Comment by phire
4 hours ago
Speedrunning communities generally hate it when having more money leads to an advantage.
If you ban deliberately smudging/scratching the disc, then some runner with a lot of money will just buy a lot of copies of the disc, find the one that glitches the most consistently (because of pre-existing scratches, or even manufacturing defects that aren’t visible)
Allowing some kind of mod is the most equitable compromise.
They typically ban the glitch entirely. For example cartridge manipulation or "CD streaming" glitches in Zelda speedruns are banned, and if you submitted a run containing them while claiming the game did it on its own, they would probably tell you to get a new copy of the game.