Hey,

So I am from the Factorio Speedrunning Community. We are currently having a discussion about our ruleset and are looking for pro's and con's of allowing older patches in submissions.

Currently we ban older versions, just as you do. It be very helpful for us to see your though process and history of how you got to this rule and why you enforce it.

I'd appreciate if you could explain that in the level of my Celeste knowledge. I am person that did play Celeste a lot and did watch some speedruns and know the tricks and names of them, but I was not into Celeste speedrunning myself and I don't know about it's speedrunning history.

Thank you for you help! Best's and love from the Factorio Community

I haven't been too involved in the community for a bit so I don't remember too well, but this is the gist of it.

I'm pretty sure we only had a rule that didn't allow patches that came before a certain date, since those had enough differences in small mechanics (someone can lmk what those mechanics were bc I forget) that the times would be different. At some point, a 'pause-warp' glitch was discovered that saved around 30 seconds by doing some weird menuing stuff. After a bunch of deliberation, the devs decided to patch it and leave it up to the community whether we included it in the run or not. The src mods changed the version ruling to be the latest possible patch and created a 'old patch' category (I think this got moved to the cat extensions or just removed in general since it wasn't played much). I might have messed up some details but that's what I remember

supermod here:

it's also worth mentioning some older patches of the game are missing several quality of life changes (lots of movement quirks - as an example, wallbounces used to be way less lenient and cornerboosting out of dashes used to be 100% impossible) but there's also accidental game breaking bugs that were live for literal hours before being patched out. as an example, a change to how dash buffering worked led to an exploit that allowed for gaining practically infinite speed on flat ground, which is as broken as it sounds. if all patches were allowed, running on these "broken" patches would probably be the meta, and we'd have to run the game without said quality of life changes. the optimal patch would likely be the original day 1 patch of celeste, since it allows you to skip all of the lake checkpoint... but has forced screenshake, 0 quality of life improvements, (i believe?) no milliseconds on ingame timer, no demodashing (!!) and just sucks to play.

as well, the route is virtually unchanged from patch to patch. many people have mentioned the menu storage "pause warp" technique, which mostly only saved time because it now a viable strategy for 5B to be played in runs, when the meta at the time was 5A. the trick was banned, and a different skip was found to make 5B viable, so ultimately the trick only saves about 10 seconds (the trick could do other things, like skip the prologue cutscene... but ironically that's been patched in as well). so, tl;dr, making people jump through the hoops of downpatching to play on a version that follows exactly the same route but is only slightly faster just isn't worth it.

we actually have a leaderboard for no patch requirement, which you will notice is unbelievably dead https://www.speedrun.com/celeste_category_extensions#Any_No_Patch_Restriction - the record is a time that is two years old that is 3 minutes slower than the current patch record, despite being a strictly faster patch. and again, this run doesn't even use the theoretically optimal patch!

i guess for a condensed list, we play on current patch because:

1: most accessible patch for all runners (this is huge - the ease of running the game is why it's so popular) 2: quality of life improvements, celeste 1.0.0.0 is nearly a completely different game 3: the timesave simply isn't worth a switch - the route is the same 4: since the timesave is minimal, why bother grinding no patch requirement (the less competitive category) for a good time in any% (current patch) instead? this was the main flaw with why a no patch requirement category was so unpopular.

as far as what factorio should do: admittedly i know very little about the speedrunning meta of the game (but i have casually launched a few rockets myself :d), but i suppose it's a matter of deciding whether its worth it for your game or not. is the route changed in a significant way - significant enough to warrant the trouble of downpatching? would splitting runs between patches split the competition of the leaderboard too heavily? is the game less fun/"painful" to run on potentially janky patches? and etc.

What a great post @AMBERLOVESARCHIE. also to the others, thanks a lot!

Even though we thought and discussed about this topic a lot already you raise plenty of points we didn't consider yet. This will really be useful to find a great way of handling this problem for our community!

Thank you for taking your time to explain this, very much appreciated :) ! Best's