We need to address -ns
3 years ago
United States

Thanks! I’ll check it out and get a better feel for it.

Mazowieckie, Poland

Many of those changes you are talking about sounds even cool and are reasonable in most part. However I'm againts changing RTA to IGN.

It will just go way further than you would like it to do so and has very dark sides. In my opinion the only appropriate and enjoyable way of speedrunning the game is progressing it. Lack of loading times is a holy grail for shrines setup grind and power-farming abusement which changes everything significantly and makes decision making loading times forces non-existant. In my eyes having it within same category is out of question.

One of the solutions for -ns I would prefer to go is reducing its scope to longer farming sessions (like jail sorc or hell barb do for example) exclusively.

91RelaX, HCGilboa and 2 others like this
Czech Republic

@BokserKabaty I understand where you're coming from. The thing is, you save and quitting for shrines etc. will always be a time loss. You cannot do that over and over regardless of the loads being removed. But what can, on the other hand happen is this: You wanna farm for a shrine, the game save & quits nearly instantly, wonderful. Or you will save & quit and the game will hang for 8 seconds.

If you just look at the leaderboards, there are people with times 1:09:44 and 1:09:45. So whose run is really better? The loads they had in the run may have been for example 1 minute and 30 seconds. Just something I can imagine for a run of this length. So depending on their hardware (and game randomly deciding to get stuck in loads), the difference between these runners can be even tens of seconds. And what if we imagine this scenario: One person decides: "Oh, I'd really like an experience shrine there", they get it on the second try, get a level faster and save 20 seconds over someone who was in the same situation, but didn't choose to try the shrine. But the game decided to get stuck on both of the loads, so what's the issue here? The player, who made the superior decision might get worse time because the game decided to.

You might argue that "it's just RNG", but this is the kind of RNG that shouldn't be a part of the run.

And as for the only appropriate and enjoyable way of speedrunning the game. Sure, you might have your unique view on this, but I might tell you that this is not what all people will agree on with you. There's many games where IGT allows for more creativity and overall more sensible gameplay. Such as Fallout 4 ( - Here's a clip of one player stacking an item on themselves to achieve more speed, this was btw. run on the last GDQ and I'd say it's one of the most loved runs there and I haven't seen a single complaint about them being in a load screen for a relatively long amount of time)

DrCliche and BokserKabaty like this
Massachusetts, USA

Everyone is being very eloquent and i'm sorry i don't have the spoons to do so.

-ns is a bad viewer and runner experience and we should just ban it from use on submitted runs. It's impossible to enforce unless we add the caveat that you must flash the options tab at the beginning of a run showing that Sound is not grayed out (which it is if you have -ns active). That's an unnecessary time loss so it would be an honor system based thing. If we have someone submitting runs continuously with no sounds because "they play with sounds off" and their load times are instant I think it's fair to say they're using -ns.

IGN vs RTA: I think it needs to stay RTA. Even elegant ways of managing when the timer stops does not address invalidating historic runs/stop people from abusing it unless we add even more rules on how long a pause can be etc.

Someone realized -ns saves time. It's exactly what we should be doing as runners of the game, and that's innovating. Sadly this one breaks more than it gains for us. Everyone runs -ns and the exact same differences in RNG and skill level play out except load time was faster. This doesn't actually mean we're speed running the game faster.

The current runs submitted with -ns: I've gone back and forth on this a bunch. I'm fine with them standing because i honestly think they'll be beat sooner rather than later. That being said i agree that decisions by the community should have retro-effective changes.

I do agree with @Teo- that i think the best way would be to get everyone that cares on a discord call over this weekend (or next) because a lot of this is hard to hash out even on forum.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Daz86 likes this
Western Australia, Australia

None of this affects what my goals for d2 are (run every class through p8 HC), so ill leave it to you guys to figure that out. Im lazy, prefer to just have RTA. There is not much wrong with how d2 is speedran, think there is too much fixing of something that isnt broken.

Imo loading times are part of the game, sound should be upto the runner and you will never ever take the grind out of speedrunning. Dynamic (bnet style) maps, takes the grind out of maps into the reset at bosses grind, seeded takes the grind off screen in finding a seed and practicing on it, resets are gonna be in bloodmoor and coldplains and act 1... this fixes nothing.

Creating too many catagories like have too few, will ruin this game for speedrunning. Its at a good balance just where it is, with normal/hell; HC/SC; P1/PX/P8; Class. Now your wanting to add, what? sound/ns; seeded/not seeded/dynamic maps; RTA/IGN

I could extent my thoughts more deeply on why. But im lazy. Have fun and enjoy! (Btw points system for races is a cool idea thanks indrek!)

