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.