I am not a speedrunner but I have watched you guys for many years!
I think its really cool that so many new things are being discovered and its really amazing how hard some of you grind. I know seeded maps have already been discussed a lot but I wanted to say something about it.

You obviously all compete for the world records but I think everyone likes seeing the wr get quicker and quicker. So why not hunt for the perfect seed together instead of grinding jail and resetting for town?

This way the time would drop dramatically, but it would still be as competitive. Even if someone finds a really good seed there is always a chance that someone finds his or her own seed that is better. And then that seed becomes the one most people practice instead.

You will be able to predict shrines and maybe some drops(?) but that still takes more skill and practice than just getting lucky with rng! Plus if someone beats a world record doing this, people will start using it and build on top of it. I see something really great growing out of this, a much more connected community that will get really really interesting to watch and follow.

I started experimenting with different seeds, starting from -seed 0 and went all the way to -seed 200. I got ZERO groups of dark ones in jail which is proof of just how crazy this grind is. But I found a quite nice one with three other boss groups close to each other. It was -seed 121.
Checking -seed 121 I also found that it had a good blood moor, cold plains, stony, underground and outer. And a top left town exit obviously.

I'm not familiar with all the maps, and don't know all the correlations. So I don't know what to look for other than that right now. But I made a script that basically restarts the game with the next seed that you might want to use when hunting for good seeds.

It is not perfect but you can modify it to fit your needs.
Start it and press F9 in game, it will then make a new game with the next seed and if you found something you press F10 and it will log the seed number in a textfile. If not, you just press F9.
https://pastebin.com/0icSrcth

I also searched around for correlations and found this:
https://github.com/squeek502/d2-map-investigation
(A tool for investigating Diablo II map generation in the hopes of finding exploitable correlations between how things are generated)

This is really interesting and someone should contact this guy if hes not already on this forum! Anyways I think seeded should be the main category tbh as it has the most potential to get quicker and quicker for who knows how long?

Long term the submissions will lead into a set of seeds being published. This is the reason for the user defined submission requirement in those categories.

The link to the map generation thing is something that is being done in MrLlamaSC's discord iirc.

I highly doubt that finding a "Jail map" will be the optimal way of doing things in a seeded run.

"I highly doubt that finding a "Jail map" will be the optimal way of doing things in a seeded run."

If more correlations are found or if you can generate thousands of map files and look for certain patterns in these with some kind A.I + maphack then obviously that is the "optimal way" of doing things. But even then people will definitely look for groups that spawn close to waypoints like Jail lvl1.

Maybe some would prefer a good act 3 to a good jail, but that is more likely to be re-rolled with tcp/ip then re-rolling for a good jail which is why I think good a1 maps + a jail wp with boss groups is a good start.

If you have a better seed than 121 I would love to see it, I only know half of what to look for.