Amiibo
7 years ago
Florida, USA

Anything requiring external hardware that doesn't' come with the game should be a sub-category. I don't care if the time difference is 2 seconds or 20 minutes. Nobody should be at a disadvantage because they didn't invest in goofy pieces of plastic in the past that have different rarities and prices... What's wrong with it having it's own sub-category and keeping the main category to just plain vanilla game?

You don't group such drastically different play methods in the same category; it's odd to me that there's people supporting this. Though I do wonder if those people would still be advocating to keep them in the same category if they didn't already have the Amiibo's and didn't have easy access to them.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
LonTr0_, uforiah and 20 others like this
Victoria, Australia

What CursedToast said. I saved up for quite a while to get this game + the switch, I'm not about to go spend extra money on the amiibo.

bobakanoosh55555, LêS4kul and 2 others like this
United States

If I saw someone at GDQ use an amibo, it wouldn't encourage me to run the game. What if Nintendo released an amiibo that warped you to the credits. I know that's unrealistic/not the case, but for me it definitely wouldn't be fun to watch. Should be a separate category.

Colorado, USA

I agree entirely that Amiibo should be a separate category. And I feel it would be best to nip this in the bud asap. The sooner the switch happens the better, otherwise there may be resistance from the community. If you want to pay extra to compete in a category, fine. But it shouldn't be the main category of the game.

The rarity of them at the present time may not be a problem, but it could certainly pose a problem in the future for anyone hoping to run this game. They would need to track down Amiibo that would likely be rare, and then spend potentially tons of money to be able to speed run.

Lastly, Pay to Win is not a thing anyone likes why would one advocate FOR it? It's divisive and gives an unfair advantage. I say separate it for now, and MAYBE if Amiibo don't actually give any advantage(which I find hard to believe) merge them again in the future. I think it's safe to assume that won't happen, though.

I gotta say it sort of feels like those who are defending Amiibo already own them and don't think it's a problem because it isn't a problem for them personally.

California, USA

With past games in the Zelda franchise, there have almost never been any complaints towards needing to pay extra money to compete in speedrunning competitively (I have only ever heard 1 person complain about this out of hundreds of people who run the games).

I've been in the Wind Waker community for 4 years now, and not once have I heard a single complaint about needing to purchase a Japanese version of the game, a gameboy, or a gameboy to gamecube adapter to compete for the best times (both of which combined save more than 15 minutes over the English version + not using the gameboy).

In the Skyward Sword community players have never complained about putting down money for a Japanese copy of the game in order to save 12 minutes over the English version.

For runners of Twilight Princess HD, using a Wolf Link Amiibo saves ~20 seconds over not using the Wolf Link Amiibo due to faster savewarping and nobody has complained. Both Amiibo and non Amiibo runs go up on the same leaderboard.

For players who want to seriously compete in the Ocarina of Time 100% category, they'll need to purchase an N64 if they don't have one, and a Japanese 1.0 copy of the game to perform a glitch that saves more than 5 minutes, and as far as I know, nobody has ever complained.

There are more examples besides these but I think you get what I'm saying. In the past, Zelda speedrunners have never complained about needing to buy extra versions of the game or some other piece of plastic in order to compete for top times. To me, it seems silly to restrict some feature that was developed for the game intentionally, especially for the any% category which I have always seen defined as simply "No Restrictions" (besides obvious restrictions such as unintended hardware manipulation or the injection of cheat codes).

I do, however, understand that the players congregating to speedrun Breath of the Wild are from many other speedrunning communities who do not actively participate in the the speedrunning of Zelda games, and thus have different expectations on how the leaderboards should be handled and how times should be compared. This is why filters exist on the leaderboards; it's a much more efficient way of managing the leaderboards instead of creating separate pages for Amiibo/Non-Amiibo for every already defined category. This has worked perfectly fine on other Zelda leaderboards and allows players to filter through to see what the times are for a run done on X console using/not using item Y, on language Z.

