Hello!
The first categories added shortly after Google Hot Air Balloon had appeared on Speedrun.com can be divided into two groups:
- highscore category: Highscores
- speedrun categories: 1,000; 5,000; 10,000.
This thread will present informations about changes in the leaderboards.
As of 2nd February 2021, a new conversion factor is used to convert gathered points into the valoue appearin in the time section, which is 1000 points = 1 milisecond. Because of that, all already verified and pending runs has been edited accordingly to it.
The change has been already added to the rules of Highscores category. Each already verified or pending run (submitted before the change) has received a proper information about the change.
A new Miscellaneous speedrun category has been added: All Collectibles.
It is the first category belonging to group of Miscallaneous categories.
For more details about this category, please read its rules.
After receiving various suggestions about changing the name of "All Collectibles" category and after discussing this topic with speedrunners, the moderators team has decided to rename "All Collectibles" into "All Collectables".
The moderator team has recently discovered that Google Hot Air Balloon works differently on different devices, making the whole gameplay look either faster or slower. After analyzing the situation and after contacting most of players who have submitted a run to this game, the moderator team has noticed that the speed of the game indeed vary on different devices.
We have tried to find out what was the reason behind this issue, and the most possible thing that might've been responsible for this issue happened to be the display size of a device. We are not 100% sure if this is the true source of this problem, however we have compared a lot of runs and analyzed them with informations provided by many players who played this game before (huge thanks to them!), and there was only one common thing among every comparison: the smaller display size was, the faster this game worked like.
The hardest thing, though, was finding out what will be the best solution to that situation. We have discussed a lot of possibilities and in the end we have decided, however that might not satisfy a lot of you, to leave the leaderboard as it is, but with adding a variable that would show the display size (diagonal size) of a device on which this game was played on.
We think of it as the optimal solution to this problem. Every other solution required to include more or less arbitrary factors, such as i.e. dividing runs into two groups with smaller and bigger display sizes, however many problems have appeared later, such as where should've been the border of display sizes for "faster" and "slower" runs.
Therefore, a new variable has been added. It is called "Display size". Starting from 4th March 2021, it is mandatory to write the display size of the device used during the run to play this game.
I have filled the "Display size" field on the pages of runs of players who shared informations about their devices on which they played this game. Those who have not responded to my message will have this field empty ("-").
Game rules have been modified accordingly.
Due to the fact that Google Hot Air Balloon works differently on different devices, which might cause the game running either faster or slower, depending on the display sieze of a device (for more informations please read the previous announcement written by me about this issue), and due to the recent activity of cheaters submitting either stolen or sped up runs (or both), the moderator team has decided the following: category dedicated to reaching 1,000 points as fast as it is possible was turned into a Misc. category. Because of the fact that this game might work differently on different devices, as was mentioned above, it is almost impossible (especially when there is no audio in this game) to be 100% sure that a submitted run was not cheated by being sped up by the cheater.
Therefore, to avoid any situation with verifying runs that should not have been verified in the future, the best solution for it was to turn "1,000" category into a Misc. category. By that all runs will be preserved and new runs might still be submitted, but like was written before - the differences between speed on different devices are too high to consider this category as a competetive one with that (1,000) amount of points, especially when many players with bigger diagonal displays of their devices might find it unfair that their time can be reached without much effort on way smaller devices, just because the game runs faster on the latter type of devices. If we add to it the fact that it's almost impossible to tell whether a run was cheated, especially in a category with the shortest runs from all speedrunning categories availble, then it would be unwise to keep 1,000 points as a main category.
The leaderboards were also reorganized. Now there is one main category called "Points" and almost all former speedrunning categories became its subcategories. All except former "1,000", which was renamed to "1,000 Points" and moved to Miscellaneous categories.
All speedrunners who had their times on former "1,000" are going to be informed via private messages about the recent change.
