Hi all,

A few players suggested changing item placements in official tracks for the upcoming 1.4 release. I am strongly against it for two reasons: i) I don't think the new item placements are better for gameplay. On the contrary, the changes may lead to even more front-runs. ii) The changes would invalidate many records we have set over the past couple of years.

I am writing here mainly because of (ii). Benau seems to be considering the suggestion. If you have an opinion about this, please say so in the main STK IRC channel (bridged to matrix, telegram, discord) or contact Benau directly. It feels like I am the only one interested in speedruns there.

Cheers, Haenschen

Where can I see the changes concretely?

This is surprising, wasn't the game supposed to maintain compatibility until 2.x? Is Alayan no longer developing? I am sure that he would strongly oppose to this...

With such changes, we would likely need to create a new/separate 1.4 category, unless they are not that important, after all, in 1.x, there were Iirc some shortcut changes in Xr591, and other menu changes that made one save a few s or so in Story Mode. But if you made this post, I suppose that they are significant enough.

The invalidation of older records is solved with that new category. But what I would really not like is to bloat the Leaderboard with 1.0-1.3/1.4/2.x categories... Once 2.x is out, there will probably be nothing in 1.4 and nobody would run that I think. I don't want to have another Misc category like 0.9.0-0.9.2 to manage... That would also be really annoying to regrind to make 1.4 runs if you made a lot of 1.0-1.3... An option would also be to ban runs starting from 1.4 until 2.x.

My opinion is that we should not make track changes until the development for the 2.0 release starts, so 1.4 runs can be included in 1.x. I posted it in the Irc.

Regarding your i) point, I would need to see the changes concretely in order to make my own analysis about this. Wax also gave me some details, like how it would favor Heavyweights even more, so if they frontrun like you say, that would indeed be bad...

I saw you joined matrix. mimiz posted a bunch of screenshots showing the changes around 3:30pm EST on Monday (Sep 19th). If you cannot scroll up, you should ask mimiz to repost them.

One of my critiques is that these changes came out of nowhere. mimiz posted screenshots and blend files, kimden and FabianF agreed, and then Benau said okay unless Alayan opposes those changes. It all happened within one day and I don't think the new item placements have been thoroughly tested.

Where is Alayan when he is needed?! :( I am glad we have Benau continuing development, but he doesn't play STK and therefore can't assess the gameplay.

Reposting what I just said in IRC, discussion should probably move there completely

Haenschen: "One of my critiques is that these changes came out of nowhere. mimiz posted screenshots and blend files, kimden and FabianF agreed, and then Benau said okay unless Alayan opposes those changes. It all happened within one day and I don't think the new item placements have been thoroughly tested."

Can you stop spreading fake news, I never said I agreed The way you say it is your typical "gang coordinates their actions to convince everyone" conspiracy shit, and I am sure that is (a big part of) the reason why you are against these changes

I don't really care if the items are changed or not tbh, but the "speedruns will invalidate" argument is simply nonsense to me There are so few active speedrunners that I don't think they should have a big say in such a topic, on the other hand online players seem to favour it and they are the much bigger group Probably the best would even be to change all item positions for your speedrun, then one can make a new 1.4+ category and everyone is happy Honestly Fouks/other SRC mods, do you really want to wait 5+ more years for 2.0 and until then keep the 1.x category? I don't think that is how to attract new speedrunners either

Regarding whether these positions are an improvement, idk where the "it favours heavyweights even more" suddenly comes from, I never saw such a thing? Imo just from looking at it most improve the track and limit frontrunning (e.g. 3 nitros instead of 1 in a row). Maybe a good idea to test the tracks though? mimiz's argument was that his knowledge from creating addons is big enough and testing isn't needed but maybe it should be different for official tracks

Wax sent me some screenshots so I saw the changes more concretely. The changes are certainly debatable. It appears to improve the issue of the first person monopolizing the Nitro due to the long respawn time, but adding Nitro at more places will also still tend to favor a frontrunner that does not have any competition, and I don't see the need of doing that or adding Bananas. I would be slightly in the "against" side...

