Hi there, thanks for reaching out. I’ll try to add all the arcade mode settings asap, I am not at home atm during holidays, unless one of the other mods do it before I do. In the mean time, feel free to join us on discord, we are mostly active there =)

https://discord.gg/CKGXAjvHDm

Sorry for the unacceptable delay... Anyways...

Concerning Leo's suggestion, that was also what I suggested to the former admins concerning the precustom rule. Including the prologue before the VoD seems like a good solution... When farming for the strength powder doesn't take 30 minutes, which it can sometimes ^^ To the point where if you start running late in the day, you'll skip your bonus day, which I've had happen once. But yeah, that would fix a lot of issues with pre-DO abuse.

I agree with a lot of Mizzow's points, mostly on the "fun" and "entry-level" side of DOs. However there are two points which I fundamentaly disagree with. The first one concerning WoL. I can't see how allowing people to start with different conditions, different amounts of experience for the exact same run is a good thing. You say that you'd encourage people that are creative with their savefile, but the chocobo abuse is exactly that, being creative with the game. When doing this, you're not glitching the game in any ways, but you could have a certain advantage. We have an expression in French, related to the actual difference that EXP gained makes, which is "de l'enculage de mouche". But the principle still stands to me, either we have a standardized run where everybody compete on an equal footing, or we don't have any at all...

The second point is concerning one argument against the starting point. Starting from new game is a hardfix on the problem of doing shady stuff before the run. I agree doing the prologue sucks, and I can admit it's the worst fix there is... Concerning the battlegens and how frustrating they are, though... Well that's RNG. It sucks, but that's RNG. People restart runs a billion times for the right RNG in a multitude of games, with beginnings that are much more boring than DFF, look at FF8, FF9, many Castlevania games, Halos, etc... Sure it sucks, but that's the way it is. You can purchase items soon enough in your run, so as a beginner, it doesn't make much of a difference anyways.

I mean, I don't know, I understand that wasting 7-8 minutes on everything before your DO sucks, but starting from start is an easy way to just make sure everyone starts on an equal footing, without making the category kind of a joke. It's up to what people want at this point, I am not against keeping things how we've got them, and I am not absolutely in favor of the new starting point. WoL's situation really ticks me off, and the new start fixes everything. Leo's suggestion is incompatible with your idea of a standardized save file we could share, but to be honest, that reaaaaly doesn't sound legit anyways... So i don't know.

Heyo. It's time to discuss rules for single character Odyssey runs. I will develop in this message my thoughts on the current ruleset, my pro and cons and we could potentially improve them.

The current ruleset is as follow:

• Time starts on "Yes" on the story

• Time end on Final Hit/Final Blow after the final battle

• Level and progress of the character at the start of the story is based off of a new game save

• You are not allowed to have any progress in one of the other storys (except prologue)

• Pre-customization is not allowed

• Buying addional calendar boosts is not allowed

• making use off the Bonus Day is allowed

So the tricky thing about the rules for Odysseys is that if you change one thing, pretty much everything needs to change. And that only is because in the current state of things, Introduction/Preprologue and the Prologue are not included in these runs. And if we change anything, this would void pretty much every single run in the LB. Anyways...

The 1st point I want to touch upon is the "Buying addional calendar boosts is not allowed/Making use off the Bonus Day is allowed". I think the rationale behind this was to have a "low EXP" category, for the Odysseys. But how relevant is that? If we want to speedrun as fast as possible, shouldn't we allow bonus day increases? We would go from a 1.1x to potentially 1.5x bonus, we would increase AP and Gils received from fights... And depending on the character, you might want AP bonus over EXP bonus, so it could be a routing element. However, not increasing the bonus allows everyone to start on a even playing field. So what's best for the category, allow for Bonus day increases or not? And allow bonus day at all? Does it need to change? I think the way it is at the moment is fine.

