No RNG Manipulation or Card Duplication
7 years ago
New Jersey, USA

Biskuit, there are so many things wrong with what you said, it's nearly unfathomable.

  1. Any% is any%. It is defined as the fastest possible way to complete the game, with no boundaries other than that. So the card dupe route will remain true any% even though it's of iffy... ethics, I guess?
  2. Why would the fastest way to complete the game be moved into miscellaneous? It's the fastest way to complete the game whether or not a lot of people run it.
  3. Glitchless is a downright incorrect term. RNG manipulation is not a glitch.
England

Personally (although I haven't been able to run yet as my PC is terrible and cant stream) I agree with the idea of putting in an option on the leaderboards to say if you used the new RNG manip or not. The way that makes sense to me is that it would be deemed as an alternative route which would give every runner on the board already the chance to either move to the new route or tick to the old one and see if they can get the god run OR they can switch to the new route and go as fast as possible.

I guess it might not be the best example but its one that makes sense to what I am trying to say so I'll use it. The first game I got properly into speedrunning is FF8 (now I also don't have a full run down here because of the crappy PC I mentioned earlier) and on their leaderboards they have the option on there to say which route you are taking (depending on certain 'cards' they get from the mini-game during the run) so you get to see which run is actually faster or if it is down to the runner themselves.

And for those of you I can hear complaining about the times lower down on the leaderboard I know what you are going to say but its fine because if the people on the lower end of the board want to improve their time and catch up then I say go for it and wish them the best of luck, to those who are happy with their old time and merely wanted a time on a leaderboard then that's cool too. As for new runner it gives them the choice of if they want to learn an easier run and take a more casual approach or learn all of the new strats/manip/'route' and compete for WR.

I know I have gone on for a while but I love watching runs of this game and when I get a decent PC I want to join you, but from what I can see here I might not have a chance to... this community was already almost torn up once before and I don't want there to be no community to come back to when I'm ready to go.

Arkild likes this
Greece

I always considered using the pocketstation to be a really big meme and really not something that is part of the game aka I don't think its a serious category however you are right because it's the fastest way of finishing the game.

England

Whatever you consider has no bearing on the game itself.

Madrid, Spain

No actual reason to keep them on the same leaderboard. Why would you guys not let people who likes no rng manip runs have their own leaderboards with their own times?

There's no reason imo. RNG manip runs are gonna be on top of the leaderboard anyway. Just let people play the cathegory they want.

Why would you want no-RNG manip runs to be stuck on the same leaderboard as your RNG manip run? Just to see your run in top of other 60 runs who use old strats? Don't be like this. We all enjoy the game. Don't ruin it for the people who likes any% legacy.

Why do they have to be on separate leaderboards? Kind of easy. RNG manip runs are 1h faster than any% legacy. So if you keep them on the same leaderboard you'll have all the RNG manip runs in top of the board and then every single non-rng manip run. Is that what you really want guys?

Leaving them in the same cathegory would kill the weekly races, would kill the most played cathegory and after someone makes a perfect, unbeatable rng-manipped run, it would kill the community itself.

Just don't be like this. Separate boards hurt no one, except the ones who want to think they're better than X people because their run is in top of 60 runs who use different strats that can't compete with theirs. Can you imagine Super Mario any% and any% warpless runs being on the same cathegory? This is exactly the same.

Enjoy the game and let others enjoy. Creating separate boards won't hurt RNG-manip runs. Not creating them will hurt legacy% runs.

I really don't understand all the trouble with this. It seems like an obvious solution to create separate boards for 100% different strats, unless like i said you want to see your run in top of other 60 and think you're a proplayer because of that.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
KampfHamster6000 likes this
Madrid, Spain

I appreciate the effort made by the people who wants to run RNG manip. That's why i'm saying they deserve their own leaderboard.

Alberta, Canada

I wonder how this discussion would have went about categories if the first attempts of successful RNG manipulation took 4 hours instead of two. Somehow I feel like "same category" would be fine by both sides then.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
New Jersey, USA

There's a fundamental misunderstanding here, and I'd like to make it very clear.

