United StatesIn Afterbirth, the "Jud9s" category was made, where you finished 9 characters with the Jud6s mod.
Since this category was fairly popular in Afterbirth, there should probably also be some sort of Jud6s mod category for Afterbirth+. However, it doesn't necessarily have to be the same exact category, especially because it is now possible to actually give the D6 to every character in the game.
Let's make the category as fun to speedrun as it can possibly be.
- How many characters should the category be?
The old category was 9 characters long, but we don't have to keep that number. However, it might be a good number to keep since it is kind of a happy medium between 7 characters and 11 characters (the 2 most popular existing vanilla categories).
- What characters should the category be?
For reference, the original category had the following characters:
- Isaac
- Maggy
- Cain
- Judas
- Blue Baby
- Samson
- Azazel
- Lazarus
- The Lost
I spoke with Dea1h about this, and we agreed that it might be cool to rotate in Keeper, since he is significantly buffed in Jud6s. (In the mod, he currently starts with Greed's Gullet, Duality, and 25 cents, although that is subject to change.)
Besides just making the character more fun, a different Keeper would help the category stand out a little bit from the other ones.
The most boring character is Isaac (since everyone else obviously has the D6), so it seems like a good swap to swap out Isaac for Keeper.
Besides Keeper, now that Eve can start with the D6, it also probably makes sense to swap Maggy out for Eve, since Eve is just a more interesting character in general with the health management aspect.
I definitely haven't finished pondering this topic yet, but these are my initial thoughts. Feel free to discuss what you think would be the best / the most fun.
I added the following line to the master bug list:
[quote="Zamiel"]Holding the “R” button to reset on Eden is bugged; it will not work even if you have available Eden tokens in the bank. Fixing this is a huge quality of life change. Resetting should decrement the Eden tokens and the game should stop you from resetting if the token counter falls to 0.[/quote]
Nicalis knows about the doc and has been fixing the bugs marked as high priority, so hopefully this can just get fixed for everyone soon!
Re: Allowing the tool for speedruns - I have no opinion on that.
It looks like Void Portals were changed during the patch today. Can anyone confirm that it is still possible to get instantly sucked into them?
I don't do Jud9s speedruns (anymore), so I will abstain from voting.
However, I do believe that changing health is a GOOD thing from a design perspective. Allow me to explain why, because I don't think anyone else in the thread has done a thorough enough job explaining it. To do so, I have to talk about Devil Deals in general.
In the Jud6s mod, DDs are changed to always give 1 item. This affects balance in a non-trivial way. Overall, I think (and the community agrees) that it is a good change because it increases the overall effect of player skill in the game. Understanding this is key in understanding the next part, so let's go over it in some more detail. If you play flawlessly and don't take damage for the floor, you should have a good chance to be rewarded with some sort of power level increase.
It's a good thing to allow skilled players to be able use their skill to differentiate themselves from unskilled players, and it is easy to see how this DD concept directly applies to a seeded race. But it also applies to unseeded racing and single-player speedrunning as well: over the course of ALL seeds, we want to slide the game towards a model where players who mess up are punished and players who play flawlessly are rewarded. (It's important to note that I deliberately chose the word "slide", since obviously there are still plenty of situations outside of Devil Deals in which players can be rewarded for making mistakes.)
Moving on from this, we can examine the health situation. In the Jud6s mod, we consider Judas to be a really skilled based character - you have to (potentially) play flawlessly for the entire course of Basement 1 and Basement 2 in order to be guaranteed the all-important power level increase from the B2 DD. In general, this is a really good game mechanic - players who consistently lose their half soul heart, on average, will lose seeded races, lose unseeded races, and get low Jud9s times on the leaderboard.
But what about other characters who are not guaranteed a DD based on their initial health? Now, this game mechanic doesn't apply at all. So by fixing this, from a game design perspective, we are artificially infusing more situations in the game where a skilled racer can differentiate themselves from an unskilled one.
I think that's essentially the motivation behind the change in a nutshell.
The Afterbirth+ version of Jud6s is considered in alpha and is located here: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=842735484
The change log is located here: https://github.com/Zamiell/jud6s/blob/master/docs/version_history.md
From reading this thread, it looks like there are 7 votes for and 4 votes against, so I went ahead and changed the health on some characters in the AB+ version. For Blue Baby, he now has 3.5 soul hearts instead of 3. For Azazel, I gave him the same health as Judas.
