Super Mario Maker seems to be having a minor cheating moment
Video here, but long story short (I'm not an expert, just tangentially aware of goings on):
The Super Mario Maker servers are getting shut down (just for the first game) on April 8th - a bunch of SMM players are on a campaign to make sure that no levels are left without a successful clear on the record books before "zero day".
There's 1 level left, a 10 second level from 2017 called Trimming The Herbs by a well known and liked SMM player/streamer who no longer has an online presence - naming them doesn't seem all that valuable to the story. Thus far nobody has beat it, with a few of the best players clocking 10s of hours so far.
There's some highly circumstantial suspicion that this may have been cheated, primarily from the player who's put the most recent time into attempting to clear it - the most damning detail comes at 3:07 in the linked video - the run is shown as if it is the first attempt after loading the level from the menu. This was standard practice at the time, but there would be a clear cut in the video where they removed failed attempts. This clear video contains 0 evidence of any cuts, implying that it was the first attempt after loading from the menu.
It's just incredibly hard to imagine how that would happen on a level that would have likely required 10,000s of attempts to complete in 2017, if not more.
The logistics of how cheating could have been executed are unclear at the moment - there are some known methods but none line up tremendously well with the existence of the clear video. As the linked video states, it's known that a hacked WiiU can be used to upload a level without actually beating it legit, but that wouldn't produce a clear video like we know exists for TTH. WiiU TAS tools weren't available in 2017 (quick google... they still aren't I think?). The player had AutoHotkey installed, but that's almost anti-evidence - it sucks at TASing because of inconsistency in its timings. My best bet if cheating were confirmed would be some kind of slow-down to record the clear vid, combined with a WiiU hack to get the level uploaded - i.e. two separate clears - one for the video, one for the upload. It doesn't look like slowdown is easy/doable on 2017 emulators, but it's my strongest guess.
It's all highly circumstantial (including a bunch of other individually weak components mentioned in the video, like "idk he kind of wasn't that good at SMM") but for me the story vaguely clicks together as - if you were looking to cheat in a game with no, what's the first thing you'd try? Tell me it's not AHK with an emulator lmao. When that doesn't work you move onto something else and maybe that works, idk. Like I say, all extremely circumstantial, and probably moot if they end up clearing the level in the next few weeks - which I suspect they will.
This is all wooly and unclear enough that I won't be tagging it at all, no interest in discoverability here, just thought the kind of people following me might be interested.
Another win for expert opinion - he admit it
Yeah Ahoyo admitted it was fake on the Team 0% Discord. He had access to a private TAS tool project.
It makes sense, to him it doesn't seem like he thought too much of it beyond wanting to make cool hard levels - he couldn't have foreseen it becoming a massive community-wide problem, and given that he pretty much vanished from the scene after posting it, I don't think you can call it a clout thing. Just an unfortunate result of seemingly harmless sleight-of-hand.
I'm calling this a win for expert opinion because the comments on every post/video about it being faked are rife with "evidence is flimsy, come back with hard evidence" comments, and this happens every time someone opens their mouth about their suspicions - it's hard to get hard evidence if nobody acknowledges the possibility, and it's usually very easy to disprove once the question is in the air if a person is being falsely accused. See this Trackmania case, where someone got too gung-ho with accusations and just talked to the person in question to resolve it.
Openly raising a question without malice is the easiest way to resolve it once harder evidence becomes impossible to gather. Just don't be weird about it.