Technically, RNG manipulation saves NO time over a traditional run. Increasing consistency in drops is NOT equivalent to skipping or warping past a required section in the game. There are two reasons why this should be obvious.

  1. There is already wild range in any% no CD runs on the leaderboard, from three hours all the way up to 10+.

  2. Between every attempt that has made it past the manip stages, only one run has been completed. That seems strikingly similar to the old route to me.

EDIT: It is also worth noting that if the first completed run wasn't in the 2-hour range, a lot more runs would have been completed, and they would be mostly consistent with good old-strats times.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
froggy25, GenericMadScientist and 4 others like this
Minnesota, USA

"Does the extra farming promote fundamentally different gameplay? What gameplay is worth preserving in a separate category? I'm grasping at straws trying to find quality answers to these questions."

Yes, it does. You need to make choices about which duelists to farm. You need to create, practice and refine strategies for beating these duelists quickly. You need to decide which ranks are best to aim for. You need to decide how to edit your deck throughout the farm as you get better cards. You need to decide how long to farm in order to meet your goal (WR, PB, fastest average completion, etc.). You need to decide which cards to buy with the star chips you earn from farming.

Then, in campaign, you need to choose which dueling strategies fit your deck best. For example, if your deck has a lot of dragons and thunders, you might toss them on the harder duels to give yourself a better chance of drawing an equip/Raigeki. If not, you might keep one.

The RNG manip route involves tossing cards on the hard duels until you draw MBD. If you draw it, you almost certainly win. If not, you almost certainly lose. There is some strategy, but not nearly as much as manip-less.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
Alberta, Canada

You actually noticed a difference in runs in the final guys on manip runs vs. Non-manip runs? Because they seem to look the same to me. Pray for easy modes, hope for removals otherwise.

Missouri, USA

@Exarion This is not convincing. As I see it, in both cases, you are farming for cards in Free Duel without access to card duplication in order to complete the Campaign by winning the duels in similar fashions (Get THTD/MBD and pray that you avoid certain cards). The only gameplay mechanic more certain to be used in a manipless route is the Passwords, but nothing in the proposed category rulesets would preclude a manip route from using passwords.

This was my concern in my inquiry as to the difference between manip and manipless. My perspective just from watching the two different styles of runs was that the runs were trying to use the same means to accomplish the same goal, that there was only a difference in scale in what was used in those means. So far, that perspective has not changed.

When I half-facetiously suggested whether separate categories would be made merely for a difference in scale in something that was used, the response I got was, "that's stupid to say" and nothing else was made of it. So how does another suggestion of separate categories based on a mere difference of scale generate at least three pages of forum discussion?

That said, I have no problem with adding a Yes/No variable to the current NoCD leaderboard, though I find it to be a wasted effort.

Minnesota, USA

I don't feel like I can have a sensible discussion at this point. If you don't understand the huge difference between running with manipulation and running without, I don't know what to tell you. If you don't understand that people who like the manipless route simply want a space to play competitively, I don't know what to tell you. If you don't understand that categories are created based on community interest, not semantics, I don't know what to tell you.

What I can say is that your tone comes across as trying to exclude people from enjoying speedrunning. You enter this thread as a non-runner and make incorrect assumptions about the community (we care about more than our times, and we don't just farm to make the Final 6 "smooth" in races). You ridicule current runners who make valid points that don't align with your own. You claim that a 2-hour run is essentially the same as a 7-hour run. You use semantics as a fallback argument (a deck with 3 MBDs is the same as a deck with none, I guess). Can you see how these arguments might deter a new runner from entering the community?

To be clear, I don't have a good suggestion for how to handle the leaderboards. If we can find a reasonable way to define RNG manipulation, albeit not entirely objective, I think a board should be created for runs that don't use manip. If not, the Yes/No option seems solid.

Kollin7 likes this
United States

i dont quite understand why you guys are still talking about this when I already posted the objectively best possible option. http://puu.sh/tdI6t/75857cf444.jpg

The subject should change from this to how to define rng manipulation.

Bristol, England

At this point I think cyber is right, and their suggestion seems like the most supported one, I believe this is the path we shall take

Edited by the author 7 years ago
AndreaRovenski likes this
Scotland

Matt, you think Cyber's proposal is the most supported? I'm not convinced that's clearly the case, at all. Lots of people on both sides have moved towards a yes/no flag for the sake of compromise.

