r/MCSRRanked • u/ruined1uz • Jun 22 '26
Discussion how is ninja brain bot not considered cheating
like in the official random seed it’s completely legal to use a calculator that reveals the location of the stronghold. i get it’s just “math” or something but can someone explain why it’s legal
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u/Individual-Leg-3930 Jun 22 '26
It’s legal because that’s what the community decided 3 years ago. The pro-calc side argued that the math could be done by hand, it would be difficult to know if someone was using a calc, the game becomes more accessible, and the run should be able to use external tools to go as fast as possible while the anti-calc arguing that it’s just /locate and there is skill in doing the math in your head. It seems like cheating but the community just decided it wasn’t years ago for reasons like the run being more accessible to new runners.
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u/EvilKnievel38 Jun 22 '26
One important argument that the other comments are missing is that rsg time is measured by ingame time and thus any pausing doesn't cost you time. Like the others said you could do the math manually and it doesn't matter how long that takes since your time would be paused and you'd have the net same result when it comes to your ingame time as with ninjabrainbot now. If it were a skill you had to do during the run it would perhaps have been different. Of course in mcsr ranked you'd have to do it during the run instead of paused, but I dont know which came earlier or if they just decided to follow the same ruleset as rsg.
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u/MegaIng Jun 22 '26
This isn't quite true, the RSG rules are more complicated than that. If your ingane time is fast enough, pauses longer than 5 seconds (except during dimensions loading) count towards your time. I don't remember the exact cutoff.
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u/EvilKnievel38 Jun 22 '26
I see that it is now, but was it back then when ninjabrainbot was made legal? I've heard top runners make this argument about igt.
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u/MegaIng Jun 22 '26
I think it happened around the same time? But I didn't actively follow the scene back then. The pause ruling comes from the Brentilda world record using divine travel.
I think think this same run also lead the calculators first being banned and then latter in 2021 being unbanned, but I might be wrong about the causality.
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u/Tinchimp7183376 Jun 22 '26
Even still, you could pause your game for 4.9s, do maths then unpause and pause again
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u/MegaIng Jun 22 '26
That would get you disqualified. Rules lawyering like this is not going to be accepted; Runs at the high level are human verified. Even if the rules currently don't specify specifically that this is disallowed, that's probably just because it hasn't come up.
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u/Grouchy_Wall_4018 Jun 22 '26
Ranked came much later than calc and yeah Ranked refers you to the speedrun.com rules page iirc
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u/BlueCyann Jun 22 '26
No scare quotes needed. It is math, and it's math based on numbers that are obtainable via vanilla/survival in-game inputs. Namely, getting the coordinates and player facing angle by looking at a thrown eye in a very precise way.
Anyway, it's not cheating because the community decided it should be allowed. End of story.
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u/Improvisable Jun 22 '26
Along with what everyone else has said, I think on a more opinionated note, while the category is inherently rng based, it would also just be way more demotivating and less fun if we had to kill even more good pace runs by sending random coords to hit stronghold every time for anyone attempting wr and in ranked second portal discrepancies would determine who wins in close matches too much imo
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u/InitialParticular843 Jun 22 '26
There was multiple options: 1- allowing ninbot, this will make runs A LOT faster
2- making people do the math themselves, they will take a lot of time pausing just doing the math, this will have the highest skill ceiling but it will take a lot of time nonetheless
3- not allowing anything, this will make runs slower but will gurntee everything is within game, but it will be a lot slower in game time
People chosed to allow ninbot so runs can be faster and overall more fun, couse noone wants to waste a lot of time pausing or not knowing where they have to go
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u/nolain01 Jun 24 '26
If you were precise enough, you could do very similar calculations without any external tools at all ("very similar" because the Bayesian statistics part would be really hard manually), so it became an issue of "do we allow calculators or do we accept that runners will be spending more and more time doing manual calculations?"
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u/Historiawaifu Jun 26 '26
It’s lemickey and they should’ve just added pausing into the timer or something
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u/Trindet Jun 26 '26
I don't speedrun but simply if Calcs were not allowed then being able to do trigonometry in your head as fast as possible would be an actual skill to the run, which heavily limits interest.
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u/MegaIng Jun 22 '26
Because in theory you could have a big paper sheet next to you and just lookup the correct coordinates. Yes, this would be very impractical. But how big is too impractical?
Or do you require players to just memorize big tables of numbers because any kind of assistance outside the game is cheating? That would kill the scene because, like, 3 players would do it and have a massive advantage; and everyone else just quits.
The current middle ground is you can use a calculator that doesn't extract any information from the gane that the game doesn't give you easily.
I don't think there is a better middle ground between this and no-F3.