Good morning, I'm wondering if these are set in stone or open for discussion by the speedrun community before coming official.

|| The following items may not be used: flower pots, display stands, specials menu, or specials terminal. If any of these items are accidentally purchased, they should be left outside of the restaurant so they disappear at the start of the day.

Having done a "few" turbo runs and food runs, I would like to express my concerns. Turbo runs are already rnghell. Food card runs are even worse. By removing the opportunity to use the above listed items, you remove further control of players over their environment and their ability to go fast. It feels like this is an arbitrary choice with limited testing so I'm really hoping you'll consider what I'm saying, solicit other feedback, and allow some testing from active speedrunners before formalizing these rules.

imo allowing those items defeats the purpose of it being a food card challenge, it would be like how the devs removed the trick and treat cards from witch huts imo. by allowing those items, you'd end up with just a slightly different turbo map, and that would defeat the purpose of being in the challenge category

Having run a lot of turbos and food card runs, it doesn't play out that way. You still have to cook everything, you still have to make space decisions, it takes time to set up displays, time to use the specials menus, and it allows you to control your run a little better against rng.

If those items are "against the spirit of what a food card run" is to you, then why are you allowing metal tables? It's a contradiction. Advocate to allow them all or allow none of them.

Also, why is it on me to bring this up and not the verifier team to post and solicit feedback prior to determining the ruleset? It sounds like the decision has been driven based on one streamer's community and people's involvement in that. That doesn't seem like a fair or inclusive way to decide on rules or involve the broader PlateUp speedrun community.

Hey Keo! So to shine a little light on how this whole thing came about, Li was the "originator" of the challlenge, and from there Fangz made an official ruleset and created a forum for people to submit their runs to a leaderboard if they so desired, and after at least a dozen people asking for challenge runs as a whole to be added to SRC it was brought up within our verifier chat, then there was a community post made back in December about the possibility of adding challenge runs and asked for community feedback on what we would want to see and the overwhelming answer was the food card challenge, so we moved forward with adding that to the official SRC board. The initial ruleset included that the left decor card must always be chosen (unless formal, cuz never formal) and there was feedback and concern about the amount of RNG and resets it would cause, so we opted to modify the rules to allow for choosing either decor card. The only feedback we got from the many speedrunners who participated in the challenge unofficially was that the decor choice was too restrictive, so we did adjust that! Thank you for taking the time to share your concerns about this ruleset with us, we will have to look into this further.

These extra restrictions on purchaseable things are not how I've previously understood the challenge to work, and I think it would be more interesting to allow them as gameplay options. Choosing all food cards is a very simple rule change which leads to very different gameplay, restricting certain purchases is much more arbitrary and hurts runners' ability to manage RNG. (and why not limit metal tables, if you're doing that?).

In my opinion, letting people buy these items defeats the purpose of an FFC run. For example in a regular cakes/coffee turbo, you get a bunch of display stands and a special menus/terminal to just serve ice cream. If these items were allowed, I believe that beyond the first couple of days, you could make an FCC run very similar to a regular turbo run depending on the main and added cards. And with that, then it could just be a lot of resetting to not get a starter or dessert so you can use displays for the course you do have. And to note on the allowing metal tables but not the other items, metal tables don't change what a person orders, it just makes sides optional. The flower pots, display stands, “specials” menus, and special terminals all change what the customer orders, thus making sense to me on why the metal tables are allowed but the other items are not. The run is a challenge run, not just a speedrun, and I agree it is a little too challenging with some foods, but I'm not sure that this would be the correct path to take to make the challenge more accessible to more players. If you have any other ideas, please share them!

Hey guys, just want to pop in here and say that the decision to add the Turbo Challenge to SRC wasn't made by one person or done overnight, it was actually a really long process to make sure it was implemented nicely. The challenge became very popular within the Speedrun community which is why it was added, people were enjoying running it with the ruleset that Fangz provided so I'm not sure why the verifiers would consider making changes to it when the community was having so much fun with it as-is. I understand why there wasn't an SRC post asking for feedback before implementing, because the community was already showing they wanted it by running it on streams.

We now have a framework for these sorts of challenge runs, and there's nothing saying we can't add more challenges (like a no-metal-table turbo food card run), it was just started with this already popular option. I think some of these ideas and suggestions are wonderful for future challenge runs!

It may have been a long process, but it still does not appear that the speedrun community as a whole was consulted on it. You keep saying the speedrun community was involved, when you mean certain streamers and their own communities. Streaming and watching streams should not be a required activity to have input on the speedrun community as a whole.

I have been playing what I understood as the food card challenge and enjoying it, and was looking forward to having a leaderboard, and now it turns out the leaderboard has very different rules to what I expected. If you had done proper outreach to the whole community you would have found that your ruleset is not ubiquitous - we are telling you we are speedrunners who have not been playing with these specific rules. It sounds like you still have the majority of runners, so, I am not sincerely expecting change any more, but proper communication should not have been skipped. Maybe if feedback had been solicited more neutrally you would have found more different opinions.

I don't find "we can just add more very similar categories" particularly compelling when it's ~120 categories each time, so much category spam just spreads competition way too thin, which is already a serious issue imo.

@Tosle it's true that my preferred rules don't impact coffee and cakes very much. I find it strange that they're even valid runs when they cannot choose only food cards (the exception made for them is strange to me). Runs where the dishes do require more items to cook aren't possible to fully cheese this way in my experience, there just isn't space in the restaurant to have more than a couple displays (and for which course?). This experience is for duos and trios mainly (though we haven't fully explored different trio layouts, and I suppose there's no point now). I think even if you manage to tech up to ~15 displays and specials tech for the rest of the orders, that's significant tech and time investment during which you still have to serve a lot of foods. If you've seen the (not FCC) set seed quad dumplings turbo I was a part of, where we sent every group away with black flowers for the last 6 days, that was an incredibly cool and rewarding strat and we still had to cook all sorts of foods to get there, as well as jumping through all the other hoops.

Streaming and/or watching streams is definitely not a requirement to have input, and there was a lot of input from the verification team throughout the process. Some of them are streamers, some of the watch streams, some of them might not - I can't say one way or the other without asking them all, but anyone is welcome to apply when applications go out, and streaming or watching streams is not a requirement to apply to the verifier team. Also, if anyone really wants to be more involved you're welcome to reach out to myself, or any member of the verification/moderation team and I'm sure we'd be happy to discuss it even outside of open applications.

So when it comes to Speedrun.com, the users moderating a game represent the consensus - the general agreement - of the players of the game. Your verifiers and moderators are your advocates, and they're doing their best to improve and grow your community in a positive way. I believe that they've done their best with this decision, and that there's been a positive outcome for the community to enjoy this challenge here on Speedrun.com.

There are currently 61 active runners, and although it's nice when decisions are made that everyone agrees with completely, that's just not always going to be the case. The general consensus of the community was to add this Turbo Food Card Challenge as a category on Speedrun.com, and your verifiers and moderators did their best to make that category in a way that seemed agreeable for the majority, which is exactly what they're supposed to do.