[quote=Firkraag]putting an asterisk next to some records defeats the purpose of having categories to begin with.[/quote]

Are you sure? Consider that many of the most popular speed games in the world have such a column.

Portal http://www.speedrun.com/Portal

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker http://www.speedrun.com/tww

Super Mario World: 11 Exit http://www.speedrun.com/smw#11_Exit

Super Mario Galaxy http://www.speedrun.com/smgalaxy

Banjo-Kazooie http://www.speedrun.com/bk

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix HD http://www.speedrun.com/khfmhd

Minecraft http://www.speedrun.com/mc

Antichamber http://www.speedrun.com/Antichamber

Crash Team Racing http://www.speedrun.com/ctr#Any_Warpless

Left 4 Dead 2 http://www.speedrun.com/l4d2

The new column on the leaderboard is a compromise based on the consensus of 19+ days of discussion, located here: http://www.speedrun.com/afterbirth/thread/yak65

Since neither of you actually partook in the discussion, it seems odd to complain about it now. If you'd like to continue to discuss it, you should probably use the existing thread instead of creating an entirely new one.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/250900/discussions/0/613941122558099449/

By the way, Dea1h and I discovered today that you can dupe Krampus pedestals in the skull room with save+quit if you get lucky enough to spawn a Host. Fairly sure this wasn't known before. (?) But definitely situationally useful on bad builds.

Edit - You can't dupe Angels pedestals in any way AFAIK.

lol at karo not reading my post FailFish

Anyways, here's an example of what Hyphen is referring to (the "Tingle Tuner" column): http://www.speedrun.com/tww

The rules were updated today officially by Sluip/Peachy.

http://www.speedrunslive.com/races/game/#!/isaacafterbirth/1

1. The "No continuing allowed" --> removed
2. "No CTRL+ALT+DEL to avoid deaths" --> "No rewinding to the last save using Task Manager or other means"

Good luck, have fun.

I don't have an opinion as to whether co-op baby should be banned or not since I don't generally speedrun the game (in a non-race setting).

[quote="karolmo"]I think we need to ban co-op baby. It's just unfair with keyboard runners.[/quote]

I am also a keyboard player. However, I've been using VJoy (http://www.headsoft.com.au/index.php?category=vjoy) to emulate a controller for the past 6 months or so, and it works with The Binding of Isaac just fine. I'm surprised that you haven't heard of it.

Although, while we are on the topic, I've found that the current top runners who do employ the co-op strategy aren't even using it in an optimal way, which is disappointing to me. I have the "speedrunner" mentality - I want to see the game taken to its limits and see every strategy squeezed of all its potential. If co-op babies do indeed get voted valid, keep in mind the following tips going forward:

1. For keyboard players, you should always be using VJoy, as it is straight up much faster than moving your hands to a physical controller.
2. You can spawn up to 3 co-op babies in Afterbirth. This means that, for example, you can take a devil deal for free with Blue Baby at 4 hearts or less. You should practice the inputs for this before doing it in a run, as they are complicated.
3. For controller players, "locking" the co-op baby using Joy2Key provides x1.5 DPS at the cost of taking double damage and difficulty using orbitals, which is clearly optimal for the highest level players in the world. Keyboard players can achieve the same technique using VJoy. Playing optimally like this takes some practice, as you have to constantly worry about toggling the baby on and off to avoid needless damage and/or use orbitals.

Are you playing on hard mode?

Ok, now I got a 1:51:45, not bad. FrankerZ

I got a 1:55:29 today. FrankerZ

@Takumashii

I agree with you to some extent. However, describing it as a "tier system" may be a bit overblown.

I think you'd agree that at it's core, Isaac is a very complicated game. There are hundreds of items and over a thousand item synergies that racers have to learn and memorize. Not to mention thousands of individual rooms, several with their own specific strategy that you must also learn and memorize. It is important to put this in perspective: the basement block clip in particular is so esoteric that it only comes into play once in hundreds of runs.

My underlying point is this. If we ask the question: "Do save and quit strategies make the game more complicated/difficult?" The answer would be yes. But only a very, very marginal yes. As an upcoming racer, it is more efficient to learn other things than strategies that may or may not even be useful, like respawning Greed.