A lot of people (at least in this forum) are claiming that including both Amiibo/Non Amiibo runs on the same leaderboard is unfair. While I do agree this is technically true, simply separating or banning Amiibo from use does not come close to solving the problem of fairness for this game. Already we know that the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild saves a massive amount of time on loading over the Switch version (~30 seconds in Any% which is probably around how much time using Amiiibo saves in the category). As well, if you are playing on a disc version of the game, you will also lose small amounts of time to those that play on the digital version on the same console. Also, different consoles of the same model can potentially have drasticly different loading times simply by luck of the draw. Loading times are not consistent between consoles (at least for the Wii U, I don't know if this is true for the Switch or not). To top it all off, the German language (only available on PAL) saves 3 seconds over the fastest languages on both NTSC and NTSC-J.

So, if we want to solve the problem of fairness between all speedrunners of this game, I don't see that happening without potentially everybody using an in-game timer of some sort via homebrew (which I believe dragonbane is working on for Wii U, but don't quote me on that).

In perhaps a few weeks, when the scene for this game has settled a little more, we can perhaps make a decision to initiate completely separate pages for runs that use amiibo if many players still feel that this is the right thing to do. For now though, all the variables of each run (console, region, Amiibo, and DLC) will remain as filters to prevent the leaderboards from significant crowding of many categories in which only a few people will have times in. To me, it makes speedrunning for a game feel more like a joke when there are 3 or 4 people who all hold top times in some different <1 minute variation of Any% for a game (at least of this length, for games that are only a few minutes long this makes more sense).

I myself do not own a single Amiibo and have never planned on purchasing any. I still plan on competing competitively for a top time in this game even if some users have a small advantage over me as I honestly don't believe it makes a serious enough difference for me to care about purchasing one.

Those are my thoughts and reasons.

theoblivinator, CarlEmilEx and 6 others like this
New Brunswick, Canada

Well I personally don't like that you guys are running BOTW meanwhile I can't afford to purchase a copy. Speedrunning should never be pay to win!

I guess I'm a random but I'll throw some random thoughts out there anyway...

I don't like restrictions in any%. Certain completion tasks figure to not be possible without amiibo/DLC so you'll probably have to make separate categories for that kind of stuff, later on. IDK I'm conflicted about the whole thing.

I feel like at some point, having all those amiibo around could get unwieldy. You can only use each amiibo once a day? What's the deal with that? If you have multiple copies of it though you can scan each of them? So if wolf link saves time or something you could just keep spawning him in. Imagine having to set up like 50 full-heart wolf links to be able to run this game, lol. And to some extent I feel like using an amiibo you have to set up beforehand is like some kind of linked game and the setup ought to either be timed (obviously you'd rather use a default amiibo than play TPHD) or have it be a separate category.

They're easy enough to get now, but how hard will it be to get 50 of them 20 years from now. Can you spoof them? Should that be allowed? Maybe it's like using a 3rd-party controller. You'd have to police it to make sure everything that is done is possible legitimately. Or maybe just the fact that you wouldn't necessarily have to come up with some system to juggle hundreds of figurines around while you're trying to do a run would give spoofing too much of an inherent advantage.

More DLC is coming up soon too... Hard to say how that will affect things, but you can count on the game getting patched when it comes out. Knowing Nintendo, they'll patch some glitches. I wouldn't put it past them to sell only the updated versions from that point on, which means you'll be left with no legal way of acquiring the earlier digital versions, lol. (Can I install the update in the middle of the run? Use the old glitches until I need to install the patch to get the DLC-exclusive stuff heheh.)

Between Amiibo, DLC, and patches, I'm expecting a dystopia of one form or another to arrive eventually.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
DaveCozy and Tigame like this
Brazil

Totally agree with r0bd0g, amiibos shouldn't be considered any% because in about 5 years or less the same amiibos will be a rare find which completely defeats the purpose of fair competition.

The discussion is not really about pay2win because p2w starts in the moment you can or cannot afford a console and its accessories. It's more about finding the fastest route for the game without requiring a rare gadget.

As for the different versions and consoles and language versions @gymnast86 mentioned, they reaffirm the categories segmentation argument, they're different platforms, they're different games. Optimally emulators would be complete and everyone would run them to avoid discrepancies, but that's not the way it goes because they sometimes lack fidellity and some people still follow "console puritanism". It's fine anyone can run what they want but let's not compare apples to bananas.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
New Brunswick, Canada

"Totally agree with r0bd0g, amiibos shouldn't be considered any%" Now you can't "agree" with me and follow it up with something I never said. I didn't take a stance, I just threw out what I thought would be some of the complications. (Having amiibo/dlc considered any% gets complicated, but it's not necessarily the wrong decision.)

