So my run got accepted and it's now #1 by a pretty large margin. I actually think this is kind of silly and that there can be meaningful Solitaire competition and categories, but defining rules can be tricky.
Here's a list of all the tricky subjects I can think of: glitches: The XP version's Ctrl+A is extremely broken and allows for stuff like moving a card that is not at the top of the stack to the stacks in the top-right corner of the field. This would make it by far the fastest version, if they hadn't added this from Vista on: hints: Just spamming T and Enter repeatedly will let you "solve" the game and the only skill is how fast you can mash and cheating via scripts would be easy and undetectable. It seems to be just slightly slower than the best XP run with glitches at http://www.solitaire-ranking.org/. doubleclicking: The established leaderboard at http://www.solitaire-ranking.org/ allows you to rebind your mouse keys to other effects, this includes making your rightclick behave as a doubleclick, which many players used to increase the speed of going through the stack while holding Ctrl+A saving them seconds. 99% of speedrunners would probably call this a light form of scripting, but it would not be fair to brush off the rules of a long-standing community as cheating. manipulating the seed: The game you get is based on the system clock and so you can have multiple goes at the same memorized board by just setting your system time to the desired value (at least up to XP, Vista and later versions may be different). http://www.solitaire-ranking.org/ actually acknowledges this as cheating, but at the same time their rules state that it cannot be detected. That several of the top times are achieved on the same board makes me sceptical that this rule was actually followed.
My personal opinion is that there should be two categories: One where you can do all of the things I just listed, that is just silly, but deserves to exist to show off the fastest way to beat it without invalidating old runs. And one, where all of them are banned, that is close to how it was meant to be played (this one maybe seperated into Draw 1 and Draw 3, although I think a variable suffices). From my (few, inconclusive) tests it seems as though the Windows 7 version at least is not as easily manipulatable. It has to be determined which versions have good RNG generation and only they should be allowed (for this category).
EDIT: Any why are there regions and why does real-time start at a different instant than ingame time and why should there even be two timings?
I used Win XP for my draw three run but apparently the "rules" for draw three don't allow XP anymore, I'm just really confused why (I didn't use any exploits/glitches btw). The top runs are ridiculously fast tho, but they also definitely use some older versions of Solitaire. I don't even know why I care about this tho, just wanted my meme pb up there
I know this will sound extremely silly: I'm not sure if the current categorization is very sensible. It doesn't save as much time as I thought and honestly it is sometimes hard to tell, if a glitch occured or not, even when going frame by frame through the video: in some situations it could be that the top card and then the card below it went to the top right decks and it could also be that the card below went and then the top card went.
Greetings everyone :)
I just came here to post about this, so it's nice to see that you are already discussing it. I am currently playing solitaire "no auto play", as I call it. This means not exploting any of these things; only manual play involved. I am using auto complete when I get all the cards on the tableau though, and allow undos. How do you like it?
I'm playing on the Win 10 "Microsoft Solitaire Collection".
Hugs for everyone. It's nice to know other Klondike speedruners :)
