Hi,

In the game Factorio, the speedrun goal is basically to build the factory the fastest possible. Regarding this, it is an advantage to speedrun as more players, and the fastest game ever was made with some hundreds of players. There are many versions : Single : classic. Duo : play 2 players, quite classic MP : "regular" multiplayer, the sweet spot between too big groups and too small is set by the community to 8 players, but it has not always been. MMP : no restriction of player numbers, can be hundreds of player.

Also game mode can be different : Any%/New game+ : Basycally a set seed run. Small difference in the 2 names that is not relevant for today's topic. Default settings (DS) : Basically a random seed run. 100%, steelaxe%, Getting on track, etc. Are others goals to achieve the run than the standard one, and again not relevant for today's topic.

Playing DSMP (ie 8 players random seed), I joined a team of 10+ players, with subs, so getting 8 players to run is easier (organisation stuff), allowing more avaliable, motivated players to run & train more often while more boring/less useful/less trainagle/less to train taskes can be done by different people, and some busier people can also be in the process despite not being "enough" avaliable. Also, by subbing each other regularly we can understand each other's roles so we can communicate better to help each others. However, it means that each run, despite being the same team and the same game plan, is made by a different set of 8 players. So each run in the leaderboard is a new entry, and do not overwrite the previous one. With some rare occurences of the same set of 8 players as an old run, overwritting an old run, which makes even less sense since the said 2 runs have less in common than like the 2 most recent runs. Also, the one which is not here on the PB/WR day, does he deserves less credits, even if he trained more and got more involved in the run design, than the one which is subbing him ?

Mess in action : https://www.speedrun.com/factorio?h=Default_Settings_MP&x=9kvxm882 Top 1-2-3 is one team, top 4-5-6-7-9 is an second one, top 8-10-11-12 is a third one.

There is a similar, maybe less mess, in the Any%MP where basically 3 teams share the top 10. https://www.speedrun.com/factorio?h=Any_MP&x=wkpjq9wk

Some, especially in Any%MP, also argues that sometimes, one player leaves or gets ejected, and thus the new team start a new entry, overwrites itself quite some times before changing again, thus the community do not agree fully on wether it should be different entries or not.

Now, for the MMP entry : https://www.speedrun.com/factorio?h=New_Game_Massive_Multiplayer&x=mke9y0nd Top 1 to 13 is the same team. One other team has submitted like 20+ runs. There are some other teams, like one streamer ask his whole community to prepare a run and voilà. But they have 0 visibility since one or two team is already taking all the spots...

Some argues that team, base plan, run plans, changed a lot in the years, so it is not clear as of which runs should be "merged" and which one should not. But here there is 0% chance that 2 runs are with the same people, actually it is fully impossible to have every people who participated to be listed, since SR.com have a maximum number of player per entry/run and that the number of players can be waaayyyy higher than the cap. So who is listed and who is in description is actually a problem each good run has to handle.

So, here is the situation regarding multiplayer runs in factorio, and it should be the same in some other game where multiplayer speedruns could be a thing. We know SR.com has been designed for single player runs, and that 99,99% of categories do not fall into that problem.

But we do not know how to handle the thing, the leaderboards are really hard to read for the public, and not clear even for us, casual teams are relegated to 100th place despite being the 5th team to enter the competition, etc.

There was the proposition to create an account for each team, which would have as description/bio the player list, classics subs, and so on. And the description of each run would have the accurate description of the run and of the players in the run.

This would add clarity for the public but may become hard to tackle : when do we say the team changed ? Is the ship of Theseus still the same ship ?

Or maybe we should make several accounts : superteam v1, superteam v2, superteam v3, like when one pleayer leaves and an other join, or the team dismantle, then the team reformes one year later with 2 different peoples. Or the team same start a new and different seed/build/etc. But that could encourage creating too many accounts (and in the end not necarilly solve the readability issue)...

Also, there may be the issue to be borderline with the SR.com ruling that each human should have only one account. Does this ruling accept an account being shared by 10 ppl, each having an other account ?

So, regarding this issues, we would be happy to ask several questions :

• Would a "team account" be banned ?

• Is there a way to remove or change number of player limitation for MMP ?

• Could there be some tools to handle better multiplayer runs leaderboards that the website could offer ?

• What, in your point of view, should be the choice to take for a better readability in the leaderboards ?

Like what is your opinion in general on this different issues ?