United StatesI want to get rid of the Pack Perfect designation on all runs in flow free. Now coming from someone who has only ever run pack perfect in my 3 years of fast swiping on my phone screen (including when I played with my nose), I hope that I can make a convincing argument. Here, concisely, are my main reasons. For elaboration, feel free to message me.
- New people get confused. And sure, it's just a single sentence to explain how to post a run correctly, but that can still be a deterrent to try and run the game, and I want to open this game to as many people as possible.
- Pack Perfect is not new-player friendly. Pack Perfect is all about how accurate you can be while still playing quickly, however if you don't have the boards and movements memorized, it can be very hard and stressful to keep that going. Getting rid of pack perfect will make your first few times far faster, and can be very motivating for that person to keep pushing forward to join the upper echelon of runners!
- The entire pack perfect system in the game is kinda confusing to understand. Check out my explanation in the flow free game forums - it's really weird and finicky.
- I feel like Pack Perfect kinda ruins the heart behind speedrunning - which is by definition completion of the game as fast as possible.
- any% runs are just straight up more fun. All top runners reset at least 10 times just trying to make it through the first 30 levels without an error. That just isn't fun, and can make running the game tedious and repetitive.
- If you post both an any% run and a pack perfect run, only your faster time will show up, which will likely be any%. Which is why I will never run any% if our current system continues - I don't want to lose the "impressive"(more on being impressive later) time of my pack perfect. One way to fix this is to make it a separate category (which is how it used to be), but that I think makes it even more confusing for newcomers, and encourages the underlying idea that those who do Pack Perfect are Superior, a toxic idea I have succumbed to in the past, and is very easy to fall prey to.
- People could argue that pack perfect is a huge accomplishment, should be displayed, etc. But at upper levels - everyone knows how to do the level immediately; pack perfect is more a display of how infrequently you make errors, and how fast you are at correcting them. Which I don't think is a really good measure of anything. 8)An additional point is that many games have a completionist category, whether that be 100%, or damage-less, etc. However in all those games, that category has distinct features - different strategies, different tech, etc. - whereas in flow free, the runs of any% vs pp look almost the exact same. There's nothing more to show off in that category. In addition, the any% category is always faster, however in flow free, the perfect run is in fact pack perfect, leading to the problems talked about in the previous statements.
The main drawback of getting rid of pack perfect is that a lot of current runs are made half-obsolete. Meaning that during the playthrough, they went back to fix levels, so upon looking back at the runs, people are gonna be like "Why the heck would they do that". And that is definitely a drawback. However I think that the positives heavily outweigh the negatives, and I hope I've convinced you of that too.
:D ~Linus P.S. Join the discord, I'd love to talk more about this there, and we're all cool people: https://discord.gg/hcPbvgxCmB
My friend and I started a competition where we add together every time trials score from all 4 flow games. Anyone who'd like do join in can! My current score is 1593.
For my runs, I just reset my progress on all levels before starting, so that way when I finish it says, "Pack Perfect" If I got all of them. It made it easier for me to tell that every level was done perfectly. You can find that under settings at the bottom of the home screen.
