To see dude1286’s developed sets on RA, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube.
Mirrored at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of Moderator BahamutVoid in leaving his farewell letter not long after Administrator televandalist’s own resignation letter dropped. If you have any concerns with this mirror, please reach out to clymax directly.
October 4, 2025
Even if the game page gets removed, my statement has been made. I’ve been a Patreon sub since 2017 and I chose to give more than the $1. The handling of this game has made me drop support just like many modern game devs have done the same. I think this can all be attributed to creating the BluSky account, because it attracted the groups that don’t engage with things unless they find it offensive.
October 6, 2025
So… They are now going after all undesirable games on the site. Glad I dropped my Patreon support, as it seems this isn’t going to stop until the moral busybodies have their way.
And they will never be satiated.
October 6, 2025
Censorship is when you tell a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.
October 8, 2025
Its interesting that I’ve been seeing a lot of familiar faces when I still directly interacted in the community on [tele’s] side of this. I kind of dropped off at the when it came to the community before the Discord server was ever a thing. I still loved grabbing achievements, I’ve just been doing it silently. I’ve just been involved with other things since I’ve left college. Sad to see everything I once enjoyed being ruined by the same people who demand to be accepted by others when the only person that matters from is yourself.
To see JAM’s developed sets on RA, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube.
Mirrored at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of Moderator BahamutVoid in leaving his farewell letter not long after Administrator televandalist’s own resignation letter dropped. If you have any concerns with this mirror, please reach out to clymax directly.
Subheadings and formatting added during the editorial process.
(Topic locked by RA moderators before anyone could reply.)
October 7, 2025
Part One: Make hide certain games feature
I’ll add my 2 cents to the current situation about removing certain games from the site.
There is a filter like that on a certain hentai sites. If something is straight illegal, you won’t find it there. First, you agree that you are 18+ or older to enter. Then, if manga has very sensitive content, it gives you a warning, which makes sense. 95% of people just came to see anime boobies and they don’t want to suddenly see guro or scat. And when you see this warning, you have 3 options.
Go on the front page.
Agree to proceed and watch this manga.
Choose don’t warn me in future option to never get such a warning.
100% are happy and everyone could get what they want.
On RA now we have the opposite situation. 5% of users are forcing other 95% to do what these 5% want. Percents may vary but it’s clear that overwhelming majority don’t mind to have recently removed games to be on the site and don’t want RA to act like payment processors recently by forcing censoring and removal of certain stuff from Steam and other platforms. 100% are unhappy. Because you can waste your time mastering something that eventually could be wiped out from existence. Even not telling about deving sets that could be erased the same way. How could I say it’s 100% if this minority got what it wanted? They eventually may lose more than they gained now and get hatred and hate by the majority of players because they caused this.
What could be done on RA? Well, aside from “show mature content always” option there could be another warning about sensitive content. If you click to agree, then you can see the game set as it’s made for mature games now. Plus, an extra option in profile. Something like “Show games with sensitive content”. If that option is disabled, you will see games with sensitive content as “Unknown Game”. This is something about to be implemented and it’s not hard to do. But. These games should be on site as they were for years. And players should have right to play and master these games and earn points for them without worrying how sensitive vocal minorities will feel about it. Especially, after RA publically supported Stop Killing Games movement just 3 months ago. So, it found out these loud words worth nothing?
And I say it out loud. It’s not your business what other players are playing. Feel as you like to feel, judge them if you want but it’s totally up to them. If somebody plays something you don’t want to exist and you offended by it, it’s your problem.
(Now deleted because all wall comments by JAM have been deleted.)
October 9, 2025
Part Two: Response to tele
In our country internet censorship also started very slowly. Let’s just block some sites with CP and drugs. To protect kids of course! Now fast forward several years. Thousands of innocent sites are blocked. Most famous are YouTube and Discord. A lot of messengers they can’t control are blocked too. If they catch you using VPN to bypass the restrictions, you’ll go to jail. If you call war as “war”, not as “just special operation”, you’ll go to jail. And murderers are rapists who previously were in jail but voluntered to go to the war and now national heroes, same as WWII heroes.
