ESA 2016 will be open from Saturday the 23rd of July at 8am until Monday the 1st of August at noon. Click here to visit the master thread!

This post was written by flicky and further edited by bangerra.

The Game submission and scheduling team are flicky, bangerra, Fatzke (new!) and maybe one or two more (if we find the right person!). We will also reach out to individuals and game communities regarding runs, rules and so on to help us make our decisions as we have done in previous years.

The stream will run from Saturday the 23rd until Friday the 29th of July 2016. Please let us know in your submission comments if you will be unavailable on any dates.

Once again, this year's Game Submissions will be using a form that will be linked here, do not suggest games in a post!
Submissions this year will not include non-speedrun content such as talks.
Skillruns and other high-level gameplay is OK too!
Not complying with the rules will cause your submission to be ignored.
This thread is for listing the rules and is open for game discussion!
Game submissions will open on Saturday the 13th of February and close on Saturday the 27th of February at 23:59 CET.

Our Philosophy
When deciding whether a suggested game will fit into the final schedule, we will consider the following: Length, entertainment value and commentary quality. We will be looking at these three qualities over others such as game popularity.

For example, long games (4 hours or more) are harder to put in the schedule due to how many games could be put in their place. Long games can and still will make it in, but will require more consideration than a shorter game.

Additionally, the entertainment value of runners, games and commentary is taken into consideration. If you're running a game that was only released in Guam, but is incredibly entertaining or has fantastic commentary, your game is still likely to get in. We also place stock in the scenes and communities around these games.

Rules for Submissions
This year, we are setting a limit of 5 different games for submission. You can submit multiple categories for a single game, but no more than 5 different games can be listed. Non-complete game categories will be allowed provided they are accepted by the individual communities. Any additional games over the five will be ignored.

Submitted games must adhere to [Twitch's streaming policy](http://en-gb.twitch.tv/p/rules-of-conduct). Pitching games that you have not yet learnt or mastered is OK. But you need to show steady (weekly) progress after the point that your suggestion passes the first cut.

When you submit your game, you should provide a short blurb about the game and video link such as those seen here as well information about your progress in the game. We suggest adding your times to the speedrun.com leaderboards for your game (or making your own!) so we can more easily keep track of times. If your community uses other leaderboards, please link them in your comments.

If you are submitting races, relays, co-op games or anything else with multiple people, all involved runners must submit a form including a list of the other participants. If you suggest a race and your race partner does not, then we will make it a single player run.

Games should be submitted with a reasonable estimate not including setup time. The estimate should consider everything that can go wrong as well as any additional content that you may wish to show off. Remember that you may have been awake for forty hours having fun before your run!

There will be three rounds of selections:
The first will pick out all the games we're interested in, regardless of current skill of the runners.
The second round will be done nearer the event after we have gauged the run quality.
The third round will be the final selection to work to within our time limit before being fit into the schedule.

Second Stream?
The second stream will be run a little differently this year and will be an “if required” option. We were super ecstatic with how well the double stream system went last year but it did put a big strain on tech. However, if we have significant numbers of amazing games and a surplus of volunteers, it is something we will look into trying to run again. We understand how this can leave runners on edge and we're sorry about that! We don't want to overreach too early. We will make sure the second stream will be announced well in advance, if it happens.

Only Two Weeks?
While two weeks for submissions may seem small, we have realised over the years that a vast majority of the submissions take place in the first few days and there's a huge drought in the middle. The extra time is often filled with extra games submitted by runners who already have other games. In the interest of just making the whole process more efficient, we are just giving two weeks for submissions so please spread the word! Tell everyone well in advance about submissions! Remember to #blameflicky.

Deposit?
We're dropping the deposit this year as it caused more financial work than it saved the games submission team. We are still working on our payment strategy and we will let you know when we have more information about this.

Schedule Organiser Information:

Name: flicky
Best contact option: Twitter (@flickyish) / SRL IRC (flicky) / Email flicky@europeanspeedsterassembly.com / Twitch (flickyish)

Name: bangerra
Best contact option: Skype (bangerra) / Twitter (@bangerrasrl) / SRL IRC (bangerra) / Twitch (bangerra)

Example of the Form

To help you prepare, an example form submission is below. The form will open and be linked here on Saturday the 13th of February! If you dare even think about posting something like this in this forum we will be super disappointed and you will be punished by recalculating frame rules for every NES VC run on speedrun.com

Nickname - flicky (this will be pulled automatically from your speedrun.com account)
Country - United Kingdom (pulled from speedrun.com account)
Web IDs - @flickyish, flickyish (pulled from speedrun.com account)

Game - Dungeons and Dragons: Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft
Category - Any% Red Monk
Estimate - 1h20m
Video -
Region - PAL
Console - PS1

Comments - The greatest fighting game of our generation, Dungeons and Dragons: Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft lives up to its two subtitles. I will be blitzing through the game as Red Monk, the most OP of characters. Watch in awe as a charged finger poke deals 80% damage, shriek with excitement as low kicks are spammed and cry tears of joy with every weird wall-bounce double knockdown! Feel His Wrath!