If anybody seriously argues for console separation, I'm out, lol.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
DaveCozy and Tigame like this
Brazil

@Samedwin: Why different consoles should be different categories? Different hardware. But I digress.

@r0bd0g yeah, I understood you wrong, what I think it's fair is separating categories not specifically saying amiibo is any% or another name.

New Brunswick, Canada

OK so I'm opposed to wolf link starting with extra hearts from playing TPHD or anything similar to that (especially if the categories are not separated). I think it's worth discussing not allowing that on the basis of it being a save that was not created during the run. That's the only stance I'm willing to take at this time. (Or maybe here's a stance afterall. For amiibo use in general, I think it's wait and see, for now. Category split someday if it gets absurd.)

I was hoping to be on the front lines of figuring out this game man but now IDK when I will finally get to play it. :(

Edited by the author 7 years ago
Victoria, Australia

Version differences will always be a thing. There's no getting around having a slower version unless you buy the faster one. The thing with TWW speedruns, the Tingle Tuner has been part of the run for many years. Getting rid of it now would be a stupid idea. But BotW is a fresh canvas. We want to make this game accessible to newcomers. Honestly, one of the main reasons people run TWW is because of nostalgia. Not saying it's not a great game, but nostalgia is a very big factor in choosing a game to run, and people will be willing to buy extra hardware. This is a new game. Everyone sees it for what it it. An amazing game, yes, but people will still be more skeptical about buying an amiibo. I'd imagine amiibo would make the game a little more frustrating to start running. Remember how rare some of the smash amiibo got? What if this one gets this rare? What if some rich fuck decides to buy a shit ton of them and sell them, after they've become very rare, for triple the price on ebay? Sure, the link amiibo is common now. But in the future? Maybe not. It's basically just a collectors' item now, as are all amiibo. In the future, people will certainly be turned off from running this game, when almost all the top times use amiibo.

Alberta, Canada

any% and any% no amiibo; done

not reading all the posts because my opinions are better than everyone elses.

EDIT: speedrun.com actually has a leaderboard function to describe runs, with/without amiibo being something you can do all on one page. if you get butthurt about one option, you can filter it out!

Edited by the author 7 years ago
Crankeey, warm_ham and 2 others like this
Germany

Since the community basically was 50:50 on this,

the Staff decided that Amiibos are allowed for Any% and also for now for the other categories that are about to come up (AD, All Main Quests, 100%, etc.)

The only restriction here is that you only use each amiibo once per run (as intended by the developers, so cheating with System time changes is not allowed).

Reasons: Zelda speedruns have a history of huge language/version discrepancies/additional tools that make the runs faster (Tingle Tuner as the prime example here). We don't see any reasons to change that for BotW. The time difference for Any% is actually not that big as there are wild horses you can tame right when you leave the plateau. You are free to just skip using Amiibos and take the time loss. If you want to compete at WR level, get amiibos (or just get NFC tags for 1 buck each and spoof amiibos, we don't care). The same tradeoff is made for TWW, TPHD, SS (JP version or not competitive), etc. Another reason we see for amiibos for Any% is the actual standard idea behind Any%, which is "Finish the game as fast as possible, no restrictions". This never included hardware manipulation (CD-Streaming, turbo controllers etc.), which is why we decided that clock manipulation shouldn't be allowed.

We don't see a reason to make different categories and with that to create way more categories than possible. This was tested with TPHD and turned out to be not useful at all.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
DaveCozy, DigiD and 4 others like this
New Brunswick, Canada

You can use the same amiibo multiple times by having more than one. Was that your intention? (Also, if the run is longer than 24 hours... >_>)