RA was a sanctuary of all shitstorm happening in gaming industry for years and for me personally from the offline issues but not anymore because of recent events. I’m sick and tired of other people normalizing and standardizing the stuff for me. What I could or could not interact with, especially if it’s the legal stuff or if nobody was really asked about it. I prefer to do my own research. If it’s something really really bad then a warning would be enough and I’ll make a decision to continue or quit.
So, if there are still golden tickets left, give me one please. I want to believe.
Sad to see this… You are very wrong, Dragon. You will be remembered for your determination. As a player who mastered all but 1 Tetris sets. As a developer who make more people to know about the PS1 hidden gem. I was hoping to see you getting these last 2 achievements in Prince of Persia but it will not gonna happen. And I understand you too. What’s the point if eventually any challenge you completed will be nerfed, demoted or altered to fit some new standards? Or even just erased from existence as it happened with Clover, Perwinkle, 177, Custer’s Revenge and even 3 new games just a few days ago?
I’m very sorry from all of us for the treatment you got as junior developer. What once was a school to teach a new devs how to use achievement tools to a make sets became a bureacratic concentration camp where you will be eliminated for a slight disagree without a thought… We, as devs allowed this to happen, so I want to apologize from us all. I am doing this because the ones who is really guilty for that will never apologize as they happy now to control the people as they want.
May you find a peace in a better place. If there will be one, I’ll let you know.
(Now deleted because all wall comments by JAM have been deleted.)
October 27, 2025
Part Five: Response on Game Wall of Galerians (PSX), Aborted Junior Set of DimensionIceDragon
DimensionIceDragon: Someone renamed my achievements and didn’t even ask ME!!!!!
[Writing Team Member]: I worked with the Writing team to update them as unfortunately a lot of them did not meet the site’s Writing policy. If you’re an active dev, you are consulted, but at the time of updating you were no longer an active dev and hadn’t logged into the site for over 2 months.
You still have full credit for developing the set and none of your code or logic has been changed. The changes are all cosmetic, mostly in grammar & punctuation. However I did change some of the titles to add a little more flavour and I appreciate this is subjective. I apologise for causing any offence with these changes.
There is a changelog in the forum topic if you would like to see a ‘before and after’ and the reasoning behind it.
@[Writing Team Member]
You should have really asked. You have mastered this game which took a several hours. Writing a short message like “Hello, I want to fix the grammar in your set. There are some errors. Would you like to work together?” would take a few minutes or so? Is that too much? Grammar probably was a bit incorrect but why you started to alter the titles? To give some hints for the secret rooms? What if the set developer prefer to not give such hints and make players to explore the stuff for themselves?
Now a few cheevos has the wrong descriptions and tickets are open on them because of that. DimensionIce Dragon saw them and realized that everything was working well and even approved by a code reviewer back in time until someone came with “improvements” and now he’s being blamed for it. Not harassed, not bullied. Just asked “dude, why are your achievements not working?”. It became a final straw for him. Especially after what he got through as a junior developer. So, he have requested an account deletion that coming in a days… Was it worth it?
And I’d like to mention that I’m not attacking you, it’s nothing personal. But the approach in general. Posts like “hey, we came here and made this set better” without asking anyone really undermines efforts of the set developer, the time he spent doing these titles and for everyone it makes him look like he did a bad job. In reality English is not his first language but many people can think “he wasn’t even trying!”
Part Six: Response on Official Forum Topic for Writing Team’s Revised Banana Prince (NES)
Context: Post Leading to User Mute on June 22
So, when WritingTeam arrives and make some changes in public it’s basically saying to dev: “Your set sucks because the titles are generic and descriptions are vague and we are here to improve it” but when the original set dev complains about the changes made and have a vaild point, for some reason this is interpreted like “the angry dev is attacking the team, so please contact the team in private and make them still look like a heroes”. Am I wrong?
in the vast majority of cases inactive devs are also no longer active players on the site and haven’t logged in for years. Some are even banned or have deleted their accounts. That’s why it’s not required to contact inactive devs.
You are confusing the cause and the effect. “I am longer a developer, so screw this site. Nobody will contact me if anything anyways” is also happening very often but there are the cases when people are tired, lose interest and quit. And there are people who still here. That “inactive developer” term itself is very hypocritical thing IMO as both cases fell under it.
