Alrighty, all of the first-place solo and co-op IL's are done and resubmitted. Still to do are the extra co-op runs with other players (like the Dead Center repeats), Main Campaigns Co-op, and both All Campaigns before I'm done with my own times. Those may roll in a bit slower, particularly All Campaigns since it's a lot to do.

Made quite a bit of progress tonight...

Diescraper Redux I cannot recommend. It's a lot of repetitive staircases and offices with not really any opportunity for a skip as far as I could see. There was some movement tech at the very beginning with good bunnyhops after that, but once you enter the building it's all pretty bleh for speedrunning, including waiting around for some events to complete that definitely can't be skipped.

Night Terror was all over the place. It had some kind of cool moments, but again has almost no opportunity for skips at all and a lot of corridors for poor bunnyhopping. Really bad and random clipping on one of the maps as well. Not recommended.

Dead Before Dawn, otherwise known as button holding simulator... I remember why I wasn't into it back in the day now. At the top I can say I wouldn't want to speedrun it just so I don't have to hear all of the thousands of constant voice acting lines over and over again. Beyond that, tricks are few if any (at least for solo), there are multiple cases where you have to stop and stare at a thing while holding E to activate it which stops the run cold, and most importantly there is a crescendo (map 4?) where you need to keep commons from entering the mall or else you fail. This crescendo seems impossible solo, or at least is very unreasonably difficult. The bots are entirely useless in killing the commons quickly enough and you can't cover it all yourself, not even a molotov was helping much. This will kill solo runs, and I can't even imagine getting that deep into map 4 just to lose it because the bots decide to not shoot things. I didn't even get to the finale because of this, I was done after that point. Not recommending really hard.

Open Road was very bland. Big, open, linear paths with very similar scenery. Likely little skips to be had, with a holdout finale that is as meh as the rest of it. Energy Crisis was enough to get on the list with some decent skips at least, so I'd definitely give this one a not recommended.

I Hate Mountains 2... has potential! The night wasn't entirely fruitless. Great scenery, designed well, and I can spot a few nice potential skips as well as some decent bunnyhopping opportunities. Where it places in my list is going to depend on how many of these skips are actually possible so I will be taking a look at it soon to make my final determination, but assuming they work this one will go pretty high up I think.

Yes, loadless should be default since it is the new, more accurate standard. If it is default, what will happen to runs that don't have the loadless column filled in? Does it fall back on the time with loads to sort those instead? That's the only hitch I could think of, if something strange like slow loadless times get sorted ahead of old, faster runs that just don't have loadless filled in.

Also, I forgot about co-op rules, which should be the same thing with the load time removed for the fastest-loading player (which would be the host, like in my case). If it were removed until the slowest loader is in that would allow faster players to make some distance for free so the fastest load is the only way to go here. This also will require the fastest loader be sure they have a video of their perspective to upload which shouldn't be a problem.

Edit: Duh. Took me a second to realize if a blank loadless time was a problem the load time could just be mirrored there to fix it well enough for the slow runs. Can't believe it took that long to occur to me.

Been distracted on doing more L4D2-related things but we've had two IL's capable of being submitted here waiting since I don't know what to do about timing. Figured I'd follow up...

Working on my own times right now, I will have them all done tonight and ready. Can you add the load and loadless columns to the rest of the IL's so I can edit the runs to insert everything?

Also, No Mercy seems to be an odd exception where the HUD elements appear before you actually gain control. Simply using the first frame where there is first-person view and a gun for that one.

Tried Yama and Energy Crisis earlier myself,

Yama is great. It is simply a joy to look at and walk through, and stands as by far the most intricately detailed campaign I've ever played as well as being a very unique setting. Solo-wise there are a few skips, level 1 has a minor one (probably won't do), level 3 has a major skip near the end that is easy with a bile, level 4 has a ridiculous OOB near the beginning that I can't believe the guy didn't know about (requires no boosting at all!), and I really like the finale as well. It is the most skillful scavenge finale that I've tried that requires excellent, practiced can management to do well as well as melee throwing. I did a full finale run and it's very possible to do quickly (with bots) as long as you're good at it, and a bonus seems that the cans are static so no RNG (at least, in several changelevel resets they never moved). There are areas with strong bunnyhop ability, particularly the beginning levels, and potential for minor movement tech I haven't found as paths are varied in most maps and there are a lot of objects to get over/around. For co-op there is potential to throwable boost at a couple of points, and I could see a grenade launch being amazing to get the finale started quickly. Loving it.

