The community really didn’t seem that upset about things when this originally broke, and team 0% told people to not go after the level maker, but here we fucking go anyway. I’m afraid all these clickbait headlines are going to bring down a stupid, unwarranted shitstorm on the poor guy who made the level.

He made it as a farewell gift to the Super Mario Maker community after making a bunch of other super hard levels that people regularly accused of being TAS’d (cheated) but weren’t, as proven when someone would eventually beat it.

Trimming the herbs was meant as a proof of concept joke to show that TAS’ing was possible on Switch hardware. He was planning on revealing it far far earlier, but life happened, he forgot, and left the scene. He didn’t realize that it might become the final boss of this shit. As soon as he realized he reached out to team 0%.

This isn’t some scandal with some nefarious evildoer “coming clean”. Just an unfortunate joke that hit the wrong place wrong time. This isn’t bittersweet. It just means they hit the goal earlier than expected.

I swear drama chasers are going to make this into a problem that doesn’t need to be, and doesn’t seem to be a problem for the actual people involved.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This strange confluence of events is the result of an admission by Ahoyo, the creator of Trimming the Herbs, who came clean Friday evening regarding his use of automated, tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) methods in creating the level.

That means he was able to use superhuman capabilities like slow-motion, rewinding, and frame advance to pre-record the precise set of perfectly timed inputs needed to craft the “creator clear” that was necessary to upload the level in the first place.

The TAS-based fraud behind Trimming the Herbs’ creation dates back to August 2017, when creator Ahoyo started a level design contest called PogChamp (named after the now-removed but then-popular Twitch emote).

Ahoyo added that the contest was “anything goes” and that creators would need to “try to push the limits” of the game, two statements that seem a bit ironic now that the truth about TTH’s TAS-based creation has come to light.

Later that month, Ahoyo was also one of the judges during the PogChamp contest finals, where level submissions were evaluated on a Twitch livesteam in the categories of flow, uniqueness, and difficulty.

Nowhere during the livestreamed level viewing does Ahoyo admit that Trimming the Herbs was created with automated tools, even though it would have been the perfect opportunity to reveal that particular bit of trolling.

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