Thanks all for the very helpful feedback. I'm sorry that you've had to report so many bugs - we are actively making improvements and I suspect you'll find everything to be in a much better state very soon.
I want to specifically acknowledge that leaderboard navigation is not in an acceptable place right now, with some games having missing/hidden/inaccessible categories and sub-categories. This is obviously a big problem, but we're working on it!
Test
Thanks for the report, definitely a bug - we'll work on a fix!
[quote=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.[/quote]
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.
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).
Hey, sorry about this, thanks for the report! We added the "Load more runs" button to make the initial page load experience much better for boards with lots of runs, but missed an edge case that caused it to not appear for some boards - this should be fixed now.
Thanks for the report, this should be fixed now!
Thanks for the helpful suggestion. We just added user assets to the API in a way similar to how game assets work - see the "assets" field on a user API call, ex: https://www.speedrun.com/api/v1/users/zx7gd1yx
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I couldn't agree with you more. We realize how bad the site performance has gotten and are actively working on a series of permanent solutions to the problem.
Site/API performance and stability is our #1 priority right now (we're delaying other feature releases - which are largely complete - until it's fixed). I'm personally devoting most of my working hours to it, and I expect to have everything in MUCH better shape (should ~ eliminate pressure messages and speed up the entire site significantly) within the next 2-3 weeks. I know that sounds like a long time but the changes required are complex and require a fair bit of planning and iteration.
Thanks for caring enough to bring it up, I promise we're working hard on it!