Farewell Update from Former Moderator BahamutVoid of Retro Achievements
To see BahamutVoid’s developed sets on RA, click here.
Mirrored at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of BahamutVoid in leaving his original letter. If you have any concerns with this mirror, please reach out to clymax directly.
October 12, 2025
In light of the number of responses I have received from what I thought to be respected members of this community, I am now convinced that this issue goes beyond just upper management. Not exactly sure how you got my email but yet another loose end to clear up.
I don’t know how to respond to being informed that I’ve overreacted and destroyed 5 years of my life just because some personal information was sent to me from someone using an alt account.
Brushing it away as me being salty that some “disgusting games aren’t allowed achievements”. I wouldn’t throw away all my time here just because of a decision I disagreed with.
I feel that it’s for the benefit of the community as a whole that previous events should be given a similar level of transparency. I’ve added them to the files at the bottom of this document. I have also included the same disclaimer that nothing here is meant for harm of any kind.
I have added these sections to highlight the other problems of site growth:
- “Legitimacy” and “Cheating Epidemic”.
As well as personal gripes about how myself and other moderators hid important events from the community. While at the time it seemed to be a reasonable stance to shield the community from the effects of any drama, I still don’t know if it was the right choice longterm.
It’s often claimed by the community that you want as much transparency as possible, but evidently that’s not true if it’s an uncomfortable truth.
I trust in the community’s ability to think for themselves. Even if the running in-joke is that nobody on RA can read.
Even if you don’t agree with any of this, I just ask that you consider that I loved this site for 5 years and that none of this is okay.
I want it understood that I never made anyone aware of this archive before making it public, especially not to use as a threat. I did not want to use these backups to coerce anyone into a decision fearing backlash, since it would only make me as bad as those I condemn.
DO NOT use anything within this archive as a means to, in any way, harass or otherwise cause harm to anyone included.
This is meant to be for transparency only.
If you want to see change on the site, its administration, or anyone in its community, I insist that you do so civilly.
I was targeted during all of this, when there’s a different crisis there’s nothing suggesting the same won’t happen to you too.
Legitimacy
It’s common knowledge within the community that the concept of RetroAchievements can encourage piracy. We discourage discussion about it, obviously for legal purposes, but also because it would otherwise highlight that the events we host can motivate users to break their country’s laws for time-limited event badges and role incentives.
It’s unlikely that users shell out up to hundreds of dollars for events that only expect you to make partial progression, with the majority who participate never passing that point. Many events like Achievement of the Week require consistent participation over the entire year, with each week dedicated to a specific game, for the best community rewards. Evergreen events don’t have this issue but they’re not the norm.
For achievement sets that only accept the US versions of games, do the large European userbase all obtain this legally when they only have a week to participate? Shipping takes forever.
Unfortunately for the large US userbase, we actively encourage all sets to mainly support the European versions. This is typically done to support as many languages as possible.
There’s even archives explicitly made for RA’s supported versions. A lot of the names match up and this archive has been up uninterrupted, and management have known about it, for years.
- Shown in the “Web – Retroachievements Collection” image. (This is not an endorsement to use this. Legally obtain your games.)
If you think I’m a monster for pointing this out, consider that everybody thinks they’ll get away with something until the moment they don’t. Decide for yourself how much you’re willing to risk.
Anything supported on RA’s Arcade platform requires hyper-specific versions of each game. The majority of the community struggle to patch games, they certainly aren’t going through the nightmare of dealing with specific arcade boards just make sure it accurately matches what FBNeo expects.
This isn’t even counting games of such limited availability that anybody playing likely had to obtain them illegally.
I know it’s RETROachievements but I’m not even sure how many copies of those official competition carts even still exist.
During my time as a moderator, the amount of times I’ve had to delete people joking about their “legally dumped roms ;)” is too many to count. Or just outright admitting that they’re pirating or asking for links.
