guillavoie

The way the rules are worded, I would say that there's no difference between a 3-1 and 3-2 run, you have to add 10:00 minutes for not beating stage 3. But, just in case, post both of your runs so we can decide which of them is the best.

You guys are summing up, what I do think, is essential to tackle this challenge correctly!

Yes, you can upload it on youtube (or any other video hosting sites) and post the link here! This is actually the best way to check your time.

Well they should be acceptable, since we already accept emulation. Naturally, just don't use any features not available when playing with a regular NES.

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Minor rules change (see OP)!!!

Oh, and last but not least, I am setting back the official ending time of the contest to 11:00 PM EST!

Man, it is totally up to you to participate or not in the round 2 competition, and I will respect your decision whatever you decide. But, by principle, we will leave the opportunity open for you to join in all week long, only because it is what was judged as the best resolution for the situation. If you don't post a score, then the result will be that you accepted the first round elimination and nothing will be affected for the other players. But, you sure know that I wish you'd play, haha!

Yes, no more brackets, for two reasons : 1. It allows us to make this 9 players second round exception possible. 2. In all honesty, the setup with 3 games and the fancy rules for points Bea came up with fits better in a pool elimination style round than a brackets round. I'm very happy to hear that you are satisfied with my arbitration, and I now thank you for weighting your opinion prior in the thread as it did gave me some good points to consider.

I also take the time to add that while this whole situation brought up some heated arguments and posts from some of the players, both Bea and I aren't taking it on a personal level. While there was indeed some abrasiveness in the tone of some of the posts, I can 100 % guarantee that a lot of the criticism and constructive comments will be taken in account when we will prepare and host next year's season. We value every players and their contribution to the contest, and this incident is something that we should construct upon to try to work for the contest in a constant betterment pattern, adjusting to what the players want and propose. In short, you guys still all rock!

Oh, and BTW, the most ironic fact about the ending time being set at midnight Brasilia time, is that if we truly followed what time was actually stated in the rules, all the contests would have ended on the Saturday 11:00 EST.

Okay ladies and gentlemen, I just reviewed the whole situation and I'm ready to give what I think is the most fair arbitration I could think of to solve the situation in the best interest of everyone involved here. First, about @the_wizard_666 not having his full screen in his pictures : ALL his scores are still valid, including his scores in the tournament that got called out. While the writing of the rules are made to be hyper strict, common sense always guided the arbitration of this contest in a case to case manner. We accepted tons of partial screenshots in the past based on the common sense knowledge that the submission setup was easily recognizable. The Wiz's 195,900 score stands. Now let's get on the most complicated problem of this whole situation. The end time of this year's contests being set by Brazil time. First off, I know for sure Bea did this for some reasons, but mainly because it is part of her host personality to make things to her image, and we all appreciate that. We know for sure it was mainly for fun as the time set at first was midnight in Brazil, so it could fit with our usual 11:00 PM EST time (which IS the official VGS time) which have been our contests' end time standard for more than a decade. Now, I'll be plainly frank here, I personally think that the idea of the end time of the contests doesn't follow with DST and suddenly change to 10:00 EST because of that is absolutely nonsensical, especially since the contests have ended on 11:00 PM EST for so LONG! But let's play the game that this was in the rules so if you don't read them correctly every week (despite being the same piece of writing every damn week that shouldn't account for any major changes) than you can be in the wrong. For one, the change of the contest ending time from 11:00 EST to 10:00 EST was such an important change that it should have been mentioned in a totally exaggerated fashion. This thing warranted a special treatment in the rules, like using 72 pt font in red, underlined in bold characters with a million exclamation points following. This change being not given any kind of advertising puts any mistake made regarding it on us, 100 %. Not only that, but we have a history of being very reasonable on accepting slightly late submissions in the past. The times that we were highly strict on the ending for submission was when the late submission in question would land in the top positions on the leaderboard, which brings me to reevaluate the Holy Diver week's rankings. @PIIand @NESfiend both made late submission within the 10:00-11:00 EST frame, cause they thought that the ending was still 11:00 EST. They were basically just told 'Brasilia time doesn't follow DST so your score is invalid'. I take the liberty here to weight in on this, even weeks after the fact, to accept these scores as valid for two main reasons, and that, even if it gives that week's victory to Pii. 1. The complete lack of warning from us that the ending time was affected by the DST not being applied in Brasilia time. 2. Because it is, without a doubt, the most excusable error I have ever seen in the history of the contest to make a late submission. We will do whatever changes needed to rectify this on the geral leaderboard, the good news being that it wouldn't have affected the rankings for the tournament's spots. Now, you guys and gals probably understand what this means for the arbitration of @bertsampson's score in this first week of the tournament, right? Given that bert was truly unaware of the ending time change (in EST, which was not highlighted in any shape or form by us), we will accept his 7 minutes late submission since it was posted before the 'old standard' ending time of 11:00 EST. So, bert's 200,830 score is valid. One would think that since both The Wiz and bert's scores are valid, bert is the one advancing to next round and Mike gets eliminated. But this is not what I will propose, for the following reason. As I have reasonable doubt that The Wiz could have hypothetically reacted to bert's 200,850 score posted at 10:07 EST, and would have the chance to make a higher score given some plausible circumstances, I just cannot eliminating him on these premises as it would be unfair. So exceptionally, and because of these very unusual circumstances adding up to one another, both bert and The Wiz are permitted to play in the second round of the tournament along with the other 7 winners of round 1. But, there's a twist in order to not make it unfair to those 7 other players. Only one of them will be able to advance to the final round, which means that round 2 will also play as an extension of round 1 for them. If both of them end up being in the 4 best scores for round 2, only the best ranked of them will pass and the 5th rank player will earn the 4th spot for the final. I hope this solution will make everyone happy and willing to resume the competition for the 2021 tournament, despite these unusual circumstances.

