FranceAlright, made you two guys new mods as you seem to be more aware of what's going on in the game than I am at this point. I haven't really gone back to it myself since last ESA.
So yeah, make new categories and change old ones as you see fit. Don't delete any runs however, put them in a "legacy runs" subcategory or something if need be.
Alright. I'll check the "old" route.
For the death/deathless, I think it goes back to the same argument of "what is faster?". I mentioned that you don't wanna die if you want to go fast, but if dying is faster, then so be it. Wanting to play hardcore just because you want to play hardcore is a bad reason. This is a speedrun. Unless I'm missing something?
How long would it take to win the rally, out of curiosity?
Hello. Glad to see there's some interest in this game. If the old any% route is no longer possible, it definitely needs to be moved into an "old version" category. I will look into this, see if the route is still possible.
Death or Deathless seems irrelevant to me. If you wanna go fast you won't wanna die anyway. I'm afraid I also don't see a reason for "driving car". Full Assembly covers that. You also need to pass the inspection for the full assembly (the plates are considered part of the car). We thought about the two currently existing categories quite hard with Shrimp (especially Full Assembly) and what they would entail, to make sure there would be a distinct any% and what would be close to a 100% category.
Win the rally seems reasonable. I think someone else also asked for it. I don't see an issue with that one, if the run is interesting.
More "random" categories is not necessarily better, if their parameters are overlapping with other categories or if they're just not that interesting. As a general rule of thumb, I personally consider that the less categories that a game has, the better. Those leaderboards with 15 categories and 13 of which are empty disgust me, and I certainly won't have it happen for a game that I'm mod.
I'm thinking of maybe coming back to this. I guess I'll have to learn all those strats you came up with Sellz. :) I was already behind the most recent strats 4 years ago, so this should be fun
Shrimp and myself will get back to it very soon. MSC has been accepted into ESA Marathon in July and we'll be racing against each other. It's likely that during practice we'll improve our times. We were estimating that a high 24:xx or a low 25 is the limit with current strats.
Yeah it we can access the counters without getting in the way of anything that'd be perfect. That's pretty much what we did with the stream setup that was there last year.
As I mentioned on Discord, Mafia doesn't need a dedicated room per se, we just need a fair amount of space and some chairs or things to sit on. We were mostly using the back corner of Hall B and the couch area in front of it last year and it worked very well for us. Something to note though is that loud noises are very distracting.
Concerning the chill room upstairs, after we bought the kettle last year it was a very comfortable and practical room to get tea and I assume coffee as well. It would be great if we still could do that this year.
gtaTyr
I think that it's acceptable. The differences between the versions are too big.
Hi. There ended up being no stream because tech was very busy at the start of the marathon and I didn't want to disturb Edenal and ask for equipment. The plan was that we would be pretty autonomous but even then I didn't feel like disturbing them. As the days passed my interest in the stream gradually vanished. Our constant movement wouldn't have made things easy anyway.
Anyway. Whatever. Now, for our online mafia sessions. Many people expressed interest in joining, so I created a discord server that anyone can join. We used to use a skype group but Discord is probably more convenient now, as skype has been sucking very hard lately. Feel free to join here : https://discord.gg/9K28wk3
We won't actually be playing on the discord server but are instruction on what to get to play with us. Also, we haven't really played in a few weeks/months as our numbers were quite low. Let's see if we can get something organised for an upcoming day. Possibly Friday.
See you there.
Obvious shoutout to everyone from the Asylum crew: flicky, oasiz, bang and Suzy, Adam, Pipe, Kotti, Dave, Shrimp, Robo. You guys are practically the reason I started going to ESAs and I haven't had a bad time so far when you guys were around. Thanks for all the amazing moments throughout the years.
Shoutout to the Mafia and Chess 3 guys, who were basically the same people: Naeg, eidgod, Alko, cfb, Spike, Noobest, Pottow, Moro, Mash, Kazzadin, Pac, Shiek, Fingers, Mergy, Freddeh, E-Dragon, Josh, CL, Vassko, Sonicku, CL, and everyone else that I forgot the name because I'm garbage.
The SRG/Swamp crew for being awesome. I don't know everyone but consider yourself included anyway!
The #gta crew. A lot of newer faces so I don't know everyone and I'm old and washed out as everyone knows. Still, it's amazing being part of such a cool community, as seen in the Pizza place. Thanks so much to everyone for making #gta be what it is.
Thanks to all the tech guys, especially the senior techs and my french tech team partner Gael for the awesome work.
And some random shoutouts to finish this up:
Tezur0 and his girlfriend, you guys were cool. I'm sorry my russian is garbage even though I try. I hope you will consider coming back next year. I enjoyed hanging out with you both.
Maral. We didn't hang out much this year but I suppose that was to be expected. Still, the times we had this year were a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing you again next time.
All the people aside from the Asylum guys that watched DEATH RAAAAAAACE and especially Pod People: I enjoyed watching some of the great movies Leigh Scott made with you people. I'm sure we can find something suitable for next year.
The MTG crew.. Thanks for teaching me and all the great times. I really enjoyed it. Count me in next year.
The french guys that I hang out with. You guys like baguettes so you're obviously cool.
Melis. I'll get you your cups of tea sometime. I hope you enjoyed your shoutout during social eating.