The second and big issue that needs to be discussed, is the starting point, and all the problems the starting point induces at the moment. "Time starts on "Yes" on the story", meaning that anything that happens in the prologue is fair game, and that can lead to severe abuse. The first thing is pretty straight forward. Since WoL is played in both the Prologue and his Odysseys, all the EXP you gain in the Prologue carries over to the run. Meaning that if you wished, you could easily farm exp in the Prologue by various methods I won't mention here, and you could potentialy start his Odyssey at level 10 for example if you had a dozen hours to waste. And you would still be in line with those 2 rules:

• Level and progress of the character at the start of the story is based off of a new game save
• You are not allowed to have any progress in one of the other storys (except prologue)

The other big issue that was fixed by a "gentleman" agreement in the previous community not to perform it. And it relies on the chocobo. Your chocobo walks along a path that is defined by your chocobo plan, and each time you engage in a fight and terminate it, either by winning, or escaping a fight (not restarting, completely running away from that fight), your chocobo will take a step on that chocobo plan. This will grant you fixed EXP bonuses that occur on specific steps depending on each chocobo plan, random EXP bonuses that occur on random steps, and accessories that you can equip to increase EXP gained after a set amount of steps. The exploit is that you can engage, and escape any battles in the Prologue to make your Chocobo take as many steps as you want, to stack up 99x accessories if you wish to, or to aline certain chocobo bonuses with important fights in any Odyssey run. Which could give you a shitload of EXP as compared to what you what you normally have, unlocking new abilities earlier, etc...

Final issue is that there is nothing in the ruleset that prevents you from doing custom fights with a random character to build gil and PP, and do your Odyssey run with another character, it still doesn't defy the ruleset. And if we allow to increase bonus day effect, doing custom fight could allow you to buy more increases for your bonus day.

How to fix WoL? Add a rule to force him to be level1 when starting? Still doesn't fix discrepancies, simply by doing an EX Burst on every fight of the Prologue, you'd be ahead in term of experience. But it would be a start.

How to fix Chocobo exploit? Force everyone to start with a chocobo chance level of 5%? You could still do the exploit, reset your chocobo plan, and step your chocobo in custom battles and start at 5% (you'd still have the accessories). Not really useful, cuz an advised Mods will see that you are equiping an accessory you're not supposed to.

So aside from adding rules, I am all ears about how to make a fair ruleset that noone can cheese through. The only "Hard Fix" that i have thought about pretty much since I joined the community is change the starting point, and doing so, invalidate all the runs present on the LB, which is not really nice, but it would definitely fix everything. By starting on new game, and therefore including Introduction and Preprologue, everything is included, and it would basically fix everything, chocobo exploit, WoL, custom fights, and even precustomization. But then again it would invalidate all the runs, and that is the only thing that I have some issues with. Mizzow mentionned that having to restart everytime is shity because of Battlegen RNG, and people would have to retry the intro and prologue if they don't get the right Battlegens. To me, that argument is pretty much inadmissible. RNG is an integral part of speedrunning, and this game in general. So that can't be the only argument against it. Anyways, even tho, it's not the best solution, it's the one I am more leaning towards, But I am aware of how shitty that rule would be. But then again, since we are starting anew with the community, if it has to happen, it's now.

Just a final word. The precustomization rule prevents you from accessing menu before your run, meaning you can't skip the tutorial prompts, can't change your button layout, your abilities, or equipment (which is nice in case you decided to perform some exploits mentionned above or not, the mods will be able to see what you equip). I still can't figure out what is best, menuing is definitely part this speedrun, but mashing through tutorial prompts hardly classifies as speedrunnable content...

So tl;dr:

• Bonus day for Odysseys -> keep it? Allow increase?
• WoL -> enforce a level 1 rule?
• Chcobo abuse -> 5% chance at the start of the run?
• Precustom -> Allow it?
• Start -> Start from new game or keep the rule as it is?

When everyone airs what they think about everything, we will take an educated decision to make the right choice between fun and fairness for the ruleset, in agreement with the majority.

