There's a lot to points to make, even being part of the winning team:
- The RNG was fixed in the worst way possible, something I think the makers of the game didn't realise. It transformed from 'random' to 'you didn't figure out the perfect route RTAers had months to make, lol have fun losing 20 seconds'. The routing for sticks had to be perfect, something which was borderline impossible in 4 hours.
- Even if you did manage to figure out RNG, the half-cryptic instructions given were so detrimential we'd have been better off with nothing. Even the wording worked against us: the beginner route was faster than the documented ACE route intended to finish the game, and there was absolutely no way to figure out a fast exploit in 4 hours. The informations we were given were more like curses, and runners more skilled than us who would have definitely finished were fully sabotaged because of this (two notable examples are link_7777, who spent time on the ACE route for 2 hours before we understood it was slower, something we couldn't have figured out, and BrunoVisnadi's team, who managed to figure out the game and even had the time to wrote a lua script for it, got destroyed because their TAS was based on a random chest, where they found out the chest had random drops 30 mins before the end of the run.)
- If you still managed to make heads or tails or this, don't forget you need perfect knowledge of the game! Finding out the location of the sniper rifle is no easy feat, and on top of that, if you found it, there was a faster route for it (getting it from a random chest.) Got that! No problem, just remember to buy the obscure speed up item, the coffee, which pretty much required perfect routeplanning prior to that to buy it.
The only way we managed to make it as the winning team was basically to cram as much people as possible into our team and pray. I figured this out early, suggested it to arandomgameTASer, and we picked solo people who were working on the campfire route. This led to a rather large finish team: arandomgameTASer, brunovalads, brunovisaldi, deogenerate, kaizoboy, mugg, true and xy2_; with brunovalads, brunovisnadi and kaizoman joining later on when their plan didn't work. Our plan was this: two people worked on separate TASes, while all others researched the game. We found many useful tricks this way: the axe glitch (which cut in half the recovery time for the axe), the coffee, the route, the sniper rifle, where to campfire exactly, and the behavior of the final boss, where we discovered to manipulate him to try and spawn fatzombies which explode in his face.
Even then, it was frantic. Our two TASers, mugg and arandomgameTASer, submitted two tases which are probably the fastest out of all, and it was at the near-deadline. If an RPG choice happens again, three simple suggestions:
1. In the case of an RTA vs TAS race, don't screw with RNG to make it easier for anyone. If the game requires heavy RNG, buff the element requiring RNG for less RNG. For example, buff campfires (10 sticks instead of 20) or make a certain type of enemy have fixed drops would have been the obivious choice, as sticks are tedious to collect. As of now, the RNG was made in the runners favor, without knowing it would completely and utterly destroy TASers.
2. Please don't document the glitches. As of this, it has lead to an utter trainwreck of information, and it confused and scared much more people than anything. I understand this was made in order to compete with the RTA runners, but it was done very, very badly.
3. Give accurate time. Speed TASing doens't have to be in 4-5 hours, it can be a little longer. Something like 8 hours would have been perfect, including the change of documentation: it would have given teams incentive to route more instead of frantically trying to TAS instead of figuring out the route, and would have been a good opportunity for everyone to find tricks.
I would have liked to say that the race was exciting for everyone, and that it was active, friendly and welcoming, but I simply can't do that; it turns out TASing an glitchy RPG in 4 hours with a prebuilt half-route isn't exciting for anyone but big, organised teams. It was a good race for us, and a complete, brutal and silent murder of the will to TAS for everyone else.