Projects like RA are always at risk which is why there’s a disclaimer. This is especially true for those with a large Patreon. The many users over the years who mention any kind of piracy only expose the entire project to takedowns.
The events that are either time limited, and/or require a specific game or version, for on-site rewards, ultimately encourages users to choose the more convenient option. The used game market’s extortion only makes it more apparent.
Due to the sheer size of the site and limited amounts of developers, it’s unrealistic for most sets to ever have multiple versions supported properly, most needing an entire rewrite to do so, in an effort to discourage piracy. The majority of the live sets do not have active developers.
Cheating Epidemic
RA largely operates on a spirit of fair play. A team untracks users who break RA’s rules in the site cleanup forum. While the higher ups don’t see this as a punitive action, users are harassed over this. Many mods and admins have publicly called out cheaters within the public channels as a spectacle despite it being against RA’s rules.
Users are wilfully lied to that they have a good way of detecting cheaters. In reality they can only detect obvious ones, and sometimes not even then.
Even right now users are using a save editor for Pokemon XD in the RA Roulette event to check for values they shouldn’t be able to see in normal gameplay. There is currently no way of checking that they aren’t also using it to edit the values in themselves. I’ve included these as files titled:
- “PKHex – The most normalised save editor that users think isn’t against the rules”
- “PKHex – Previously untracked user jokes about something that would get them untracked”
As I’m writing this, there’s a discussion of how mods normally delete every mention of it since an emulator update just bundled the feature into it. - Shown in “mod-forum – AfterPlay PKHex + Licensing”
Cheat discussion has no consistency. Sometimes it’s looking at timestamps, sometimes it’s based on comments, sometimes it’s based on vibes. There is an unfair belief that if you are simply that good at games, you should have an online presence and recordings showing that skill off.
While we now have the ability to see if achievements were manually unlocked by staff, that data only goes back for a certain amount of time. If you’ve had a group of achievements manually unlock long enough ago, congratulations! To the site, you look like a cheater. Even worse is that I still don’t know if this accounts for network difficulties. We always say that if you go offline during play, make sure you stay in-game when you connect so that the server can register them. You should probably check when that happens to see if anything unlocked has almost identical timestamps.
When untracked, there are multiple options on how to handle it: ask the user to reset specific achievement(s), specific set(s), or their entire profile. Currently there is no way for the server to re-lock an achievement.
The reason you only hear about full profile untracks is because the team will stalk your history and often use anything that looks suspect enough to justify it. The view is that someone who’s cheated once will likely have done it again.
There is no appeal process. They will never tell you what got you caught, the intent is that you either won’t learn to cheat better or will admit to games that weren’t included in their discussion. What if an achievement mistriggers?
Importantly this also leaves you entirely at the mercy of a small group of enthusiasts, that while having a range of gaming history, don’t have the knowledge necessary to fully be a judge, jury, and executioner for every set we have available.
If you’ve been on the site for a long time you will realistically never be able to appeal a false untrack, especially if you’ve been untracked previously. This is made more apparent by the untrack being applied long after the vote, unless a mod/admin decides to pull the switch early.
There have already been exceptions for users that have community influence or an external platform, out of fear of backlash. Check out the site-cleanup thread on Miaguwu to see how they’re treated differently from anyone else who would record themselves breaking the rules.
- Shown in the “RetroAchievements.org Workshop – cleanup-forum – Mia [1403895786361589921]” thread
Let’s apply the same thinking to someone else, we’ve joked in the past that Auburn’s unlock history is enough to make Infernum blush. Does that mean it’s fine to assume they’re cheating too? Or course not. You cannot use the site’s current measures to accurately detect cheating for high level play.
The concern you may be feeling is that higher role members may not be looked into with a similar level of scrutiny. The limited time of an already overworked and ill-equipped volunteer team manually looking into a trusted member of the site, on the off chance there’s something amiss enough to be picked up, could easily be handwaved as unnecessary. Especially because the report has a high chance of being seen by the same person.
