Welcome! Here you'll find changelogs of things done with the leaderboards so we have a nice history to reference. Questions or comments on any of the changes? Feel free to post!

11/13/18

Created this thread, created the leaderboards and moved stuff over a couple of days ago. Not much to note, just getting this going.

November 4th 2018,

Created a new thread for general game rules which apply across all runs submitted unless otherwise specified in the rules popup for a category. This helps clean up our edit game page as well as make it so only different rules are shown in each category rather than 80% of it being the same pasted wall of text.

https://www.speedrun.com/l4d2/thread/x3cng

Hello new runner! Here are general rules to follow during any given run you may be doing for this game, including co-op specific rules near the bottom. Everything here applies across all categories unless the rules button popup for a specific category specifies otherwise. Please make sure to check those rules for each new category you try to be sure there isn't anything different. I dropped this in a thread to help clean up the rule pages and avoid the same long wall of text being everywhere.

NOTE: All Category Extension runs must be on Newest only!

Timer starts when your HUD appears in the first map.
Ends on the last frame your HUD can be seen during the escape in the final map.
Entering the rescue during the finale of each campaign must fully fade to black to count as completed.

For runs that have multiple campaigns, they can be played in any order you'd like, but each campaign must be played in a single server, from its first map to its last. You cannot switch Realism on or off mid-run, you must commit to what you started with.

All addons are banned from use. Video must be a live recording (not demo playback) and audio must be enabled and clear enough to confirm no addons were used.

Console commands protected under "sv_cheats" are banned during the run as well as the following:
z_difficulty
changelevel - added 27th Dec 2016
kick - added 19th April 2015
thirdpersonshoulder - added June 2017
jointeam - added August 2017
report_entities - added February 2018

The following console commands are allowed:
map
cl_viewmodelfovsurvivor
cl_glow commands (for highlights)
cl_crosshair commands
cl_interp/ratio, cl_update/cmdrate
cl_showpos

It is highly recommended you have the Livesplit autosplitter shown in your recording comparing to Game Time or have your recording set to capture the mouse cursor for most accurate load removal. Alternatively, you can accept a slight time loss by leaving the red "4" loading icon in the upper-right unobstructed to use instead. The autosplitter that removes loading times is available in the "Resources" section, or a tutorial on how to calculate a without loads time manually is available in the "Guides" section.

Milliseconds are used only as a tiebreaker, leave it 000 in all other instances.

Co-op specific: Video perspective of the first-loading player is required (likely the host). Can be completed with any number of 2, 3 or 4 players. Only players who were present at the start of the run and completed at least one whole campaign can be credited in the record.

See this other thread for a much deeper explanation on these various rules and why we came to the decisions we have: http://www.speedrun.com/l4d2/thread/wlk68

Run time starts when any element of your HUD appears in the first map.
Ends on the last frame any element of your HUD can be seen during the escape in the final map.
Entering the rescue during the finale of each campaign must fade to a completely black screen to count as completed.
For runs starting on No Mercy, time starts when you enter first-person view.

It is not required to show a timer for a valid submission, unobstructed gameplay is all you need.

For runs that have multiple campaigns, they can be played in any order you'd like, but each campaign must be played in a single, unbroken instance, from its first map to its last.
You cannot change game versions mid-run, you must commit to what you started with.

All addons are banned from use. Video must be recorded as you play (not demo playback) and be uncut for the duration of run time. Game audio must be clear enough to confirm no addons were used.

