I have been a mod for this category for a long time - and you may or may not know that I was here to originally lay out what you have here now.

2 years ago, we wanted to start creating runs for TTR, and needed to have lots of categories set as we go through with it.

After reading many of the forum posts and hearing out perspectives, I agree that TTR needs an overhaul to standardize its runs.

There are already many factors of RNG that greatly affect how fast a run can go, and adding load times, crashing, and amounts of players runners have in their hands gives many an unfair advantage.

As a proposal, we need to do the following to make these runs fair for everyone.

For Co-Op:

1. Ban having more than 3 additional teammates for the speedrun. This means you CANNOT allow anyone aside from your teammates to help you during the runs. 1a. Because of this, it needs to be considered whether or not going forward runs can or should be allowed to be livestreamed, as "stream snipers" can always come in and help the runner, whether or not they are asking for extra help

2. Compare runs by GAME TIME over REALTIME. --- Because of the various factors based on people's internet, hardware, etc. The only way to make runs more fair is to start excluding times within the runs where the game is either loading or crashed. Runners should have the right to pause their timer during these times. For now, you can manually do this until a load remover has been programmed. If you have experience with this, you may DM me on discord at foxotic#0482 if you would like to contribute to this.

I think these 2 changes can make the runs significantly more fair, and gives everyone a chance to complete the game based off of teamwork and SKILL over it being a popularity contest.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Do you approve? Disapprove?

I'm going to wait until Friday, Jan 25 to make action happen on my own, as I have not been active in the community for some time, but I do have a passion for runs overall, and want to see some care taken into somewhere I can help.

If any mods or active runners in particular want to discuss changes with me, please don't hesitate to DM me.

I'll address these from my own perspective.

1. Banning the help of others in the speedrun simply removes the MMO factor of Toontown Rewritten. Toontown Livestreamers certainly have an advantage when it comes to speedrunning, however removing others outside of the 3 other toons in the speedrun marks a grey area. For example, If a toon outside of the teammates joins a battle unknowingly or not, would that be considered a bannable run offense? Is there a certain criteria that fits if the toon was joining to help the speedrun or if they were there of a random occurrence? And If not, what about toons outside of the teammates joining into buildings? There's a lot of questions that question rather a run is validated or not based on the involvement of toons and while restricting it may change the speed-run drastically, it will also cause many runs that were previously validated to either be permanently be up on the leaderboard where nobody can touch the times because it is not allowed anymore or taken down because they no longer fit the new rules. I feel a new sub-category to separate these from Co-Op would be fair to all players who previously submitted runs.

2. I don't have an issue with this provided the crashing or loading issues was not intentional. If the timer was paused and the 3 additional teammates were to take advantage of this time to go to locations (such as shopkeepers and toon hqs) it would be a matter of how fast you could get into the game to teleport to each toon - thus decreasing and making the amount of time it took to run to each area completely un-timed. Ontop of that, some toons would still be faster than others during loading screens due to their internet, AND if they are using a HDD or SSD to load Toontown Rewritten. Simply put, there are some factors of the game that cannot run as fast as others due to how the game loads.

I hope this community sees a renovation as well in order to ensure the benefit of all toons playing fairly and adequately towards speedrunning in Toontown Rewritten.

1. I think the current difference between Solo and Co-Op right now is fine. The rules we have for Solo have worked well in creating a fair category where nobody gains an advantage from receiving outside help. I agree with bingokemski and don't really see the benefit of a 3 toon restriction for Co-Op. It would be really hard to enforce, and I think it is good to have a category that is allowed to be live streamed with resitrctions that the mods would have to try and make additional rules for.

2. I could see this working well when a load remover is complete. In the meantime, it is not practical at all to manually time every single loading zone. Timing by game time only works well when there is a program that can time it automatically so that the method of timing is uniform across all run.