Why change the health on Azazel in such a weird way? Well, here's my reasoning.
In general, in Jud6s, as you may or may not know, I try to make the minimum change to accomplish a goal. For example, if an enemy explodes on Isaac automatically when he enters the room, I move the enemy 1 tile away when I could really move them 2 tiles away just to be safe.
So how does that relate to Azazel? Well, we could (arbitrarily) quantify Azazel's overall power level numerically as a "50" on AB+ vanilla. We want to give him a guaranteed DD, because it makes the game more skill based. But doing so would increase his power level from 50 to something like 70, especially because it gives him an extra black heart nuke to use for room clear.
So, going from 50 to 70 is a big jump. How can we minimize that? Well, we could nerf him by removing the black hearts and giving him Judas' health. You could say that this version of Azazel would be a 60 - still stronger than with having 3 black hearts, but not as good as 3.5 black hearts.
Well, 60 is closer to 50 than 70 is, so this kind of change follows from the "minimum change" principle. It also reinforces the skill in dodging - Azazel is really powerful, but you really can't be sloppy with your dodging or you will straight up die.
Of course, I should say that I'm not committed to this change and maybe setting him to 3.5 black hearts might be better. But that was my train of thought.
Finally, I've updated the Jud6s website to contain a list of the 4 official codified goals of the mod, since I've seen some confusion as to what they are, and it might help to have that laid out explicitly.
(Note that the website is still not updated with all the AB+ stuff. I will do that later when the mod is not in "alpha" anymore.)
"Finishing" the game this way is not legitimate under the current rules.
I do think that they will fix this issue for everyone in a future patch. And as an aside, I've actually fixed the bug already in the Afterbirth+ Jud6s Mod. =p
But in the meantime while we wait for a patch, there's no need to change the rules, because you can easily escape the portal by using save and quit. (It is very similar to my S+Q cutscene skip strat in that the menu doesn't appear.)
By the way, a shoutout should go to Krakenos for discovering this method!
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Hello Faila.
One new feature of Antibirth is that the floor generation algorithm is changed completely. One of the side effects of this is that it is somewhat rare for a Treasure Room to be attached to the starting room. This makes unseeded races + unseeded multi-character speedruns fairly untenable, since resetting for a good item is one of the cornerstones of general speedrun strategy. Killburn is aware of this issue, but he has so many other bugs to fix and things to do, it seems unlikely that this will ever be addressed in an official build.
Seeded races with the mod are of course still possible, but without Instant Start Mod integration, they are really cumbersome.
As a footnote, it should be mentioned that BrainTM has been doing Sub 23 Eden Hard Mode Witness streaks, which is obviously contingent upon the luck of the 2 random items, but still sort-of speedrunning.
Hello emeraldaly.
Official categories are based on the things that people actually speedrun. When a bunch of people start running a new or novel category, it becomes an official category. If you want something like "7 char Greed Mode" to become an official category, run it yourself, highlight your PB videos, and get a bunch of other existing speedrunners to do the same.
[quote=Hardrocker]Krakenos, I don't get why you don't want two room floors. Thats faster![/quote]
The point is that it makes racing more consistent. (It also makes speedrunning more consistent, but that's a secondary point.) If we wanted the fastest possible runs, we would mod out all of the hard rooms, etc.
[quote=Hardrocker]are half of the "bug fixes" even actual bugs?[/quote]
While the majority of the changes are indeed bug fixes, I'll change the section title from "Bug Fixes" to "Mod Changes".
[quote=Hardrocker]Also why bring up fixing the coop baby glitch but not the BM clip?[/quote]
The rules for SRL are listed here: http://www.speedrunslive.com/races/game/#!/isaacafterbirth/1
As you can see, co-op baby is not allowed, but BM clip is.
[quote=StoneAgeMarcus]changing a cat Like Jud9s this close to AB+ coming out is...silly. No one will run this once AB+ comes out...so you would be making a dramtic change..with only 2-3 weeks left of this being run.[/quote]
I think that hits the nail on the head.
