LMAO nice one
Sad you will get banned

its a risk worth taking (i can also just use tor)

"Part of a sponsorship with the game's publisher"

Yeah right, just admit it, they paid you. It was always about money and only about money, the purchase/acquiring/whatever it was of speedrun.com was nothing but a money grab. Recent changes have made that clear enough.

Don't get me wrong, I'm completely ok with promoting games. In fact, I think it would be awesome to promote some small games to get them some attention (assuming their moderation is ok with it and can handle the increased runs of course). Paid sponsorships is entirely the wrong way to go about it though, the site has essentially turned in to one giant ad and it really is a bad look for speedrunning. I suggest we boycott the game, Elo has done something we don't like so let's do something about it. Simply nobody should run the game at all, don't even engage with their socials. We'll make their shady promotion tactics backfire until we get some transparency. I don't recommend submitting troll runs, they will likely end with you getting banned. They can use troll runs as a reason to ban people, they cannot ban people for not running a game though.

A side note, great use of your time guys. You're telling us you're working as hard as you can yet you pull this stunt? Is this the reason why forum pages or message notifications have yet to be fixed? It may be the reason they are broken in the first place.

The whole thing reeks of bad faith acting, whether it’s on the part of Elo or the game devs I do not know. Either way I will have no part in it, I suggest ya’ll do the same.

Yeah the longer we stick with speedrun.com, the more it becomes all about the money, its like a college student getting into college because his father donates thousands of dollars, the game doesn't deserve to be on the front page but jts there anyway

Also I suggest not running the game because if we were to run it, it'd show that it works and they'll continue doing this

I mean, aggressive advertising turns me away to begins with so I wasn't really planning on running it. Even if I did, I already got too many other games on my list to begin with, and I'm not particularly good at FPS games anymore.

Have to give my pessimistic side credit, it saw this coming months back, but I decided to be at least charitable for a while. A boycott is well and all, but alas, our voice of grievance is drowned out by the deafening silence of the complacent majority. It's possible that @LivLiv is on the mark with the Q&A parallel, and I won't disagree that this is all kinda sketch. The whole thing about front paging streams of this game over the United Kingdom Speedrunner Gathering also burns, especially since they just started today.

On the bright side, this issue got noticed on r/speedrun and it's managed to bring itself to the very top of late, so we're not alone. https://old.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/pq5j54/speedruncom_now_has_promoted_games_on_the_games/

But I'll be honest, I'm rather tired of all the recent controversy and negative feels of late, so I'm probably just gonna peace out from threads like these for a while. I prefer positivity and supporting things over having to express discontent and criticism into a void. What I think about this subject should be clear by this point, y'all know where I stand.

"That said, wouldn't surprise me if this "closer relationship" was in fact just using speedrunners as glorified, unpaid QA. As "A Hat in Time" devs basically did.

I primarily just don't understand why relationships with devs are even necessary or wanted at all. It's obvious that a lot of them don't give a shit about the actual community and just don't want to do the work to find bugs, exploits and imbalances in their games so they use us to find them for them. Once again going back to Gears for Breakfast (HiT Devs). They usually turn out bad, like parasocial relationships, basically."

As an admin in the Hat in Time speedrun community, this is so wrong and based on misinformation that was spread back then by angry speedrunners because they patched specific glitches. Some of those glitches were even patched without others in the dev team knowing about it because one of the devs noticed the bug and just patched it real quick. It was a huge communication issue and also one of the reasons they have a CM now and why we talked a lot to them. GfB pretty much did not touch the speedrun and even made specific versions of the game a specific branch for speedrunners, as those versions are the fastest versions available to runners.

Please if you do not know the full picture, saying something like this is stupid.

I'll just throw my 2 cents in:

First, devs aren't to blame. Naturally, a dev wanting to appeal to speedrunners would reach out to speedrun.com for advertising. Common sense, and not particularly bad behavior. The site is already plastered with ads to the point of being unusable, might as well have some of those slots filled up by things the minority of people without an adblocker installed would enjoy?

The real issue is w/ Elo. Naturally, this is ANOTHER change that is neither communicated with the community nor wanted by them. A lot of the advertising for this game is not properly disclosed as advertising, making it either outright illegal or at the v least, a "convenient coincidence" that further plummets the already-skeptical community's trust in Elo. Though frankly at this point, I can't imagine there's a single person left on sr.c that doesn't have a reason to dislike Elo and what has happened w/ the site in the past year. This is just a monthly occurrence at this point.

And for anyone reading this thinking "cmon guys its just a tiny little box, you guys are overreacting 4head." This is just an extension of a year's worth of destroyed faith, to the point where even many of the site's defenders have to admit that the critics make a compelling argument. If this weren't paired w/ the promise of heavily wanted features without an ETA, an excessive amount of ads that crash some browsers, months of a borderline non-functioning website, unwanted features, significantly decreased transparency, and an utter lack of meaningful communication for any of these changes while regularly insisting "we totally care about the community uwu <33333. we luv speedrunners!!", then yea it'd just be a tiny box 4head.

