I'm not aware of any way of changing the bind. If you are playing with kb&m, you need to be aiming on top of an enemy to be able to lock on to them, so perhaps you are not doing that.

Lock-on is only really useful in certain situations and largely just slows people down or leads them to silly mistakes, so if you wish to improve at the game, I would recommend starting off by not using it anyway.

In forum posts, when you do a soft line break (Shift+Enter) and save the post, the result is formatted without any line break at all. That is unfortunate because a hard line break (Enter) is formatted as an entire empty line and then the next line. This used to not be the case. Soft line breaks used to be formatted as an actual new line and this has broken the formatting of some old forum posts.

Soft line break: test

Hard line break:

test

Edit: Nah, the entire ass forum post thing is broken. Everything is formatted correctly inside the editor. For example when you add a header in the markdown editor with ##, it is displayed in the other editor with the GUI. But when you save the post, the header isn't displayed AT ALL. Empty lines that you add manually the the post apparently just get deleted upon saving.

Also, there used to be posts here trying to explain the messy of old markdown editor functionality, but now I cannot find anything of the sort. If you're not gonna pin a post here again, couldn't you add a page about the text editor to the support section?

It is really rather annoying that every time I want to create or have to fix a simple, small forum post / guide on this site i have to research from zero how to do it and what is broken about it. I don't want to have to create a google doc for every small thing/resource I post for the benefit of others.

This update looks very nice and I'm happy to hear the date filter is also getting an upgrade soon.

One minor suggestion, I would make, is for the "run notes" and "no video" icons to get their own row, because it is not really easy to scan over and tell which is which.

[quote=KIlleDragon]i feel like that's literaly 1 single case you found and no more than that case lol[/quote] I didn't need to "find" that, it's literally a game I moderate lol I also mentioned Mirror's Edge as a game, where loading times are hidden in the gameplay and not visually confirmable, so it's literally 2 cases lol

Of course you wouldn't know what it's like to run PC games with load remover when all you run is a different 2min web game every month, so maybe take my word for it when you have no idea, instead of assuming I'm cherrypicking for no good reason.

[quote=KilleDragon]@Urinstein not sure i understand entirely, but your main point is that some speedgames just don't have the chance to be retimed accurately up to the miliseconds? welp, in that case, just retime every run without miliseconds, just up to the second[/quote] Worse than that, my point was that some games are absolutely impractical to retime even to the minute, because the load remover will remove frames worth of time every 20s of gameplay in a 90min run. So the load removal is imperceptible, but adds up to create an entire minute of different between people just because of hardware differences, so even if you could theoretically retime those runs manually by counting the loading frames, it is not gonna happen because it would take 10x longer than the duration of the run. That is why load removers exist. (example CrossCode: https://www.speedrun.com/crosscode#Any_NMG) Or another example would be Mirror's Edge, where apart from normal loading screens and main menu time a lot of load times are hidden in elevator rides, so you will see the load removed timer pause, even though it looks like totally normal gameplay, I would personally not know how one would retime that manually. (https://www.speedrun.com/me).

Some PC speedruns, due to their use of load removers are quite simply, not feasible to be retimed at all, not to milliseconds, not to full seconds, and perhaps not even to the minute, except maybe in very special cases where it's be worth the exorbitant trouble. So the idea that every run that gets submitted to a LB should always, in every case be retimed, because "it's the verifiers job" is anywhere between totally impractical and literally impossible.

[quote=hahhah42]The new runner aspect is why I suggested that the mandate could specify a cutoff point. That said, Deepest Sword has a "show ms" rule for all runs without too many issues, and it gets more runners than ODC.[/quote] Having a cutoff point for milliseconds would still require OP's solution. And I would say there is a qualitative difference between a game where 90% of submission are under 8min and where 90% of submission are under around under an hour. I doubt people are thrilled to spend another 40min to do the same thing again with the ms option enabled, when the simple solution is to just default them to an invisible .999s.

Well I already said, why would anyone get so bothered by it. If that is your worst case scenario, that is not so big as to outweigh the benefit of the "user pb notification feature".

And even so, just don't have it visible. In principle I agree with the criticism of "this is not what srcom should be about", when it comes to building a social media presence. But this is the speedrun records website. Why would "this is not what srcom should be about" be extended to being notified about speedrun records?

[quote=Jubilee]visible or not, following will be exploited some way or another, including bots, alt accounts, spam threads, and an overall toxic competition, when the actual competition should be beating games fast.[/quote] I genuinely fail to see the mechanism that leads to this being exploited. If I personally have to press the button to follow a person, just as it is with following games right now, how can that be exploited with bots or anything? What exploit is there to be had to begin with. Even if the follower count were visible, which not a single person in this thread has asked for, i dunno why people brought it up at all, that is a very small issue to have. No one's experience is really hampered by someone faking speedrun.com followers, especially not yours, as you do not seem to care anyway, who follows whom.