Take care everyone, and as MASH said, stay sexy

"About the no knowledge: I still have no idea where you are coming from and I don't have to but If i wanna learn something about the game and a runner doesn't tell me or anyone else then this ain't going to work."

When did you ever ask anything about the game, or seek for help? If you are referring to the "press start button to skip battle results", I highly encourage you to go back on the old discord, because before there was drama with Leo iirc about that, it was said how to do it a few weeks/months before, and you took part in the discussion, so you knew (and forgot probably). I only recall two instances when you asked me something DFF related, first time was when you asked if I had notes for Squall, which I still don't have, and second was about which ability with Squall I used to manipulate the AI, to which I answered it wasn't on ability in particular, just harassing the AI into not being able to act. Then, since you started to play seriously with Firion, did you ever ask anything about that character, or how to improve your time? Nope. And that was way before the mutiny.

Furthermore, since you do not see where I am coming from, let me explain. When I joined the game, the only any% time was Smartkin's, with Cloud. I said that Cloud was not a good pick, because he is one if not the lowest-tiered character in the game, both for pve and pvp. When I said that, I was confronted with hostility from you, saying that Squall had no good abilities, that Omnislash v5 was amazing, yaddi yadda. And that happened in 2017, the game had been out for more than 8 years at that point, and yet you didn't experiment with other characters, blindly following Smartkin's notes. Then came out the discussion about Chaos, I said that the boss wasn't hard, and you couldn't accept that. Just go back to the discord and check your reaction... I am not questioning your skill of the game, but your knowledge. And that is the important point in the matter at hand.

As for Leno, as soon as I posted the original message of us going away in january, like 20 minutes after that, he asked me about the new discord. So he was still interested in the game, and most likely wanted to be part of the new community.

Finally, for the precustom, it's not what the rule intails, it the way it was handled. I won't repeat myself once again. Out of the people that were involved in the discussion and still played the game, 3 people (Leonis, Smartkin and myself) thought one thing, you, the admin, thought otherwise, and your decision came on top in the end. Whether it's about 3 seconds (which is much more than 3 seconds in some cases, so adding 3 seconds to runs already in place was an completely arbitrary decision taken with no imput from the community) or 20 minutes, it's the same.

Anyways, I am being objective when I say that there were problems ever since I joined the community. It's up to mlstrm and deln to sort things out, because as you say, this is getting nowhere.

Okay. So I'm not supposed to witch hunt, but I need to adress specific points from IDP's message. I'll be as civil as I can.

First concerning the discord. It's already been said multiple times, but this message will compile my thoughts. We decided to part ways from the old channel because of the bad atmosphere, and how things were handled. I'm going to speak for myself, I think others agree, but the whole idea behind the old discord was: "We admins are going to have a discussion in the admin channel, and we'll come up with what we think is best. Don't contest our choices". Pretty much what Mizzow said. Which I find despicable. Sure the community discussion that happened i don't remember when was a nice change, but it was too little too late. As for the argument that the old discord is already set up, the new discord is being built and refined. And to be honest, there has been more discussions there than there has been in the past 2-3 months on the old channel. And sadly, it's precisely because of childishness that the core runners have decided to work together on the side of the old discord, because it wasn't worth it to do it there.

The goal with the new discord is that everyone has a say, which wasn't the case back then. I am going to go back, once again, to the precustomize ruling that was handle in the dumbest way possible, following this idea of "admins have the final word, even tho one of them hasn't touched the game in god knows how many years, and all the active runners but the other admin disagree with that rule". So yeah, we are getting started with the new place, but there won't be authority abuses like there were before, in the sole interest of the game/community. And I think that's a much better environment that the old discord. Everybody is free to join whatever channel, however the new discord is where you will find runners since most of them joined it, as well as a community in a much better shape. And that's why I won't come back, I sincerely don't have time to waste figuring out how people think and not stepping on people's toes, and engaging or being in the middle of a clash of egoes. The new discord starts from new, no drama, everyone is on an even playing field, we won't have admins pulling rules out of nowhere with no discussion, and preventing the other people from saying GG to a person that beat a WR held by an admin, which happened twice.

