Let me preface this post by saying that I am aware this is a hot take.  If you disagree with me, that’s fine.  This is not an attack.  Your opinion is valid.  Let’s keep discussion civil!

With that out of the way, this has been bothering me the entire time I’ve been running SM64CoopDX.  At this point I’ve been running CoopDX long enough that I think my opinion is informed and valid.  My buddy and I even held the WR for 2P Vanilla 120 Star for a few days–so this isn’t the opinion of some rando, but of someone who deeply cares about and is pushing the game.

I propose that* any one of the following* changes should be made:

1.) The “Pause Anywhere” server setting should be Disabled for speedruns on the leaderboard

2.) or, there should be separate leaderboards / categories for “Pause Anywhere” being Enabled or Disabled

3.) or, “Pause Anywhere” can be allowed, but the behavior of the pause menu should change so that, like in vanilla SM64, you cannot Exit Course while airborn–you must be touching the ground for this option to appear on the menu. This change would need to be done either with a mod or a feature request to the developer.

Pause Strats Explained

For those who have no clue what I am talking about... Pausing behaves differently in CoopDX than in vanilla/console. In CoopDX, pausing the game does not actually freeze the game–it just brings up the pause menu. Also, unlike on console, you do not need to be grounded to Exit Course in CoopDX. These two elements combine to allow for some cheesy strats called Pause Entering and Pause Exiting. Pause Entering is where you pause the game right as you are entering a painting and then quickly unpause. It skips the fade-to-white transition and just brings you right to the star select screen, saving a few seconds. Pause Exiting is where you pause and Exit Course as you are collecting a star. This skips the cutscene of grabbing the star and immediately kicks you out of the level, saving like 10 seconds per star. This is massive. Pause Entering and Pause Exiting combine to save several minutes over the course of a 120 star run.

So what's the issue? "Pause Exit Chicken"

Well, Pause Entering is fine. It saves time and adds no risk. Pause Exiting, however, honestly feels kind of toxic–not because it saves time, but because it adds huge risk to the run. As you try to optimize more and more, you eventually realize that the optimal way to Pause Exit is to cut it as close as possible. You can actually hit Exit Course before even grabbing the star, and then fall into the star during the fade out. Maybe you can see where this is going…. It creates a toxic game of Pause Exit Chicken where you are trying to Exit Course on the earliest possible frame, which risks you not collecting the star…

We’ve all been there, I’m sure. My teammate and I have ruined plenty of perfectly good runs because one of us accidentally hits Exit Course a frame too early and the star does not count as collected. And you have to play this game of chicken 120 times per run. (Well, minus the 100 coins stars and Bowser reds I guess…) Point is, it is infuriating to lose a run this way, and it will happen to you eventually.

This game of chicken could actually be eliminated if pausing behaved like on vanilla (see option 3 of my proposal)–where you cannot Exit Course while airborne. Theoretically Pause Exiting would be virtually riskless as long as you had to wait for Mario to be grounded before the “Exit Course” option would appear on the pause menu.

(Can we also talk about the fact that hitting the Start button while the game is already paused does not simply unpause the game, rather, it executes the menu option that you have selected. So you can potentially realize, “Oh crap, I’m not lined up with the star. Let me unpause and re-align myself.” only to find yourself booted out of the level because you just hit Start on “Exit Course”. I hate when games do this.)

Pro-Pause Strat Arguments

I understand that there are benefits to pause strats. But let's unpack them a bit.

But pause strats save time! They make the run shorter! It’s a QoL improvement!

Ehhhh yeah they save time, but I would argue it’s not worth losing runs to the Pause Exit Chicken minigame you have to play on every star. Also, it’s not like vanilla SM64 has tons of down time. It’s not like SMS where you have 30+ seconds between shines thanks to loading screens, menus, and cutscenes. In SM64, the down time is much more reasonable, and a lot of people actually appreciate that down time and use it to read chat, take a drink of water, change the song they’re listening to, etc. With pause strats, there’s basically no downtime at all throughout the entire run, which I actually find stressful and annoying.

It's also not like Co-op (or even console) SM64 runs are particularly long. 45ag and I were getting 120 2P runs around the 1-hour mark before we knew about pause strats. I'm sorry but a 1-hour run is a short run IMO--and that's the longest category this game has to offer.

But Pause Exiting makes routing more flexible!

I guess? Yes, Pause Exiting makes it so that the Lobby levels can be done almost in any order, at almost any point in the run, because the fastest castle movement for these levels becomes: pause > Exit to Lobby > move to the next level. This is objectively more flexible than vanilla–but not that much more flexible. You can still do this in vanilla, it just costs you a small, pretty much negligible amount of time in castle movement. When 45ag and I originally came up with our 2P 120 route, we were not aware of pause strats. Once we became aware, our route really didn’t change much. I reordered some of the Lobby levels, but…you still kinda have to do all the Basement levels in one trip, all the Upstairs levels in one trip, all the Tippy levels in one trip… IMO, the benefit of being able to re-order the Lobby levels without time loss is not worth the cost of losing runs to Pause Exit Chicken. In fact, I would argue that routing is more interesting with a little more restriction. Coming up with a 2P route before we knew about pause strats was fun. It was fun to find a route that minimized castle movement while allowing each of us to play our stronger levels and avoid our weaker ones.

Now, here are my arguments against pause strats.

Pause strats are not intuitive to console runners and make the transition from console to CoopDX harder than it needs to be.

These pause strats are simply not present on console. I recently entered a co-op bingo tournament where pause strats were banned because the TO believes that console runners should not be unfairly punished for not knowing co-op specific tech like this. And frankly, I agree. If you are coming from console and you’re not aware of the pause strats, you’re going to lose minutes. I feel like we should prioritize making the transition from console to CoopDX as seamless as possible. This is a pretty big seam.