I appreciate the feedback guys (This is ChrisCampbll on my newer brand channel) I'm gonna take some time to figure out some of these points, because yes a lot of these points are valid

For one tho, I will say why I believe a 4 person team should be max at least for TTC runs (most common) Everything can be done with a max of 4 people, including 4 person battles, teleport rotating, etc. I think it would simply make the run more fair and allow all 4 members to have their names listed.

The issue with more people is the unfair advantage. Not everyone has access to 70+ people to schedule out where to park and go. Theres a few ways to avoid as much interaction as possible from streams (if chosen not to ban them)

1. Require everyone be on a Welcome Valley variant, and agree which district to go to before the run starts unrevealed
2. Do not add anyone aside from your teammates as friends. Making it impossible to TP park from other viewers. The worst case scenario is that some people come in to help with battles, but the MAIN TEAM is responsible for finding the required cogs for tasks and getting the "lead" to the proper destination

Secondly, Bingo brought up a great point about how regardless of the main runner's loading times, others can still move around. Honestly tho, I think the important factor is that the frame of reference in time is that the main screen IS what is important, so regarless of the teammates moving to where they need to go, the final time can still qualify by the "lead" in the group.

Well, if you have more friends on your friends list, I feel like it would be so much harder and slower to teleport to the right people because of how many friends are on your list. So I feel like having more friends just makes it harder for you. All you need is about 4 friends to make everything so much simpler.

For the 1st point, I believe that A. Streams need to be allowed in a category, and thus anything uncontrollable by the streamer should be allowed in at least one category. Without streams, any possible person wanting to do the longer runs with fans may be inclined to quit, and I would rather not exclude any people that are interested in running the game fairly.

B. There may be a difference in fairness, however if there is any change restricting help in co-op, I would rather it seperate Co-op into 2 categories of "Limited Co-op" and "Unlimited Co-op" so that no previously completed runs are excluded due to random rule changes. My idea is that unlimited can use whatever you want in terms of friends, but limited dissallows abusing the rules by limiting either the amount of friends or how you can use them. One idea branches off of the idea of Multi-tooning in that you can have friends, but the toon must have been created after the timer started. However, that would difficult to enforce.

C.How fair do we need to make it? Do we need seperate sections for newer updates because silly meter can improve walking speed or Field Offices can block Toon HQs? When do we decide to draw the line of making everything fair?

D. Neither of the categories represent the way people would normally play the game, which is friending people as you go. While I don't necessarily fully support this idea because it is way too vague and tricky to implement to work, I do want to try and see about making it so you cannot teleport to friends but they can teleport to you and help you freely aside from that. The main use would be if somebody tried to do an all tasks run, or even just a "Start until MML" Speedrun, that would require training gags during the run. For all tasks, people would be forced into co-op if they didnt want to solo a bunch of tall buildings during a run and have to grind before each attempt. This is more of something to consider for if any runs like these come to be, which they might (Emphasis on the might) at some point this summer if I can set aside the time to just play-sleep-play for a while

[Edit: Rereading this, point D may be a bit confusing. TL;DR is that a run in which you do a long playthrough of multiple playgrounds is more likely to have you friend people as you go, but is put into Co-op on technicality while working completely different from the other co-op runs, and that while these long runs may not exist yet, it is best to start thinking about it before they do.]

For the 2nd point, many games have several platforms and some are faster than others, but it is still no difference between the games so I think that overall this is only worth doing if timing it is easy.

This is a quite old thread, but on the point of streams:

Streams can still be allowed while limiting the ability of stream snipers by enforcing a stream delay. It doesn't have to be huge -- about a 30 second delay would probably do the trick. I'd personally prefer it to be longer (around 1-2 minutes), but 30 seconds allows the streamer to still be able to easily interact with their chat for an entertaining stream without the chat being too far behind.

Also, I absolutely agree with the idea of co-op being limited to 3 teammates which are not on your friends list (although I would encourage an exception -- teammates may be added to the friends list for the beginner TTC task, but must be deleted immediately after the task is turned in).