EnglandBacking All ASS and Puzzles. Don't really like the majority of other category options.
I don't think Plat RTA should be on the main leaderboards next to Any% etc. Plat RTAs are unpopular and used as fun runs, very rarely optimised. I think it works perfectly well in the miscellaneous section.
I believe that categories such as All ASS and All Puzzles should end time on either killing the last AS member/sephiroth, or competing the last puzzle. I find this similar to Crown speedruns where it makes perfect sense to stop time on acquiring the crown.
If you have to do the rest of the game afterwards (Xemnas 1 and Final fights in all puzzles) I think it turns the run into a glorified any% bingo.
I think both sides have been a little unreasonable in some of their arguments in the past over this category. I believe it's perfectly legitimate for the category to have not been made up to this point - due to only having one recorded run. I also believe that if one or two others complete a run it does not necessary have to end up on a leaderboard.
What I can say is that I'm incredibly dedicated into pushing this run further. I believe you can take my word at face value here due to my past experience in a long category (kh2 100%). This is a run that I did countless attempts in and pushed the time down even when there was no competition. I believe wholeheartedly due to the interest that NightBarrel has shown only yesterday about the category that if I did end up beating his best time, he would return to the game and do a run.
I have spent many hours into the category and palace routes and will continue to do so.
If you can agree that the run will be on leaderboards as long as there is optimisation and a few runs on the board, that's terrific news, and it inspires me to do more runs because I know that they will be recognised. In this case, I look forward to seeing the runs up on here in the upcoming days. Not only will having the runs on the leaderboard promote the category and get more people into running it and being able to find the PB VoDs for it more easily, it also brings more traction into the Persona 5 Speedrunning Community as a whole. I see the addition of NG+ to the leaderboards as having practically no downside. There are games in which there is a clear favourite between NG and NG+ in several different game series and that is understood throughout the runners and viewers of each community, therefore NG players won't be looked down upon because their times are 'worse' or anything like that.
Thank you for your promise of accepting the category into leaderboards for the near future, Nev. I'll be working on the category and I hope both Gold and NB do the same so we can make this category fun, competitive and an asset to these boards.
Salad
Update for Kingdom Hearts II:
I just haven't felt like playing it as of late. Had lots of university work that doesn't subside until May and a bit of depression thrown in there. I'd still REALLY like to represent kingdom hearts with this run at ESA, and I can promise you 100% that if i'm accepted into the marathon I will practice and grind the hell out of the game (Given that there are several months between game selection and the marathon itself, I know that i'll be better than i've ever been at the game by the time the marathon rolls around).
But I realise that you cannot make decisions based off uncertainties, therefore I completely understand not accepting this game even if you planned to previously.
Sorry for any inconveniences caused.
I'm very happy that Kingdom Hearts II made it past first cut instead of 0.2, because i have much more love and talent for the game, BUT
I thought if one game were to make it, it would be the 25 minute, newer game rather than the 4 hour long older game. Could I get some input as to why the decision was made to include this KH game over any others?
You can! It's a nice introduction to running the game. I started on it, as did LiquidWiFi, and you can see that we both have pretty good times on the leaderboards. However I must warn you - the game doesn't run very well in comparison to NTSC.
Trinity finishers tend to miss a lot, as do parts of Knocksmash and Valor Genie. So you may have to adapt in fights, and some strats aren't possible on PAL due to this. Also Genie Jafar is worse and harder to DM Skip because slapshot damage is pretty low. Also - the loading times count for about a 10-11 minute timeloss on PAL, so there;s that too.
Overall, i'd recommend that you start playing on PAL regardless of the differences. If you keep running the game and you're really enjoying it, or want to make your time super competitive, i'd buy yourself the NTSC copy :)
Hope this helped you out.
Reason for Kingdom Hearts II Any%.
Update - Bought a PC yesterday, it arrived today, and will be streaming from now on.
Sorry for cluttering up the forums.
My internet has not been letting me stream. In the midst of a move too.
I've been doing offline runs of my submission (Kingdom Hearts II) all the time, as shown on my Twitter. I've worked on it, learnt and found new strats/route changes, and it should be a good showcase at ESA.
Completely understand if it won't be accepted due to no proof of my running in the past month, I just haven't been able to. Every time I attempt to stream it lags to a point where it's unwatchable, and there's no way i'm going to stream with that burden on me.
Thank you.
Could my submissions for Fire Red [Any%] and Fire Red [Elite Four Round 2] be removed, please.
It's disappointing, but i'm focusing on the other game I submitted (Kingdom Hearts 2), so I guess i'll put my eggs in that basket. I'd prefer to be really good at 1 game than to split my focus up.
Thank you.
Apparently I hold the unpopular opinion among most of the community that video submissions shouldn't be required for good times in KH games. BB's idea on the top 10 runners or whatever getting together and voting on a suitable cut-off point seems like a very effective way to sort out this 'problem'. This was how things were back in the Google Docs: for KH2 it was roughly the 4:15 mark where proof was neccessary, and for 1.5 i'd say around 3:00-3:05. This was arbitrarily chosen by the top runners of the category or the leaderboards mods.
We're now using a more official and organised leaderboards than the google docs. A website shared with the vast majority of other communities. This means that random uncodified opinions on what the cut-off point should be is a bad idea, HOWEVER if it is decided on and written down on the individual pages for each KH game, I believe it's a more official way to do it.
The idea that a divide or cut-off point such as 4:15 for KH2 would create a point where runs become 'good', and would therefore deter people with lower times, is absurd in my opinion. 'Good' and 'bad' are somewhat objective terms. People can find some runs good when other people can call a run bad. We've had several arguments about this in the past, one of which directly involved me, where a runner who had World Record in a category called their run bad. The argument was that it was a cruel thing to say since it meant every other time in the leaderboards is bad.
