What is your speedrunning style? When do you finish speedruns and when do you reset?
6 months ago
Belgium

What is your speedrunning style?

When do you choose to reset, when do you think a run is worth finishing?

I ask because my preferred way of speedrunning tends to be different to other people: the first few runs I prefer never to reset. After that, once I have a semi-okay sum of best, I speedrun until my "best possible time" is worse than my PB. If that happens, I am okay with resetting, unless I know there's a big gold coming up. This means (in theory) that 99% of my runs make it past the first quarter of the run every single time, but it also means I have smaller PBs. This personally makes speedrunning much more fun to me, rather than resetting because I missed a trick in the first split. Obviously this wouldn't be applicable at WR-level to a game like SMB1 where missing a frame rule is an automatic reset, or when your runs are so optimized that a death is automatically a reset.

(I say "in theory" because I do tend to reset if I'm moody and therefore more prone to getting angry, lol)

Edited by the author 6 months ago
gnrts and Hunterwind like this
United States

Hello,

I can analyze runs! Your style sounds like a "completionist" approach, prioritizing finishing runs over resets for learning and enjoyment. This is a valid strategy, especially for early practice. You might consider resetting more as you approach WR times to optimize segments.

Sweden

Probably the best way to learn a new run is to start out doing IL runs.

Full game runs are so much more complicated and more stuff to remember / think about.

Kentucky, USA

I do mostly IL runs so I reset aggressively.

However when I am routing a new game with no other runners I do it as a "segmented run" with save/load to get each part of it right. Then later I play it back as an Any% and tolerate large mistakes as long as they don't violate the spirit of the practice - if it feels too much like a "long play" then I dont like it as a speedrun.

Id guess for 2-3 hour games I tolerate 5 minute mistakes. For 2-3 minute ILs I tolerate 10 seconds of mistakes.

Gaming_64 likes this
North Carolina, USA

Most of the time if I'm doing a fullgame run, I'll just go through it without really caring too much about what I do. If I want to improve my time, I'll most likely review every level and then improve more and more. If the game is easy enough, I'll know that I will do a good job no matter what.

A lot of the time I do IL runs and I reset whenever I know for a fact that I'll miss world record no matter what. If I know I can't get world record, then I'll just play it out and submit the run (unless I want to complete more runs like in Google Snake).