Dear speedrunner in communities, I am Pika, a speedrunner. I am writing on my behalf. I know this letter may not do anything but I want to share my current thought about speedrun.com.
First of all, I agree that speedrun.com hasn’t taken any community suggestions. Even they will have an update on moderation tools which were always asked by communities before, so what? They are not even released now. We do not even know if they will update it in the future. Even more, elo hasn't listened to the community of previous layout update too.
Compared to another underrated speedrun website, even some of them are centralized in moderation, they also listen to community opinion. In SRC, there is one obvious example, everyone knows speedrun.com has banned PVP-related leaderboard. But Is it what the community wants? You can see there is contradictory between site rule and what they do sometimes too. In the beginning, I think that SRC would listen to more opinions from communities after the acquire of elo. I wish they will listen to different kinds of people in different communities.
Also, some people said that it is good to have advertisements in SRC to pay some people for working in SRC. It is understandable to have advertisements in general but at least please do not break the layout.
I do not know if this thread will be deleted. It is not hating message for SRC. But this is the fact of SRC now. There are many things I haven't mentioned in this thread/letter as I do not want it to be too down to read. I am not natively English so sorry if there is any grammar mistake.
PikAsriel
People defending the further worsening of the site need to understand that it is not ran by the "community" anymore. elo.io didn't buy SRC because they themselves are speedrunners and they just really want to improve the site/community. The plan was always to monetize it.
Regarding your “obvious example” about PvP leaderboards:
From what I’ve seen, not accepting new PvP games (they aren’t banned btw) is indeed what the community wants. Anytime a discussion comes up about it in the forums, I always see more people that think they don’t belong here than those who do.
@Pear 🍐 I hope they stick to those rules.
Problem is, if the profit incentive is the most important thing to the new ownership, then opening the floodgates to Among Us, Fortnite and every new pvp fps that has popularity will be to their benefit because it'll mean more people watching ads.
I think that'll kill this site tho. Speedrunning becomes a laughing stock if evey game just becomes inundated with pointless, arbitrary and superfluous categories for WRs no one cares about save for the one person who runs it.
This is a bit of a tangent but since people are already talking about it: I think the rule should be that categories shouldn't include PVP, even if the game primarily does. If people want to do runs against bots or through tutorials of online PVP games, who cares honestly? People have fun in different ways and even if I find those runs a little silly, it's potentially someone's introduction into speedrunning and they're not hurting anyone.
Now games definitely don't need a leaderboard on here to be run but: with these past games with not an insignificant amount of runners getting rejected (hundreds in some cases), where many have never speedrun before, it puts a really bad taste in their mouth and tells them that they're not welcome on the site, or that the speedrunning community is generally elitist.
Bit confused about the message above and the connection between PVP games getting accepted and "evey game just becoming inundated with pointless, arbitrary and superfluous categories for WRs". This already happens; sometimes people make a bunch of dumb categories and they run it and call WR and nobody cares. The world continues to rotate. The site manages to survive. Speedrunning is a lot more than WRs.
@Bullets because 99% of this community doesn't want to see a homepage that looks like this every single day:
Fortnite 1st Place: Tutorial Level 1 ANY % w/Knife Fortnite 1st Place: Tutorial Level 2 ANY% w/SMG Fortnite 1st Place: Tutorial Level 1 ANY % w/o Knife sub Fist Fortnite 1st Place: Tutorial Level 1 ANY % w/Knife first checkpoint Fortnite 1st Place: Tutorial Level 1 ANY % w/Knife first to second checkpoint while eating an apple dipped in peanut butter ETC.
It's stupid an adds nothing to the hobby when parameters become so arbitrary to the point of meaninglessness. Of course I'm exaggerating on some examples and may make no sense in the context of the game, because I don't play Fortnite; but the game isn't my gripe, it's the genre in general in the context of speedruns. Resources are not limitless, and the more games that are hosted and supported, requires more resources from the site and community to support. SRC didn't change their rules in respect to pvp and endless games a year ago just to be spiteful jerks, they did it because it was getting out of control and hard for them to manage; as it will again if those restrictions were lifted.
@Brakshow I get that PVP games seemingly work against the concept of speedrunning, but the examples listed could easily be any other single player game where the community decides to have a million categories. If the members of that community want a bloated leaderboard like that, then that's what they want. As far as resources go, thousands of games are coming out every week, non pvp even. Many of which meet the """criteria""" to be listed on SRC. Disallowing certain genres or styles of games because people perceive them as not being legitimate just reminds me of SDA and TG.
If there's that many games coming out every week (there isn't by a long shot, but I get your point), then thats' even more a reason to disallow pvp/endless/terrible mobile/flash games or it'll be even worse.
Also, just because a thing exists now that sucks (Bajillions of terrible categories), doesn't mean said sucky thing should be allowed ad infinitum to all possible genres. I'd argue restrictions should be put on categories to keep them in line with site rules about length and notability. I mean what sense does it make to deny a game that only has 50 mobile downloads from the app store but allow a category that 1-2 people play worldwide? If you're going to enforce a rule like for new games, you should hold new categories at the very least to the same standard.
There were a couple reasons why we stopped accepting PvP games, one big one is just that there is a lot of variables to consider in PvP games that can make it so that speedruns are vastly unfair to the people running them.