I added the bugs in your list to the doc.
Since Jud9s is a category now in Afterbirth, it seems reasonable that people might want to have another modded category in Afterbirth+. Such a category could include balance changes. We can talk about that more in the February/March time-frame.
Yeah Cyber I don't really think they are looking for balance suggestions. That's purely up to Edmund, not Nicalis.
Well I actually already have a list of things. FrankerZ
If you guys can come up with any other ones I'll add it to the doc.
Dea1h I already posted it in above post but I think you missed it. You can see it here: https://pastebin.com/UpUQgctS You just use "Search Game Structure", then start holding R, and that's it. It will stop on BR+IH. Easy!
[quote=Cyber_1]is there any difference between using cheat engine to speedhack this way or to read floor layout[/quote]
Well, yes. The difference is that, in my 1 character run, Cheat Engine turns off before the runs even begins. If you were using Cheat Engine to read floor layouts, you would be using it DURING your run, which is a big difference!
(Side note - reading floor layouts like this isn't even possible with the current cheat tables.)
[quote=karolmo]I don't want to start an arguing where we end up hating each other. Over all this, we love speedrunning/racing TBOI and we are part of the same community, and we all want it to be kind and friendly.[/quote]
Well said!
Here's my opinion. Currently, the consensus is that my WR in Rebirth is legitimate. Essentially: "In the Rebirth WR, Zamiel used a tool to decrease the Eden resetting time from 11 seconds to 3 seconds. That's OK."
But now, by posting this thread, Karol is implicitly saying: "In the Afterbirth WR, Zamiel used a tool to decrease the Eden resetting time from 11 seconds to 0.3 seconds. That's not OK!"
See how this seems weird? I don't think you can you coherently make a distinction between these two things. Either you allow decreasing the reset time or you don't. The Rebirth WR currently stands, so this one should stand too.
Why? Well, all the old arguments in the old thread still apply. We probably don't need to rehash all the same arguments over and over again - if you want to discuss it, read through the old thread(s) if you haven't already done so!
In short,
- Does it actually make sense to outlaw something that isn't part of the run / only applies BEFORE the timer for the run is started?
- Does holding R really constitute any form of skill?
Again, the consensus was that reducing the reset time on Eden IS allowed.
[quote=Lobsterosity]I think he should publish the tool to allow level playing field.[/quote]
Sure! Here it is: https://pastebin.com/UpUQgctS (It's a Cheat Engine table, which should be familiar to all the speedrunners who have ever done practice runs, or done any testing of game mechanics.)
[quote=karolmo]should we allow using those kind of scripts to start a sub6 meg on 7 char runs? [/quote]
I think you might misunderstand how the script works, as what you said doesn't make much sense. The script simply checks to see if you have Blood Rights and Isaac's Heart in your inventory (essentially the same thing that the Hyphen-ated Item Tracker does). Maggy always starts with the same items (Yum Heart). In order to get a Sub6 Maggy run, you have to actually play the game by checking Treasure Rooms, Devil Deals, and so forth.
Of course, you COULD use it to "farm" a good Eden start for a 11 or 13 character WR attempt. But think about that for a second. Is it really worth spending 1 (or more) hours per run attempt? That seems really unnecessary. I don't think it even gets you enough of an advantage to be worth it, since the 11 character and 13 character categories are so long. Also, don't people typically want to play the hardest characters first, like Keeper?
[quote=karolmo](Rules have to be clear on way more aspects. If we leave them as they are right now, cheating item pools is not banned)[/quote]
That's not true at all! Modifying the item pool is done via a custom "itempools.xml" file. This has been, and continues to be illegal for speedruns. (It is also easily verifiable, since you can re-play their seeds with a vanilla game.) For the run that I submitted for the WR, I played on a vanilla copy of the game without any external mods.
I'm Zamiel and I volunteer to host the Isaac Item Tracker Server that allows broadcasting your items to other people.
I recently made a change to the server so that it now listens on port 8080 instead of port 80. This will break the server for you, so I'm posting this here for visibility.
HOW TO MAKE IT WORK AGAIN: Go into your item tracker options and change "Trackerserver Url" from: http://isaacitemtracker.com --> http://isaacitemtracker.com:8080
That's it!
