Experience as a runner

When my run was set up, there was a bit of confusion about the N64 console that would be used. I was told to bring my console, but then it turned out that the RGB N64 that Fuzzy had provided was already used by the last runner, so we went with that. Last year, the situation was basically the same. This shows that the best option for ESA would be to just get one optimally modded version of each console that can be used every time. That way, the setup for every console run would become much easier while also having top quality. To pay for this, ESA could use donations, maybe with a special online marathon.

I have no complaints about any other aspect of my run. The tech crew helped setting up the TV and the headset without any problem, they did a great job here.

Experience as an attendee

This was my second ESA, the first being in 2015. I liked most things more last year, which was largely due to the venue. I have nothing against the town of Växjö, but I didn't like the location of the venue. It was too far away from the actual town and the Arenastaden was not a very nice place to be, it felt more like an industrial area with some commercial places that are intended to be accessed by car. Last years venue was right at the center of Skövde, which allowed easy access to a lot of different food places and other activities. Around the Fortnox Arena, you only had a handful of fastfood places available, unless you were willing to go to the town, which was inconvenient due to the limited number of buses. On the positive side, there was a shopping mall right between the venue and the Scandic hotel.

The venue itself lacked the charm of the Kulturhus in Skövde. Due to the layout of the venue, the stream area felt disconnected from the rest of the event. Last year, I found myself taking a quick look at the streams from the practice area from time to time, so I could spontaneously decide to watch a run. This was not possible this time, you had to walk all the way to the stream area to check things out, which would often result in the chair being taken away that you just used to sit in front of your practice TV. And this leads to my main problem with this event...

The organization of the practice area! While last year, the practice area was the most chilled place to hang out, it felt like more of fight this time, a fight for TVs and chairs. It quickly became obvious that there weren't enough tables with TVs for all the people. When I really needed to practice my game, I often had no choice than to wait until a TV looked somewhat abandoned and I could just go unplug someones console. It was especially annoying in my case, since my game is too dark for a lot of the TVs and I can't change the brightness without a remote. I eventually found a somewhat decent corner to practice, but it was a very stressful experience. The other problem, as mentioned earlier, were the chairs. Just from guessing, I think there were enough of them for just people practicing. But if so many chairs end up being used to build an audience around someones TV or for activities like Smash, then it starts becoming tricky. The situation was really getting on my nerves and I started just grabbing what I call "audience chairs" somewhat aggressively, which pissed some people off. I tried to always get those chairs and not a single one in front of a TV. Practice has priority over Melee and fanboy-audiences, sorry guys! Many people weren't like this, they simply took your chair if you just left it in front of a running console setup for a few seconds. Really? For that reason, I actually started dragging around chairs if I only wanted to talk someone really quick. For next year, there needs to be a better way to organize the practice area, I don't want this anarchy again.

A problem that every event like this has to face, is the fact that so many people don't care about putting their waste in the trash. It wouldn't be much of an effort, only a few steps at best, but people are still too lazy. The worst were all the half-finished drinks in cans, those could so easily be pushed over and damage consoles. The cleaning team did their best, big thanks to them!

Overall, I had a good time. It wasn't as amazing as last year though, there were a bit too many suboptimal things for that, especially the stressful situation in the practice area. I really hope you consider using a different venue next year.

I will bring my N64, but I don't have RGB or component, just regular composite.

In the schedule, the link to Beetle Adventure Racing doesn't work. Here's the gamepage: http://www.speedrun.com/bar

I can see why you don't want to go back to the old layout. But why are you against separate layouts for desktop/mobile? The majority of complaints here are because speedrun.com - like so many other websites - sacrificed desktop usability for mobile.

Was this decision made to make it easier and save time and resources? If that's the case, just ask the community for enough donations to make a desktop version happen! I would certainly be willing to donate specifically towards that.

I'm not the person to try to get the Mega Man games on this site, since I don't run any of them. I would definitely try, though, if I was running them. It's up to the runners to get good leaderboards done, if they care enough.