I've been working on this game since the first time I played it with bangerra. I'm working on taking world record from the only guy to have finished it.

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To clarify, the Nickname, Country and Web IDs will be taken from your speedrun.com account so make sure they're correct!

All the runs will be initially looked through and "accepted" if they're filled out correctly. If your run is "rejected" at this phase, you should find out what was wrong and then re-submit!

Once the runs are "accepted" during the open-submission phase, they will be viewable on the schedule page (linked here later) by everyone. Please note that this page may no longer be viewable while we're messing with it and doing rounds of cuts. All games and runners will link to their respective speedrun.com pages (should they exist).

Once your run has been submitted, you will not be able to edit it. Please post in this thread or contact either flicky or bangerra directly to change things! Try to make sure everything is correct before doing this!

If you're having any problems with the form once it is online (Opens on Saturday the 13th of February), please post here and we will help you out!

Are games like Tetris/DDR, i.e. games with score attack focus rather than speedrunning, acceptable? Just for clarification.

Dang, that's one hell of a punishment, is that even legal because surely that's torture 😉

Not a submission but a suggestion - if you're looking for another person to help out with handling game submissions and organising schedule I highly recommend JohnUK89. He handled stuff for pre-ESA and did an amazing job! 🙂

@Kitty I like how he did everything by himself (sarcasm 😛 )
But I think they have their crew covered.

I know that not released games are very hard to submit and fit into a marathon, but what are your opinions on submitting Star Fox Zero, which will be released in April? The biggest problem is to find a fair estimate, but if it is submitted, would it be considered as a backup or for the second stream? Newer, hyped games normally bring attention.

I have a question about a category in Beetle Adventure Racing:

There's the category called "Bonus Circuit, max points", where you have to get all 100 points in each level while winning Bonus Circuit. I would love to show it off because it's pretty much the master category of this game, but at the same time, it might be too inconsistent for a marathon. The reason for this is that the AI has strong rubberbanding and will pass you if you make mistakes. You have to be ranked at least third after each race or you'll get a game over. If you're a minute behind in a race, you'll get disqualified immediately. This might not sound like much of a problem for a speedrun, but in this case it is. Getting all the boxes scattered throughout the levels requires perfect driving and the physics can easily mess things up. A lot of times you'll be forced to turn around after you miss a box, because there's no second chance to get it.

Maybe it is possible for me to get consistent at finishing Bonus Circuit with this, but if it is too random, I have an idea how to still show off the category at a marathon: There's a cheat that allows you to have the bonus boxes in time trial, which is used for 100 points ILs by the community. So the backup plan for an RTA run would be to get all points in time trial, where you can always finish the run. Would this "fake category" be allowed at the marathon?

Sorry for the wall of text...

@pottow we'll consider it, but april is quite close to the actual marathon. I have no doubt 2 months is plenty to get a good speedrun together, but it will be hard to tell wether the game will be good enough to show off on stream when doing cuts on an unreleased game..

@andypanther I'd love to see that, the time trial thing sounds safer indeed. Go for it!

@Onin skill runs are okay too! Maybe we should clarify this in the ruleset..

Would it help if instead of including PB video I would record run with marathon strats and commentary to go with submission?

@KrusKader I'd assume that's okay, I'd even go as far as to say it's even better.

I have (and i'll have for the deadline) some runs that i'd like to submit, but most of them are speechless, cause when i was recording them there weren't much viewers (my stream channel is pretty new, so i'm still building my viewer base), and i didn't like to speak with basically nobody.
Besides that i have no problem in commenting / interacting with chat / viewers, may i send them anyway?

Thanks a lot!

I think you answered your own question: It's a multi-game category so it encompasses multiple games, so it's a multi-game submission.

Garadas i would advice you to record video with explains, though there is plenty of time to do it 😉

edit: I can't read.

Hey Samtastic, have fun recalculating frame rules for every NES VC run on speedrun.com 😃

@Samtastic Please do not suggest games in this thread. It's written very clearly in Bold letters in our rules. A form will be available to submit your games to when submissions open.

A question about races.

When submitting races for ESA does you have to specifically name ALL the other racers or is it okay to simple mention that you are up for a race? Then if multiple people submit willing to do a race, it turns into a race?

Trying to organize a race 5 months before with people that may or may not be going is complicated.

Cartina, your question is answered in the first post in the thread:

"If you are submitting races, relays, co-op games or anything else with multiple people, all involved runners must submit a form including a list of the other participants. If you suggest a race and your race partner does not, then we will make it a single player run. "

If someone wants to submit a game but aren't sure if they'll be able to be at ESA, how should that be handled?