Pause Exiting adds an unnecessary skill check to runs: menuing.

This ain’t a JRPG. I don’t run SM64 because I like menuing. I run this game because I like moving the red hat guy. "Bing bing wahoo" and whatnot. I hate losing time to menuing errors. Plain and simple. I think it’s a dumb mechanic that is against the spirit of the game. And like I said already, the better you get at CoopDX, the more seriously you take it, the more you are going to try to optimize, the more likely you are to lose that game of Pause Exit Chicken.

Thanks for taking the time to hear me out. I understand this is a lot of text in the year <current year>, especially in regards to a video game made for children. But in case you didn't read...

Tldr:

I think pause behavior should change so you cannot Exit Course while airborn, or I think Pause Anywhere should be Disabled, or it should be on a separate leaderboard so people who don’t like dealing with Pause Exiting don’t have to. While it does save a lot of time, some people actually want some down time between stars, and nobody likes losing runs because they hit Exit Course a frame too early.

Pausing in coop is what makes coop really different from vanilla, if it was banned peoples would just run on sm64online for multiplayers, and emu/vc/n64 for 1player, it saves a lot of time, even if you pause 1sec late, taking your time making sure you have the star is definitly fine and i actually wonder why you want to pause frame 1 instead of just pausing exactly when you have the star, pausing before getting the star is only a good thing for stars with cutscenes but you listen to the sound of the star and pause when it's about to end and you pretty much never lose any runs by doing that

"taking your time making sure you have the star is definitly fine and i actually wonder why you want to pause frame 1 instead of just pausing exactly when you have the star"

Because it's faster. There are stars like WDW Secrets where you can long jump at them and you can Pause Exit before you have even made contact with the star, and then you collect the star during the fadeout as Mario falls into it*.* It's faster than taking your time and waiting until you have the star, and it is the natural evolution of the strat (at least for some stars) as the game gets more and more optimized.

Speedruns are all about going as fast as possible. If I don't do it, someone else will. And then I'll have to. That's kind of the nature of the beast. That's why I would rather this strat get restricted in some way before it gets out of control. Option 3 is my ideal solution as we get to keep the benefits of pause strats while eliminating the risks.

Now that I think of it, Option 3 might be the only solution. Even with Pause Anywhere disabled, you could still theoretically do the sweaty "Pause Exit before making contact with the star" strat.

Also, for what it's worth, I don't think the draw of CoopDX is pause strats. I think the draw is that it's the most accessible way to play SM64 online. Yeah, SM64 Online exists, but it's kind of a nightmare to get set up.

I think it should stay the way it is, coop wouldn't be the same if it weren't for that. Multiplayer and pc port games are available and I know they suck to set up but those are different leaderboards for a reason. Coop kind of wouldn't be the same without being able to pause exit and in the level. It would be too similar to sm64 itself and all of the other pc versions. I like coop for that reason and I feel like it would defeat the whole purpose of it.

Worth noting that I'm not saying "let's get rid of pausing and exiting in level". I'm saying let's either make a new category where you can't pause and exit to skip the star get cutscene, or let's make it so you can't Exit Course unless you're touching the ground like in vanilla. We don't have to get rid of anything.

For that second one, you could still Pause Exit to skip the star cutscene, you just would never accidentally exit too early. Most people probably wouldn't even notice a difference, but the sweaty try-hards who do notice the difference would be very thankful.

Its not like you need that 1sec of early pause exit while you can save 10min in your entire runs by learning new movements and new strats, pause entry and pause exit are the last thing to try to improve tbh, if wr isnt fully optimized, it's not worth trying to be 0.5sec faster by exiting the level just a tiny bit before grabing the star

I agree with Chiara here. The evolution of optimizing coop runs is not going to revolve around the pause starts. It's going to be around the co-operative nature of routing. The fastest runs are not going to be two people who have planned their separate levels. It's going to be the teams that combine levels.

Anytime there is a 'collection' based star (secrets, reds, ghost hunt, 100-coin) there is the potential to send two or more people after the collectable thing and save huge swaths of time. If you'd like proof of concept, check out the routing used by Newmanbeatbox and Tnewm, Thier WR is listed under the archived EX versions, but it is still minutes faster than anything else we've seen. And both of those runners openly admit that they are not the fastest speedrunners out there. This effect is diminished outside of the 120 category. But I wouldn't be surprised if we see more 100 coin stars even in lower star categories.

The base game was always a classic example of the travelling salesman problem, albeit with the added complexity of mastering your actual travel technique. With the coop version the problem of routing has become infinitely more complex and therefore entertaining. Pause starts are part of that complexity and part of the entertainment. But in the long run of the evolution of runs, I don't think it will play as big of a role as routing will.

I don't want to be rude or anything, but if you're scared of losing runs by exiting too early then just wait longer or practice the trick.

In vanilla if you you're scared to lose a run by missing carpetless then take the carpet or practice. This is like any other trick from vanilla, you have to get better at it and you won't lose runs anymore... or you just don't do it and accept the timeloss.

I'm for keeping the strat the way it is. I guess having another board where the setting is disabled could happen but I'm not gonna run on that and I'm against option 1

As someone who has basically built the leaderboards from Day 1, I think the strat is fine. Coop, hence the name, relies more on cooperation in routes than something as miniscule as pause exiting. It saves time, but it doesn't make the Speedrun. I just don't feel it's worth making changes to something that actually has been nerfed since DX 1.0 came out. The Pausing tricks aren't difficult either way, and like any other trick, they can be practiced.