Lets say a beta tester would be speedrunning a game you want to speedrun before the release. How would you feel about it?

Would you want him to tell you his starts day 1 or would you prefer trying to find some by yourself?

Would you abandon the idea of speedrunning that game since someone already have 500 more hour of experience in the game then you do day one?

I'm curious to see how you would react.

Somebody with much more experience than me wants to help me by sharing their existing knowledge and findings? Hell yeah I'd want to know what they have to say!

I can understand the appeal of trying to figure it all out on your own, but at the same time, if you're at all involved with the community for any game you run, you're inevitably going to come across something you didn't know, so it's not like you're really doing it all yourself anyway.

No different to entering any other speedrun community that already has an experienced runner pushing it. I'd do a few runs myself blind to get a grasp of the fundamentals and then I'd absolutely want to learn what the experienced runner knows.

Also, having 500 hours of experience solo routing the game doesn't mean it takes 500 hours to learn either. Anyone willing to learn from said person is gonna catch up real quick, especially if the tester is open and willing to teach what he/she has learned.

The only real question is, from a routing perspective is everything tapped? is every glitch found? Chances are there is still something that was missed, since testers are only really required to find things that effect the casual experience. Speedrun tricks/glitches can often be much more obscure and difficult to find, so even though a game has gone through rigorous beta testing it doesn't mean that the speedrun is definitely fully optimized either.