Ontario, Canada

@stasyszy Unfortunately, this isnt JUST about creating more categories. It's about addressing the unfair advantage for someone choosing to play without sound vs someone choosing to play with sound. Imagine if someone came around and ran p8 HC and crushed your times, simply because they used -ns. Imagine if the only way you could compete with your favorite categories is to disable sound? What would you do then?

Western Australia, Australia

Like i said, sound should be up to the person. There are positives and negatives to it. If i wanted to compete i would take which ever gave me the advantage.

-ns is if i understand it, is what gives the time reduction and not just turning your sound off?

Then question needs to be asked, should there be things allowed in the command line? If things are allowed in the command line, then -ns saves time and you want to compete at the highest level then you would do that.

Would sound have to be a requirement? As i understand it, a VoD can be uploaded for a speedrun, and for moderators they would have no way to know if its spliced or not if there was no sound and it was locally recorded.

In my opinion Its matter of asking the right questions

Western Australia, Australia

AS for in game time and real time attack.

That would require a tough choice, Do you want to add even more catagories? (and i will always come back to that)

Or start the leaderboards fresh?

As a long term thinker, adding more and ever more catagories will dilute this pretty good speedrun game into a joke. It is better to make the tough transitions if there is a benefit overall.

Is there a benefit over all for In game time tracking? I believe that is the better approach, allows users to not have to rely on -ns and/or hardware setups for load times. Which solves the question of sound being a requirement to allow moderators to eliminate the risk of missing spliced runs.

Russia
  1. IGT enables reroll maps on Arreat Plateau and Frozen Tundra when finding WP quickly. There are 4 lines of WP, if you find WP on the 1st line, the fastest solution will be reroll, perhaps IGT will give the opportunity even 2 reroll, which gives an advantage over the existing normal runs for chars without jump and charge.

  2. I, like many other runners, have a problem with pain in my hand. If you give the opportunity to take breaks in the hell run, I will have to use them very often for the maximum time. This will greatly increase the time of the run itself, while significantly improving the final time.

  3. Why if I like to run with -ns, do I lose this opportunity? The rhythm of the game greatly disturbs me the different loading times for rolls. And this is not just a jail run. The same goes for Charsy rolls. If you ban -ns, I will be forced to set the volume level to 0, as well as hardware prohibit the use of sound d2. This will give the same effect, just in a more confusing way.

  4. Let’s even stop on one thing, because now most of votes want to ban -ns and change the time for IGN.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Russia

Yes, and the current sorc WR is get with -ns, it is certainly possible to beat it without -ns, but it requires a little more effort.

Western Australia, Australia

My point was, that if you were to change to In Game time, then you would need to restart the leaderboards. Then load time would not be an issue in your times, Getting around the -ns need. so in order for easier and better verification of runs, having sound as a requirement makes sense, otherwise the argument becomes circular, so instead remove the component that causes issues which is ns/sound off.

Restrictions breeds creativity, Now since the timer doesn't count your load times, the rhythm you talk about is on people's styles. Better to fix for the majority not the minority, lose the option of ns but gain the options, of less possible cheating and solving the issue of load times being included in the time of the run.

Czech Republic

@stasyszy You don't necessarily have to restart the leaderboards, there are ways around this.

@327 Allowing no sound in a game with competition (let's be honest, D2 is relatively large) is a risky step. You can effortlessly splice a run without sound, create a few sample runs, run a stream on Twitch, stream those sample runs, then switch to the spliced run and everything you have to do is talk to the chat and act like you react to what happened in the run. It might sound complicated but no, people have done that. And people have spliced even runs with audio, they put in the effort to actually align the audio perfectly. That takes insane amount of effort. Having no audio makes this super easy.

Russia

There is no rule about the obligation to stream run. All my run on sorc I do offline.

Czech Republic

@327 Oh, no, I didn't mean that. What I mean is that if you splice a run, you want it to look real. If someone streams the runs, they instantly gain one layer of credibility (because many people will think "oh it's live, this can't be spliced, they already reset 4 times and it's not prerecorded because they talk to the chat"). This has been done in speedrunning and it's easy if you don't have to play the audio.

New South Wales, Australia

Can we have a poll? Im sure it wouldnt take much effort to share it around. Streamers can mention it on stream or in discords. It could give an idea of what runners and viewers are thinking.