Console commands protected under "sv_cheats" are banned during the run as well as the following:
z_difficulty
changelevel ---------- December 27th 2016
kick ------------------- April 19th 2015
thirdpersonshoulder - June 2017
jointeam -------------- August 2017
report_entities -------- February 2018

The following console commands are allowed:
map
cl_viewmodelfovsurvivor
cl_glow commands (for highlights)
cl_crosshair commands
cl_interp/ratio, cl_update/cmdrate
cl_showpos

It is highly recommended to capture your mouse cursor for accurate load removal. Alternatively, you can accept a slight time loss by leaving the red "4" loading icon in the upper-right unobstructed instead. It’s also recommended to have the Livesplit autosplitter shown but it isn’t necessary for submission.
The autosplitter is available by right-clicking in Livesplit, clicking “Edit Splits”, and clicking “Activate”.
A tutorial on how to calculate a without loads time manually is available in the "Guides" section.

Milliseconds (ms) are used only as a tiebreaker, please leave it blank in all other instances.

Co-op specific: Video perspective of the first-loading player is required (likely the host). Can be completed with any number of 2, 3 or 4 players. Only players who were present at the start of the run and completed at least one whole campaign can be credited in the record.

See this other thread for a much deeper explanation on these various rules and why we came to the decisions we have: http://www.speedrun.com/l4d2/thread/wlk68

Ah, got it Liv. I'm blind. Thank you.

November 3rd 2018,

Created a new game in the series for category extensions which you can see at speedrun.com/l4d2_ce

As of writing there aren't any categories or runs migrated there yet, but pretty much anything here that is custom content or isn't "legitimate" to the base game will be moved over there.

Thanks! I do see now that it doesn't show on the series page unless game type in the bottom-left is set to "or" instead of "and" which seems kind of obscure. Is there any way around this so it shows more easily on the series page?

Hello, just created a category extension game for Left 4 Dead 2 to clean up the main pages and would like the appropriate tag added,

https://www.speedrun.com/l4d2_ce

As bill mentioned, there are already Survival records tracked which was one reason for not including them here. I asked about it in our Discord to get information from somebody that knew more about the active groups and here's a copy/paste of what he said for you if you want to check them out,

There's 3 main leaderboards for survival;

Vanilla/Standard survival, where we have a steam group for full team records:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/l4dsurvivalgroup

A seperate group for solo and duo survival records in vanilla:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SDSvR

Fixed survival, which fixes what valve messed up, basically "competetive survival", includes full team, trio, duo, and solo leaderboards:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/fixedsurvival

Thanks to JAiZ for the info!

Left 4 Dead 2 mod here, https://www.speedrun.com/l4d2

Looking for the removal of "blackwayv" as moderator to clean up the list a bit. He hasn't logged in to the site for a year now and last I attempted to contact him both by Twitch message and whisper while he was actively streaming Fallout casually, I received no response or acknowledgement at all. I waited far longer than I should have to post this, probably, but with us expanding modship with some more verifiers just now it's definitely time.

Indeed, at one point LMOE existed but it's essentially solo with everything interesting about the run removed. The fact that it existed was a bit arbitrary (why that mutation over any others?) and nobody seemed to actually think it added something to the game or was interesting. Some (like me) dubbed it a walking simulator, so it was replaced by the custom Blastoff mutation which fundamentally changes movement in the game.

Currently, there are no plans to add it back nor other mutations, besides Dash which I put up the Christmas before last. That's pretty interesting. Likely from this point there will not be any more category expansion (besides a Custom Campaigns Full-Game category) as there isn't enough activiy to support more and there really isn't anything else that'd be too justified to go up.

March 28th 2018,

Changed run obsoletion setting to "match any, any order" which now means that any run in which each individual player has a better PB than it, regardless of their player roster being different or not, will be obsoleted, which makes the leaderboards much cleaner now. Runs will only show if it is the PB of at least one of the runners involved.

There are also some skips that they attempted to patch and did it poorly so there are still workarounds. Examples of that is the Dead Center 1 window skip near the beginning that just requires a different technique, and Dark Carnival 3 coaster skip which requires a couple of different jumps to do the same thing. A Parish 2 fence at the crescendo was blocked so you can't go over it in solo, but you can still abuse warping to get through it in co-op.

