Canada[quote="yp"]I'm just more confused as to why y'all literally didn't any of the older runners, let alone the one SR mod that has actually touched the game. Just feels like y'all purposely strayed away from discussion.[/quote]
[quote="damagak"]I think blatantly ignoring what is and was obviously the rule, especially when you say you were doing runs with the correct rules, and then just changing it with no notice is absurd. I actually have no real problem with allowing infinite ammo, but there obviously should be some amount of process before changing rules.[/quote]
To answer both of you, when Master and I asked about the rule in the #revolution channel of Discord, a couple of moderators chimed in and we reached a consensus to remove the rule. A forum thread about it was then posted, and since nobody responded for months, Master and I happily went ahead and improved the route without the rule over that time. We even persuaded Tezur0 to create that thread, so I'd say we encouraged discussion more than anything.
If reaching out directly to old runners is somehow a required part of the rule change process, which I am not familiar with, you'll want to contact Tezur0 directly for that because Master and I aren't mods. (Personally, I'd expect anyone who cares about a game to follow it so that important forum posts like the rules one are seen quickly.)
[quote="damagak"]For example if YP and I started doing runs again and we just decided that you can ignore all loads and one player can stand still until the other loads, and we just used IGT with no notice to the other people who are playing the game that would be insane of us, and obviously the run would have to be re-timed. No one wants the rules to just be a whiteboard that changes for the convenience of whoever has a marker.[/quote]
If a forum post or SSDQ Discord discussion happened first, which did for both the infinite ammo rule and 300% enemies rule, then I would have no problem with it, as I adjusted my notification settings according to how much I care about the game. In fact, the 300% rule had some pushback, so the moderator created a strawpoll for it: https://www.strawpoll.me/16303016/r
[quote="yp"]The management of weapon ammo is something that isn't relevant outside of a few select spots, but stuff like being limited to only 5 rockets at the start of both TFE and TSE did change how a few earlier levels were handled, especially in categories like All Secrets.[/quote]
I haven't and don't currently intend to run All Secrets, but if infinite ammo does change the run enough to warrant a subcategory, I'd be interested in seeing a bulleted list of route differences. Any%, however, I know does not change much because I ran it.
[quote="yp"]As for why it wasn't allowed, I could've sworn at one point in time it was literally listed as a cheat in the game options but I may be mistaken, regardless it's always been classified as a cheat in the other SS games so it made more sense to keep it off. It's always been separate from the mutators so I never really got too familiar with the menus, since I literally never hosted the servers.[/quote]
I've never seen the infinite ammo setting listed as a cheat since I started playing v1.05. Singleplayer's cht_bInfiniteAmmo console command yes, but the co-op menu setting no. I just checked Serious Sam 2 and Serious Sam 3 as well, and they too just put infinite ammo alongside benign settings like "Clients may pause".
[quote="yp"]The argument that disallowing it made it closer to the originals is kind of redundant when it was set to 1000% anyways, so I don't see what you're trying to get out with that one...[/quote]
Spoiler alert: you two are in agreement with that one, but I'll leave this for Master to clarify.
Are you able to list the instances in which infinite ammo changes the run significantly? I only remember Alley of the Sphinxes.
There are a lot of settings that change how something is routed; for example, fire rate would eliminate the insane damage boosts (which account for the majority of the time saves in Revolution, so almost a complete re-route would be necessary), player health would eliminate them as well, and player movement would at least have a much larger impact on time than ammo. IMO there should be a more compelling reason to single out infinite ammo over the other settings, which impact the run in a significantly larger way.
Scrapping questionable rules without preserving the old runs' placement isn't new to Serious Sam; in the past, deaths were disallowed in co-op runs, and thankfully that's not a thing anymore. It sucks that work was put in for the sake of a rule that was removed, but I don't think the ammo rule makes that much of a difference.
Also <3 Haruhi
In addition, doing something as long as possible is the opposite of doing something as quickly as possible, so that may be overstepping the purpose of speedrun.com
@bill_play3 I don't think the OP is asking for all mutations to be added, but just select ones.
Unfortunately, we did already try LMOE and there just wasn't enough interest or activity to have a competitive leaderboard for that category. I don't remember how many 1st place records I had when LMOE was removed, but I didn't care and it doesn't seem that anybody else did, at least at the time.
I'd say just submit your expert runs as they are, and if there's enough volume, they can easily be moved into a new category. The last poll only had a difference of two votes, and there have barely been any submissions besides the top three players, none of whom want a new category with the level of activity this game has been receiving.
Any% implies a completion metric, which doesn't exist in L4D. It wouldn't make sense.
Some aspects being difficult on Easy won't stop some people who won't shy from a challenge.
The Tank, Sacrifice 1 and non-Jesus finale strategies certainly change on Expert, as well as how handle enemies throughout the whole run. Doom, back when its speedruns and Compet-N were active, had UV, UV fast, and NM categories amongst others, even when the path doesn't change at all, and I don't see a problem with that.