The problem is, NO ONE will just go on the game and then instantly check this thread. I encourage troll runs because its a sign of saying, "Hey, get the fuck out of the community!" especially in its current state, If we get enough troll runs onto the boards, they will eventually realize we don't want them in the community = the game will be deleted from the site and so will promoted games.

The game probably won't be deleted off the site ever, but hopefully we can show we don't like promoted games

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hopefully we can show we don't like promoted games

I really dislike the direction where SR.C is going right now, their website is just a big clump of ads at the moment and all they're trying to do is add more ads and features that get them more money. We got promised mod tools this summer, it's the middle of September and as far as I can tell they're not here, nor any of the other community suggestions.

Also, mandatory rant about how you cant make a speedrunning game, a game will be speedrunned because people like it.

Originally posted by Mantse007 mandatory rant about how you cant make a speedrunning game, a game will be speedrunned because people like it.

2. Regarding the second half of the message, there are countless games on the internet that did receive a lot of attention through playthroughs and other methods and were given very positive feedback, and yet they only have a few active runners at most. Even my only game falls into that category; it has tens of millions of plays over on flash game websites, with millions of views on YouTube, and yet there's only 10 active players. While the game itself pulled off an impressive amount of plays, the speedgame had very few promotions over its lifespan, even though every big name that has run the game claimed that it's a very good speedgame. I bet there's many many many more games that are in the same scenario which would greatly benefit from being promoted on the main website which thousands of people visit every day.

Hi all,

First, I just wanted to say that we appreciate the honest feedback everyone is sharing related to this promotion. It's the first time we've done something like this, and we thought it was worth a test. Generally speaking, we're cautiously optimistic about the idea of partnering with game developers/publishers to help promote speedrunning as a meaningful part of their game launch. Obviously this may involve paid marketing/promotion, but there's also an opportunity to help make their games more accessible to runners with built-in tools, skippable cutscenes, leaderboard integration, etc. It's easy to be pessimistic about these things, and we also know that runners choose games (not the other way around), but it's still an interesting space where we've seen increased interest from developers in the past year or so.

Mea culpa:

- We could have done a better job with labeling/delivering the promotion
- We know that your trust is a precious commodity am sorry we missed the mark here
- We do read all of your feedback and take it to heart
- We will continue working to improve the site, both with features/fixes and better communication

I'd like to offer clarification on a few things:

- This did not in any way delay other efforts such as mod tools. More on that later.
- This is a limited time promotion and the game will be treated exactly like others once it's over (if it attracts genuine interest from runners then it will be visible on the games page, otherwise it won't, governed by the same algorithm as other games)
- The blob post that was written by Meta about Severed Steel a few months back was not part of any kind of paid (or unpaid) promotion, it was just a post about a cool upcoming game that the author was really excited about.

Speaking of mod tools... we'll be releasing our Moderator Hub tool next week. The initial launch focuses on improving the run verification tool. It will make it easier to see the verification queue status for games you moderate, find runs in different states more easily, see all of the metadata (variables, etc) for a run in one place, and easily review then verify/reject without navigating away from the page.

In a series of future updates we're going to tackle the mess that is levels/subcategories/variables, making it easy and less confusing to setup boards, make changes to categories/subcategories/variables without orphaning runs, mass-edit runs, etc. This will take some time but we're fully committed to end-to-end moderator improvements and want to tackle the biggest pain points first.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, and thanks for reading my post (if you made it this far).

"there's also an opportunity to help make their games more accessible to runners with built-in tools, skippable cutscenes, leaderboard integration"
P sure Celeste devs did a good amount of this without needing to pay Pac or MSushi.

Originally posted by Lieutenant_Boo"there's also an opportunity to help make their games more accessible to runners with built-in tools, skippable cutscenes, leaderboard integration"
P sure Celeste devs did a good amount of this without needing to pay Pac or MSushi.

Definitely, and to clarify, this kind of advocacy is not something we expect to be paid for. We know that most devs won't care, but ultimately every developer/publisher relationship is an opportunity to advocate for things that make games more accessible for speedrunning.

@Lieutenant_BooLieutenant_Boo Sure, and Celeste is proof that people can make a successful speedrunning game.

Anyway, if there's going to be advertising on the site, clearly identified promotion for games with leaderboards on the site seems like the best option, in that it's more likely to be relevant to our interests and less likely to be malicious. It's a rare instance where internet advertising could potentially provide positive value for the users in itself, rather than maxing out at "necessary evil".

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we also know that runners choose games (not the other way around)

Speaking of which, I thought that submitting games that aren't out wasn't a thing. I know when a friend submitted a demo version of a game it got rejected the day after he submitted it, so what happened here?

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It's the first time we've done something like this, and we thought it was worth a test.

I know I've probably criticised your post a lot, but while there are some things that you guys didn't get right or could've done better, I appreciate that you took the time yet again and inform us about the situation.

@HiHi From the game request rules:

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Well-known users or moderators of other games in a series may request unreleased games beginning 21 days prior to launch. In rare cases, requests for unreleased games may be accepted by well-known users and only at site staff discretion. Series moderators may also add games to complete a series. Games will not be added prior to release for users who are not well-known.

Well-known is not defined, but I assume it's one of those things where if you have to ask, it doesn't apply to you.