So with the recently large update across the board of the game that has seemingly addressed allot of the issues with crashes and AI, it also brough allot of changes/re-balancing to various weapons,armor,trinkets,mods and traits. This ultimately changes the game for speedruns going forward even more so with Nightmare having now doubled health as well.

My Question to the community is how do we adapt to this very significant change which we should have expected to come?

Also what sort of future plans do we have down the road for when they add new content like the coming Adventure/Instanced Mode and so on.

I have several ideas that I will share in due time just curious on what others are thinking about right now in terms of this massive update that we got at the very least.

I have one question about NG+ coop run. With this update a host with a gear lvl of one can't get any enemies above gear lvl 4, but he can summon a gear lvl 20 friend or two which do lots of more dmg foreseen on this world. Is it allowed or should all players have a gear lvl of 20 in this category ?

@H1lli My understanding of how the game works is that it scales everything based on the individual players better known as normalization which is a system that seeks to always scale to match players growth to a point.

This means that even if players are of different strength the game is set to scale them up or down to match what ever difficulty the game is set at. A weaker player can play with a stronger player and the game will be scaled to both of them accordingly and so on.

Since the game also has "difficulty levels" this means that it can further adjust the amount of scaling based on the selected difficulty. Harder difficulties means the scaling difference is much greater.

Also the fact that your are strictly speaking of New Game+ there is no restriction to a players Trait Level or Gear, since your are replaying the game with already acquired progression thus it would always be better to indeed have stronger gear and a higher Trait Level.

New Game on the other hand would mean all players start on a fresh character which means they are already restricted from having already acquired progression. The one thing that makes Coop difficult for this tho is that all players must first complete the tutorial solo till they can activate the "Red Eye" which unlocks travel to Earth and thus allows coop/online to be used. This means that the coop partners would need to quit their worlds to then join one of the other players that are hosting.

To me this posses a few complications for verifying coop runs from the other players that don't have their own video from their perspective also submitted as well. It would be something to keep a keen eye on when it comes to New Game Coop runs explicitly. I don't think requiring each player in Coop runs to submit a video is needed but we should be aware and know what we are looking for when it comes to this category specifically.

In my opinion its hard to formulate a real plan for the future with these updates because it seams like the devs are super trigger happy with flipping everything on its head once a week. Nightmare having more health doesn't really matter since we kill him so fast anyways but theres a possibility of a future where they just remove every good item and we cant 1 faze him anymore. We really just cant tell what the devs will ruin next so there might be a point where we do have to just clear the leaderboard and start over.

As far as adventure mode it'll help people trying to get specific things and maybe we could start doing individual level runs. If they were to add actual expansions or dlc we might have to split the categories depending on what they add. Thats more up to how everyone feels when the time comes.

With co-op runs new game+ seams to be in a good spot. New game though is a little more tricky with the tutorial. We might end up needing to have every runner involved submit a video. If we see someone using something that the other player hasn't acquired though then thats a clear form of cheating.

These are my thoughts on a lot of this but ultimately what we chose to do will be up to what everyone thinks is best.

Not a speedrunner (or even a player) of this game, but here's my two cents for a game like this.

Current Patch / Old Patch subcategories until the game patches are more stable. And if there are certain patches that everybody can still access through downpatching and it's faster, consider allowing it, or having a more main/specified subcategory other than Old Patch. Until then though, always mark runs with an (obsoleting) variable of the patch number, so it's easier to sort runs later if they're grouped together between major updates.

Also, it's probably a good idea to subcategorize some of the categories you have on here. If there was something like 100% or All Bosses, or All Achievements, or literally anything other than Any%, then the names no longer make sense. I would suggest Any% as the category, Solo/Co-op as the first subcategory, then NG/NG+ as the third, then whatever else you need to do. Better to have it messy in the subcategories than in the main categories when runs must be split.

Obviously I could just be way off the mark with my thoughts, and at least the first part might be a good temporary solution. If you do take away 1 thing from this it should be to know the patch number of incoming submissions just for later purposes.