Fatzke, on top of all the other categories you're in. You're great. You'd be greater with your moustache though so yea ..
Lysteria, my partner in crime.
All the people that watched my run and stuck with me despite the awkward time slot. I hope you enjoyed it.
And everyone else I guess because I'm running out of ideas. See you all next year.
Not sure about this. We'll only have one game at a time on stream for sure. That's gonna be 20 players max. I can see there being another game played at the same time if there are enough players wanting to play. As a comparison, the biggest game at ESA 15 was .. 27 players, I think ? It was a bit too large, and I think less fun for everyone involved than the smaller games.
Hello town
Mafia was a huge success last year at ESA and despite the fact that it was the first time playing the game for a lot of people, there were plenty of memorable moments coming from both great and ... questionable plays.
There will be more mafia this year, and we're hoping to make it even better. Some of us kept playing every week over internet, and we slowly started excluding or tweaking some of the more imbalanced roles in our games. We feel like we have arrived at a fairly balanced state and even though we've played quite a lot of games by now, they're still fun.
But first of all, for those who don't know, what is mafia ?
It's a party game of logic and lies. At the start of the game, the players are divided into two teams: the majority will end up being members of the town, and only a few will end up being the mafia. Members of the mafia will know who the other mafiosi are, while the townies know nothing besides their own role. The game has two alternate phases: the night phase, where the mafia will kill a townie and where the so-called power roles (more on this later) do their actions, and the day phase where the whole group discusses what happened and chose one person to lynch. The game ends in a town victory if all the members of the mafia are dead, and a mafia victory if there are an equal or larger number of mafia players left than there are townies.
There are some power roles to spice things up. -The Medic can protect a player during the night. If said player is targeted by the mafia to be killed, he will survive instead. -The Parity Cop can check a player each night and gets told if the person he checked tonight is of the same or different alignment than the person he checked the previous night. (Yes, he is useless night 0 - the regular cop is actually way too strong) -The Vigilante can kill a player at night, once per game.
There are many, many more, but those are the ones that are the most balanced and that we use regularly.
Oh, and one more thing.
We're gonna set up a stream and stream everything on twitch! We actually sort of wanted to do that already last year, during one of the open blocks of the second stream but it ended up not working out. This time, we're setting something up just for ourselves. Besides the obvious interest of watching a bunch of speedrunners play a party game, it's also a good opportunity to show the "behind the scenes" of ESA.
The setup is gonna be pretty simple, though we're gonna limit the number of players in a single game to 20 probably, not just to be able to fit them all on the couple cameras we'll have, but also because it becomes quite messy at anything above 20 as we've experienced it first hand last year.
Signed up for tech. I was one of them last year and it's not as scary as it might sound at first. If you have basic knowledge of how streaming and capturing works, you'll be fine. Our tech guys are really good at what they do and they can explain or show you what you'll be supposed to do, so if you're hesitating or something, just sign up. It's a good opportunity to learn a thing or two from the best.
Amazing event, had great fun with everyone. I honestly don't have much at all to complain about.
-Mass Housing was a bit far as everyone else said, but I prefer walking 20 minutes and paying 25sek for the whole event than walking 2 minutes and paying 250sek per night.
-Being one of the tech volunteers and seeing the "behind the scenes" as someone who isn't very tech oriented, and having everything explained to me at the beginning, I can safely say that most of the time, tech was fine. More than fine, it was great. I've seen what "wrong" means with swat and OoT.
Someone mentioned having to fix stuff yourself during the runs or "in-between". Okay, I can guarantee you didnt need to do that inbetween the runs and tech had it under control. As for during the runs, you probably ended up messing some settings that the techs had spent time to make sure it was right. Please don't do that, or make sure it's okay with a tech beforehand. We also had a very clear schedule and as far as I know it worked pretty well. At the very least, the senior techs seemed happy about how that part went. I don't know about the other volunteers, but I got briefed very thoroughly by both oasiz and Edenal on pretty much everything needed to switch games. oasiz even tried to teach me how to use the matrixes, but I prefered to leave that to him. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that the volunteers could hold their own, no need for that "idiot-proof guide" As for that FF 3 man race, there probably was a miscommunication between the tech and the scheduling people. Afaik, it was made very clear by the tech team that 3 man console races wouldnt be possible on the second stream. It was offered to change it to a 2 man race and moved to a bit later in the marathon. The VC 3 man bingo was only possible because one of the feeds was RTMP and not hardwired.
Concerning that, to andypanther: I was the one organising the VC bungo and one of those setting it up. Yes, it was very unfortunate that the stream died but we couldnt have known that someone fucked up and that the power cable was barely in the socket of the computer and that it would fall down if someone barely touched the computer. It could have happened to any of the runs actually. I did feel very bad about it and I still do even though it wasnt really anyone's fault, and the fact that some GTA people, unaware of what was happening asked some people on the couch at that time to move because they thought the run was over didn't help. I apologize on their behalf. As for me making some noise setting it up on the computers on the side, well, again, I apologize but the fact is, it needed to be done to keep the setup times minimal. It happened many times during the marathon, and it'll happen again next year.
-A fixed check-in of some sorts was required I would say. For everyone who entered to building to show their wristbands or be given one or something. There were a few incidents and we were probably lucky that nothing was stolen.
-Mafia was great, thank you everyone for playing!
