Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Hello, sorry I didn't read the entire thread carefully (only skimmed it, you guys are just talking in circles anyway) but I agree with Warp a lot, although I'm not really worried about the situation. I remember being excited about the Minecraft speedrun at GDQ and then when he did the "trick"... I simply lost all interest, the run was dead to me. They stepped outside of the game to gain leverage. But hey, that's what the runner wanted to make, so that's fine I guess... I just will not watch it or be remotely excited by it.
Minecraft is the absolute worst example I can think of though. There are other games where exploiting the save system doesn't bother me, like Dark Souls (saving and reloading resets the enemies). I also love the wrong warp glitched Ocarina of Time run. So I guess it's all opinions and no objective answers, each game will have to be considered separately and there aren't any rules that will apply to all games.
Not all games are created equal anyway. Some games are simply less suited to speedrunning than others. Those games that have a "fastest but boring" way to play them I consider to be duds for purposes of speedrunning. Just for playing, not for speedrunning. Not for me anyway. I think it's fine if some games are crap for speedrunning.
In the end, people are just going to make the speedruns they want to make. Hell, some people even make New Game+ speedruns and many consider it a legit category.
Remind me what the "trick" is again? I like you saw the run and was disappointed by it, but I can't remember why.
You mean the Minecraft thing? I don't remember the exact details anymore, but I think it was alt-tabbing to Windows and killing the game from the Windows task manager. This goes so far away from actually playing the game that it isn't even funny.
Blublu wrote:
I also love the wrong warp glitched Ocarina of Time run.
It's not the glitchiness itself I have a problem with, but how it's done.
If I remember and understand correctly the "wrong warp" glitch in OoT can be done purely by gameplay. No non-gameplay features involved (maybe not even the reset button). Thus it's completely ok in my books.
It becomes especially non-bothersome to me because OoT speedrunners also like to run less glitchy categories, such as explicitly banning wrong warp and item manipulation. (Much unlike HL2 speedrunning, where save-load abuse is essentially the only category that exists. As a viewer, you have no choice.)
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Here's a good method of enjoying speed runs during this new era of the existence of these distasteful categories. Watch and play the categories you prefer. Recruit for your preferred categories if they're not popular enough and you'd like more competition in them.
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Lex wrote:
Here's a good method of enjoying speed runs during this new era of the existence of these distasteful categories. Watch and play the categories you prefer. Recruit for your preferred categories if they're not popular enough and you'd like more competition in them.
That's what everyone is already doing all the time. Edit: So are you saying people shouldn't discuss their opinions? You wouldn't be surprised to find people discussing things in a discussion forum, would you?
Edit:Let me try this again: I agree with that general sentiment but I still think it's fine to have a discussion about it, which is what a forum like this is for. But yeah if you want to make a real change, you have to go and make the change yourself instead of telling others do it.
Yeah you know what, I shouldn't have mentioned Ocarina of Time in this context because that's just an awesome glitch, not save/load abuse. Actually, come to think of it I can't think of any game where I'm completely OK with using saving/loading as part of the route. In Dark Souls it's not really used in any routes, but only to recover from mistakes, I think. (at least the speedruns that I have seen)
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Blublu wrote:
Lex wrote:
Here's a good method of enjoying speed runs during this new era of the existence of these distasteful categories. Watch and play the categories you prefer. Recruit for your preferred categories if they're not popular enough and you'd like more competition in them.
That's what everyone is already doing all the time.
Remind me what the "trick" is again? I like you saw the run and was disappointed by it, but I can't remember why.
You mean the Minecraft thing? I don't remember the exact details anymore, but I think it was alt-tabbing to Windows and killing the game from the Windows task manager. This goes so far away from actually playing the game that it isn't even funny.
In Dark Souls it's not really used in any routes, but only to recover from mistakes, I think. (at least the speedruns that I have seen)
Quitting out in Souls Games is actually used for a number of different purposes, ranging from:
* Recovering from deadly falls
* Resetting enemies to known locations
* Skipping door opening animations
* Cancelling deadly fall damage using the Fall Control spell
The last one is particularily noteworthy, as it's a glitch and used a couple of times in the route in the Dark Souls All Bosses. There's a bunch of other assorted cases, but those are the main ones I can think of.
Personally, I don't mind the quitting out to menu so much from a legitimacy perspective, but I think it kills the flow of watching somewhat. It's kinda annoying when you have to watch a 10 second loading screen just to skip 5 seconds of door opening.
In Dark Souls it's not really used in any routes, but only to recover from mistakes, I think. (at least the speedruns that I have seen)
I can't watch DS3 speedruns because they are amazingly annoying to watch. They heavily abuse the fact that loading times are not counted towards the length of the run, and thus will quite liberally quit to the main menu and resume, even if that makes the wallclock time of the run longer. They will, for example, spend something like 10 seconds quitting to the main menu and resuming, to jump to a location that would have taken like 5 seconds to reach by just running there.
