I agree with you. My thinking about this is:
- Losing cards might turn out to be pretty RNG heavy (especially compared to anything Shovel Knight by now) and to be super off putting for any old and new runners
- Route deviation possibilities will be a nice addition and might make the run more enjoyable overall
- Although it will be pretty unlikely after one point, it is theoretically possible that we find a Lower %. What do we do then? Split categories, obsolete old runs? Let us not go that route
Generally speaking I find categories to be needed when we have meaningfully different instruments approaching the run (Low%, Any%, NG+) or meaningfully different competion criteria (100%, pet memec, all cipher coins). I feel we should stick to that mentality when choosing the rules. Losing cards to a random dude will not improve a run in a meaningful way (unless we do a Going Broke run which I am totally in for)
A question: Do medals increase %? And if they not, do you feel it will be proper to include them as a criteria for Low% just so we stick to the usual Shovel Knight formula? I am kind of 50/50 here.
Losing your cards should not take that long even with few RNG. It doesn't bother me at all. So lowest card completion should be taken in account.
I don't see any issues with the map completion aswell. It is fun to go for another route compared to any% for world 3 and I'd like to keep it that way.
@kartacha : medals count towards items%, don't worry
I'd like to add the fact that you are proposing to ignore 2 out of the 3 of things which impacts the total completion. To me low% should be lowest total completion. The low% items should be the misc category there
I did some testing on the subject of losing cards. The fastest spots for losing cards are specter knight and playing kid which both don't take long to reach and playing kid is even reachable five minutes into the run, so this would be a reasonably early reset point, should we decide to include minimum card completion. However in order to lose one of your non infinite cards you need to have it in your starting hand, because the opponent will appearantly always take the card you have infinite supply of, when you have one on the board. Likely there is a mercy mechanic in play, that makes oppoents try to not take away your non infinite cards when you have a small deck. So the only option for losing one of these cards is to play it from your starting hand and immediately concede, so the opponent has no other option but to take away your non infinite card. One match played this way takes about 15-20 seconds, so optimally you are done with it in about 70 seconds. I think the game might have some bias for giving you non infinite cards on your hand, because in my experience you get them more often than you should, if it was purely random which cards you would get. Still when I was testing, losing the cards took anywhere in the range between two minutes to four minutes. Since you can reasonably lose minutes from this and even losing just 20 seconds will be significant enough in a couple of months, I would say for the sake of having a more consistent category, that does not have you reset most of your runs to RNG we should exclude minimum card completion from the Low% requirements. Lowest map completion I am fine with either way, but I would include it, because I don't see any solid reason as to why not.
For the cards, I’d say no. Make a different category like TrueLow% or Lowest% if you really want to keep all the % as low as possible.
For map %, I’m pretty mixed. I think there’s only two routes currently that are the fastest (the 10% route & 11% route). I haven’t personally timed the 11% route yet, but it seems faster. I’m fine with whatever the consensus is with how we want to handle that.
I would say keep a misc. category for lowest map completion % and/or total completion %, King's the only knight with the other completion variables, and for the sake of keeping all the main category runs the same, the main category should be only item completion % in my opinion.