Emilia-Romagna, Italy

First, I wanted to make everyone notice that no RNG manipulation is not a restriction of gameplay, but a restriction of the speedrunner's intentions while playing, and I find this completely hilarious. Also I don't get why people are so willing to have competition in an environment where rules are not clear. When I speedrun I am not willing to do what others tell me to do, but I'm willing to look at the environment I am in (that is defined by the rules of the run), and solve an optimization problem that is finishing a run under those rules in the lowest time possible. If the rules are not clear there is no optimization fun, you don't even know what you can do and what you can't, and can't tell if someone with a better time is in the same environment or not, but whatever, to each their own. I guess people enjoy different things.

Anyways, if you are fine with it, you could make some "no console reset" (imo during run) rule to restrict the manipulation strategy with a clear solution (trying to restrict knowledge and console resets for the starter deck is really stubborn imo), but that doesn't stop knowledge of manips from helping, and maybe eventually easily outclassing the blind hope strats method.

If you really want to make this legacy category thing and stop RNG manipulation, just make the rule "a run belongs to the no RNG manipulation category if and only if the moderators of the leaderboard agree so" and (one) problem solved. It annoys me the idea of something like that existing on the leaderboard, but I'm not gonna bitch about it.

For the arrangement of the categories, do whatever you want, I don't care. Everything seems pretty fine for me (sufficiently arbitrary categories not in misc makes me kinda laugh, but again, I'm not gonna bitch about it, it's fine)

New Jersey, USA

If we define it as no console reset, that doesn't stop a runner from using RNG manip for an initial deck.

The way it looks right now is that we have two options:

  1. Keep arguing forever about whether or not to separate the runs, since there's very little chance of the categories staying merged because of mod support for separation, or

  2. Decide to separate the categories, have seemingly over half of the community pissed off, set a precedent of refusal to change with the times, and THEN argue forever about what defines a no RNG manip run because it's so arbitrary we'll never find a suitable answer.

Minnesota, USA

Arbitrary categories are a part of speedrunning. They're not as bad as this thread is making them sound.

Having said that, we have no working definition for "no RNG manip," and we'll need one if separation is going to happen. Would it be effective to ban resets, and simply discourage other forms of manip? Obviously, someone could get an unbeatable WR by manipping the starting deck and hitting a frame-perfect input on campaign Heishin 1 for MBD, but would people do that if the entire community was against it? No one would realistlcally A-POW Heishin 1 in a "normal" manip-less run, so you couldn't disguise it. Maybe this would lead to allowing only starting deck manip (which could be cool, since it would allow us to play the game more). At this point, I think we have more questions than answers. It wouldn't hurt to try something like this, then abandon it if people abused it or it wasn't as fun as we imagined.

Discouraging a play style rather than banning it might seem silly, but it's not unheard of. For example, in Gen 1 Pokemon runs, the conventional method of resetting is to press A+B+Start+Select. This is normally the same as pressing Ctrl+R on emulator. However, on certain screens, the game won't execute the A+B+Start+Select input. It will still execute Ctrl+R. So if you're on emulator, resetting using Ctrl+R is discouraged because it's faster, but the mods won't reject a run that does it at the start (to speed up resets, not the run).

(Note: The above example might be a bad one because certain consoles can reset using other methods, but the idea is clear.)

Edited by the author 7 years ago
Scotland

If you think it's enough to dissuade Heishin 1 MBD then you're not appreciating the full potential of this. Resetting for an amazing starting deck on its own is helpful. Furthermore, Heishin 1 MBD is only hard and artificial because you have to S/A Pow Heishin 1 with what is basically a starter deck (an already very difficult task) and then on top of that get a 0.2% drop.

But why would we restrict ourselves to this? With the magic of things like draw prediction to locate the seed, we could invent strats in real time to get things like ... well, anything we'd get in a "normal" run. E.g., DT and WSR off Isis, maybe even Beast Fangs off Seto 1. Furthermore, we could campaign manip that last one without much difficulty.