Overall, I think you may be overestimating the power of the small number of save and quit strategies. They are all relatively minor things that don't really give a racer that much of an advantage.

@thisguyisbarry

I'm fairly certain that it has something do with co-op babies. Since they currently remain banned in racing, I suspect that this will never be an issue.

In Rebirth, there were several silly exploits/strategies that were possible with saving and quitting. This led the racing community to outlaw saving and quitting for races. The exploits were as follows:

1. Duping of Krampus items

The Krampus pedestal appears before the death animation actually ends. If you save and quit in between when the pedestal appears and when the death animation ends, it would respawn Krampus but leave the pedestal.

2. Boss Rush steal

If you save and quit on the first few frames of touching a Boss Rush (or Mom) pedestal item, the remaining pedestal(s) will not despawn.

3. Alt+F4 to rewind and/or avoid death

Since the game only saves at the beginning of the floor or when initiating an in-game quit, you can Alt+F4 to rewind to the last save.

All 3 of these bugs have been fixed in the current build of Afterbirth. Thus, it may be time to reevaluate whether or not we want to keep the save and quit ban in general racing. Let's review some of the pros and cons.

Reasons for keeping the S+Q ban:

1. It is what everyone is used to. (Not the strongest argument, obviously.)

2. It prevents the use of resetting a Holy Mantle proc, which is situationally worth doing with 1 hit remaining, but is a lame strategy in general.

Reasons for removing the S+Q ban:

1. Without being able to save and quit, you get an automatic loss on a game crash, power outage, or the like. This is probably the biggest reason to remove the ban.

2. It allows the strategy of changing Greed to Super Greed. Depending on the floor and the strength of the current build, doing this may potentially waste time (if you don't plan to visit any more shops), so the decision of whether to waste the time to do it or not is a strategic choice.

3. It allows the strategy of proccing the delayed stats from The Small Rock. Depending on the current build, the speed down may be less important than the tears up, so the decision of whether to waste the time to do it or not is a strategic choice.

4. It allows for less restrictive use of Mega Blast. Depending on the situation, there may be reason to prematurely end the blast, so the decision of whether to waste the time to do so or not is a strategic choice.

5. It allows for RexmoreOP's basement block clip strategy in racing, which introduces strategic depth into the game. For example, depending on the strength of the item, it may or may not be worth it to full clear the floor to look for an extra bomb. (Technically, the block clip is already allowed in racing, but is generally unfeasible since without saving and quitting it requires the use of some form of teleportation.)

Weighing these pro's and con's, I think that we should probably remove the save and quit ban, but of course I am not 100% convinced either way. Let's discuss this, as I'm sure I've probably missed something. =p

I've thought about this a little more over the past few days. Some food for thought:

1. It seems a little weird to outlaw inputs that occur before speedrun timing starts (or finishes). Currently, the start of timing is defined as the first frame that the floor name banner starts to become visible at the beginning of the run. If we agree that we should outlaw tool inputs that start a run, then I think it makes more sense to adjust the start of timing to the frame that the R button is pressed on the previous seed or the frame that enter is pressed on the main menu, depending on the situation of the specific speedrun. Otherwise you are outlawing something that isn't technically a part of the run.

2. However, point #1 seems largely irrelevant, since it seems silly to outlaw tool inputs that start the run at all. This is because ultimately, it would be a rule that is non-enforceable. In other words, there is no way for a moderator to know from any given submitted video if the input that started the run was made by a tool or not. Thus, if the community agreed to enact a "no tool inputs to start the run" rule, it wouldn't accomplish anything - dishonest players could still submit runs that were started with a tool and no-one would be able to tell the difference. Honest players would abide by the rule, but at the end of the day, having the rule in place at all gives dishonest players an unfair advantage.

