Linkers

Since a Council (n°20) meeting made last 13th January 2024, the VGR Council decided that use of linkers will now be forbidden in VGR.

Following some recent problems we had with people playing emulator, or Wii Virtual Console; regarding the time spent to manage these cases and the time to explain and answer with details, it's now time to announce this on the public forum, despite it's not yet active/applied and written in the Rules.
I hope these explanations will help people to better understand the situation.

• Wikipedia (France) definition ( source: link )

A DS linker is a tool whose main purpose is to run homebrew and illegally downloaded video games.

Nintendo is actively seeking anti-piracy solutions by adding protections in its games and intercepting linkers. In fact, it is in Nintendo’s interest to ban linkers to reduce its financial investment in DRM. Linker manufacturers, resellers, and users argue that their use is not illegal when you use games that you own. Linker manufacturers and resellers want to shift the responsibility for piracy to the user. Once again, it is in their interest because the sale of these devices is precisely at the heart of their activity.

The linkers are sometimes presented as tools for exercising the right to backup copy (“The person entitled to use the software may make a backup copy when it is necessary to preserve the use of the software”[1]).

There is no legislation in France that explicitly addresses linkers.

However, several linker vendors have been convicted in several countries including France[2], Great Britain[3] and Japan[4], the courts considering their use as abusive (piracy of games). In parallel to its lawsuits against sellers, Nintendo does not prosecute manufacturers for linker [5].

links: France 
Great Britain

• 2013 list of existing linkers ( source: french blog link ):
   

VGR never promoted the illegal use of video games (unofficial emulation, patches, mods or other unofficial game elements are forbidden).
In a general way, any practice which isn't integrated in the original game or which makes competition between players unfair, is also forbidden.

Now we better know the long list of different existing linkers, and the fact that you can add different options to the games, including options who change the speed or gameplay like savestate.
We also know that there is strong probabilities that games (or files) have been downloaded illegally.
So we now consider this, more or less, as emulation, which is strictly forbidden in VGR, because it simply ruins any score comparison, so the main goal of this site.

Note that we first discussed about 3DS linkers for DS games, which was authorized until now.

But finally, we decided to make forbidden any linkers, mainly because it was too hard for us to make searches and studies about each type of linkers, and each VGR profile with many games.

As said upthere, there is also a bigger probability with linkers that people download illegal files, and with not the same 100% exact version.

The only way to compare is to own both, but very probably you can't check this for all types of linkers.

We agree that even if it is probably too late and too long to know who used linkers in the past, at least with this new rule (it will be updated soon, or before 2025) it will avoid us to loose too precious time, like we do now with Zimer's case consequences (split of Wii VC games: decided in May 2020, but concretely started since July 2023)

New recent cases showed videos of linkers use. 
We can't (or dont want to) force people to proove by video, but we need to be more vigilant for people who play retrogaming now, for sure.
In other words, if we know that people used linkers, the concerned scores should be removed.
After we officially act that linkers are forbidden in the Rules, we can ban (temporary) people who used it, like for emulation. 

I hope it brings you more elements for understanding our global choices, and that people will understand (even if some people can proove that they use a "normal or legal" linker to "just" copy their bought games, for example).
If you still own the original game, you can (or should) show it to avoid you suspicion. 
If you saled your original games but still own a linker copy/file of them, sorry but you should avoid to send your scores on VGR, it's too complicated now for us to make the difference with people who got them illegally.

So the best compromise we found is too make linkers forbidden, like emulation is, as always and forever.
Thanks for understanding.

Comments are welcome, even if a decision was already made.
 

Nice to know that protecting Nintendo's profit margins is more important to VGR staff than the health of the site.

We know that its difficult to have oldschool games, because there are expensive and rare. 

And there is no a lot of new games because, the online ranking ingame is sufficient for lot of people

What we want, a web site with fun and a lot of scoring, or a website with lot of rules, lot of same game on multi platforms.

There is a good rules ok, but there is also bad rules,  so i demand maybe a pool on that question to know the feeling of members.

If there is no scores, there is no VGR and we know actually that the forum is dead, the discord is dead and i try to put a v8 to do something.

thx to read me.

I disagree with the rule and does this also mean that having a custom firmware on your console to play your game backups is also not allowed?

On disc based consoles the laser of the disc drive fails sooner or later and you won't be able to read the discs anymore. This has happened to my PS3 slim and I got the super slim in the last sales before they stopped selling it, but that too is showing signs of not reading some discs nowadays. Dumping your physical game discs to your hard drive and playing from there isn't really any different than if you got the game from the digital store and playing from your hard drive.