@Pinka I raised the same concerns with the vague wording on the speedrun.com discord. Only there did I get the answer that it was a paid advertisment. This would is illegal in most countries, it is not clear at all as you already said. So I can only agree on how this further breaks the trust.
I swear, every time they say they listen, they read the feedback but they are more and more silent about a lot of the changes that happen. Another example of that was the load more button that only got mentioned, once it started causing issues.
It used to be tied to marathons but apparently it no longer is so i dont fucking know lol rules what are those
Its been 249 days since the introduction of custom pronouns and people asking for the change
"That said, wouldn't surprise me if this "closer relationship" was in fact just using speedrunners as glorified, unpaid QA. As "A Hat in Time" devs basically did.
I primarily just don't understand why relationships with devs are even necessary or wanted at all. It's obvious that a lot of them don't give a shit about the actual community and just don't want to do the work to find bugs, exploits and imbalances in their games so they use us to find them for them. Once again going back to Gears for Breakfast (HiT Devs). They usually turn out bad, like parasocial relationships, basically."
As an admin in the Hat in Time speedrun community, this is so wrong and based on misinformation that was spread back then by angry speedrunners because they patched specific glitches. Some of those glitches were even patched without others in the dev team knowing about it because one of the devs noticed the bug and just patched it real quick. It was a huge communication issue and also one of the reasons they have a CM now and why we talked a lot to them. GfB pretty much did not touch the speedrun and even made specific versions of the game a specific branch for speedrunners, as those versions are the fastest versions available to runners.
Please if you do not know the full picture, saying something like this is stupid.
https://www.speedrun.com/user/prettyneatmyguy/info my favourite mod of that leaderboard
I will still push this frequently because Im tired of it not being a feature
Technically the first https://www.speedrun.com/key/run/pydgnjyn