At first glance, this may seem weird or confusing, so I'll give a pertinent analogy to illustrate the conundrum. In 2015, I participated in an Isaac tournament called the Balls of Steel Weekly. Some of you may remember it. ;) In this particular tournament, entrants would race to defeat Blue Baby using the Diversity Mod, a mod that gives you three random starting items at the beginning of your run. The two competing racers were each given the same Diversity seed to ensure that they got the same three starting items. However, Diabetech, the tournament organizer, had a rule where a player was not allowed to start a "test run" before the race actually began. This way, the three random items given to the player would be a surprise and they would not be allowed to start thinking of synergies and the like beforehand.

The problem with this rule is that, given a Diversity seed, it is trivial to use a program to figure out what the 3 resulting items are. Back in 2015, Inschato wrote a program called "DiversityViewer". It is located here:

https://github.com/Inschato/DiversityViewer

This program is open-source, freely downloadable, and was generally well-known at the time of the tournament. Thus, if a competing player wanted to know what their 3 items were before their run, they could just open the DiversityViewer off-stream on a second monitor or whatnot, enter in their seed, and no-one would be the wiser. And since the Balls of Steel Weekly had a cash prize, a disingenuous player had a financial incentive to download the program and use it so that they could start planning and strategizing before the run, giving them a competitive advantage.

The solution to this problem is simple. By simply removing the rule that prevents players from checking the three items beforehand, it puts everyone in the tournament on an even playing field regardless of whether they are honest or not.

By the way, a shoutout should go to Diabetech for the tremendous amount of work he has put into organizing tournaments for the Isaac community. The point of this analogy is not to shit on him as a TO, but rather to illustrate how unenforceable rules like this can potentially have a negative impact overall.

The more I think about this, the less I want the category to be artificially longer. I think 9 characters is more than enough personally, but I'm not sure how Ness feels.

By the way, for the record it looks like the current WR is 2:02:

I got a 2:07 on Monday and Krakenos got a 2:20 yesterday.

Just for the record, I personally don't feel strongly about this either way. Consider me neutral - I will be completely fine with whatever the community decides.

I do think that as a community we should strive to respect each other and be nice though.

Sillypears, can you add it to the resources tab please?

@CrafterLynx, I'm sorry you feel this way. I don't think that using a config.ini is "laughing in the face of all speedrunners", as others have been already using a config.ini for quite some time. Speaking more generally, I'll gladly take down the run if there is a community consensus that it unlawful. I only did it as a side project for fun!

@CrafterLynx, that's certainly one possible way to define modding. However, consider that by that definition, anyone who wants to disable Steam Cloud or use a mouse to control Epic Fetus would then be using an "illegal mod", which seems a little silly. Furthermore, using this definition would invalidate a bunch of runs currently already on the leaderboard, such as BrainTM's 3rd place time in the 13 character category. Finally, consider that people with poor computers are unable to play the game with the default settings, so that with this definition you effectively outlaw a segment of the community from being able to speedrun at all.

Overall, it seems somewhat clear that all of these things are things that should have been programmed into the in-game options menu from the get-go, but it just wasn't done due to lack of time or laziness.

Beld,

I don't think you are actually reading any of the posts in this thread, which doesn't make for a very constructive conversation! I'm happy to address this bit by bit so that you can understand:

1. The cutscenes are not removed. Please take the time to re-read my post above. If you don't believe me, take 5 minutes out of your day and actually try doing the method that I described. You should easily be able to accomplish it on your very first try!

2. Krakenos linked a thread authored by Simon, one of the actual developers who work on The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. Please take the time to click on his link and read through all of the contents. From that link, we find that the in-game graphics menu does not actually contain all of the graphics settings for the game; it is only possible to accomplish some settings through a "config.ini" file. Again, this is not a mod - it is a game configuration recommended by the actual developer of the game for people with poor computers. The screen WILL fade like this if you use the config.ini file recommended by Simon. BrainTM doesn't use a config.ini file, so that's why his game looks different.

The cutscenes were not removed; I played on the vanilla game + the eden resetting thing. It's trivial to skip the cutscenes on the first possible frame by mashing spacebar with your left hand and enter with your right hand as fast as humanly possible. I'd imagine that most speedrunners probably don't care about doing this since they don't care about losing frames. However, I'm a perfectionist. =)