October 27, 2025
Since I had no time to answer to this earlier, I’d like to sum up things from my side…
The incorrect descriptions will be fixed (they may already have been fixed?).
WritingTeam will consider feedback about contacting active former devs and potentially make a process change/improvement.
If you notice issues with title/description rewrites, please contact WritingTeam directly rather than creating a public callout. The whole team sees your messages to that account, so it’s more likely for the issue to be addressed ASAP.
My answer to this proposition is “no”. It’s rule to the one side and just a suggestion to the another one. I already saw how the descriptions were changed from a bit vague (but only to players who didn’t actually played the game) to some nonsence and when the team have been contacted, they fixed the mistakes but did not do what set dev wanted and all that was before the closed doors. And I already see situations like this continue to happening, so nothing is changed. As being said, it’s not a single case. 2 cases for only Xanders. He made only 4 sets and 2 of them (that’s 50%!!!) had the wrong descriptions after changing them. I’m glad that it’s fixed now but I personally know more than 5 of such cases, including my own achievement where “5-2” somehow became “5-1”:
Another time it caused achievement with wrong description got demoted because it looked like it’s something completely RNG while it wasn’t. Who will fix that?
Nobody asked for these improvements in the first place. The last case happened just recently and it was the last straw for developer who decided to delete his account after he found out about it. Of course, everyone is making mistakes, but imagine some dev will go to fix problematic set but only make things worse as a result. He will get instant punishment and probably demotion to jr. if he won’t fix this stuff fast enough because “we have too many devs right now”.
What I’d like to see here is a responsibility and accountability for all teams. At least, make tickets for the former/inactive devs be addressed to the ones who made the last change, even if it’s just a description or a badge that could had some hint. At most, get rid of this blatant “inactive dev” term and learn new grossary:
a. dev who is around and cares about his stuff; b. dev who is around but don’t care about his stuff anymore; c. dev who is not around but cares about his stuff and can come if anything; d. dev who is not around and don’t care about his stuff anymore.
You are smart guys with native English skills. I’m sure you can figure out how to name stuff.
All of us want accurate & well-written achievements that make a better experience for the players! Let’s stay respectful and focus on ways we can constructively improve the site.
Please don’t speak for everyone. Sometimes people prefer to have a vague stuff in description like “find a secret room in chapter 3” rather than “in chapter 3, having item X in inventory, come to site Y and do Z to open a secret room” or a short, clear, eye-catchy and compact descriptions like “Beat the game without dying [Hard, 3 continues]” rather than “Beat the game without dying at least once playing on hard mode blah-blah-blah”. And I prefer to write numbers as I like. Something like “1,424.5” makes my mind boil every time I see it. Because in many countries including my own the decimal point is not the point but comma instead and there are no thousands separators, though blank is used for a large numbers. Besides, in the retro games (sorry, but I refuse to call PS2, GameCube and Wii as retro) we usually just had 6 or 7 figures without any commas and people knew how many points they do have. What’s the point to write “50,000 points in description” while it’s displayed as “50000” in game? People became blind since 1980’s and not being able to see how many figures are there?
We could discuss these things beforehand but unfortunately there were no discussion and this Writing Policy was just implemented without asking the community or even developers while things like implementing the “beat the game” feature has a wide discussion. I don’t remember how majority of the community was asking for that writing policy guidebook.
Also, I don’t like the mentality of “if WritingTeam has not fixed the achievement titles, then dev made a bad job” by default. Not sure when came from, but it should go away. So, I’m asking for WritingTeam to Stop Killing Sets. You think that you’re helping when in reality you’re killing RA lore with your improvements when nobody asking you for doing so. If somebody does that then I see a problem right here. And I wish before touching anyone else’s work the people were reading Hippocratic Oath each single time.
I appreciate the improvement when it’s actually improvement and replacing of something generic like titles like “Stage 1”, “Stage 2” etc. or if there are real typos in descriptions. But what if it’s not improvement? The question “what if I don’t like the some new achievement titles?” still remains open and unaddressed. If people behind the scenes are often talking like “another set was ruined by WritingTeam” or “another piece of RA lore was destroyed” and even for some of them it’s the last straw and they are deleting their accounts then something is definitely off.
