A matter of coherence
7 years ago
Italy

With any% activity being pretty low at the moment I think it's time to bring this up.

The reason we reject paint lines from Sigils of Elohim in any category is because 'they require you to do other stuff before you start playing the game'. However, from a purely philosophical point of view this should invalidate the QR and Audio Log paint lines too. I believe that at the moment our rules are incoherent - if we are trying to reproduce the fastest way to beat the game on a just downloaded game, then we should not allow QR and Audio Log. If we are trying to reproduce the fastest way to beat the game with certain prior set ups, then we should allow Sigils of Elohim paint lines too. Maybe we can make dual categories - any% and 'New Game + any%'. From a purely philosophical standpoint I believe this should be the correct way to see the issue; all of our current runs would be reclassified as 'NG+' runs (including All Sigils) and new any% will ban QR and Audio Log paint - drastically altering the route for paint in A (we could still realistically get 5 quick paint lines - New game, solve Don't Cross the Streams, solve a puzzle that requires an unlockable item, unlock an item, go OoB - but it might reintroduce Connectors in the route because of Don't Cross the Streams being necessary). On the other hand, NG+ any% would have paint right from the moment you spawn (lines for New Game, and 4 of the 5 you get from Road to Gehenna + Sigils of Elohim; this would require people to buy Gehenna, but I think we could easily find some workarounds with QRs since paint in A1 is most likely irrelevant and there are quick QRs in many places).

Now the obvious counterarguments are (1) this would completely screw up our current times and create a bagillion new categories that nobody would probably run - although Eternalize and Transcendence aren't far from that atm - and (2) this might be a change that is unnecessary and might make the game less fun for the runners. I definitely understand these points, and it's why I want to create this discussion.

Should we be philosophically coherent in what we do and don't allow? Or should we create very arbitrary restrictions to keep our categories in their current state?

Canada

Some things we should consider:

  1. As far as I know, the bonuses you get (messages and stars) from Sigils of Elohim are incredibly difficult to remove once they have been added. From what I recall, the previous runner who experimented with SoE could not remove them even after deleting all local content. He eventually asked the Talos dev team for help removing the bonuses and even they could not provide a method to do so barring creating an entirely new steam account. (Please do note that this is what other runners have told me. I have not tried experimenting with it myself, for obvious reasons.) Given this, any person who wanted to run the proposed "NG+" category would be barred from running the "NG" category without having to essentially create two different steam accounts just for Talos.

  2. If we wanted to be most true to the clean slate philosophy of the proposed NG category, we should also require that local saves and player profiles be deleted between each run. This is obviously a great hassle given the frequency with which most runners reset. Of course not deleting saves would not change anything fundamental in the run, but it is a requirement to have a technically clean version of the game.

  3. Whereas having a previous save file is completely achievable with only the base game, SoE is an entirely separate application. SoE also includes bonus stars, whereas a previous save file only provides paint messages. Whether any of this is problematic or not is debatable.

  4. I predict that, if we were to create dual categories for each present one, we would see half of the categories stagnate without runners. Already we only have a few runners in each category. Given the above described hassle of switching between the NG and NG+ versions of a category, my bet is that the community would naturally gravitate towards one version and leave the other one inactive. Is it better to stick with a single set of categories which does not fully represent the different ways Talos can be run, or have twice as many with half being inactive?

Personally, I am on the fence about whether to include SoE or not. We could create dual categories, but with the challenge of removing SoE after it has been added I predict that one set of categories will quickly dominate. Ideally I would like to avoid a situation where runners start running with SoE and then discover that the most active categories ban it, leaving them to struggle with removing SoE in order to participate in the community. Because of this I must say I'm against having two sets of categories; we should commit to either "NG" or "NG+", or agree to using previous saves but not SoE. Of course this all changes if we do discover an easy way of toggling SoE on or off.

Edited by the author 7 years ago