This is not intended as an accusation, but simply highlighting the way reports are unlikely to be examined evenly.
This shouldn’t need pointing out but do not harass anyone over this, it’s never okay even if you think someone is in the wrong. Don’t witchhunt or otherwise try to guess if anyone’s not 100% following the rules. It should never have beeen on the community to snitch on each other.
Also don’t fault the volunteers who dedicate their time to this thankless task of tracking down cheaters while knowing they’ll never catch the majority, especially when the tools don’t support that level of efficiency or accuracy.
RA created this culture that only the hardcore leaderboard matters despite its entire concept being flawed from the beginning.
Some people start off hopeful and change their minds. Some want to fit in with the mastery-focused vocal minority and resort to the easier answer of rule breaking. The site’s requirement of masteries for badges, reinforces that this is the “correct” way to engage, further pushing users towards these methods. This mindset also biases non-developers towards wanting to dictate set design, compounding the excessive reports to DevComp mentioned before. When caught cheating, and untracked, a user either has to risk harassment or reset all acknowledgement that they ever played on the site.
This is what I consider to be the biggest issue I never solved at RA. During the team’s setup, nobody involved had any idea how to structure it fairly. We just went with the flow until we settled on whatever worked. I still dread that we have unfairly untracked users knowing they had no way of defending themselves.
We are the only achievement community that actively bans exploits while in others would say it’s the developers fault for not fixing. We add so many clarifying statements to each rule and it never ends up being enough.
Achievement hunters in general are the best at finding and abusing any loophole they can find.
I’ve had no end of issues from cheaters in Monster Hunter sets, either using hacked quests or playing with cheaters online. It’s just not “seen” as being against the rules and is essentially invisible to any tools.
I mentioned during the initial discussion thread for this whole thing that RA’s Achievement Hunting Rules aren’t even a requirement to read during site signup.
I had a long-standing wish, and have made it clear multiple times, that I want to see an option to downgrade a user’s profile to non-hardcore so that those caught off-guard by RA’s rules have an option besides losing all record of their interactions with RA. The addition of the Beat system, while initially well-received, ultimately failed to give Beats the needed weight to be valued as a true alternative to masteries.
Others try to address this problem by catching and removing as many cheaters as possible. Some developers, even on the cheat team, intentionally create hard achievements, subsets, or even fake leaderboards as a honeypot because it’s so difficult to actually catch someone in the act.
Over time the site and emulators have gotten better at identifying player sessions, achievement resets, and even your emulator, core, and operating system. I admittedly haden’t ever looked into how much personal user data is stored on the server. Only a few select people have access to that. All I know is that resetting an achievement still keeps a recording of the unlock.
It’s never going to be enough. The site is too big and it has been acknowledged by admins multiple times that any meaningful effort to crack down harder on cheating would always have a way to be bypassed. Modern game developers can’t even crack down on this epidemic, why would hobbyists be able to? Do you want anti-cheat at a kernel level and to always be online?
- Shown in “Workshop – cleanup-private” channel
That is one of RA’s dirty secrets. RA has always been based on an honour system and we pretend it’s not. The hollow hope is that people don’t know how to cheat or won’t if the option isn’t easily accessible, a viewpoint that gets challenged constantly since we routinely find that exploits are being shared around in secret, for years, that bypass any restrictions we could ever hope to enforce.
Plenty of users have already used emulator features before signing up for RA and don’t enjoy being judged for playing in non-hardcore.
When we untrack users who record themselves cheating that ends up being the only evidence, because everything on the site indicates they’re playing completely legitmately. The hardcore leaderboard is not fair. How many users in the Top 1000 do you know have been untracked? How many still there do you think cheat?
We should’ve been providing alternatives to these players rather than focusing on punishment and rejection. The community commonly rejects what they think to be excessively hard achievements, or report them as Unwelcome Concepts, because it’s seen as the only option for them.
Sunk cost fallacy is a real issue that you shouldn’t be surprised affects a community project dedicated to celebrating dopamine hits.
