I was thinking about how when WoW Classic comes out, there are likely going to be many people who will speedrun the full level 1-60. From what I know of from people who speedran vanilla WoW back in the day, in-game time was used and will probably continued to be used in timing these runs due to its length. There are potential loopholes and mechanics that could be abused to drastically extend real time in order to significantly cut in game time though, which could cause a creation of a real time category.

My question is, if a community such as this (or other communities with long games) decided to have a real time category for something far exceeding 24 hours of time to complete, should we be allowing this? It is pretty well documented how much risk you can potentially subject yourself to when you are sitting for that much at a time, often without any sleep.

I'm certainly not someone who wants to default to restricting any community from creating any categories they want to, but should speedrun.com at least provide adequate disclaimers and warnings for people wishing to go down this route? It would be a shame if anyone ever hurt themselves or worse while speedrunning for the purpose of submitting to this website.

As a side note, I also don't believe this is really a big deal for games where like only 1 person decides to be crazy enough to do 100% of some super long game. My concern is when a game such as WoW Classic comes out which is a very popular game and the speedrun gets potentially very competitive, more and more people could be doing these extended speedruns in a single sitting and eventually would be doing these runs over and over again.

I figure most speedrunning of WoW in general belongs to the Ironman Champion boards, and I know they've done some real-time related runs as well, but if anyone does decide to do it in real time here, it could definitely become an issue. Fads in gaming pop up quite rapidly, and having played my fair share of WoW in the past, I know there's always been a major hype for Classic WoW. People do reckless things for brief fame, just look up any of the pop culture "challenges" within the last few years.

I think its completely valid to put up some disclaimers and warnings should this become a thing. I'd definitely vote for it. Part of me doesn't think many people would be willing to do a 24+ hour run (probably most would stick to in-game time), but this wouldn't be a bad precaution in the case it did. You never know, it could prevent someone from making an impulse decision or the site getting a bad rep for it.

Regardless, we can just hope people will be smart about it and that nothing will go wrong in the first place. (Heck, what would you do for 60 levels? Kite high-level mobs like you're going for Rhok'delar or something?)

I don't know a single thing about WoW specifically, but to answer the question generally,

[quote=Grav]should we be allowing this?[/quote]

Meh. People are gonna do dangerously long speedruns whether leaderboards exist for them or not. Attempting to regulate it (which would be problematic anyway) wouldn't solve anything.

Disclaimers aren't a bad idea, although there's currently nothing stopping game moderators from just adding one to the category rules, which is probably the best approach to that. Any sort of automated site-wide "should this have a disclaimer" algorithm would inevitably be flawed.

[quote]

My question is, does Twitch have any kind of guideline/disclaimer specifically around this point?[/quote]

Well, streams automatically picnic after 48 hours (you'll notice this with GDQ and ESA streams), but I think that's more of a technical thing. And there's obviously nothing stopping you (again, as GDQ and ESA show) from just starting up again.

BloodThunder's done 48 hour streams (yes, plural) and emerged none the worse for wear. I doubt I could go much past 28 or so. I don't think it's inherently harmful.

specifically in the case of classic WoW, no matter what rules you try to impose, a leaderboard on a site like this is pretty much meaningless. a seperate site that votes on the quality of each run is probably better than a strictly time-based leaderboard.

the first level 60 in classic will likely be in the range of 40-70 hours real time, and nobody will be able to compete with that unless they are assisted by other players, and there's no way to be completely unassisted, even if you try. the closest you could get is a local server emulating the game, at which point everything can be messed with, so there would be no way to tell a legit run from a cheated one. on top of all that, the only way you could even kind of verify a run is to have the player stream the entire thing from start to finish. i'd guess that the first lvl 60 will be piloted by 2 skilled players living in the same household, who swap off play about 24 hours or halfway through (probably at like level 42), and it will be done off-stream because of that. classic wow speedruns are for fun, entertainment, and for advancing your character in the game quickly. a leaderboard does not make sense for this game.

as far as health concerns go, i think for most normal healthy people it's probably safe to go up to 30 hours given you eat and drink properly, and stand up and stretch occasionally. you just don't want to be seated the whole time, and in WoW there's plenty of time to go AFK on flights to take a quick walk irl

as far as the site goes, i think it would be smart to at least have some kind of blurb that shows up when viewing leaderboards of runs that are over 16 hours or so. it wouldn't need to be long, maybe just one line with a link to another page with a bit longer of a writeup regarding long run safety. in that page i'd probably mention caffeine safety, as well as reasoning for why caffeine is not recommended, and why water is better.

regardless of all that, any mod of a game with long runs can put their own long run disclaimers in the rules for the run

I approve of some kind of health disclaimers for super long categories. I suggested a scheduled break system of some kind but for now people are responsible enough to play healthy.

At some point, you as the concerned viewer just have to accept that people are going to do these long runs, and that they are aware of the health risks and accept them (and take necessary mitigating precautions) accordingly.