NOTE: Due to protection of routes, the videos for this category will not be made public, as it includes challenges and bonus levels, and you can't see other people's replays ingame either.

For those unfamiliar to speedruns of this game, can you explain why this is in place for the 100% and All Levels+ categories? What are the routes being protected from?

_

edit: threads locked now, but I just wanna say, based solely on this thread, y'all were pretty cool about it. Gave your reasoning, listened to the other side, talked it over and were willing to change it in the end. Good on ya.

I think, as here I don't have a character limit, I can explain this better here.

In the game itself, you can't watch the replays of other people on challenges and bonus levels. As the devs themselves stated, that is so players need to find their own ways around those levels, first of all. However, the important part is the second part of their reasoning. They made it like this, so if someone finds a new route or strat, he doesn't HAVE to share it, unless he wants to. We decided to stick with that, as we agree with that reasoning. However, if someone uses their own strats exclusively in the run, and wants the video to be left up, we will leave it up (I should probably specify that in the description, and will add that soon). However, we don't want people sharing a strat that they didn't invent / find, and just got told by the inventor / finder of the strat to improve their time on the leaderboard, but is not meant to be shared publically. It's a difference between two people exchanging strats to push each other to new limits, and sharing them publicly for everyone to see.

Seeing this response, we will rethink the decision.

The mods have discussed the issue and decided to discard the route-guarding rules in an effort to be more in-line with the speedrun community as a whole.

Yeah, to actually submit a reasoned argument in a non-shitposty format because Twitter doesn't allow for much else.

I know the devs would like players to figure their own way through the bonus and challenge levels in game and do this by not allowing the replay system, a speedgame's community is not beholden to and possesses no particular obligation to the devs wishes at all when speedrunning their game.

Speedrunning in particular can be a community effort of gradual refinement amongst many skilled individuals. Many people working together on a game can get so much more done than if one person has to figure it all out on their own. This is wonderful, and not enabling it in any way I would argue demonstrates remarkable lack of touch with speedrun culture, and kinda the internet at large.

There's also the consideration that hiding strats in this sense makes the game harder to approach for potentially interested new runners who stumble across your leaderboard by chance, as your leaderboards will appear desolate and that's already off putting and if they stay hungry, such a player would have to jump through numerous hoops to get the information they want to improve their play. Most people just aren't going to bother and won't get into the game, which will just result in gradual stagnation and likely just eventual death of the game if you actively hinder new blood. Being cagey about things is very bad for a speedgame in the long term. Be open, sharing and have all your stuff be easy enough to find and be easy enough to reach yourself for questions and you'll pick up interested players out of blue. It's better for everyone involved, the game's community and the game itself.

Another consideration is that a record is sort of fundamentally useless if nobody can see it, the clue is in the name. "Record", as in there is recorded easily-visible proof that this run actually happened. By hiding all of this, you open the possibility for a lot of internal bitching and arguing and general distrust amongst your own runners. Meanwhile, if everyone has all the info, there's no ambiguity.

imo being open about everything is just clearly better in basically everyway possible and I feel like making the right decision in this case is easier than not? I think you'd do well to change your minds, at any rate.

edit: dang it i wrote all this like just before you already made the decision so now I look stupid

^ What this langer said. Punchy covered the community side of the matter, and I more specifically want to comment on the moderation side of things. Obviously my submission was a joke, but it was made to illustrate an important point: If you're going to claim that time can be made without any substantial evidence, then what precedent does that set to possibly unscrupulous runners who just 'claim' to have a better time than anything listed. If someone who actually knows the game had came along and claimed to have a god-tier time that was still reasonably and actually possible to achieve, what basis would you have for rejecting that time just because they're not providing a video to verify?

If the response to this is "We do require video evidence to verify, then we remove the video after verification", then this does not address the main problems that affect your community, namely:

The community is forced to take your word for every speculative time that's posted.

It creates an atmosphere of elitism that can be very off-putting to a lot of people, when they see knowledge and resources centralised around one or two figures who are 'trusted' with them.

Either way I hope this incident doesn't hurt your speedgame or the community that supports it, go forever fast.

I'll lock this thread, as the issue has been resolved.