Energy Crisis is quite the contrast. I just couldn't help but feel unenthusiastic as I was going through it, it feels a bit lifeless to me. There are at least two major co-op skips, one of which bypasses the finale in its entirety making it probably a minute-long map, although for solo there may not be any skips at all by the looks of it. Not sure there is much minor movement tech to make either since it's very straight-forward. I'd only take it if there were no other options.

Time to update my lists!

Campaigns remaining for me to check,

Diescraper Redux Blackout Basement Night Terror Death Row Day Break Plan B Dead Before Dawn The Bloody Moors Dark Blood 2 Open Road Fatal Freight

Potential campaigns in rough order of most to least liked,

Yama Detour Ahead Suicide Blitz 2 (needs trick checking) Warcelona (needs some trick checking) Urban Flight Death Aboard 2 Ravenholm or City 17 Energy Crisis

I'm thinking, once we've looked over all of the campaigns we intend to, maybe we should all post a completed, roughly-ordered list of our picks like I did above? That way we can aggregate the rankings and see which campaigns are averaging the highest to get a better idea of what we all agree we want in.

I got a deathless Main Campaigns Solo!

Working on its loadless times before I submit it as I wasn't using the autosplitter for the previously mentioned slight lagginess. The method I am using is to measure by the first frame any element of the HUD appears to the last frame that doesn't have the loading symbol in the corner, since the first frame it shows up is the start of the load. For each level beginning I start at any HUD element I see appear, sometimes it isn't the entire HUD at once, usually the weapon/crosshair/item bar will appear a frame before the character portraits and stuff, so in that case I go for the weapon and so on appearing. Seems consistent. For campaign transitions I end the finale on the final frame before the next poster appears, and start the next campaign on the first frame where it is a black screen after the poster disappears.

I may do the rest of my times as well as I realized I was having a desync issue when I was encoding them before upload (my local source is 30k bitrate so I encode to 12k!) meaning the YouTube versions may be slightly off in time. Twitch versions would be fine, though. Regardless, I have the unencoded originals locally that I can work from to make it easier. This new run doesn't seem to have a desync issue and I've since updated GeForce Experience and the NVENC encoder with it so it must have been some framerate issue that was fixed? I don't have to pull out the audio to fix its duration to keep sync anymore so that's nice.

Subscribed to Haunted Forest to check out, Arena of the Dead 2 I can't find on the workshop. I figured we may want to stick with things on the workshop so it's easy to download and everything is in one place? I guess it probably doesn't matter too much, but there are many good campaigns turning up so losing just one to not being on the workshop isn't a big deal anyway.

Death Aboard 2, while there is a (usually short) waiting crescendo in each map, I have to say it has a wealth of skips with some major ones in many places, especially maps 2 and 3, and many of those waiting crescendos can actually be bypassed in this way. These skips will be difficult in solo as it requires common jumps so, er, not sure if a pro or a con? I did test them and know some are possible but definitely very difficult. Visually nice as well. Map 4 is a bit confusing to look at since everything is tilted and it is a very tight space, but the rest of the maps are more open. It has a holdout finale that would be pretty painful if there is no jesus spot, but the massive scale of it mixed with a ton of weird places to stand in would be bound to turn up with something. Having a hard time placing this one, honestly, as it has some good and some bad.

Detour Ahead was tried tonight in co-op.

Good stuff, very strong for nice tricks in co-op including a possible grenade launch. Another running finale rather than a holdout which is great. This one is near the top of the list now.

Made some good progress tonight on four more campaigns,

Dark Wood requires no words. You would have had to be in my stream to understand it, that thing cannot be explained, only experienced... not even the slightest bit able to recommend it... what a ride...

We Don't Go To Ravenholm, although also a bit heavy on corridors, does look to have some strong potential for skips and bunnyhops. I would say that, if even including a HL2 campaign, it should only be one and I am leaning on Ravenholm over City 17 based on its bunnyhops and skip potential looking greater. The finale was a bit weak although City 17 wasn't particularly exciting either, that is the biggest negative I'd give it. Plays well as a L4D campaign otherwise, though.

Warcelona looked very nice visually and has strong bunnyhop potential as well, along with a potentially major skip in the finale if the clips allow. There may be other possible common jumps as well. I like this one, the finale also isn't a holdout so no boring jesus spot to find (a BIG plus IMO). Main problems are potentially annoying RNG paths in the first map and finale (at least) although it might not matter or can be mitigated. Would need more testing to see if the RNG is too heavy before seriously considering it but I definitely enjoyed the rest.

