GermanyThis Any% speedrun in 00:00.000 IGT by dahlukeh is allowed under the current ruleset.
Right now, the rules don't have any statement about debug mode or using debug features. Modifications to the executable are banned (among cheat and assist mode), however debug mode does not modify the .exe and is therefore not covered by this. I don't think there needs to be much discussion about banning the use of any debug tools, this needs to be explicitly stated though in the ruleset of every category somewhere, which it currently isn't.
Beyond that though, I think there needs to be a decision made on allowing debug mode for run submission in general, as in if runs that were played with debug mode being on (but without using any debug features) should be allowed on the leaderboard or not. Currently, as there is no explicit ban on it, these runs are allowed by default. However, I feel like the overall community consensus has always been that it was banned. There is a legitimate discussion here that never really happened on if it should or shouldn't be allowed.
From a runners perspective, it's more convenient to allow playing on debug mode. It avoids having to switch around every time you go from practicing to doing runs and vice versa. On the other hand, banning debug mode makes verification simpler. When debug mode is off, simply looking at the final IGT and the version number, as well as checking that cheat or assist mode weren't used, is pretty much enough to make sure a run is legitimate. This is not the case if debug mode is on, as you can't rule out the possibility of someone using debug features without looking at the gameplay itself.
Inevitably runs that have debug mode on will take longer to verify, so a sensible middle-ground solution would be to allow debug mode, but with the expectancy that runs submitted with debug mode being on will have to wait longer for verification. Otherwise, a binary decision on allowing or banning debug mode has to be explicitly stated in the rules.
With the recent addition of ARB IL categories comes a bit of unfortunate clutter. Namely, for 6A and 8A, the ARB objective is identical to the Full Clear objective, which makes them essentially the same run and therefore renders one of them redundant. Due to a limitation of speedrun.com, we can't simply remove those 2 categories in particular. The way this is currently treated is that the ARB categories for those 2 levels are left blank, which isn't ideal and just simply doesn't look very nice.
The way this can be fixed in an elegant way in my opinion is to make ARB a subcategory of Full Clear. This way we can most notably get rid of the redundant 6A and 8A categories, since speedrun.com allows to add variables to only specific levels. It's currently done this way for 1A Dashless too, which honestly works out great, given that both Dashless and ARB are arbitrary, in the sense that they are not implicitly defined by the game itself, and consequently aren't tracked in the journal either. Looking at how similliar Dashless and ARB ILs are on a meta level, it would make sense to treat them the same way in how they are represented on the leaderboards.
One other thing this proposal would do is that the IL grid would directly mimic the in-game IL grid shown in the journal, both even using the same timing method. This is how it used to be before ARB ILs were added, and I always found this to be very neat and pretty.
The only downside I see to this is that the naming scheme could become a bit weird. With the way it currently is, there would be a category called "[Level name] - Full Clear - Full Clear", however this could be avoided by renaming the current Full Clear category something like "Collectibles" and then making the 2 subcategories of that "Full Clear" and "ARB".
Overall, this proposal would not only get rid of the redundant 6A and 8A ARB categories, but would also get rid of some general clutter and inconsistencies, as well as making the IL leaderboards better resemble the way the game represents and handles level times.
This thread is mainly a reminder of the recent leaderboard discussion going on in lights of a new exploit being found, regarding All Hearts for the most part, but also Any% and ARB. As of right now, there hasn't really been any communication or response from the leaderboard moderators regarding this topic, and I'd love to know their stance on it and hopefully push for change. There seems to be a pretty unanimous agreement from the community about this change, along with the developer supporting it and stating, that the related exploit will not be fixed, so this shouldn't be swept under the rug. @TGH @baldjared @seckswrecks
The proposed changes were:
- rename "All Hearts" to "All Levles"
- add a main category "All Hearts" with a ruleset along the lines of "Collect all 24 Hearts in the game"
- change the Any% ruleset to something like "Reach the credits/Beat The Summit from a fresh file" (remove the requirement to beat all A-Sides)
- change the ARB ruleset to something like "Beat Core A-Side while collecting all 175 Strawberries" (remove requirement to beat all A-Sides and collecting 4 hearts)
I don't want to go over the reasoning for all of this again in detail, but to summarize: These modified rules should better reflect the actual intend of all categories, stating only the objective without unnecessary and redundant restrictions, and therefore officially allowing different routing choices than the current standard. The addition of All Hearts would create a unique and interesting category, that is very separate from the other categories in that it doesn't require any A-Sides to be beaten.
For further discussion about these proposals, please refer to the following links: (1) https://www.speedrun.com/Celeste/thread/vlnn9 (2) https://www.speedrun.com/Celeste/thread/866fy (3)
Just today, Revolucion found out that you can unlock 2A by beating 1B, the same goes for all other A-Sides. This means that you can beat the intuitive definition of "All Hearts", which is collect all 24 hearts in the game from a fresh file, without beating a single A-Side, but only collecting the tape and hearts of each A-Side. This would cut out over 10 minutes (to be more exact, I approximate around 15 minutes) of the current All Hearts run.
Now clearly, this goes against the way we currently have been running All Hearts, which is why I suggest to split the current All Hearts category into two categories, those being:
- All Levels, this will be the way we currently played All Hearts, beating all 24 levels
- All Hearts, this will be the category exploiting this, so you are not required to beat A-Sides here
I can see why people would dislike not finishing A-Sides, as it kind of feels fishy to not beat the levels, but thinking about it I personally came to the opinion that the new All Hearts would be a cooler category probably. People run All Hearts over other categories to play the B- and C-Sides, not to run the A-Sides for the 1000th time. So this would actually make for a more condensed category, cutting out a good chunk of the stuff that we have already seen so many times. This might increase activity in All Hearts too, because many people were probably scared away by the length of the category thus far.
I think there is further discussion to be had if we should have both categories on the main boards, and if not, then which of these should become the main one. However, I do think splitting the category into two is the best way to go, as both are completely valid, non-arbitrary and, frankly put, cool categories that should be represented on the leaderboards. Giving people the choice which on they would rather play is the best way forward in my opinion.
I know this is something silly to complain about, but the way A/B/C-Sides are referred to in category names and rules isn't consistent right now and for the sake of polish we might want to change it. It's usually spelled as "A-Sides", which is how the game does it, but sometimes also as "A-sides" or "A sides" - most prominently in the misc categories for all B- and C-Sides.
On a similar note, we might want to change "B/C-sides" categories to "All B/C-Sides", to be consistent with the "All A-Sides" category, and also because it's just a more descriptive name.
As of right now, there are some inconveniences with our boards that I think could use improvement.
First and foremost, we could really use a different background image for our page. The current one, being low resolution, get's terribly upscaled and has lots of bad compression artifacts.
We could use one of those for instance:
Or really any 1920x1080p image that you can find in a lossless file format. (.png most likely)
On top of that, some of the actual leaderboards are a bit messed up. Most obviously, categories such as co-op or All Music Sheets have the same subcategories as our main categories. So for instance, All Music Sheets has a Specter subcategory when it shouldn't have one, and the co-op categories should not have any subcategories at all.
With the newly introduced Horace categories, I also think we should only have one Horace category and then move the current variations into subcategories of that. So similliar to how we have Any% with Shovel, Plague and Specter subcategories, we should have one Horace category with Armed, Unarmed and NG+ subcategories.
The Horace one is less bad, but I think changing it would make the misc. categories less cluttered. I believe the backgound image and nonexistent categories definitely need changing though.