February 10th 2018,

Added the command "report_entities" to the banned commands list. This command which looks to be server-only prints a complete list of all spawned items in the level which could enable you to know if something useful has spawned or not so you can save time not bothering to look for it. It was also made cheat-protected at some point as 2.0.2.7 allows it, but newest does not.

All that exists is "All Courses" with no defined rules. Should we set up categories for each individual theme like Ball Race?

You can try OBS using the NVENC encoder, which is what Shadowplay uses (it runs on a dedicated chip on your GPU, not your CPU). You might be freezing because Shadowplay is recording at a crazy bitrate, you can try setting it to 10000 for great quality or even as low as, say, 5000 in OBS and it'll still look fine. You'll probably want to set it to downscale to 1280 x 720 as well. There's a good chance this will fix your issues.

Good luck!

Yeah, I wasn't really accusing him of cheating. It's simply that all runs, regardless of who it is submitting them, should be held to the same submission standards, and any other person submitting would most certainly not have a video like that verified. I get a bit bothered when mods accept their own runs with problems like that just because they can, I was involved in another leaderboard a while back that had the same issue where mods were accepting their own runs without video proof even though it was a requirement. Yikes!

Anyway, good job to the mods in this thread and in fixing up the rules!

On to the conversation of launches that just spurred up...

I'll be referring to getting stuck between a moving platform and a wall to get launched as "stucklaunch(ing)" because I used to run Marble Blast Ultra way back in the day and it had an identical trick by that name. Good times...

I was doing Summit runs for a while yesterday and for the life of me could not get a powerful enough stucklaunch on level 9 first try. I looked into it deeper after eventually giving up for the day and figured out some pretty depressing things...

First, the FPS definitely seems to influence the strength of the launch. I go flying every time on 240+, with 100 or more FPS lower it is considerably less the majority of the time. Now we hit the real problem, the game has some sort of FPS capping bug?? I noticed that much of the time my FPS was seemingly capped around 142 while I was using input, and I could never get the stucklaunch to be powerful enough while it is like this. It randomly uncaps back to a proper 200+ when it feels like it and the launches were fantastic then. What in the world is causing that? I tried a lot of things, messing with Nvidia Control Panel settings, tweaking the in-game graphical settings every which way, nothing seemed to influence it. I did think today to change my refresh rate (I'm on 144hz) since it's suspiciously close to where the game is capping itself, just haven't gotten to it yet. No idea what else to try if that doesn't work, and I'm going to give up on doing the stucklaunch in runs because of this because I really don't feel like rolling for framerate RNG...

EDIT: I tried a 60hz refresh rate and it didn't change a thing. 🙁

What's going on with that video? It has a lot of jumping around about 6:40 into it where levels could have easily been skipped and it seems like deaths happened at some point but it's impossible to tell.

It doesn't seem right that a run can be submitted with a video that is impossible to verify with.

Yup, it's basically a difference of running "how the game launched" to "the final state of the game".

If you end up wanting to run the Original Campaigns category it is highly recommended you grab version 1.0 of the game since it has some important extra skips, you can find it in the #resources channel of the speedrunning discord linked in this thread, https://www.speedrun.com/l4d/thread/8pqqt

All Campaigns can be run on the newest Steam version just fine.

As mentioned, it is impossible to define clearly enough what is or isn't a glitch. Would we allow bhops or not? Tank boosts? Idle warping? The last two are absolutely intended behavior that are just abused. It would also make the runs very straightforward and uninteresting since it's just running from point A to B while trying not to get hit or specialed which is already what happens. Co-op would be Solo plus three other people suiciding each map, and hardly anything additional would be played in the maps in Solo since the really big skips are all Co-op.

I see glitchless more as a solution for games which have absolutely massive skips or sequence breaking that bypass large portions of a game entirely, meaning that the only way to run through all of the game's content is to have a category that disallows skipping it. That isn't the case in L4D where we still experience almost all of the content, only some parts are skipped in Co-op with GL boosts.