Urban Flight was decent. The environment is pretty samey although done well for what it is, with strong bunnyhopping as well and definitely some good throwable boosts at least. I can already see a unique and interesting gas can strategy in the finale as well where players would have to throw and catch them mid-air (I ¤think¤ it should work). I'd recommend this for the running.

Pretty good findings tonight overall, now my campaign list to check after considering DerpDuck's campaigns looks like this,

Yama Diescraper Blackout Basement Night Terror Detour Ahead Death Row Day Break Plan B Dead Before Dawn Death Aboard 2 The Bloody Moors Dark Blood 2 Open Road Energy Crisis Fatal Freight

Still so many! >_<

Current list of campaigns that have potential in my opinion, ordered roughly by most liked to least. I encourage anybody to play these too and corroborate their own opinion, we'll need to narrow this list down a bit I think!

Suicide Blitz 2 Warcelona Urban Flight Ravenholm or City 17

Hmm... only disadvantage I can see to using changelevel and then voting restart is that you will not be able to vote difficulty to take care of bots (only a problem in Solo). Could be an option still.

I tried City 17 tonight, it was alright. Unsurprisingly very heavy on corridors and blind corners so its mix of open and enclosed areas aren't balanced too well, which also means I'm not sure many skips will be possible since it's pretty straight-forward too. Great opportunities for bunnyhopping (its strength, definitely) with a decent overall length and it is very recognizable for many people. I'd say this can be considered if there doesn't end up being other great campaigns that would have to be given up for it.

For reference, these are the campaigns I have subscribed to still to go through,

Yama (Treescrub says this is heaven for big tricks) Dark Wood Warcelona Diescraper We Don't Go To Ravenholm (rounding out the HL2 campaigns) Blackout Basement Night Terror Detour Ahead Death Row Day Break Plan B Urban Flight (tried it a while ago, not sure it'll be good or not) Dead Before Dawn

Quite a bit. I hope some are obviously not usable or this decision is going to get pretty difficult!

Some thoughts on the mechanics of this category,

I noticed you can't vote to change to addon campaigns, so that will present a bit of a problem as to how we want to handle them being strung together. The only alternate ways to change campaign off the top of my head is by backing out and starting a lobby on a new one, or using map/changelevel. Changelevel breaks intros (I assume with these as well but haven't tested that), going through the menu seems like it would be clumsy although technically "proper", and the map command would force clients to reconnect which is also a bit clumsy, not to mention it would then require that the host open their port which isn't required when connecting via the lobby. Maybe there is another way I haven't thought of? I'm not really sure which option would be the best... changelevel probably would be if somehow intros don't break. This assumes there isn't a roundabout way to call a vote for a specific map I'm not aware of which would be ideal.

I realized that downing the bots will be... interesting, since there will be no bug to get them kicked and the vote creation timer exists. Quite a few maps will be on Expert, I wonder how sustainable this will be in Solo runs... it may be time for me to learn to cut the Smoker tongue. I'll say in advance I hope none of the maps require bot warping, please, please no! Ahh!

Maybe we should try to aim for a rough target time for the category? I'm thinking about an hour at minimum, hour and a half at most, so it starts around what Main Campaigns are and leaves room for more in case many nice campaigns are found. Once a list of campaigns are built that we agree are suitable it might be a good idea to run them dry with the director off to get a rough idea on how long they are to find the total time without skips since huge ones are probably going to be very uncommon for a solo run. Perhaps this collective, trickless time should be closer to the 1h30m mark to compensate for potential big skips especially in co-op to ensure the time doesn't get too low.

Tried two campaigns tonight so far, Suicide Blitz and Back to School.

Suicide Blitz looks good and looks like it may have some potential for interesting skips (especially for co-op). The maps feel like they are longer than Valve maps but once you're speeding through them and skipping stuff it may cut down on time. I'd put it in the running.

Back to School was a pretty muddled campaign that felt like it was trying to take several different themes and shove them all into one, not to mention almost everything about it had nothing to do with a school until the very end. For speedrunning, there were too many holdout areas that will stop a run cold while you wait for things to happen before proceeding which will really kill the pace. There were also some missing textures in one of the maps which we were all seeing so that must be a problem with the Workshop upload. I would not recommend this for consideration.

I'll keep going through the top rated ones soon and keep that list building.

Ah, Suicide Blitz! I think that's a campaign people kept telling me I should try, it looks great.

I think I'll go through some of the top rated on the workshop on stream to get a feel for them and gather opinions as well as ideas of other popular campaigns people know about.

Yeah, back in the day there was a reason since it wasn't known yet if anybody would run it on console, but it seems pretty clear that will never happen, especially when you consider it isn't possible for consoles to compete anymore. Perhaps the platform column should just be removed entirely?

