I just summitted PBs for both categories that employ the "Two-Family Strategy".

This involves starting the game by selecting "Two-family game". The primary benefit of this is skipping a cut scene. In One-family mode, when the second family is shown, they have a computer generated name and there is an unskippable cutscene where the host walks up to each family member. In Two-family mode, you type in a name for the family, and then the cutscene is mostly skipped, cutting 11 seconds off a FMW run (44 seconds off a 20k run).

As it stands, there is nothing in the rules for either category that specify that you must start a game in One-family mode. But I recognize that this may be be a little controversial to some, so I wanted to open the discussion up to the community and see what people thought about it.

Personally, I think this should be a valid strategy for the existing categories, and should not invoke the creation of new "Two-Family" versions of the categories. For the most part, it appears that skipping the cutscene is the only real benefit.

Hypothetically, the second family can be used other ways. For example, if you need to answer a 3rd question before a Fast Money, you can answer the #1 question, pass, have the second family get 3 X's, then the first family can steal. I am still not convinced this is faster that simply answering the questions, since even after a steal the game will spend time revealing all the answers on the board (this is in addition to the time spent checking the board to get those 3 x's). But this and potentially other strategies taking advantage of the fact that you control the second family could be employed. I still do not think this demands new categories.

Ultimately this decision is up to NihilistComedyHour, but I would like to hear what people have to say on the matter.

Here are the two runs I submitted:

It seems fine to me to do runs this way without subcategories (I'll still probably mark them in some way so each run has the strategies used showing, just not as a subcategory). Since it involves the use of two controllers though, I'll leave the runs pending for a moment to give the community their thoughts or objections. If there isn't any, I'll approve the runs.

I personally don't mind either way.

It kind of invalidates the current runs based on just what was assumed to be the rules for the category, but there aren't that many runs on the board so I don't know if that matters.

Edit: I did just try two family mode and I will definitely give SpaceColonizer that is more fun to play that way, the reduced downtime makes it a bit more engaging.

For SNES (I forgot about this) we had someone come up with a similar idea so we made a 1P2C category for one fast money round. IIRC for some of the other game show boards (wheel of fortune snes for example) not having cpu competition is allowed so there are precedents for boards having it either way. IMO I just think it's a creative way to try and win as fast as possible. It should be allowed and whether it needs its own board or not I really dont care either way to be honest. Whatever you guys deem appropriate I am down for.

just submitted a possible WR (creepio says it's .3 seconds faster than his). don't know if that changes the conversation at all.

Alright, so I'm going 1P2C idea, particularly in the interest of maintaining some consistency among the series boards, lending viability to the 2 controller runs, and maintaining the status quo for the 1P1C board, and because the small little community we got here seems to lean that. Additionally, I could always add a 2P2C sub category if that ever becomes an issue.

There's a lot of little things addressed in some of y'alls post (I consider RAM watching on an emulator during a run to be cheating in general, and I'm under the impression this is widely held for the majority of games, but I don't believe that is in play here), but for the most part, I intend to allow emulator runs to continue, since NES has amazingly accurate emulators, and in general, abuse seems to remain low.

Also, nothing ever is set in concrete; the way the data is handled on these runs allow for future changes to be implemented with ease, should there ever be a large sudden flood of community coming to run this game, and they decide otherwise.

Anyways, I'm always open for thoughts and concerns on board moderation, and always appreciate new strats being test and implemented. It's a good strategy.

Although yesterday I would have said this was my last choice, after NCH's decision I have come around to the idea. A 1p2c sub-category for 20k makes sense, since I think there are strategies that could potentially be used that would change the experience of the playthrough. With FMW there is pretty much only the cutscene skip, which isn't a major change to the experience. But, for the sake of consistency and avoiding confusing anyone who is drawn to the game in the future, having the same sub-categories for both main categories is just straight-forward and practical.

Thank you NihilistComedyHour for your careful consideration of the issue.

Thanks for coming to a decision Nihilist! I think that's a reasonable solution, even if I think the categories are a little silly since they don't really change the game in any notable way.. Unless someone comes up with new strats for 20k 1P2C.

Chambers does have a fair point regarding emulators in that it is considerably easier to map out and target Family Feud seeds on emulator because of how the RNG is implemented, compared to NES + original cart.

But since this is an issue with a number of NES games, it feels like there'd need to be a general consensus view in the wider community to take any action.

To clarify in case anyone is unaware, Family Feud's RNG used for the initial question seed is affected by initial ram state (it uses uninitialized memory) and i believe also the PPU/CPU clock alignment. This is always the same in current emulators, but fluctuates on NES.

RAM is more variable for sure, most consoles seemed to have one 'main' starting state that they hit more often, maybe up to 50% consistency depending on the hardware. I think all seeds should be be accessible on all consoles, there are only about 1000 possible question seeds and the way the rng advances is pretty simple.

The difficulty mapping out seeds on hardware is that flash carts also initialize ram and ppu, so they are effectively the same as emulator when it comes to this. To get the actual seeds for an original cart you'd need to come up with some clever game genie codes or something similar to find your starting state. Seems doable, but more work than emulator at the moment since no one has made the codes.

I personally don't really mind either way, seems a little silly to separate runs more considering how few there are in total.. but if they were separated I think the board with more players should be the main category. At present that would be the board for non-original hardware, which would have 11 vs i believe 2 (me and chambers) for original hardware.

Sounds like you made a good decision NCH. I've always appreciated your judgment on these sort of things. I've been slowly getting out of speedrunning for a while now. I don't have the time to really focus on being a mod. I'm going to basically be sticking to Godzilla NES and FF6 speedruns. it's really the only games I have a passion for at this point. it's really nice to see that people like you have taken the reigns of the games i used to mod for. very much appreciated.

Anyway I think this is probably a bit far off topic from whether there should be a two player category. :)

These inaccuracies could be fixed in emulators and flash carts, I'd say it's probably a better approach to file issues with these projects and try to convince them rather than try to convince every game to separate emulator runs.. I know the Mesen dev has been working on it.

Again, great work Nihilist!

I appreciate the kind words. I try to approach everything as rationally as possible. I've been slowly converting from EMU to hardware, which has given me more time to work on modding; and I got plenty to do there. (I work taxes, so I go into blocks of doing neither much, like, now for instance).

Learning a lot here about hardware and everdrives and emulators; at least as much as a non-programming related person as I am. I can see emulators/consoles being subdivided in the future if more and more and runs make this an issue a bigger one, though it's a bit much for may brain to handle understanding how their may be some carts have different... things... or that the RAM being stuck in the console itself and not being able to be cleared out with a Gameshark, could actually make the console hardware more inconsistent than what an emulator with a sort of "default" position in RAM would achieve. I'm assuming that last sentence makes as much sense as it does in my head.

Anyways, I'm generally hesitant to split out emu/console runs, since the site itself does a decent job of this with it's ability to sort runs out (assuming they are correctly identified) through data filters that allowed to see what a board would look like (and what positions would be allocated to whom accordingly), and have always been surprised their hasn't been a global filter added on the site in all these years that would allow any user to basically hide all emulator runs by default. That, and it will one day be virtually impossible to run some of these games on original hardware and so I'm not sure in general how this will one day be treated.