Having Legacy of the Wizard as a limited option definitely made you a better person in the long run!

Yeah! Let's get this NA/VGS/XMAS tradition a proper and ceremonial drawing! I'm in!

RC Pro-Am II, a childhood NES favorite of mine! We used to rent it and have 4 players party night. Good times! I see that nobody named their character 'NES' for starting with $5000 before race 1. Good thing cause it is now officially forbidden

What if it is someone who bought something for a good deal and then flip it immediately to HA in order to have more money to buy games he wants for his collection? What about someone that bought sealed games for decades as a hobby, and that now decide to sell off his games for life changing money?

Indeed, it does sound over the top too stupid to be true, and I do hope it is, lol. But on the other hand you never know how ridiculous people can be about prices on eBay sometimes.

I love the 'we wish you well' overall tone of this, lol! That's crazy to send a message like that, let alone the fact he's just hoping to pump a game at $270. BTW, no chance that it is rarebucky, not his style at all.

Playing left at hockey is being righty. The real test is playing golf, cause for some reason our fathers were playing hockey lefty and golf righty, which makes no sense to me.

@Gloves, can you please provide our good pal Karl here with all the info you have on this? Jeff and gocollect have certainly been careless about preserving the forum and database in the shape it was. Was it a conscious hit at hiding knowledge about the video game market is something possible, though harder to prove. IMO, if this was the goal, he kind of failed, as there was nothing in the database that could be really useful to know how the sealed market was going and unfolding.

Indeed, the idea that NA was nuked instantly from the moment it was bought by Jeff is nonsensical. It took well over a year for the forum to disappear, and it wasn't because Jeff deleted it, the server tech expired by a precise date (something like that, Gloves could explain further). His plan to preserve the forum was a joke, but still, all the threads are still searchable somehow in the gocollect version of it, though largely chaotic to navigate. The database was a very useful tool, but honestly, it had absolutely no utility regarding gathering any info on the sealed market.

I don't think Karl said that, and personally I thought that the cliff note you're highlighting was referring to the part about the guy explaining how his father (I think it was his father, not sure) used to rebuy some of his collectibles just to have a new higher price sale data point in time (but I might certainly be wrong here).

I did a goofy search on google and found a thread on a pokemon cards collectors' site that is quite interesting for the contrast in discussion VS what we have here. Just thought I'd share for the fun of it, and because it is sometimes a good idea to take a step back from the heat : https://efour.proboards.com/thread/25034/jobst-video-heritage-market-manipulation

Oh man, this brings back memories, this video was so funny, lol!

That's PAL, there's some Netherlands stuff written on it. Plus, canadian first party games were distributed by Mattel.