So yeah, if you don't mind, please give me a concrete example of worst case scenario, because I cannot see one.

I've been making some mistakes while trying to have quotes in my forum posts here. I probably kept messing up closing the BB-code quote thing and so the entire rest of the message became a quote including nested quotes.

When trying to edit the messages the edit button would just open a bugged empty text field that doesn't work, so I could in fact not edit the message. And for that reason I could also not check what the actual formatting of the message was, so I couldn't figure out the cause of the issue.

Nested quotes seem not to be the issue. [quote=Urinstein][quote=Urinstein] So perhaps the issue causing the bug was the quote never closing. So I will try to mess up this quote and not close it correctly. If you can read this message, you know the cause of the issue. [/quote][/qoote]

[quote=YUMmy_Bacon5]It's not unfair? 1.000s is faster than 1.500s, putting 999ms is unfair, it also makes the leaderboard inaccurate[/quote]

[quote=KilleDragon]that also would carry a problem, if any run happened to be added without miliseconds because of an exact retiming of no miliseconds (ex.: a run of 12,000 seconds exact), it would be marked as worse than all the runs slower in the 12 mark, while it is faster than all of them[/quote]

Neither of you understands the op. There is a difference between submitting a run as exactly 12.000s and submitting it as 12s. So you can still accurately submit a run that happens to be exactly 12.000s long, even if a 12s submission is ranked below all other 12.xxx runs.

[quote=KilleDragon]verifiers job in the site is, indeed, verificating the runs in the leaderboard, including retiming all of them correctly, adding or removing miliseconds in each case, and they should control their leaderboards don't have this type of errors[/quote]

This is not only stupendously entitled, that every single run should require retiming for milliseconds (top runs maybe, but not every run on an active LB), but in some PC games it is straight up impossible, as they use load removers and very often loading times that accumulate slowly across the run cannot be (easily) visually confirmed. So it becomes anywhere between incredibly impractical and entirely impossible to retime them manually (OP specifically mentions ODC, which uses ingame time and runners seem to forget to turn on the millisecond option for the IGT). And in those cases, if the runner decides not to show their milliseconds in the video (if there even is a video, some boards only require video below a certain time threshold) and also will not provide them themselves, the reasonable solution is to just assume that they are not any faster than all the confirmed times. Lastly, the idea, that one should just make milliseconds mandatory for everyone and remove runs that do not have them, is extremely pedantic and shortsighted. Usually submissions with small technicality problems are from people new to speedrunning. Often times they submit one run and will never be seen again, other times they will soon improve their time and eventually learn to submit their runs properly. There is no need to make a whole deal out of a run that is places well in the bottom third of a busy leaderboard and no need to greet those people with an immediate rejection of their run, when OP's solution to this specific problem is so simple. We're playing video games here and video games are supposed to be fun, so it makes more sense to put some effort into accommodating those people as opposed to putting much more effort into alienating them for very pedantic reasons.

[quote=MagikBased]I don't understand the claims that getting notifications when particular people have submitted a new run would turn this site into a social media site.[/quote] this [quote=SioN] there is no reason to have a follow system thingie on this site when others exist. check their youtube to see new runs or if they have twitter follow them there[/quote] There is no reason to have a leaderboard on this site when google sheets exist, I guess. And for all the people who don't even upload their pbs to Youtube and submit der Twitch vods, the right thing to do is to regularly check 20 people's Twitch pages, just to see if they pb'd by any chance. Why would you be so adamantly against a thing that would be optional. Following games is already optional, why are people so bothered by following specific people. It sounds piss easy to implement and very low footprint overall.

CrossCode https://www.speedrun.com/crosscode

The any% run is under 30min because of various glitches and various methods of skipping pretty much the entirety of the game, save for the two linear intro sections and the linear final dungeon and even those have plenty of smaller skips. Most of the speedtech here is menu related stuff and manipulating the savefile creation process.

NMG (No Menu Glitches) is 1:10h long, because it also skips the majority of the game, just not as much of it. Essentially this category has to do the five major dungeons in between the intro and final bit. It uses a few cool mechanics/physics based tech to skip a lot of the mandatory quests and sections.

NMS (No Major Skips) sits at just over 2h and is a somewhat clumsily defined category. It bans Menu Glitches (like NMG) as well as another tech that causes havoc (Dash Flares), and additionally requires the player to follow along the main questline and not skip ahead into later sections, but still features a lot of skippage within each section, in particular a lot of shortcuts (some bigger than others) in the dungeons.

There's a lot more to say about each category of course, but that's the gist of it.

