Vaz / NoMercygreenspun.com : LUSENET : MARP Editors : One Thread |
I've given it some thought over the last couple days, and I am now more sure than ever that the mysterious NoMercy is Vaz, and he's using some kind of slowdown cheat. The only thing is, I have no way to prove that just yet.Let's look at some of the evidence:
A few months back, Vaz made some strange, creepy comments in #marp when BenJos was DQ'ing some of his recordings for slowdown. He started saying stuff about killing people (?) and then said that he would try to slow down as many games as he could and use autofire from some C-64 joystick of his... idle threats, or genuine?
Of course, a lot of people noticed this part, Vaz mentions that he wants to delete himself entirely from MARP right when NoMercy shows up on the scene. Vaz's excuse for wanting to delete his recordings is because he wants to spend more time playing C-64 games... this is one of the flimsiest excuses I've ever heard in my life.
More importantly, NoMercy is uploading on games that Vaz played. Vaz has a lot of recordings on MARP, but it sticks out that NoMercy is uploading on games that are generally ignored by most people... like Mega Blast, Meta Fox, The Last Day, Pollux, Thunder Fox... there are some games that only Vaz and I played, but now NoMercy comes along to destroy my score. (and, before anyone gets any ideas, I swear on the name of Shock Troopers that it's not me with a split personality... I've been so busy with Deca 2001 the last week anyway). What are the odds that a person would know this many obscure games that well, or at the very least could learn them at the incredible rate that he seems to?
One of the strangest things that's happened involves Final Star Force. NoMercy uploads a score of 760k or so, taking 1st. A few days (weeks?) later, Hisa-Chan uploads a 1.62 million point score that finishes the game. Less than 24 hours later, NoMercy has uploaded a recording that not only finishes the game, it achieves the very rare feat of beating Hisa-Chan. Could he REALLY have gotten THAT much better at the game in this short a time? Or did he simply slow the game down to give himself a better chance? Oh, and does Vaz have a recording up for Final Star Force? You betcha.
So, with all the recordings that both Vaz and NoMercy have up for games, are there any similarities in their recordings? Well, I've started comparing some but I think I need to look at some more. The most obvious is DoDonPachi - both Vaz and NoMercy pick the blue ship. Neither player can pull off the 170+ combo from the beginning of Stage 1, which I'd think most 40-million point scorers would manage. Then they both focus on the left side of the boss when one can move to either side to blow off the side parts of it... I just found it odd that both would do that even when the boss is crammed against the left side, but that probably doesn't prove anything. Similarly, both Vaz and NoMercy choose Irori in ESPRade. Either these are astonishing coincidences, or...
oh, while we're on the subject of DoDonPachi. Just try to playback his recording in DOS, it won't get past Stage 1. I tried playing it back in win37b11, and it got to Stage 3... still doesn't play back to the posted score, but since it plays back farther in Windows, makes me wonder if it was really recorded there instead of DOS... but then why would he list it as being recorded in the DOS version? To throw us off his trail, since Vaz has almost always used the Windows versions to record? Either way, it doesn't seem that NoMercy plays back all his recordings, as he didn't know about the NVRAM in Cave shooters... just like Vaz. And let's not forget that Vaz has the high score on Gunbird, which doesn't playback. Then NoMercy takes the high on Sengoku Ace, the other Psikyo shooter that doesn't playback. Do you think he/they would bother to test it out? Nah. They're both ignorant of this fact.
Ok, this is getting a bit long. To sum things up, we're pretty sure it's Vaz that's causing all this trouble, but we need to prove if he's using slowdown or excessive pausing. What we need to do is get "NoMercy" to record something eith MAME 35tg3. Unfortunately, most of his recordings seem to be in games that aren't supported in it, but I see a good candidate - GunSmoke. This is a VERY difficult shooter, so if he could get a million-point score with this version of MAME then I might have to eat my words about all of this. However, I'm sure that he would refuse for some reason... we need to a reason, a plausible excuse to convince him to record with it. If he does refuse... then we go public with all this evidence and possibly DQ his recordings until he proves himself. Is that too drastic a measure? I don't know, but I really got this feeling that cheating is going on here. We really need to take care of this and find the truth.
Any comments or other observations on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
-Matt
-- Anonymous, February 14, 2001
Some of the things I mention I have already discussed with BBH on IRC, but I'll repeat them here for the others.OK. Let me address two points:
You wrote: "What are the odds that a person would know this many obscure games that well, or at the very least could learn them at the incredible rate that he seems to?"
Well... I myself knew MAME long before I discovered MARP. Or, let's put it this way: Suppose, BBH, that you had been playing MAME as long as you have, but did not find out about MARP until now. What would happen then is probably very similar to what's happening with NoMercy: You'd play 2, 3, 4 games that you've known a long time (so NOT learnt at an incredible rate) per day and upload the results. And you'd probably start with games you like and/or games you could most easily beat the MARP #1 on. So for a few weeks or months, you would upload several recordings a day, and almost all of them would be number 1 scores.
All I'm trying to say is that I very much doubt that even if it is not Vaz or anybody else we know, that that person is just now learning all those games.
My second point is regarding the MAME version used. As some of you already know, there is a slight difference in the header of Windows recordings and DOS recordings. To wit, WinMAME puts the version number of the MAME version used in the header, whereas DOSMAME does not. The few NoMercy .inps I've looked at did not have the version number in the header, meaning that either (1) they were really recorded with a DOS version, or (2) they were, but the version number was subsequently edited out. Here's an idea: Yes, Vaz used to use Windows versions of MAME, but... he used MAMELang32, not the "official" MAME32. Maybe his DoDonPachi recording plays back all the way with MAMELang32 37b11?
