RoyalFlare is shutting down!

[KirbyComment]

When you go to score.royalflare, you'll find a message stating that this website will be closing it's doors by the end of January. This is done because of the increasing rate of fake replays and because over time it becomes easier to create hard-to-detect cheated runs and thus a replay-only system is becoming less reliable. To add my own two cents on it, I also believe the site shuts down because there's little to no efforts being put into checking the validity of replays or having a report function, which did result in cheated runs that have stayed on the leaderboard to this day.

I'm not in the loop of what combined efforts are being put in the preserve replays, but the biggest blow in my own opinion to this loss is scene game scores. Royalflare is to my knowledge the only database that tracks these scores. I have at least spoken to Maribel and he's considering starting his own replay database. Perhaps a score version of LunarCast could be launched, since it has a Western replay-equivalent of replay.royalflare already. In any case, if you wanna be sure you have access to certain replays you think you might have a use for later on, you have until the end of January to download them.

[deice]

that's quite sad to hear. even though i never personally used the site (as i don't go for high score runs in the mainline games), this much data being potentially lost for good can only be an overall detriment for the community.

if there's no archiving effort being made at the moment, i can try putting together a script that scrapes replays off the site so that they may be preserved. if anyone's already archived them, or is in the process of doing so, they should probably post in this thread.

[KirbyComment]

Maribel is currently archiving the replays. I don't yet know in what way you can gain access to them though, but we'll know in due time.

[Arcorann]

Someone told ArchiveTeam about it already as well, so they should be grabbing everything public facing.

[KirbyComment]

Maribel archived the replay database on his own site. It contains all replays, including the history section and player standings for games that had them. What it also adds that the original site didn't have, is a player search and you can also sort the results by clicking the top of any column.

I will make sure to update all RF links in the spreadsheet in the Hall of Records thread to have the replay links from Maribel's database sometime soon.