Abruzzo, ItalyI will leave this up to you and Zachary with the mod powers and glitch experience to decide. But I think a good option for now is allow it in normal runs, no new category or tag, until there is more competition or it gets patched. If it gets patched we should make them obsolete. If there is more competition across different platforms we should make a new tag/category.
I don't have a immediate way of checking dev progress anymore nor do I know whether the dev aims to update the game further, but I know for sure in the past they were pretty keen on fixing bugs, and I feel like this blue glitch is no exception. But do let me know if the dev has stopped updating the game altogether. If this is the case then having the blue glitch runs at all becomes obsolete, as if it is patched out we are going to have runs which cannot be beaten/do not reflect the current state of the game. I'm not sure about mobile devices but restoring old versions is pretty unfeasable via steam, at least not without a lot of effort, and so the glitch would pretty much be lost if that's the case.
Also if this is the case, it provides more reason to segregate glitched and glitchless runs, as I feel most glitches will be patched (as long as the dev is still keen to update the game).
I agree with Saturnes point when saying it is nice to see how fast a game can be completed at all. But I feel like this is more of a task reserved for segmented runs/TASes, whereas speedrunning should not require using really convoluted game setups, hardware specifics, and older game versions, rather it should be simply based on the speedrun feature of the current version which is just in the game already.
So TDLR again: will this blue glitch get patched? If yes then we should segregate these runs or just not include them at all.
A pity, but maybe if some unofficial thing wants to be set up it would be nice to have an archive of how fast the game could theoretically be beaten historically.
I think there is a lot of sense in Saturnes argument, because lots of other games on this website split glitchless/glitched. But I think if you add a new category it should be «glitchless» vs «glitched» because there is more than one game breaking glitches than just the blue glitch (example clip glitch) and many of these are bound to hardware. Also if a new game breaking glitch is found it can be filtered into «glitched».
On the other hand I still think for the time being its not very suitable to make a whole new category since anyone speedrunning seriously would try implement the blue glitch where possible anyway, so competition between glitched vs glitchless for certain ILs won't really be a thing. I guess there is the point that this might make some ILs inaccessible for speedrunners who use different hardware. For example, I'm assuming 8-4 is probably pretty unreasonable for mobile players who cannot recreate the clip glitch easily.
However in my opinion, given how there is not much competition yet, I think it would be better to wait until there is more demand for optimisation/more people running the game. Plus the loud majority of people running the game seriously do so on mobile anyway, where the blue glitch is performable. I guess you could say that results in some bias for PC versions for the clip glitch, but this has only one or two good known uses and the ILs it concerns are hardly touched for now.
So TLDR, I think wait until there is more competition before splitting categories.
I think having a tag named «glitched» or something like that would be a good idea. There are too many ILLs for new ones, I think it would be messy. I agree with Saturne saying that a new category would be nice, because having categories restricted by hardware seems like a bad idea, but then we have to define what «glitched» means. So I think the easier solution is to just make a tag, at least while the game still doesn't have so many runners.
Also just a question: does anyone have a link to a guide/video for this new glitch tech? I would like to try it out 😇
I haven't really done anything like this in the past, but I'm sure if you ask ConfiG, he might know some things already and might be able to help you. Otherwise, maybe modding the game could help too. The easiest way to talk to him would be joining the speedrun discord (https://discord.gg/yepfrVddB3) or modding discord (https://discord.gg/puNrzd6eEp).
Strats that have been found in the past are mostly just unintentional bugs which we have found and tried to use lol, but there is probably a few more to find