Oh, and what if we can real time figure out final 7 manips? Given this game's tendency to have things appear in bands (at least that is the case with Heishin 1 easy modes, among other things), this is not remotely unrealistic.

Edit: oh, and to those who say draw prediction requires a program, no it doesn't. It makes it easier, but print out enough stuff and I'm sure a human could do the binary search themselves, if they so wanted.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
froggy25 likes this
Missouri, USA

EDIT: I feel like I have myself to blame for my tendency to make absurdly long posts. Honestly, paying attention is a lost art. If you have too short an attention span to comprehend the entire post, then that's a "you" problem.

I could care less about "enjoying" speedruns. I have done plenty of runs of games that not a lot of people necessarily enjoy running. Every game I have taken on I have approached with the chief objective of improving my own times for my own amusement, not to enjoy the game. I enjoyed enough games as a kid and felt like I wasted so much time in the process.

If I'm analyzing what categories are appropriate for a speedgame (and I have had to do this at least twice with Mario Golf: Advance Tour and Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom along with several other speedgames I have pioneered), I'm not looking at the people that run the game (because they usually do not exist at that point). The people that play the game now may not necessarily be the ones playing the game in 5-10 years. My chief concern cannot be with the community. Growing the community would be nice, but it would be an ancillary benefit to my true objectives: analyzing the game itself and advancing the speedtech. As sacrilegious as that anti-community-sounding stance may come off, I'm just trying to look at what the game has to offer. I cannot disagree more with the idea that categories should be based on community interest because communities create stupid categories all the time, such as this: http://www.speedrun.com/fnaf1#1987.

When I see the gameplay of this game, I find that the currently established categories ask some very compelling questions. The fastest way to play through this game uses the PocketStation and duplicates cards. What would the game look like if we didn't have access to these things? What would the game look like if we had access to all of the legally obtainable cards from the beginning? What would the game look like if we tried to get all of the legally obtainable cards in one file? Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon dominates the other runs so much--what if we couldn't use it? What would that game look like? I would also posit the question of what the game would look like if we had access to no dragons at all and still managed to complete the game. These questions interest me.

The question of RNG manipulation vs not having access to it does not interest me. Looking forward, I get the impression that these runs would merge at a point to becoming indistinguishable from each other. However, this impression is met with the reaction of "You're wrong" from people who are unable to explain to me why I'm wrong and criticize me for being an outsider. First off, I can't be that much of an outsider for having done runs of other Yu-Gi-Oh! games, including one that could be considered a spiritual successor to this in terms of gameplay in Sacred Cards. Secondly, I am making plans to start running this game by the end of the month. I will be spending a great deal of next week practicing the manipulations.

And finally, TELL ME WHY I'M WRONG! I am open to considering that I am mistaken about the differences in the gameplay--and I'm not talking about the mindset going into the gameplay or the skillset needed to execute the gameplay. I'm talking about the differences in the way the game itself is being played. I want to be told that the manip and/or no manip routes are more than just summoning a bunch of dragons and praying that you don't get hit by a badly timed Gate Guardian or Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon at the end. I want to be told that the game will react in a fundamentally different fashion to these differences. I want to be told that the extra gameplay involved in no manip is valuable to the advancement of the speedgame.

I feel like most of the people came into this discussion knowing why this was a question that needed to be asked. I came into this discussion wondering why this was even a question and tried to take it to logical extremes to point out its absurdity. I want to know why this should be a question. I want to know the merits of each decision and I have yet to see a merit to making a separate no manip category.

It should also be made clear that no one is legislating how the game should be played. The game itself should dictate that based on its coding, not on its intent. This is just a decision on how to organize a leaderboard. The leaderboard should not have an impact on how to play the game. I will start doing runs with manip no matter what decision gets made here. I cannot see any value in ME playing the game manipless with any intent of going the fastest I possibly can because I find it to be a waste of MY time (so if people start doing races of a no manip category, you can count me out), but that doesn't mean that other people can't see value in THEMSELVES playing that way. I just think that the leaderboard should be game-centric, not people-centric, primarily because my experiences with creating leaderboards from scratch on this site have had to be done without the input of runners that did not exist.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
froggy25 likes this
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