I am not sure if it's to throw us off his trail. There are two very good reasons for using a DOS version assuming NoMercy is Vaz and assuming he has decided to cheat his way to the top: (1) Vaz has been active on the Hall Of MAME, and only the latest DOS version is allowed there. (2) Re-recording... . Unless you roll your own WinMAME, you can't re-record on it. Re-recording is possible with the DOS versions. Maybe "he" (whoever "he" is) is not even using slowdown, but re-recording. As I've mentioned before, slowing a game down and then holding the keys longer and pressing less fast to mask out the slowdown is very hard to do. NoMercy's statistics look perfectly legal to me. Now if somebody told me NoMercy was definitely cheating and I was told to find out which way(s) of cheating he used, then, based on what I've seen, I'd say he re-recorded. Hmm... wait... that wouldn't explain some of his recordings not playing back.
Just some thoughts.
And I know I made a remark on IRC that maybe YOU were NoMercy, BBH. Just to make sure: I was kidding.
Finally: IP addresses. If NoMercy would make a post on the MARP board, then we (read: Zwaxy or Gameboy) can see the IP address it was posted from. But we don't even have to wait for that. Most servers keep logs, so it's possible that every upload to MARP is logged already, and, if not, it should not be hard for Zwaxy to log IP address and filename for every MARP upload...
Cheers, Ben Jos.
-- Anonymous, February 14, 2001
Ok. You ask if I would get as many first places as quickly as NoMercy did when I came to MARP? That's hard to say, because I was with MARP from the beginning and didn't have many games to UL on that I thought was all that good at. Three years later it's a different story since MAME supports so many games, so it's possible. But still, look how quickly he retaliated and beat Hisa on Final Star Force. He doubled his score in less than 24 hours. People don't beat Hisa-Chan every day, and nobody has ever TAKEN BACK a score once Hisa beat them again on it.As for re-recording, is it still possible in the newer versions? He could very well be doing this though. And I don't mean any disrespect, but analinp can't be the be-all and end-all when it comes to detecting cheating...
And yeah, I know you were just joking about me possibly being NoMercy, but I was saying that for the others too. :)
Now, I've noticed a couple other things today. I have realized one more thing that further proves it's Vaz - the timestamp. The other night I was online in #marp when phuquenut gave a score upload notice saying NoMercy had uploaded on the Time Attack mode of Dangun Feveron. It was a little after Midnight in Central time zone when this happened, I think. I downloaded the recording to check the time on it, and it says it was recorded at 5:55 am the next day. About six hours ahead. Italy is about six or seven hours ahead of Central time zone IIRC. Now how's that for a strange coincidence?
Also, look at his new Terminator 2 recording (a game that Vaz had uploaded in, who woulda guessed). Maybe it's just me but it looks like he's gotten pretty damn accurate with that mouse huh? It's like a smaller-scale version of Phil Lamat's infamous Crystal Castles crap from T2. This could be the recording we needed to nail him on slowdown. Please, take a look at NoMercy's inp and compare it to mine and Vaz's old score. He manages to get that cursor on those endoskeletons with uncanny precision compared to the previous scores. I'm sure his Operation Wolf inps would be a similar story if those played back.
The case against him is looking better and better, I think action needs to be taken ASAP.
-Matt
-- Anonymous, February 15, 2001
I am pretty sure re-recording is still possible with the newer versions of MAME, although I haven't tried. I mean, I haven't tested if it is still possible with every new release.I am very aware that analinp isn't everything. It is nice to put some hard figures on things, but other than that... . I myself have said several times that we needed a few editors that are familiar with and good at lots of games in order to spot irregularities that our programs don't and that the untrained eye (especially mine) would miss. I myself don't actually watch a lot of recordings partially for that reason and partially because I am lazy.
Some more observations:
Vaz's last recording on MARP (bluehawk) was made with m37b9 (so DOS, not Windows).
Very good catch on the timezone thing. Although, from downloading a dozen or so of NoMercy's recordings and comparing the time of the upload (according to MARP) to the timestamp on the .inp, I'd say NoMercy is in a GMT timezone country (UK, Ireland, Portugal, ...), not GMT+1 (which they have in Italy). As far as I can see, NoMercy records a game, then immediately zips it and submits it, except when playing several versions of the same game. For instance: He played both batrider and batridra before uploading both at the same time.
The timestamp on most of his .inps is 3 or 4 minutes later than the time of upload according to MARP. So either he waits almost an hour before uploading, or he immediately zips and uploads, but the clock on his computer is a few minutes fast. I think the latter is the case. I haven't looked at all of them, though. If I can find a recording of his on which the timestamp is close to an hour ahead of the MARP upload time, I'll accept he's in GMT+1.
I'll try to remember comparing those two recordings this weekend.
Also, it might be a good idea to start downloading all the Vaz recordings that are left on MARP before they all will have disappeared. Because if NoMercy and Vaz are indeed the same person, then why else was Vaz so insistent that his recordings all be deleted? Could it be that he thinks there are things in his recordings that might give him away? Or does he just want to cover all his tracks and not want people to compare NoMercy's recordings to Vaz's recordings? Or could he even have used some of his old recordings as a basis for re-recording?
Hmm... didn't you say you received an e-mail from NoMercy once? I just checked and if you send something through HotMail, it will still have the IP address of the sender in the header... (isn't it great to have someone with a HotMail account send you several e-mails a day? :- )). If I misremember and he didn't, maybe you could send him an e- mail congratulating him on some score or something and hope he replies. Just make sure first, of course, that you have a way to get to see all the header lines of e-mails. Well, it's probably easier if we talk about this on IRC tonight.
Cheers, Ben Jos.
-- Anonymous, February 15, 2001