Part Seven: Response on Official Forum Topic for Deplatformed Game, Hokuto no Ken (Master System)
So, seems like, I was right after all and you are targeting “the problematic devs” and their content for any tiny far-fetched pretext.
Here’s a little sum up:
August. Rockman 5 set was demoted because suddenly not all cores are supporting it. A set from UnsolidSnake, a person you certainly hate. Though the partial memory exposure or instabilities in some cores was never was a problem for this site and Rockman 5 isn’t the only set with recently exposed ScratchPad memory. At least 2 more Rockman sets are using it in cheevos but for some reason only this one was demoted.
September. The “Can I play Daddy?” subset by me which was nothing but April joke based on crazy subset hype at that point and the joke the game developers themselves did about newbie players. Again from all such events only mine don’t follow some standards and should be erased.
October. Hokuto no Ken by Anic. Another problematic dev. Though 2 versions of the game that are different enough to have their own sets. it was OK to have 2 versions for years but suddenly this one needs to be removed?
Don’t know about you but I clearly see the pattern here.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
— Ian Fleming
Do this witch hunt several times and then “just clarify the rules how we are already handling stuff”.
And speaking about this specific game. The Japanese version IS being the original and the English looks like bootleg. Official though. I know Hokuto no Ken or Fist of the North Star series and it’s based on anime and manga but what is this Black Belt thing? I see no consistency here, especially after continuously and forcefully trying to separate Pokemon regional sets which IMO have even less difference than here. Also, using your power to undo the community poll for devs to separate these 2 versions which was publicly announced at the Black Belt topic really makes your team looks in a bad light on public. And if it was your decision to allow regional set 3 years ago then it’s even worse for you.
(Now deleted because all wall comments by JAM have been deleted.)
October 27, 2025
Part Eight: Second Response to tele
I appreciate what you’re trying to do, tele. I mean, to return the status quo.
But it’s way too late for that. As if apply a makeup to a corpse to make it look better. But nobody is talking about it.
The corpse is just dressed in a military uniform with more and more awards to be added even after its death, where every new supported system or every major event being such an award.
This place is FUBAR and at this point a fork is inevitable.
Even the founder resign and the total wipeout of all existing teams with major power shift to free style with total transparency would not help.
November 10, 2025
Part Nine: Site Mute
I was muted for 2 months on Oct 27.
I made a few posts after I noticed 3 more games were removed from the site.
A formal reason they gave me is threatening the other person in private messages while there was no real threat and they usually don’t send any message at all when they mute you.
You just realize you can’t post any message by yourself.
What I actually did is asked for some respect when reporting others, explained that putting your feelings over community interests by reporting active developers for insignificant violations is probably not a good idea.
The user was pretty hostile over me, mentioned me in negative light, so I also told him about 10% of things I actually did for the site as I prefer to do actually things, not to yell on every crossroad how cool I am that I fixed a single ticket or added a leaderboard or two to the set.
The real reason was my reaction to removal of 3 more games (while they promised to keep the list low) while things gone quiet and discovered and exposed a pattern of targeting the content of the developers they don’t like, which you can read here.
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.
[Editor’s note: links at least temporarily removed at the specific request of and pending potential discussion with RA.]
You can follow IzaNamiZXon RA; for the player rankings, click here.
Mirrored at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of Moderator BahamutVoid in leaving his farewell letter not long after Administrator televandalist’s own resignation letter dropped.If you have any concerns with this mirror, please reach out to clymax directly.
I would also be very interested in a community fork myself. I’ve been following the Clover incident since the beginning, reading the posts as it developed, but I was concerned to comment directly what I thought in the forum topic or on the Discord, since I get the impression like those who have shared views similar to my own aren’t being listened to anyhow.
Part of what drew me to RA (besides the achievements/leaderboard) was the laid-back and “free” atmosphere that reminded me of old websites that had a real sense of community.
That said, I was disappointed at how it all turned out, but I’m glad that [tele] and several others have taken a stand in an attempt to keep RA what it is, and what made it cool in the first place, instead of listening to moral crusaders who barely engaged with the website prior to this.
