IL support on this site is not great. While this doesn't matter for most games, there are still many communities out there that are very heavily focused on IL competition.
For as long as I can remember being on this site, people have been asking for quality of life improvements to the way ILs are handled, and for as long as I can remember being on this site, nothing has changed (See [1]). There is a reason that the communities of newer IL based games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe haven't moved to this site yet (MK8DX is over at https://www.mkleaderboards.com/mk8dx ). This is not a dig at ELOs lack of community interaction (although it is quite ridiculous, so much for "listening to the community"...), because this was a problem under @Pac aswell.
As a runner of various heavily IL based games, there are numerous features and changes that I find incredibly important for IL based competition. I am making this post in the hopes that if you folks at ELO actually read this forum, you can consider adding some of these features.
This is a massive problem, but instead of explaining this, I will instead ask you to view link [2] below as I think it explains it quite well.
Using CELESTE Classic as an example, the category "Gemskip Any%" only applies to the last few levels, and "Gemskip 100%" applies to even less. (**EDIT: ** See link [3]), but it makes absolutely no sense to force the two categories to apply to all levels, when at most they apply to the final handful. The same applies to variables.
This might feel a little bit odd to fullgame speedrunners, but this is massive in the majority of large IL based speedrunning communities, such as GoldenEye, Mario Kart, FZero, Crash Team Racing, etc. To summarize how it works, along side the IL leaderboards, there is an additional leaderboard ranking players based on their overall performance. This is typically done through something such as AF (average finish), where a players average placement is used to rank them (if the player hasnt played a certain category, they are generally considered to be last on that category by this ranking system). Some games like GoldenEye use a points based system, but it's the same concept. This is technically supported on the site, by manually updating a players ranking when he submits (1080 Snowboarding does this, see link [4]), but for a game like Mario Kart Wii which has thousands of players ranked, it is almost impossible to do this.
For some examples of AF rankings, you can check the links below ([5], [6], and [7]) as well as a concept by @warspyking (link [8])
I am sure there are more features that people can think of (such as glitch leaderboards inheriting runs from the glitchless leaderboards), but these 3 I think are the absolute most essential features for IL based competition on the site.
[1] IL update requests by @DrYoshiyahu and @Slevanas: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/g79jt/79#ob3y4 [2] Request to view subcategories by @DrYoshiyahu: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/g79jt/83#ck1sd [3] A visual concept for selective IL categories by @OnGod: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/g79jt/97#6fvcb [4] 1080 Snowboarding Total Time rankings: https://www.speedrun.com/1080snowboarding/Total_Time [5] FZero AF charts: https://fzerocentral.org/f0/viewladder_10.php?ladder=1 [6] Mario Kart Wii AF charts: https://www.mariokart64.com/mkw/afc.php [7] Crash Team Racing AF charts: http://ctr4ever.joora.fr/rankings.php?mode=af [8] AF ranking concept by @warspyking: https://justpaste.it/9t5f1
Amen man, amen.
[quote=1]Using CELESTE Classic as an example, the category "Gemskip Any%" only applies to the last few levels, and "Gemskip 100%" applies to even less. I can understand that it might take a bit of creativity to implement this without the leaderboard looking really stupid, but it makes absolutely no sense to force the two categories to apply to all levels, when at most they apply to the final handful.[/quote]
On the topic of applying categories to ILs selectively, while you mention it might be difficult to avoid making the leaderboard look stupid, I don't think we need to go for too much of a stretch to make it look visually decent:
- When viewing a particular level's leaderboard, if the level doesn't have the category, it just doesn't show it. Pretty straightforward, but I thought I should mention this nonetheless.
- When viewing the general IL leaderboard, make all levels have all columns, but for those categories that are missing on a particular level, just make that cell be crossed out from corner to corner, or it could also be filled with some sort of "N/A" value (it has to be really noticeable at a first glance for it to work).
Granted, there are probably better looking solutions waiting to be found, but my point with this is that this solution for the front-end shouldn't prove to be too difficult to implement and it'd still look ok IMO.
A good solution to the second point is what Isaki suggested in this post: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/g79jt/97#6fvcb
The rationale is that some ILs are so different than other ILs, it makes no sense to put them all together in one leaderboard to begin with. So you could split ILs by groups, each group would have its own categories.
Also, another thing is that in the listing of games at https://www.speedrun.com/games, when you sort by active users, it does not take into account individual levels at all. Seems like speedrun.com considers IL speedruns lesser and irrelevant compared to full game runs.
I'm developing a separate website that uses the speedrun API. I'm not ready to share details, but my intent is to independently solve nearly all of these issues.
Wow no response, seems like SRC is too busy making the site unusable with intrusive ads rather than improving the site.
You've had 40 days to respond.
Given that issues with IL implementation have been around for years, 40 days is a short time frame to expect the devs to change this and anything ahead of this in their backlog, no?
@Quivico yeah if they have a big backlog then that's completely fine that they haven't fixed it
it's just that no staff member has responded or addressed this thread, which is unacceptable
^ Yee it shouldn't be unreasonable for them to acknowledge suggestions. Like, "We acknowledge you want this to happen. We will add it to our plans but there are other things taking priority". (Although I suppose & hope some people have used the new suggestions thing to reiterate this idea)
I agree w/ all of this, but for ranking via 'AF', it should be possible to do this using the src API and just posting like a spreadsheet or something on the forums. If anyone ever makes, this hmu, bc/ I'd be interested in using it.
Bump, @warspyking posted this in the speedrun.com discord https://justpaste.it/9t5f1
Why go with a ranking system rather than simply summing up each player's IL times, provided the player has run the full set of levels available in a given category?
@hahhah42 That's another way of doing it, but its a lot less common because of cases where one IL might be a lot shorter than another. As a result, the longer IL would have a bigger weight on your placement as longer runs also have more time that can be saved.
A response is really nice to see, thanks for taking the time to look over our ideas.