It is time! Time to discuss the Bi-Weekly Challenge leaderboard that I've been talking about for so long. I finally have more time to dedicate to getting it up. As always, comment on all ideas below and anything else that may come to your mind.

This thread is for discussing the basic idea of the "category" itself, including how often it rotates, how to handle creating the rules and applying them for runs, and whatever else comes up. This is NOT the thread yet for discussing actually running the category as far as challenge ideas or the currently active challenge. That will be its own official thread later. This thread is to get the functionality of how it works done.

The proposed idea is a single, temporary category, likely on its own tab in the Full-game Leaderboard, which rotates its ruleset every X amount of days. It will have "challenges" which are crazy ideas that make for a much different run than usual, the crazier the better and anything can potentially be used to build one of these challenges, including modifying cheat commands.

How the rotation would work is that the category under the Full-game Leaderboard will be created for a new challenge, possibly reading as something like "Challenge - Jockpocalypse", Jockpockalypse being the title of the current challenge. It will have its own rules when you click the view rules button that is specific to the challenge, including either a mutation to use that will set the environment to run it all up for you (ideal, this is being investigated), or perhaps a config with the commands ready that can be executed once in-game. When the challenge is ready to be rotated, the leaderboards will be screenshotted, written out and preserved on the wiki and a thread here, and then deleted and replaced with a new one with new rules and all. I'm pretty sure deleting a category doesn't actually remove the runs and readding a category of the same name will restore it as it was. I still aim to test that.

Originally I conceptualized it as a weekly challenge since that came to mind immediately, but then I worked through that and realized bi-weekly (every second week) made more sense. I am thinking of running it for 10 days on, 4 off, then the rotation. There are many reasons for this. First, seven days may be just a bit too low to get some good runs in before a challenge rotates. It may also be difficult to delete and replace a category with a new one all at once, so four days off gives plenty of time to be sure I can slot a new one in time and do the leaderboard preservation. Having time off leaves other categories more open to run. It will run through challenges at a slower pace, making it easier to keep up with making new ones. This also allows a challenge to run through two weekends, maybe starting sometime Friday and ending the second Monday? Need to figure out what range allows all timezones to get a full Saturday and Sunday twice over.

I am thinking of holding a vote after every 4? 5? 6? challenges to bring back a previously run challenge, or still continue to a new one, in case we really like one and want to revisit it after a while. Hopefully the leaderboards will preserve as I hope so when one is readded all old runs are still there.

I still need to work on actually getting the environment for a challenge done enough (figuring out mutation or config and rules) of one challenge before the category can go up, so it will be a bit. I do have quite a few ideas already to support it for a while, once they are set up and confirmed to be interesting enough.

I agree with everything you said. I think this layout will work just fine. One thing is maybe 4 off days are a little too many, maybe around 12 on days and 2 off days would work better, not that it matters all that much. Also maybe we could employ a point system and after every few (5?) challenges are done the top 2 or 3 people who got the most points could get something little (money, whatever) as a prize. This is just an idea, not something we necessarily have to do. We'd have to see if our community would be interested in getting a small prize pool together.

I agree with burhac's suggestion that maybe there should be less days off, I'd say 3, although an odd amount of days feels a lil' wierd to me, Yet having 4 days off feels like a bit long, yet 2 days can (possibly) cause some problems with getting new ideas further down the line.

Although if there is some small prize pool, I hope that it would end up taking away from the main leaderboards because getting, say: some money, steam gift card. a dog. or whatever the prize may be, may seem more appealing to people than than the WR, while obviously this wouldn't be for everyone, it could still lose submissions to the other category's, which in my eyes isn't desirable with this just being something for fun. (not saying that the other category's arent done because they are fun. Atleast that's the case for most maps #GetRidOfDarkCarnival)

I think that the bi-weekly challenges could also be used to give attention to some categories that are lost in time. Might not be as appealing, but it could be fun like bringing attention to some of the custom campaigns or something. I agree with everything said, pretty much.

Oh, another thing I forgot to mention is the content being run in the challenges. It might vary per challenge depending on how long it seems like it'll take to run through a campaign, but I was thinking on average maybe a run should consist of two campaigns? That would probably place most runs at around the 20 minute mark, and a single campaign seems it could be too short. I also wanted to purposely pick campaigns to match the rules, so a challenge based on bunnyhopping, for example, would likely run on Dark Carnival at least and whatever else compliments hopping.

We could modify the days on/off a bit, odd days won't matter so much since the important part is keeping it in a two week schedule so that the start and end days can be consistent. Having enough time to swap the categories properly without having to rush to do it if real-life things are happening and so on is important. We could go 11 on 3 off, add another day in there around the weekend. That means it could run, let's say... from end of day (near 12am-ish, I guess) eastern time on Thursday, to end of the day on the second Monday? That gives Friday leading into the full weekend twice in my timezone, and should be at least two full weekends in others.

I'm not sure about prizes, at least not monetary... as pickle was saying, that may detract too much from running other categories plus it is a lot to ask from the community to pool that. Also to consider once prizes are introduced (especially monetary) is that the chance for cheating as well as the requirement to stop it goes up dramatically. Some of these challenges may have sv_cheats on if mutations can't force commands effectively otherwise, so being able to confirm that no cheating has happened will not really be possible. If it's left just for fun and a temporary leaderboard that isn't as big a deal.

As I mentioned about picking a couple of campaigns that compliment the current challenge, custom campaigns could certainly be run as well if they fit it. If there's even a really unique campaign (out of the box like Questionable Ethics) that doesn't fit being a permanent fixture on the leaderboards but may be interesting to try anyway, this would be the place for it. I was already thinking of trying Survival here and there which is the same idea.