Hello everyone,
I'm the Moderator of Stardew Valley and this issue is main talk in the community for weeks now. The new Patch that will come out on PC (and is already out on Console) will remove one very often used glitch.
Many runners are now in fear of their times.
We thought about changing the Leaderboard, so we can have Versions as category or sub-category in that manner. But that would divide and clutter the Leaderboard more and more.
The next idea was, that we would wipe the Leaderboard and all times. This wouldn't clutter the Leaderboard much. (Only 2 categories don't use this glitch)
The Dev (only one Dev), doesn't answer our calls so we probably can't expect the ability to change to older versions without digging in the code itself and programming it.
I write here today to get better ideas how to handle the incoming problem and the Speedrunning communities opinion on the actual ideas. Maybe we as a community find a better solution.
Sidenote: That glitch saves minutes up to hours depending on the category ran.
Thank you for taking your time.
I don't think deleting it completely is the right move. Could you use another subcategory to split them up?
Legacy(aka pre-patch) category is the solution, if you can't downgrade the version of the game/get source code to revert the changes. You just have to move all current runs by editing them to new cat..
We had such an issue with the leaderboards for FEZ. Last version (that was released many years after the previous one) fixed some glitches that were used in the run, leading in a route change, and making the runs slower. What was decided is to keep the old times for the sake of history, in a separate "category" that is now in the Misc categories, and create a new board for the new version that is now the only accepted version.
Now, once again, this is just a testimony for our situation. As the moderator of the game, your goal is to find a solution that will please most of the runners, so potentially something else than what we did for FEZ.
Yeah don't delete. Just rename the categories that use the now-impossible tricks to some name referencing the older versions.
Then add new categories for fresh competition.
just add a new variable(naming it Legacy or something and set all current runs to that variable) and then making a new variable with the current version and set that one so its the only one that show on the page. Whenever a new patch come out just make a new variable and set that new one as default.
Just gonna leave that link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/611h5e/guide_how_to_download_older_versions_of_a_game_on/
It wasn't working perfectly for Payday 2 as some updates crashed each in a different manner, and some others worked fine. I have yet to find a way to make it work properly with all updates, and also actually understand what is downloaded and what isn't. However they all downloaded fine. If that workaround kinda worked for a game with 200+ updates though, I can see it work for Stardew Valley.
Thank you all.
After some discussions, we settled with allowing downgrades with the method Salem posted.
<3