If BB happened to call his 1.5 run bad out of rage one day because he hasn't been able to improve for a few months, would everyone suddenly put 2:45 as some arbitrary cut-off point where a run turns from good to bad? No. Besides, whether your run is good or not is somewhat self-explanatory... If one gets a time like a 3:20 in 1.5, 35 minutes off the current World Record, of COURSE it's a bad run. The runner will know that regardless of whether there's a cut-off point where runs require video proof or not. Speedrunning is a competitive hobby, no matter what anyone says. It's incredibly leaderboard driven, otherwise SR.com wouldn't be as popular as it is. As with any competitive sport/hobby, you will compare yourself with other players, teams etc. Therefore in comparison to other people, you know whether your time is good or bad.
Over half of my KH2 Any% PB (Was World Record for a month), was corrupted on twitch. As soon as I made that highlight, although I only came to realise it later, the 2nd half of my run couldn't be watched. If we add a strict rule that all runs require recordings, are we saying that any prior runs that don't have recordings are safe?? So if someone did a run without video proof a good few months ago and was accepted, it will stay, yet in future someone can submit a worse time and it won't be accepted? This doesn't seem right to me. If this rule is to be implemented, I don't think my KH2 PB should be able to be on the leaderboards, it should be removed. Along with BB's 2.5 time and many other times. Or are we saying that because I had a lot of viewers and people saw that I got my PB, it's fine? If we're implementing strict rules on recording, there shouldn't be any exceptions no matter what.
For my final point, i'd like to talk about my experience when I was first starting to run KH2. I ran the game for about a year before starting to record my runs. My first run that I submitted to the leaderboards was a 4:57. That was around 80th place or whatever, and although I was happy that I got the time that I did, the fact that my name was so low on that leaderboards inspired me to keep going. At this point, there was most certainly a arbitrary cut-off point over where runs would be allowed without proof or not, but this didn't deter me in the slightest. I saw that World Record was a 4:04 and how bad I was playing compared to it, so I knew my run wasn't good. I didn't need some silly little cut-off point to tell me that, and I wasn't going to be offended if anyone said my time was bad. I pushed harder and harder to improve my time, and I ended up gaining places on the leaderboards which added so much excitement to my speedrunning. I would tell my family and friends about how I was top 50 in the world or whatever, and be able to show them on official leaderboards and everything. Since I was on the PAL version, I would also remove ~11 minutes from my time to see what I was capable of and what place i'd be on the leaderboards if I had NTSC.
Eventually, I bought an NTSC PS2 and a capture card because I saw that I was roughly top 10 on the leaderboards if my PAL time of 4:24 was ran on NTSC with the faster loading times. The capture card wasn't too expensive, and I agree that recording runs isn't too difficult, but the fact that I'd seen myself climbing the ranks on the leaderboards for a whole year kept me going. It kept my interest for running the game high. Eventually I started streaming, loved it, and got WR etc etc etc.
I apologize for that being incredibly long-winded, but my point is that I honestly wouldn't have stuck with running KH2 or even speedrunning for such a long time if I hadn't seen my name going up on the leaderboards. I was just a guy who was just testing the waters with the whole speedrunning thing, but seeing my name put up with other great people that I knew about and watched was a blissful thing that kept me focused and willing to push myself and get a better time.
I wouldn't be here right now, nor would I have ever come close to WR in KH2 if my initial 4:57 required video proof. I would've felt incredibly disappointed, and since my time was no where near good enough yet, getting a capture card was the least thing on my mind since I didn't know how far I was going to go with running the game, or how low I could push my time.
tl;dr
- I'm for a cut-off point to be made and decided on by the top runners of individual games/categories.
- Having one's time show up on the leaderboards is an INCREDIBLY valid reason for people sticking around in speedrunning and improving their time.
- There are old runs such as my KH2 Any% PB that is 3rd Place on SR.com leaderboards without half of it's video. If these rules are implemented, surely runs like this would be removed too to maintain the strict rules.
- This will discourage new runners from picking up the game. It definitely would've discouraged me.
Thank you for reading my inssesent ramblings.
$10 by iiSalad for a time better than 14''66 on Port Royal Skateboard Minigame KH2/KH2fm
Game Name: Kingdom Hearts II System: NTSC PS2 Category: Any% Gameplay Estimate: 4:10:00 Ending/Bonus Estimate: N/A. Possible Donation Incentives: Fighting Sephiroth. (Would add 10 minutes to estimate) Sample run video: (WR video courtesy of Ninten886) Description: Kingdom Hearts is a JRPG series focusing on a great deal of combat. KH2 offers varied and difficult strategies to deal with a plethora of mob fights and boss encounters abusing revenge values and a variety of abilities. The Any% route skips a bunch of worlds and is rather medium paced throughout, with downtime during Gummi Missions for plugging the marathon/reading donations etc. It's just a really fun and technical run including tearing apart bosses that were excrutiatingly difficult when we first played through the game in our childhodds. I hope you consider it :) Availability: 8AM -> 10PM UK.
Game Name: Kingdom Hearts II System: NTSC PS2 Category: All Worlds Gameplay Estimate: 5:25 Ending/Bonus Estimate: N/A Possible Donation Incentives: Defeating Sephiroth during the run. / Singing songs during Atlantica. Sample run video: part 1 - part 2 - Description: Same as Any% except no worlds are skipped. A more complete run that uses more interesting strategies and techniques than any%, at the cost of being a little longer. I would prefer to run this category but would obviously settle with Any% too :). Availability: 8AM -> 10PM UK.
I'm really sorry, but it turns out going to ESA just isn't financially viable this year, a couple things happened and I just can't make it. So you can remove my submission. Again, sorry - hopefully next year i'll be able to go.