I dont wanna sound harsh here, but theres probly less than 20 WR capable runners, I think their feelings on -ns and RTA vs IGT should be weighted accordingly. They have the most to gain and lose.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Switzerland

Ok, here is what I enjoy about running D2 and why i wont compete in IGT:

I like to get the best time out of the hand given to you. Example: some people only lvl on serena in act3, i also got a Tomb-, Flayer-, Travincalstrat to adjust to the situation. Now if TCP/IP gets free, my act3 lvling-strats wont matter because you can reset into a better with very little effort. What will happen to normruns? We will have stuff like reroll waypoints in spider to get the instant cut into flayer or get act4 tundrawaypoint early and try to warp across. Instead of running the game, we just coinflip a lot. IGT will turn norm into an insane fish-for-RNG category

With IGT, you dont deal with your hand, you just get a new one whenever you feel like it. It might not work every time, but with enough people doing it, you will just need better RNG to compete. It very quickly narrows down what hands you can play. I know some people have a "if thats what it takes to be faster, i`ll do it"-mentality (and grind jails for 100 hours). I just want to play the game.

Inconsistent loading times isnt great, but im not really willing to sacrifice the fun part (for me) of the game for consistency... For me its RTA either with banned -ns or not, sound also has advantages at some points

swiftkindness, 91RelaX and 5 others like this
Germany

For Benders issue we would have to ban tcp/ip resets again. Which obviously makes all the jail map farmers unhappy.

In the end there will be no way to accomadate all the wishes.

I will create a discord for a rule discussion date. Because I feel like we are at a point where we need to think about a hard reset and archive all the existing runs into a "legacy" place and starting from scratch. With a rule set that is discussed and decided up on by the community. And I think we need a proper discussion with polls on like every rule line for that. In this discussion we should talk about pretty much every starting parameter like "-ns" and stuff and come up with solutions that the majority of runners should vote on.

In the end. I am sick of having to discuss rules because of something every other week because someone started to abuse something that wasn't clarified well enough. I know we might lose some people by doing this aswell. But I think it is necessary to get on the same page for everyone and stick to that rule set for at least a couple of YEARS.

Western Australia, Australia

Tcp/ip reroll wouldnt exactly be free, its is more like bringing a reroll of maps on the level of difficulty switching for map rerolls to normal, with in game time. I think. Could be wrong, didnt test this.

Agreed with teo, polls and stuff to bring a rules set that is clear for everyone in this great game of diablo 2 speedrunning :D

Ontario, Canada

I'm going to do my own thing for now. I like the idea of a poll, and I think it's great for getting the community involved in something so important.

My problem is, there's no way to create an official category on the leaderboard where everyone is happy. This vote will make the majority happy, and the minority unhappy. I don't want to take part in that. I'm a firm believer that everyone should be allowed to run what they want.

I'm not going to deal with this. I'd rather come back when the dust settles and see what the new rules / categories are. From there, I'll decide if I want to compete in anything.

Until then, I'll compete against myself, or anyone else that wants to try it. I'll be running dynamic maps, RTA (no loading), ladder runewords enabled.

I'll tell you why:

  • RTA (no loading) or IGT as we've been calling it
  • Fixes the -ns vs sound dilemma
  • With loading times removed from the timer, everyone gets to play with sound or without sound without gaining or losing a competitive advantage.
  • Meaning, sound is now just a cosmetic preference (AS IT SHOULD BE)
  • This will negate any advantage from being allowed to use TCP/IP with the new timer
  • In fact, it will make TCP/IP useless AND it's better than simply banning TCP/IP
  • It completely removes any chance for permanent WP farming via lucky maps
  • Meaning, things like jail or BB farming is no longer the meta
  • Meaning, you're now playing through the game instead of fixating on forcing improbable RNG
  • RTA (no loading) and dynamic maps are already making a huge leap towards how battle.net / multiplayer playstyle is/was
  • Might as well just go all the way
  • Anyone that's played Diablo II on battle.net is going to appreciate this category
  • Newcomers are going to be familiar with something they already know
  • Working category title: any% BNS (any% Battle.Net Style)
  • Can add or remove current tags as you like:
  • e.g. any% Hell HC p1 BNS Sorc
  • I'll be running players X to start

Good luck with the upcoming Discord debate. I hope everyone finds something that makes them happy. I'm excited to see what happens.

darxide and Wraithulek like this
Texas, USA

It wouldn't be terribly complicated to develop a python/opencv script to automatically re-time all old runs that have video. For other runs, just worst-case convert missing times using the method I outlined earlier, agree upon a default sorting method, and list both timing methods so interested parties can re-sort the leaderboards if they desire. Talk of retiring any runs from the leaderboards is definitely barking up the wrong tree. It's both wrong-spirited and entirely unnecessary.

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