Following on that last thought... Concerning mods, I said what I had to say for NT and 012. When it comes down to DFF, however, I don't think IndDragPack should retain his role, either as a community admin (which won't matter if he choses to join the new discord, and he is more than welcome to do so) or an LB admin. No witch hunt, just being honest with my feelings, and being civil while stating facts. You've apologized, IndDragPack, concerning your past behavior, and I accept those apologies. Nevertheless, in the past, you have shown consistent propensity to going full tilt and behaving like anything but an adult when people challenge you, either your speedrun times or your authority as a community admin. Which is absolutely unacceptable, especially from a mod. And the fact that you are saying "we mustn't behave like children" is quite surprising considering what happened time and time again. Once again, you've apologized, and this is nice, but I work on a first impression basis. Nothing tells me it won't be the same all over again. Finally, when it comes down to knowledge of the game, I am sad to say that it is indeed a problem. And it's not because other communities may have the same issue that we cannot have the most relevant people handle the LB. I won't go into details concerning specific points, if you wish for me to do so, either here or via PM, I'm more than willing to oblige, I will just say that in terms of knowledge, for run verification and rules definition, you are not fit for the role. I hold no grudge against you, or rather the grudge I felt when I posted my last message on the old discord faded somewhat. I'm just saying how I feel, in the sole interest of the community. You are free to join us on the new channel if you wish to.

As to whom should be DFF LB admins, the four people I mentioned earlier are fine by me, I don't really care.

Just as a final note, I may appear blunt, but the goal of this forum is to have an open discussion. So yeah, I am speaking my mind, because it would be a waste of time and energy to start with the same issues. What I want is play the game, share what I know, improve my PBs/WRs. Simple as that. And the cancerous environment of the old discord prevents me from doing so.

To follow up on Shinoda's post, for the leaderboard mods, I think it'd be nice to have 2 people per game, just in case one is busy with life/work/etc.

For DFF, the most knowledgeable players are Lenophis, Leonis, Mizzow and me. I haven't heard about Leno since we decided to split the community, he seemed to still be interested in the game though, so I don't know whether he would like to resume his mod role. For 012, I have no clue, I think Leonis put some work in the run a while back, but in general, there hasn't been a lot of progress for that run iirc, so I can't really say, so I have no issues with the current mod(s) keeping their place, as far as I am concerned. For NT, the game is still very young, the speedrun even more, but MASH and Ultronimus are the ones that have put some thoughts and done several runs so far, so my suggestion would be to make them the NT mods.

My thoughts on the matter are abundantly clear in the screenshots I shared with Smart. For as long as I can remember, the current admins (or two of them) have shown nothing but pissy behavior, especially when I contested their knowledge of the game with my words, or my runs that beat WRs at the time. I am not trying to start a witch hunt as you say, MLSTRM, I am merely stating a fact. Whether things can change or not, I have no clue, and to be frank no hope in that regard. I mean, this was transparent in the rules that were removed of the old dissidia discord:

"Don't discuss or debate with an admin" "If an admin asks you to to stop a conversation (for example when it gets to offtopic) do it"

So yeah. I am not expecting anything. If concerned people want to air their grievances on anything, feel free to do it, it's better to talk than to keep it in and let it turn to poison. However, I am not going to work on the game on the previous discord. And that decision is final. Whether leadership for the srdc leaderboard changes or not, it truly doesn't matter to me to be honest, as Mizzow, a fellow runner said, I just want to play the damn game, with no drama. So whether i submit my times to srdc or not, I don't care. I know my worth on this game, and srdc holds no authority. When you (Leo) get banned because you say GG to another person, there is something seriously wrong.

I can express my thoughts in more details, if somebody wants me to, but when I come back to speedrunning Dissidia, I'll do it alongside people that have the same vision of the game and the community than me. And at the moment, such people can be found in the new discord.