Hey runners, I wanted to share the internal guidelines that I personally have used for years and allows new verifiers/mods to understand how to approach a community. These guidelines were originally written by @Celestics who I worked with during my tenure as Warframe supermod. You can view that forum post here.

These four simple guidelines should help you understand what type of categories we are looking to provide for the community. If you have a recommendation for a new category, follow these guidelines when creating it and then contact the mod team so we can review it.

• Consistency: Future changes to the game shouldn't often obsolete runs. In this sense, most categories should be glitchless.
• Accessibility: Any player should be able to get their feet into these runs, and we should help them be able to.
• Popularity: Players should be interested in actually running these categories.
• Sensibility: Categories should just plain make sense from the standpoint of an outsider reading through their descriptions.

Glad to see some updates to this game.

I wanted to discuss a few of my thoughts regarding these points.

Sensibility is a great topic to cover. It's definitely been hard to decipher what certain categories really entail in other games.

That being said, Consistency and Accessibility are naturally going to be the enemies of gachas.

Specifically regarding consistency, even without glitches, a unit like Mlynar drastically changed the landscape for speedruns, especially in categories like IS (where he obliterated no relics as well).

I'm surprised that these ideas came from Warframe as the game, at least back when I was more hardcore in it, had constant buffs and nerfs to various aspects and abilities. If I complete a Void T3 Capture in 60 seconds under movement 1.0, then movement 2.0 comes out and nerfs coptering making 60s clears impossible, what do you do with the category?

My recommendation in this sense is maybe instead of limiting what can be done, especially if that's what the community wants to play, but rather archive the current leaderboard and reset the category if major changes do occur.

On the topic of accessibility, again, I'm surprised to hear this come out of Warframe. What's considered a new player? In Warframe with primed frames and guns getting vaulted constantly, and primed mods taking months of work to level up a single one, naturally some types of clears will be gatekept by what the player actually owns. Likewise for arknights, potentials, levels, mods, masteries, will all impact how much damage units will do. This obviously won't be applicable to New Account speedruns, but that comes with its own challenge as load times between devices can heavily impact a run unless some sort of auto splitter can be made, in which case mobile phone users would have to manually calculate time in game vs loading. When looking at it in IS2/3, load times could easily add up to half a minute or more of difference between emulators, and this is for shorter categories than many of the new account categories. So the point of this text block is more to say, what's your vision for accessibility in Arknights?

Edit: Saw that there was a calculator spreadsheet posted. Will this be used for new account speedruns as well?

This brings me to my last point: Popularity. I'd have to guess, without looking at the leaderboards, that the most popular categories are those with in-game timers that tell the player how long the run took, those being Annihilation and IS. And naturally the longer the run, the less popular it is. There are many many different divisions of New Account categories. Were these popular in communities in China? I only see 1-2 entries max for each of these. Given the recent IS3 speedrun event, I wonder if Yostar would allow a specific channel dedicated to the discussion of speedrunning in arknights on the main discord as that could definitely help visibility (indirectly popularity) and accessibility.

Hi @GL1TCH3D, thank you for your continued interest in AK speedruns. I hope my responses below are sufficient for your concerns.

even without glitches, a unit like Mlynar drastically changed the landscape for speedruns, especially in categories like IS (where he obliterated no relics as well).

Operators that decrease the amount of time to clear will not reset the leaderboards. An example would be Horn S1 saving a full second on Anni 3. Conversely, changes to the game that prevent replicating or would overall slow down the run will result in the leaderboards being archived and refreshed.

Our goal is to have 0 leaderboard refreshes annually, but we will take steps to archive if it is necessary. You can view some of those old categories in the Archive leaderboard. We don't foresee Hypergryph making underlying design changes like Digital Extremes does with something like parkour 2.0 (though it was an improvement overall).

My recommendation in this sense is maybe instead of limiting what can be done

Though I responded above with how to handle serious gameplay changes, I want to state here that we are not interested in limiting the player outside of infrequent contests. I will explain this more later, but from my experience, restrictions make things convoluted and feel more like bloating the leaderboards.

So the point of this text block is more to say, what's your vision for accessibility in Arknights?

My vision for accessibility is that anyone can jump into speedruns at any point, no matter their progress.

Yes, having maxed potentials on maxed operators with maximum trust will improve your time in certain scenarios. However, this is for competing at the top 10%. Having this type of account is not a necessity and would create an artificial barrier of entry that would defeat our goal.

We value personal player progress over leaderboard position. Think of the moderator team as not just the individuals trying to keep the playing field fair for everyone, but also the cheerleaders. Whether you are always in 1st place or in 50th place, we celebrate when you, the player, are enjoying yourselves and are showing the willingness to improve your times (this is why we do not reject obsolete runs).

For a newer player who may only have one or two 6* operators, the moderator team should be helpful in guiding the player to completing their goal of a certain time with what they have available. This is why we do not implement restrictions outside of the infrequent contests. We take pride in being the only niche that has access to all operators (267 at the time of this post)! Even for veteran speedrunners, we intend to help them progress and reach their goals.

No matter if you started Arknights last week or on Day 1, your speedrun is still valid for the leaderboards if you have the passion and motivation. My explicit expectation to the moderators is to be there, ready to help, and to cheer any level of speedrunner. This is my vision of accessibility.

Will this be used for new account speedruns as well?

Unfortunately, we do not have plans to use the calculator for New Account speedruns due to the sheer logistics of verification.

There are many many different divisions of New Account categories. Were these popular in communities in China?

To my knowledge, these are more popular in Japan. For specific New Account related inquiries, I defer them to @Hinabu's and @LeSot's expertise.

I wonder if Yostar would allow a specific channel dedicated to the discussion of speedrunning in arknights on the main discord as that could definitely help visibility (indirectly popularity) and accessibility.

This would be great to have, but a related link to the AK Speedruns Discord might be more sufficient. We separated from Cesith's Discord earlier this year for the ability to stay agile and eliminate the need to contact an administration above us when we needed things done.

I am not opposed to the idea for the AKO Discord, but there are some logistical and administrative needs that would have to be implemented beforehand.