And they do that pretty much constantly. I just can't watch that. It's so amazingly annoying.
Warp: The problem with PC games is you more-or-less have to go by time without loads, otherwise you don't have a level playing field and players could bring down their times by shelling out thousands of dollars on a top-end PC. Then stuff like this is an unfortunate side-effect.
To be fair, they could prevent that easily by assigning an arbitrary (say) 10 seconds for each loading screen, independently of how long it actually takes. This would complicate timing of the run, but it would penalize abusing the loading screen uniformly regardless of how good or bad your computer is.
Warp: The problem with PC games is you more-or-less have to go by time without loads, otherwise you don't have a level playing field and players could bring down their times by shelling out thousands of dollars on a top-end PC. Then stuff like this is an unfortunate side-effect.
Easy: Add 5* minutes for each loading screen.
*example value
That doesn't work perfectly either. You could then find yourself in a scenario where players are using a route that is suboptimal in both real time and without-loads time, because the alternative is a faster route which has more loading screens, which are now being unduly penalised.
So the solution is to add X time for each loading screen, where X is how long the average loading screen takes on the strongest realistic computer you could play on (high end consumer computer, best CPUs/GPUs/SSDs, $10000 budget limit say). That way you're simulating speedrunning and timing on optimal hardware.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6438
Location: The land down under.
creaothceann wrote:
Easy: Add 5* minutes for each loading screen.
*example value
Actually... backwards.
You remove the time for the loading screens for the console runs, you don't add to the PC.
The infamous Crash game The Wrath of Cortex is a good example on how it's setup on the speedrun boards.
The PS2 version is famous for the long ass loading screens while the Xbox & GCN load in much shorter times. (There's also 2 PS2 versions, the platinum version shortens the loads by a bit.)
Three Other Board Examples:
Mirror's Edge - Different types of Computers. Different types of load times. (Some Console runs, that have also been adjusted too)
Portal - Ditto
LittleBigPlanet - Oh Look I have an SSD in my PS3. Oh look, I have a HDD and performed much better than your run. I have the disk. (Times account for no load times)
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Warp: The problem with PC games is you more-or-less have to go by time without loads, otherwise you don't have a level playing field and players could bring down their times by shelling out thousands of dollars on a top-end PC. Then stuff like this is an unfortunate side-effect.
I don't really have a problem in loading screens not being counted against the overall length of the run. I do have a problem when this reasonable rule is being abused, especially when it's abused in a manner that makes the run longer in real time, and especially if it's abused pretty much constantly, making the run unenjoyable to watch.
It's reasonable to have that rule in situations like when the game transitions from one level to another and there's a loading pause as it loads the new level, for the reason you say: A faster PC with a super-fast SSD, fast RAM etc. would have an advantage over a cheaper PC with a slow HDD and slower RAM etc. However, I wouldn't consider it the intent nor the purpose of the rule to be abused in the manner they do in DS3 runs.
If they wanted to limit this, I think an easy way would be to simply ban quitting to the main menu. (That might also remove the possibility of other tricks that do not abuse the loading-times-do-not-count rule, but personally that wouldn't bother me in the least.)
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
So you're saying a category with no quitting to the main menu is what you'd want to watch. It's not about "banning" it in that category. It's just a separate category.
So you're saying a category with no quitting to the main menu is what you'd want to watch. It's not about "banning" it in that category. It's just a separate category.
Banning things is such a drastic measure. (Things can, of course, be banned if there's a very good reason to ban them, as they go completely contrary to the core idea of speedrunning a game. Such as alt-tabbing to windows and hex-editing a savefile with some editor, for example.)
Different categories cater a lot better to a wider audience. I really like the LoZ:OoT speedrunning scene exactly because there are so many categories, which appeal to a wide range of people. There's the any% category, where anything goes, no matter what. There's the any% glitchless category. There's 100%, and 100% glitchless. Then there are categories where only certain glitches have been banned (such as wrong warp and item manipulation), and other categories where certain goals need to be achieved (such as all dungeons).
In contrast, Half-Life 2 has effectively one single category: Any%. (Technically speaking speedrun.com lists others as well, but at least the "low-glitch" categories are pretty much dead. They contain one single run on each. One of them is 2 years old. The other is 2 months old.)
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Warp wrote:
(Things can, of course, be banned if there's a very good reason to ban them, as they go completely contrary to the core idea of speedrunning a game. Such as alt-tabbing to windows and hex-editing a savefile with some editor, for example.)
No, things can't be banned. New categories can be created with different rules, but an existing category with existing runs can not have "bans" added and still be the same category. Anything allowed in that category will forever be allowed in that category. Any change in rules creates a different category. Otherwise, you're comparing apples with oranges.