I've always been interested in seeing a difficulty column that reflects the lowest difficulty played during the run (so no Easy voting if you want to submit Expert), so if anybody wants to submit Expert runs you can sort by difficulty to essentially create Expert leaderboards without the clutter of entirely new categories. I was thinking this after the complaints of the game not being played on Expert in AGDQ, which made quite a mess of its YouTube comments. Maybe if platform is removed that will make room for this? I'll plop the idea down here and leave it up for discussion.

I wouldn't mind some new stuff to play, and my viewers would probably like to see some completely new campaigns as well. I support this with the hope that other runners like mister tree man above me submits too, I wouldn't want to be all lonely! By the likes it looks like mrfailzz and kaito might be in too. It will make for some interesting new skips as well, who knows what crazy common jumps may await us?

We need to handle this carefully, though. I really don't want another Left 4 Mario situation (that campaign is godawful). These campaigns should be in theme with the official campaigns, designed well or at least are fun/interesting to play, look good, and are rated highly. I'm not familiar with many custom campaigns myself so I'd have to look around at some before voting on any, but if anybody else is familiar we should start posting them so we can all take a look and figure out what the best candidates are.

Length-wise 5 or so campaigns so it matches the Main Campaigns length sounds good. Are you also thinking of having IL versions of each? Those categories are always a big help in practicing for the "main campaigns" category.

Ah, you're on the times, alright, thank you again. Figured I'd offer initially just in case the work was reason to not update the leaderboards.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of updating things on the leaderboards, can you remove Freekill's 6:20 on The Sacrifice Solo? In the description of a run after that which is now obsolete he actually asked for its removal as he accidentally left the platform as PS3 so it's stuck with no placement now.

Speaking of which, is it possible to change the ordering of things in the dropdown menu? The platform should probably default to PC since that is what the vast majority of runs are going to be so it's harder to slip up in the future. Maybe also default the version to Newest since that's probably what new runners would be playing on?

Thank you, Darkossz!

I've been testing the autosplitter with bill and it is fully functional right now in recording times with and without loads and splitting accurately. The only problem is some jumpy lag while it's running, although it has been minimized significantly. To be honest, I may only notice it because I am on a high hertz monitor and accustomed to everything being very smooth, others running at a standard of 60 might not notice it as much. Regardless, loads can still be removed via checking the recording in the end if somebody didn't want to use the splitter anyway. Hopefully we'll find some way around the lag entirely, though.

I'll start working on building a list of the new times for existing records. Second and third place sounds good? I'm not sure how moderating these leaderboards works but I hope the times are easy to edit or add to new columns, however it's decided the loadless times should be displayed.

I wonder what runs will now be close to a sub-whatever time, I might find some campaigns I will want to improve now...

Hey there! Just submitted L4D1, L4D2, and Alien Swarm, all of which we ran in the SourceRuns Marathon as well, and L4D1 we're running in AGDQ 2017.

I think I did the time estimations correctly, but just to be clear both L4D runs are 1h10m, and Alien Swarm is 17 minutes.

Agreed that it is time to remove loads as requiring fast hardware to compete is not right. That is now the point the leaderboards are pretty much at, you are going to have a very hard time taking some of the records if you don't have an SSD, or even two in RAID0 like I do. Although this should have been in place a while ago, now that the leaderboard times are much more competitive it's more important now than ever. No Mercy might not even be possible anymore with slow loads, The Sacrifice is probably the same, Swamp Fever, Dark Carnival for certain. Even loading just a few seconds slower on some of those (which is absolutely the difference between HDD vs SSD) will make getting the record far more difficult, if not impossible.

Now that an effective autosplitter exists that can accurately remove loads there is even more reason to use it since it no longer requires knowledge of checking the frames, simply using the autosplitter and submitting the LiveSplit time will work.

As for the runs already up, well, the times can only be faster and worrying about how to fix the current leaderboards isn't a good reason to leave things as they are instead of future proofing right now as waiting longer will only make things more difficult. I would be happy to look at the frames of every submitted run of mine to adjust without loads accordingly and use the autosplitter from this point on. I'll even do one better and volunteer to pull the proper 2nd and 3rd place times as well assuming I can easily download them to open them up. The rest of the runs past that point are generally pretty slow so it probably isn't a big deal to leave the runs beyond third place alone and wait for new submissions to roll in using the new system.

Columns for RTA and no load times is alright but maybe not really necessary as long as the rules are clear about how to remove loads and instructs clearly on how to utilize the autosplitter. There would be no reason to use RTA timing in the future.