The only real option was to deincentvise masteries since it becomes apparent that a suprising amount of the community, even some that have been here for years, only get caught when they get too comfortable and slipup. The problem is that slipup may be indistinguishable from achievement logic errors or network issues and you wouldn’t get punished, or you get so many of this issues that it’s a sign you are cheating even if you aren’t. Ultimately, there’s not solid information to be certain either way. And if you haven’t recorded your skill online, or nobody on the team can vouch for you, and you get untracked, you’re never going to be able to appeal it.
LillyJade
The first interaction I really remember of you was when you and other users tried to force Dolphin support into existence by claiming it was ready for release all the way back in February 2023. While your enthusiasm for the site was always publicly appreciated, I don’t think you’ve ever understood the lasting damage done from you painting both the mods and admins in a bad light, and forcing us to be the bearers of bad news that Dolphin was, not in fact, ready for even a rollout. It didn’t even have hashing, it was hardcoded into the emulator to match Sonic Adventure 2. I’m honestly surprised it was never deleted.
- Shown in the “Dolphin Announcement by Lilly” image from the “RetroAchievements.org – gaming” channel
The upper teams then saw how you thought about RA in private. I am quoting you directly here because someone in your circle leaked it to us:
“fuck their control, I’m an anarchist. a large portion of this project spawned out of conversations I had with Infernum about how Jamiras has effectively monopolized the code base and how he’d stonewall anyone who was attempting to contribute in any meaningful capacity. So he was the one I was primarily hiding this from.”
I cannot show proof of this without also dragging that person into this. Everyone else can feel free to ignore this quote if you don’t feel I’m trustworthy. This is just to inform Lilly that we knew you thought this the entire time we’ve worked with you.
At the time, you fell into the wrong crowd and tried to force change rather than working with us. If anyone genuinely still thinks Jamiras doesn’t actively encourage collaboration, you should put your money where your mouth is and reach out.
StingX2
I have not seen anything from you that negatively affected this situation. But since is my last chance to say anything to you, one of my biggest regrets as a moderator was responding so quickly to you previously posting threats towards members of mod and admin teams in the public channels, accidentally shielding you from community backlash.
You were removed as a moderator yourself for role abuse. You were removed from the original QA after demanding it be kept secret from the moderation team and turning it into Dev Police. Regardless of the community’s current opinion of Developer Compliance, what you tried to implement was magnitudes worse.
Time passed and we allowed you to return to a reformed QA, on the condition it was under permanent probation and you would be permanently barred from any higher roles. This was solely based on the perception that you had finally reviewed your behaviour and your appeal stating that you now only wanted to quietly contribute and never lead any decisions.
Despite this, you were removed once again. We received complaints from multiple members from multiple teams you were on stating how you made them uncomfortable by trying to force your views against their wishes. You also deliberately riled up developers against DevComp.
As with everything else in this writeup, I do not intent to make claims without evidence. All discussion is there in the archive.
I’ve also included the mod group messages deciding how we handled your situations. These are the files titled:
- “Group Chat – Sting’s threats and meltdown” thread
- “Group Chat – Revamp talks and Sting team removal” thread
Knowing your disdain for secrets and a desire for transparency in general, you may even see this as a positive.
The community never know how much the administration’s hands are always tied. We avoid divulging crucial information to the community solely due to how big of a contributor you’ve been and the platform you have.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/uphcw1ing1c9dlbtehq47/AO9xTwjUK2jKW-0xykV-92M?rlkey=c0jxiaic4zc7clt9aig7w7roz&st=fn81ofga&dl=0
https://1drv.ms/f/c/cae1d40ed6977a5b/EhWpPweNj3pPhEA6X_QH3UwBcTCUtSbraaPNDFX-GRC4yQ?e=cGlf5a
https://mega.nz/folder/vlpGVAhR#ysZYtwFb3OjPhKLtUFHbbw
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