[quote=Wrap]This is going to sound crazy, but you might want to consider practising[/quote] A bit unfair to bring that amount of sarcasm to this, when OP asked rather precise questions on what that practice is supposed to look like taking into account different aspects of the game and in particular pertaining to a new runner, who may not be able to just follow along the WR route.

However those question are actually too precise to answer them independently of a specified game. For example in Hotline Miami 1, you would start by learning a few of the main mechanics and some bread & butter routes for every level. Aim, movement, and muscle memory you build passively by grinding out levels, as familiarising yourself with the many RNG patterns and edge case mechanics takes just as long to develop as mechanical prowess (it's not particularly mechanically challenging). Meanwhile I have heard, that for Halflife 1 you pretty much gotta practice air strafe bunny hopping for a good hundred hours before you can attempt a run. So the process there is clearly very different. I'm gonna make a guess here and say that HL1 probably has mods that let you practice that stuff much more efficiently than you could in the game proper.

So yeah, I think OP understand that it takes a lot of practice to become proficient in any skill, however that practice should be done in an efficient manner, and as such will look very different from game to game for a plethora of reasons. Even the question whether difficult starts from top runs should be practiced and replicated as early as possible, or circumvented until one has largely closed the skill gap to those runners, is dependant on the game, I would say.

I'm gonna hazard one generalisation and say that a strat/tech that comes with transferable skills makes a lot more sense to front-load in your speedrun journey, than one that doesn't. That is to say, if you fail a WR strat because your movement is imprecise and your ability to adapt to RNG is lacking, then practicing the strat will improve those skills of yours and make you overall better in the entire game. If however, to beat a boss faster, you need to connect your Donkey Kong Bongos and play Symphony No. 2 in D major, that is a formidable speed tech, but will not benefit you in any other part of the run, and you can probably off-load it to your future self, when it is absolutely necessary to improve your times.

I have no experience learning a speedrun that hasn't already been routed by someone, and usually I have already seen a run of the game I decide to learn. The vast majority of people look into a game's speedrun after playing it casually and I cannot imagine anything more miserable than to time my first playthrough.

So after having learnt a couple of games myself and having seen a lot more people trying to learn those games, I would describe the process as follows (assuming the game you choose to learn already has been routed and has a semi-active community):

Learn the basics:

• familiarise with the categories (read the rules) or maybe ask on the Discord for a beginner friendly category
• compile resources like guides (the game's srcom guides section)
• if there is no comprehensive guide, ask on Discord whether you should follow along with the WR or whether there is a different run with more reasonable strats
• figure out peripheral stuff like whether you need high FPS or a specific input device (freescroll mouse maybe) or specific control scheme for some speed tech
• if necessary make run notes (maybe some are available on the game's resource/guide section or you can ask another runner for theirs)
• once you have a grasp on the route and basic tech, you can do a first run as a personal benchmark (very much optional)

Actually get good at the game:

• segmented practice
• segmented practice
• segmented practice
• doing runs is an amazing waste of time, compared to segmented practice. Repeating the same trick/fight/section over and over is multiple times more efficient for improving than seeing each section of the game only once an hour
• additionally, during runs you will be afraid of losing the run and play safe. If you play safe, you will not improve. You only improve if you challenge yourself to play better than before.
• getting pbs is fun but does not even compare to actually improving at the game
• when you have sufficiently improved, you can go on a pb grind, but when you get your fat pb, you should go back to practice
• in some games doing ILs is good practice, as a shorter run will be more optimised and require you to play at a higher standard than your full game runs.
• consistency is key. You will have commit a lot of stuff to muscle memory and brain memory, and for that you require a large amount of repetition over a considerable amount of time. Particularly at the very beginning, taking a break can undo quite a bit of the learning process, which makes it frustrating to get back into it. Once you have poured a few hundred hours into a game, your skills atrophy at a much more manageable pace.
• practice is a great opportunity to critically analyse your gameplay and to pay attention to the game's mechanics and AI behaviour or whatever else may be of interested for the game in question. Here you have a chance to find new optimisations or alternative strats that work for you. Of course this becomes more relevant the less optimised and datamined the game is.

If you had taken a look at the top pinned thread here in the forum or at the category rules, you'd know that below a certain time (any time in ILs), people are required to post a VOD, and plenty of people add VODs even when they are not required, so moderation still happens on the board.

The reason we have taken this route is because Hotline is horribly optimised on PCs, the game is pretty popular with speedrun beginners, with young people and with people from outside EU/NA, which means that a large part of submissions are from people who lack the know-how and/or the hardware to record their speedruns, and also most of them only do a couple of runs in their life. We do not expect these people to get a grip on OBS or buy a new computer, if they aren't going for competitive times.

speedrun.com leaderboard settings also disappointingly binary. We can only turn on/off verification for the entire board, not for certain categories or certain time thresholds, so we went the route of just auto-verifying everything and then cleaning up behind them.