I just express my opinion, if a large majority of people like that then fine. Though I also remember Alayan saying that the development should not be affected just because a change is super popular. With this reasoning we would have added Mod Circuit as a Standard Track, but I am sure that nobody plays on that anymore now... Technical and practical aspects must be considered, and regarding that, the compatibility break is concerning and I am strongly against this. And we should certainly not make such decision on a whim over the course of just a few days!

Frankly, if the changes are not groundbreaking like that, yes, I would wait forever. Unless there are enough versions planned like 1.5 and 1.6 before 2.x, AND you guarantee that there is not any compatibility break in 1.4-1.6 or so. But in that case just name 1.4 2.0, take the opportunity to make some more improvements, and keep the super big ones like new Story Mode for 3.x.

Affecting unexpectedly the compatibility would also create a bad precedent... Many people are for some reason still using old versions too and if it becomes the trend to add or move a few Bananas or Nitros every minor version update that would quickly become a huge mess. There will also be servers that are slow to upgrade, etc.

Yeah I agree, not all changes mimiz made are undoubtably improving the tracks. But most are either more nitro in a row (-> less frontruns) and adding bananas (-> more technical difficulty, e.g. Volcano Island is way too simple to drive, bananas certainly improve the situation imo + that leads to less frontruns as well).

I don't think we can say there is "large majority" of people approving these changes, simply not enough people who expressed a clear opinion to say that.

" the development should not be affected just because a change is super popular" ok??? Or, to put it differently, the community shouldn't have any influence in what happens to the game??? Never heard of the idea of putting Mod Circuit into the main game tbh lol

I hate the idea of 2.0 being "1.0 but a few different tracks and minor things" and I am sure many others would agree. It's simply stupid. That's not STK 2.0. With the current speed (or rather, lack of speed) of STK's development I doubt we will have any major updates (e.g. new story mode) in the next 5 years really. Possibly the idea of 1.x being compatible should even be re-thought.

"take the opportunity to make some more improvements" is easy to say, but not easy to do, with exactly 1 active developer. Would take a lot of time, and 1.4-rc1 is released already.

For online, item placement doesn't seem to make a big difference from what I've read. So it's just speedruns that would be affected ...

I agree that having small item changes for each version is stupid. That's why I suggested mimiz would update the item placements for all tracks and you have a new category for the rest of 1.x (hopefully!)

Of course that is not what I mean. At some point someone used the popularity argument to include Mod Circuit to Stk Addons, I was referring to that. What I mean is just because something is popular, does not always make it a good idea to include it in the game, I was responding to your "on the other hand online players seem to favour it and they are the much bigger group" phrase. The community will make propositions and influence the game, but ultimately it is the developers that make the final decisions based on practical and technical rationales.

Well there are a lot of simple improvements that could accompany such track changes, like some balancing (make Heavy/Lightweights speed +/-4% rather than 5% or so), reduce the number of Ai karts in Story Mode, put the new Shifting Sands that everyone was talking about at some point, scale Zen Garden properly, maybe add some good Addons Tracks... In that case, and assuming that 2.x will not be out until years, then I would actually support having a 1.4-1.6 category or something like that. We should just ensure that after these changes, we are good for at least 3-4 releases, with no compatibility breaks. The point would be to have some significant 1.x turning point. Otherwise if it is just updating the tracks like that, I am strongly against and would rather wait years before a new category.

Regarding the versioning, it is the same debate as the Linux kernel that was forever 2.x, then suddenly someone decided that it should be 3.x now, and now we are at 5.x and soon 6.x. Or FireFox that used to remain for years in versions like 2.x, 3.x... then started to inflate that number for some reason, and now we are at 100+... At the end it is just a number...

I think that in general the compatibility argument outweighs any potential small benefits that changing item placements might have. I looked at the changes being suggested and I don't really like them very much anyway. There might be a few that would be small improvements, but most of them seem to be rather pointless, and there are some that I think would definitely be bad.

"For online, item placement doesn't seem to make a big difference from what I've read. So it's just speedruns that would be affected ..."

If it wouldn't make a difference for most players in any case but it would negatively affect a few players, that seems like a reason to not make any changes.