Edited by the author 7 years ago

Well, I would talk about the larger perspective about the speedrunning community as a whole when it comes to these things but I don't really know many people actually care about creating an evolving community or if they are only concerned about personal goals and utilizing resources they themselves "have easy access to." Like not everyone lives in a safe location or has a secure job or a simple life ya know? Doesn't matter if it's a $1, 5, 15 or whatever and this includes whatever console may be the fastest if a decision is made not to separate them because not many care to drop a few hundred extra for the system and then possibly repurchasing the game for digital vs physical copy in addition to languages. When hearing hush hush talk of modded controllers and not bringing up certain aspects of advantages/disadvantages for using certain programs and controllers to make things easier or rather only talking about these types of things if and when someone brings it up it just brings a feeling of disappointment. I'm not by any means saying so and so is suspicious of cheating or using hidden advantages and what not but hey man plant the seed and watch it grow if you know what I mean. The more convoluted you make doing a run, the less individuals will be interested and actually submit a run because a common interest factor (this does not mean it's the only reason) in the community is going for a world record/competitive run that a person has much of a fair chance as we the runners can allow for other than the RNG that occurs in game so when it comes down to it and people have runs across all categories there are many people who do not want to be grinding for the best possible result of being less than say 5th place if all runners above utilize amibos because they aren't utilizing extra components. This also creates different routes that make newcomers become even more discouraged to learning the game. Same as some others mentioned, most just want to turn on the game and have a fair chance from the get go. To try and explain the perspective I am putting forth, imagine there are 5,000 people in the sr community then over time it has 20,000 and next thing you know you have over 100,000 people in the community. The original 5,000 people see things one way but there is still 95,000 other people who have interest but don't want to be stonewalled for making changes that allow the community to double and triple these numbers. I'm not saying you don't have logical reasons or they are bad at all because there is experience and knowledge that goes behind them but I am just suggesting for something which I perceive to be better for access to all players especially those in less favorable living/financial conditions and yes I will say that I heard multiple people say "that's their problem," but this should not be acceptable in all situations.

If you care about creating easy access to vets and newcomers alike you would be more open to making appropriate changes despite this breaking tradition of previous sr communities you may be accustomed to or even the community as a whole because we all know it can be improved upon. I can not emphasize "hidden intentions for personal gains" enough when it comes to different communities I've looked into and the lack of support or just basic consideration for new speedrunners seems to be a problem that still exists in a decent percentage of communities. Also Hwhat do you MEAN 50/50, clearly there is quite a bit of discourse about allowing it, theres a several comments that have a disagreement with 10-15 people (many of which have involvement in many sr communities so they aren't just blindly agreeing) supporting that comment, sorry I just had to point that one out lol.

I put this post forth with due respect because I know there are people who have been in the community longer but I call out these problems as I see them.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
cros107 and Stami like this
Berlin, Germany

Banning Amiibo won't solve a thing. Already the Wii U Digital PAL version is gonna be the fastest for runs, which means that entirely legal speaking as a NTSC user you have to import a PAL Wii U and then buy a PAL version of the game on the eshop to compete with WR once its optimized. People who do this or have it will appear at the top of the leaderboards regardless if they use Amiibos or not, cause their version saves a lot of time over the Switch. To be precise around 20-30 seconds in Any% + 3 from German over French. In EVERY other category it will be MINUTES just due load times. Until the switch has full homebrew there are no viable ways around this.

So you are talking about having to buy a console that is out of production, exceedingly getting rare and very expensive or buying a NFC tag which are mass produced and will never run out of a stock for $1 the piece.

DaveCozy and Tigame like this
Florida, USA

Fair enough, we're keeping Amiibo's for now. I'm going to go buy them all up now. You can buy them at a 500% increase at CursedToast.com by the end of the month. :) /s

Edited by the author 7 years ago
United States

I don't care if Any% is the one with amiibo or without it, but I think Any% With Amiibo and Any% Without Amiibo should be separate categories. Just having a filter leaves them in the same leaderboard, and as the same category, and I don't think that's fair. The point was brought up that people had to pay more for certain versions of games in the past, and while that's true, that's paying more for a version of the base game. I think paying more for stuff outside of the game that gives you an advantage is entirely different. That's like if a community allowed using a gameshark for their main category, so you had to buy one of those to even compete on an even playing field. Like I said, I don't really care if Any% is the one with the amiibos, because I think people will go to the superior category regardless of what it's named, I just think they should be separate.

New York, USA

I think its notable that A PAL Wii U only saves ~20 seconds in any%, while amiibo certainly save more. The drastic comparison raises a similar point, but not exactly a fair one in this case.

Antarctica

Did you really compare using an amiibo in a run to using a gameshark in a run?

Fucking lol.

This thread is a disaster. Ive never seen so many people have opinions on how a LB should be structured while simultaneously not running the game.

Filters exist on LBs for a reason.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
DaveCozy and lozplyr89 like this