Since Doodle World's first few months, a lot has been added to the game, while the speedrunning community remained dormant. This has allowed for mechanics that weren't in the game before that greatly impact runs to crop up, even those which are heavily RNG dependent. These include roulette tickets, which I am going to ban shortly (roulette as a whole will be banned) but it also includes daily gifts. The problem arises where some runs will be impacted in an unpredictable way due to what doodle/item is given from the daily gift system, similar to the idea of why the roulette was intended to be banned. I would preemptively ban this as well, but a run was just submitted which used this to get the WR. It followed all the rules of the current category, so I accepted it.

On one hand, I know innately that the run violates the spirit of the category, and I don't know if it should stay. However, I'm very excited to welcome new runners to a dormant community, and I am optimistic that a better time could be achieved without the use of daily gifts. For now, I will allow the random gifts from the daily rewards in runs, but if someone who holds a leaderboard position or submits a run without using daily gifts protests the legitimacy of runs which use them, I may be inclined to change the rules to reflect the newest state of the game and also ban random rewards from daily gifts. In doing so, I would have to reject runs on the leaderboard which use such things. Therefore, I recommend not using random gifts from daily rewards in the future.

It's hard to make everyone happy. I love welcoming new runners (and a new WR!) but I must also respect those who came before.

Now, there are a few more solutions to this issue, such as making a roulette/daily gift category or opening up the main category to such things. The community is quite inactive now, so if one such decision seems overwhelmingly popular (and I get an appropriate run submitted), I will go with the community. I'd love to get Doodle World speedrunning popular and make the community satisfied!

At the moment, my right hand is unusable, so typing is really slow (this has taken 30 minutes ;() and I won't be updating much in the near future (read: week or so) but be prepared for some changes as I find out more about Doodle World now.

DW speedrunning head Mod

Halaffa

I have this on my radar. I'm concerned about creating niche categories with so few main category runs though. Also I don't have too much experience with the most recent update(s).

Yeah, this won't be a category. Starters aren't misprint locked iirc, so the optimal run would be to reset after getting a normal starter until you get a misprint one. There would be virtually 0 improvement on time over time, down to simply better menuing and movement to the lab, something which can be improved for the main category anyway.

When the categories were initially made, month bonuses weren't a thing. It was more of a safeguard for in-game events not invalidating previous runs just because something temporary made the game easier. However, we thought it would be cool to have a category for the runs which use OP events to get record times, so we added one. I think it's fine to keep them all in one "event" category though, since the community is still very small and adding more categories will just serve to split it even more for little reason.

Adding on to this, I personally haven't played DW in a while, so I suppose logging on to a fresh account and seeing what all the new update material can offer in advantages for speedrunning is something I should consider.

I heard there is a new daily reward system that gives rewards for playtime. If these rewards are the same for every day, or at least the same for any account's first and second day, I think they are fair game for the main category. If they differ based on time of month/week/year, I would ban them from the main category all together but allow them for events. "Events" should be renamed to "Time specific boosting allowed" or something like that, because that's really what it's for.

Sounds great! Second key guardian is now a category.