I'm personally gonna move forward with Ryu's plan here. It just makes sense to me personally. I was never a fan of the jail strat, forcing the rng in specific areas to get the fastest run. Having the maps be random on save/exit makes it feel like the d2 I played my entire life anyways. IGT- solves the no sound/sound debate instantly...and is like 3 clicks in livesplit. If you don't want to add extra steps, like having livesplit in the first place, then I understand...but you're probably not worried about any of this time argument to begin with in that case.

Hey everyone,

Before I go into my opinions on each topic introduced by Ryu, I would like to explain my personal feelings about Diablo2 speed runs. Most of us who love watching and doing speed runs have seen games come down to a couple seconds between new records. We have seen games pop in and out of relevance for speed running because of this. We have to ask ourselves, why do we enjoy diablo2 speedruns so much? What is the deeper feeling when speed running this game? The answer, for me, is RNG.

Most speed runs aren't randomly generated maps with randomly generated creature, dropping randomly generated items. Think about that for a second. Diablo2 is literally one of the best examples of having to speed run into the unknown, and that's amazing. You don't know what you're going to get and that's why we watch and run diablo2, imo. When someone gets an item drop or the perfect wp spawn for your runes? The excitement begins.

So.

Seeded maps take away from this for me. They take away part of the randomly generated world we play across. At what point does the best seed become the only way to speed run? I know for a fact that once a amazing seed is found, it will be the only way to compete for the best time.

So make seeded maps a separate category. Being the WR holder for a seeded category is just as cool as holding the WR for non-seeded, imo, but cutting out the whole RNG of map and creature spawn just hinders what makes this game an amazing experience for runners.

Refresh on maps using plugy. I think that's great, I think this community holds so many people, someone may be interested in making an app that can just change the seed on save/exit.

As for having challenge runs, I agree with the many saying that it may create too many variance within speedrun.com for the game....however....where do the people who find it intriguing go to do this then? Are we stuck to a single streamer, or branded discord for these runs if they become popular?

Sorry for the long reply and rambling in the beginning.... but diablo2 has always been my favorite game and the speed running community surrounding it is very meaningful to me. To see the game stripped of what makes it the most fun to watch (RNG) would be horrible to me. Again, let people have their seeded map runs, just make it a different tab.