Maybe not many will run Expert, but the challenge it offers is way better than LMOE, which in terms of tricks is just a regular run with a bunch of missing tricks, as opposed to a run whose difficulty increased for the challenge. Despite holding many of the LMOE records, I'd be quite happy to see it replaced by Expert.
"Easy" is patently wrong if you change difficulty at any point throughout the run. "Any Difficulty" only works if you're going to call the other one "Expert Difficulty" or "Expert Realism Difficulty", but it should be clear enough that the extra verbosity is unnecessary. I assume "Noob" is a joke, so "Any" is the only option I can see.
If we're creating a new difficulty for the express purpose of creating a challenge, then Expert Realism to start with, and add the tweener(s) later if there's enough activity. As usual, I don't want to bloat the leaderboards with watered down categories.
map has been a command for developers and admins since Quake 1 or earlier. It is not a cvar, is not a control, and destroys multiplayer client connections, so I don't believe it belongs in a speedrun.
I suppose this is the type of research that would be quite appropriate for http://l4dspeedrun.wikia.com.
[quote=flicky]Honestly, that's really shitty of you.[/quote] Hey, just want to say, that's a really professional and appropriate thing for a mod to say after the active people around here who actually care about the game have been trying to contact mods over the past several months and have been discussing changes over the past several weeks.
Honestly, I'm quite happy someone active and new is getting work done.
FYI the L4D2 section has a lot more activity, resources, guides, etc.
Edit: There is a link in the sentence above, and wow links are hard to see on this site.
[quote=Cyberdemon531]Also @Deagle, Speedrun.com should track all speedruns for a game. That's the point of the website.[/quote]Where does it say on the website that it's supposed to track all speedruns ever indiscriminately? I might as well speedrun a bunch of L4D2 mutations so that they can get added as more categories that virtually nobody cares about.
[quote=Cyberdemon531]So, less focus on what YOU want, then? This isn't your game. People are free to play how they like lol[/quote]Less focus on 50 twice-redundant leaderboards where >90% was done by two people who are no longer active as I mentioned earlier, yes. Of course I wouldn't want those. You're fighting for ILs, yet the single run you have submitted to L4D1 here is an original campaigns run from spring 2015.
I don't own sports either, but I perfectly understand the purpose of divisions and why they don't want just two people competing in each one. These are leaderboards, not a collection of diary entries. People can speedrun whatever they want regardless of speedrun.com, as SDA/YouTube/Twitch/etc. exist.
[quote=Canterlott] although, i can also see the reasoning behind wanting to preserve and respect the hard work that people have already put into this game[/quote] This would be a valid reason if the majority of the ILs weren't done two years before a L4D1 section was even created on speedrun.com, but it seems Freezard was done with the game a loooong time ago. His runs will stay up on SDA.
[quote=Cyberdemon531]They can just run what they want to.[/quote] That is exactly what dilution is. The amount of time/motivation that runners have is not infinite. Spreading one's time over the extra options results in less focus on campaign/full runs.
What's wrong is, as I've already mentioned, it dilutes the already thin amount of activity even more. Is that not a "real reason"? ILs only detract from actual competition when the 0–4 active runners at any given time have 25x2=50 extra leaderboards to look at. You should scale the number of divisions according to the depth of the competition, because that's how it works in legitimate forms of competition like sports.
If a shitty category should go, then the runs can just be viewed on SDA/Twitch/YouTube/etc. then. It really doesn't matter to me if they're already done (I'd be happy if LMOE disappeared from L4D2, but that's another story). Of all those who have done anything for L4D on this site over the past half a year, I think only Canterlott can fight for his two runs in 2015. If a significant number of ILs were done by more than one person who did it all in 2012 and early 2013 (they're all copied/duplicated from SDA anyway), or another who just solo'd a fraction of the levels and is no longer active, then maybe I wouldn't be strongly opposed to them.
But what are the reasons for keeping the ILs? So far in this thread we have at least two reasons to axe them:
- Consistency within the L4D series
- To avoid 5x super-diluted leaderboards that only have one person each in a highly inactive game
[quote=Canterlott]"Ah, also, I am considering the removal of the level leaderboards and shifting the individual campaigns there, like L4D2 does." no boys[/quote] Why not? L4D1 has so little activity already, Having 5x the leaderboards doesn't really make sense to me.
Cheat protection is sufficient to ban a command, but not necessary. For example, the kick command is not cheat-protected, but is banned anyway.
I don't believe the command gives much of an advantage beyond a few dark areas such as The Passing 2 crescendo, but personally I find fullbright to be pretty ugly and unnecessary, so I'm only slightly opposed to it.
I'm not sure what the best way to contact them would be. Flicky seems to visit the site frequently, and has appeared online since the creation of this thread, but has neither replied here nor verified the two runs we have submitted, so notifications may be disabled (or ignored) for the two moderators.
From our experience and what we've heard from other runners who have recently submitted L4D1 runs, it generally takes weeks before a run is verified, which is quite long. I'd like to propose that active runners of either L4D game, or some of the L4D2 moderators become appointed moderators here because L4D1 is almost a proper subset of L4D2.
While we're at it, some of my submitted runs have a harmless sound add-on: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=173558747