If people want to use this site to have all their PBs in one place, they should be able to do it. If you want to allow certain communities to monopolize leaderboards (something I still strongly oppose), there should at least be a way to display your PBs in those games without a leaderboard. Because it clearly takes away functionality from this site if people can't keep track of all their PBs.

If "modern" means that a site has to look good on mobile and every other system has to deal with it, then I don't care, I prefer it "looking like 2003".

I can agree with what many people already said: Just make the new layout mobile-only.

The most obvious improvement is the loading time, it's really a lot faster! But that's the best I can say, unfortunately, as I don't really like many of the changes. I find it harder to read text and finding symbols. Many things were put in menus, maybe a bit too much.

• All text is too small in my opinion. I also miss the category names as a title over the leaderboard, I liked it much more than just seeing the name on a tab.
• IL tables look TERRIBLE without borders! Also, why did you make it that you need two clicks to go to the IL table from another site on the gamepage? The old layout allowed you to either go directly to the table or popping out the list first. Now you're required to pop it out first, I don't like this.
• Why did you remove the footer and put all links in a dropdown menu? You should avoid menus like this unless you really need to save space, which wasn't an issue with the footer. I'm assuming you tried to get everything close together so you will never have to scroll.
• I also don't really like changing the leaderboard filters to a single dropdown menu, but I can see that the old separate dropdowns weren't optimal if there were too many filters. Maybe there should be some more options here to choose between the new and the old method, or only having certain filters show up as separate dropdowns.
• The same thing goes for the misc. categories, some more options would help.
• Maybe you could make the Speedrun.com image at the top left a bit larger to match the search bar?

Switzerland isn't part of the EU, even though it's right in the middle of it. But hey, we're neutral :D

For non-EU Europeans like Swiss or Norwegians, I don't think a passport is needed. We always get that special treatment and can use IDs.

I also like it more as a dropdown, I tend to find on-hover navigation somewhat annoying.

Optimally, I want to have a navigation that's always visible (just like it is now) and have dropdown options that are immediately obvious (and not those stupid mobile-ish menu symbols that consist of three horizontal lines on top of each other).

Thanks for explaining :)

Could you get "Unique Run Count"? I'm just assuming that you currently count obsolete times too.

I noticed another thing about run comments: When using Internet Explorer (for whatever reason), comments will actually disappear after a while, even though you're still hovering over the run. This behavior can be seen everywhere on the site, leaderboards, home page and user pages.

In speedrunning, it is up to the different communities to come up with a good ruleset. There are many approaches to this, but I do believe we should draw a line somewhere in what is allowed. Some basic rules should just universally be respected, rules like:

• Absolutely no cheats (obviously not including stuff like game modes that are accessed through a cheat)
• No hardware modifications
• The run needs to reach a clear end of the game (if it isn't something like a race category)
• The run needs to begin at the start of the game

If we allow to break some of these rules, just because it's more convenient, we basically open Pandoras box. Why not starting Ocarina of Time runs from Links house? That way we wouldn't have to watch that long cutscene every time! Why not starting Pokémon with a code that always gives the starter Pokémon perfect stats? It would save us from so many resets!

I know some things are annoying to deal with in runs, but getting rid of them is not worth it, if we have to sacrifice some of the most basic principles of speedrunning.

When hovering over a run on a leaderboard, it will only show a part of the comment and cut the rest off. For the full comment, you have to position the cursor exactly over the comment icon. This does not happen on userpages, hovering over runs always shows the full comment there.

Alright, looks like you want me to run the hardest category I submitted :)

And wow, the Winx Club hype Kreygasm

I'm definitely joining again, it was fun last year :)

This thing with off-site leaderboards always bothered me. Why can people on another site just tell us what leaderboards we can have? They don't own the concept of a Mega Man leaderboard or anything. If individual runners don't want their runs here, fine, but people on this site should be free to create any leaderboard they want (if the game itself is eligible of course).

I made a TAS of Cheetahmen II. Hard to find a game that's worse.