So that's called "boosting." And it's pretty universally frowned upon. I mean ultimately, who gives a shit what anyone does with their free time, but I don't think most people would consider that valid or legitimate or respectable or anything like that.

You said it yourself. There are several logistical issues with that (and you mentioned most of them), and also the concept of players vs players that is not speedrunning. Even if all players are "cooperating" in a way to make something faster (like a competitive match), this is still player vs player or team vs team, not players against the game.

This has been discussed in several other threads about multiplayer games. You mentioned Among Us; You can read this thread about Among Us, for example: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/hsffi In particular, the response of Habreno: https://www.speedrun.com/post/vrsq5

@Delrus7 If you are so convinced that it makes sense go ahead and do it. Nobody is preventing you from setting up a competitive multiplayer speedrun for any game. There is no need to have speedrun.com involved though. The site has it's rules and you'll have to accept that. Have fun killing all players at the entry area of Among us ;-)

@Delrus7 I think the keyword here is "artificial". Many single player games have a clear end, and your goal as a player is to reach that end. It doesn't matter if you are a casual player or a speedrunner in that regard. This is similar with games that have co-op option. There can be some artificial extra goals or restrictions, making different categories; but the end goal is still the same - finish the game or segments of it, but fast. It doesn't matter if the game was originally developed with the intent of speedrunning it or not.

Now, when you take PvP games, there is no clear end with a goal of "finishing the game". The goal is just to win in a match against other players or teams. You can make a goal of "finish a match as fast as you can", but that would be arbitrary goal which wasn't exist before. Also, when all the players in both sides cooperate in a manner to reach that goal (finish the match fast), you artificially turn it into a single player/coop game.

[quote=Delrus7] I hope you don't see my replies as arguments! I'm just playing around with the ideas.[/quote] “Playing Devil’s Advocate” is a fancy way of saying “I like to argue but I don’t want to seem rude about it”. What you’re doing is indeed being argumentative, because you’re not actually proposing any ideas. All you’re doing is reiterating the same thing every other user has ever said in an attempt to persuade the staff to add PVP games, and those points have been refuted for years now. So, yes, I’d wager most of us see your points as arguments because that’s all you’re doing. You agree with what people are saying, but you’re intentionally disagreeing with them, which is arguing.

All of your points boil down to somehow finding a way to justify PVP speedruns by achieving the worst possible outcome (losing) as fast as possible. That alone leads to nothing but incredibly boring runs if all you’re doing is watching a group of 100 players get in a circle and blow themselves up, or if you’re watching a group of people vote out Imposters. You’re not even watching a game at that point, nobody is really even playing a game anymore, they’re just hitting some buttons to die as quick as possible. You can’t speedrun PVP games to a win condition usually because that takes longer and it’s nearly impossible to guarantee a win of players not in your group are present. When you eliminate every aspect of what makes the game itself to just turn it into a loss, then it’s not even showing off content. Its a speedrun in the most basic form of itself, with no skill or routing. Just a VC and a group of people who don’t even want to play the game, they just want to lose.

But again, you already know this and it has been repeated many times, as you’ve mentioned. There is no devils advocate to play here. This topic has been beat to death and doing nothing but disagreeing with people for the sake of disagreeing is bound to accomplish nothing other than to annoy people.

[quote=Delrus7]I only mean artificial in the sense that the doing-it-fast part of speedrunning is not necessarily intended by the game itself. In that sense most speedruns are artificial (except for games like lovely planet where the point IS to beat the levels fast).[/quote]

Speedruns are an artificial challenge we impose ourselves. However, they also have a defined set of rules like any other competition, and multiplayer-only games don't seem to comply in this aspect. Take for example this next bit:

[quote=Delrus7]Reaching max rank in a multiplayer setting is a game-made goal, for example.[/quote]

For starters, for a game to be hosted on speedrun.com, the applicant is required to show an Any% speedrun from beginning to end. This means that the game must be ran as fast as possible (otherwise it wouldn't qualify as a speedrun, but rather a longplay/walkthrough), and they must have a clearly defined start and end.

• A clearly defined start could easily be understood as selecting "Start Game" on a main menu or something akin to this.
• A clearly defined end should be something that indicates that you "Beat the game!" or "You Won!", or even some sort of indication from the game itself that you completed the game at a 100% completion rate.

Now, while some multiplayer games might make it your goal to reach a certain level/rank to entice you to play, you don't really "win" or "beat" the game once you reach those levels. If I reach Global Elite on CS:GO, I don't just suddenly "win" at the game (and I'd actually have to keep playing to retain my rank, at least every once in a while), so I think using this as an ending marker would be ultimately arbitrary and not really defined by the game itself.

[quote=Delrus7]And while I agree that speedrunning single/coop usually means the end state of the speedrun lines up with an existing goal of the game itself, it is the existence of the misc. categories (like 9 stars in super mario 64) that lends credence to competitive multiplayer.[/quote]

I'll take SpiderMan 2000 as an example, given that it's a game/leaderboard I know pretty well.

There's a clear distinction between the regular/main categories and the miscellaneous categories:

• Main/Regular categories (ie. Any% - Easy/Any% - Kid Mode/Any% - Hard/All Comics/100%) are all categories that have you play through the game using only challenges that you can impose to yourself through the game itself (like changing difficulty setting or getting all collectibles in the game), with the exception of going as fast as you can (again, otherwise it wouldn't really be a speedrun).
• Miscellaneous categories (Any% (No Skips)/Peter Parker Challenge) are all categories that have you play through the game while imposing extra challenges on yourself that aren't really supported or endorsed in any way by the game (there's no setting in the game forcing you to play glitchless or to use the Peter Parker costume once you start the game).

In that regard, miscellaneous categories are only there to provide the runners some extra challenge should they want/need it, but as their name suggests, they're still miscellaneous. They're there for extra flavor and I don't think they really embody what a speedrunnable game would normally look like. Besides, comparing "Any%" of a multiplayer game to a miscellaneous category of a single player game (where there's a lot of variety and meme categories floating around) is like comparing apples and oranges, so it's not exactly leading us to any real conclusions.

PS: Of course, as it's been mentioned above, all of these only apply when talking about hosting speedgames here. These guidelines don't necessarily translate to other sites, and a community looking to run a multiplayer game could very well host a google spreadsheet and keep a record of all their times on there without anyone being able to say a pip against it. I understand that's not your objective here, but I thought I should mention it nonetheless in case someone else reads this.