are loaded so the result is seamless. See for example this (very old) video from a Let's Play of the Link to the Past hack Parallel Worlds - it's done with savestates, but it just looks like Diabetus is playing exremely well (and he did a reasonably good job of seeming like his commentary was live to maintain the illusion).

Alternatively you could just record an input movie (which also rerecords) and then play that back.

Also, are we assuming that the speedrun wasn't a Tool Assisted Speed run? In either situation, I think that savestates are perhaps how he did it (and technically they aren't "wrong" in speedruns as it is possible for all moves to hit with 95% chance or whatever they have, unlikely but possible in a runthrough of the game, but my reasoning of save states are OK is due to my love of Zelda speedruns, which require savestates to actually get good records due to perfect timing for certain parts) It is also possible that he is one lucky person (as why would he not remove the Sand Attack missing if he removed the others, is my question to everyone)