If our leaderboard moderation style bothers you to the point that you do not want to play the videogame, I invite you just look for one of the many games, that value gatekeeping higher than helping people enjoy the game. https://speedrun.com/randomgame

Rather low priority but: Submitting a single run to multiple categories.

Multi-game runs or multi-category runs can lead to PBs in multiple categories (3D Mario 1862 includes Mario 602 for example) and it's not even out of the ordinary that a single run would be a WR for two different categories, so if on the runs page it would show all of the categories it is submitted to, that would be nice. In that vein, if obsolete runs would show which rank they would be on the current LB, that would be equally nice, and especially in conjunction with multicategory runs. So for example a Mario 602 run could be submitted to the 602 cat, as well as 120 Start, 120 Shines etc. and then list them all as "would be rank X".

I've been meaning to open a thread about this actually. I see myself in a a similar spot to mkk.

The supporter subscription is actually something I have been asking for (privately) ever since the Elo takeover and I did not expect any more perks out of it other than removing the ads. And I am not >really< mad about Ads having been introduced to the entire userbase. I have not used an ad blocker in my life, but this site actually on the edge rn. The problem is really the type of ads that runs here. The popup video ads in particular are stupendously annoying and probably a CPU hog. In a similar vein, the cookie settings are just straight up toxic. I invite anyone from Elo to delete their cookies and then try to reject every single cookie on this site. Make sure to do it during work hours, so you get paid for your time, because it it takes a hot minute.

So while I welcome the introduction of the supporter subscription, this should come as a replacement of these awful, overbearing ads and not as an addition. I'm not saying get rid of ads altogether, but oh lord, just make them bearable. And find a cookie thingy where you can "reject all". Otherwise it's kinda hard to justify paying for the service, would honestly make me feel kinda complicit.

I'm not as cynical as all the people getting angry about every update for no reason and I'm sure everyone working on the site is well intentioned, but this issue is where I draw the line personally.

• Category Extensions should be properly merged into the main game, just how ILs are.

• Every category should be able to be moved around between "Full Game", "ILs" and the extension's full game and ILs. (atm if you wanted to move a category to the extensions or god forbid the ILs, you need to just resubmit the whole thing) In fact maybe every single category/variable should be able to be promoted and demoted as a main/sub category as per Bacon's suggestion.

• The 'Leaderboards' dropdown menu should not link to the different boards and then list the ILs, particularly because often games have dozens of ILs, and ILs are usually the least searched for categories on a board. Maybe opening the menu should just list/link to the boards and have each of them expandable if one wants to open a specific category/level directly from there.

• The date filter should include a "from" options additionally to its current "up to" option. Also the feature of just typing in a date should maybe work? At least I cannot get it to work. Also that feature should use the same date formatting that I have in my site settings, I get confused with the yyyy-mm-dd format. And lastly, I did not realise >until just now< that when you expand that thing to choose the date from the calendar, you can click on the 'Month Year' thing up top to zoom out and choose a year directly and stuff. I used to scroll throw every month of the year to go to 2015. All in all I love the filter but I hate everything about how it was implemented.

• Filters should be moved out of the category panel into the game panels, so that you can apply a filter once, and then as you go from one board to the other (Full game to ILs, or taking my first suggestion into account also Full Game to Extensions), it retains the filters. Also this would make it so when you look at the IL board overview, it could also be filtered.

• Speaking of overview, what about a Full Game run overview? And how about making that overview informative? Uh... lemme actually make a mock-up with my non-existent skills: (I should probably be clear here, PC/Console is supposed to be a variable/sub-cat so it could be any other variable like "good/bad ending")

• As per my second suggestion, "Levels" should become "Categories" and "Level Categories" should become "Variables" to resemble the structure of full game categories. Even without my second suggestion, I found the difference in IL and Full Game structure always confusing, in my head a level is a category and I recently had quite the problem talking to another moderator about some changes we were making to the IL board. The difference between Levels and Full Game would make sense if a board duplicated its entire category system from Full Game to every single IL, but that is really never how it works, ILs rarely have anywhere as many categories as Full Game, and no one thinks about ILs in such a holistic way.

[quote=Yummy_Bacon5]• Checkboxes to decide on what categories a variable is for instead of the Category dropdown[/quote] This, this and so much this. This should be extended to all the hard-coded variables like Milliseconds, Platform, IGT, Loadless... even "requires video".

Seems like this isn't a featured "run" as much as a featured "PB". I think it would be very interesting for some people to show runs that are not PBs, such as marathon runs (which of course can be submitted to srcom without being PBs) or maybe old PBs that have had post-commentary done for them, things along those lines.

Starting October 2021 VODs are also required to have game sound.

Would like to request Hotline Miami ( /hotline_miami) to be added as a base game for its Category Extensions: https://www.speedrun.com/hmce Thanks.