SpeedRunner FAF

Speedrunning FAF:
Everyone likes to remark how easy FA campaigns are. Well how easy are they? When you are competing against someone else?

I am thinking hosting a tournament or event. Next Month to early Janurary (expect a firm date within the week). Where we take people each playing a campaign mission (Fort Clark Assault or Black Day are the ones thinking about) and try to complete them. Here are the rules:

You start at 60 Points
-X Points (X = How much In-Game Time Lapsed)
-10 Points for Each ACU deployed beyond the first
+10 Points for Completing Mission on First Try.
+5 Points for Each Secondary achieved
+1 Point for Each Primary Objective achieved
+10 Points no Experimental Teir Unit was built by the Player
+20 Points If Nothing Above T2 Was Built*
+40 Points If Nothing Above T1 Was Built*

Any interest?

*This means Built Not Upgraded

Why points? If it's a speedrun just do it by fastest time. Additional players means a diff category.

Its about incentivizing certain playstyle also sense this be one day event, and doubt that many partipicants will sign up so having more ways to score or seperate folks in score is good.

Honestly could properly do time instead and have the points subtrsct and/or add from your final time.

don't we already heave a timed leader board for missions why bother doing an event? besides that's not really how speed runners compete

well the leader board would serve as the authority.

I see this as a pretty good idea. as Bennis (I think) recently showed with a supcom 2 mission there's probably tons of skips to be found within the sup com and sup com FA missions.

Any % speedruns admit any kind of shortcut and exploit whether gamebreaking or not in the name of getting faster times.

And watching any % speedruns either streamed or casted is IMO very fun.

Sup com fa is one of those games you don't first think of for speedruns but as has been prooven countless times before that it being a "unconventional" game for speedruns only makes the speedrun more entertaining if it'll fit in under 4 hours.

leaderboards are broken as usually

I mean it doesn't really need leaderboards anyway, just submit a replay with the end time in the forum post. Give avatars to person/persons that currently holds the best time. People that lie about the time just get banned from the events.

@FtXCommando said in SpeedRunner FAF:

I mean it doesn't really need leaderboards anyway, just submit a replay with the end time in the forum post. Give avatars to person/persons that currently holds the best time. People that lie about the time just get banned from the events.

The intention is to be community style streamed event with multiple streamers. Also I'd be wanting to disable SimMods for the event or put obligatory large penalty to do so (depending on interest in that or so hence why not in post currently banned).

Otherwise scoring is basically indicating folks not memeing around building billion game enders on first objectives then winning by trying to encourage fast play. Even if said would be true regardless given the the fact it was competition. But its meant in many ways a subtle nudge.

I would be surprised if there is significant interest in competing to finish campaign missions the fastest

For a speedrun community to develop, they usually play the same "version" of the game (usually the original because it's the buggiest, because bugs are fun for any%)

Every time a patch goes through, the prior speedruns would be ruined. The community would have to come up with a new speedrun path. That would be demoralizing. Updating the campaign missions would get complaints.

Why speedrun the campaign when you can speedrun loading a nuke on Dual Gap?

So I don't think it makes sense to use FAF resources to develop infrastructure to support speedruns as a separate game mode. If you could show significant user interest in speedruns (e.g. by having contests based on leaderboard placement) maybe people would be willing to commit FAF resources towards a more formal speedrun system. Also, if you could show significant user interest in speedruns, there would be 10 players who are "top 10" at speedruns and we could look to them to provide guidance about what FAF should do to encourage more speedruns. Their request for FAF resources, as actual "champions," would have more weight than your request.

If you establish a speedrun tournament (e.g., if you get the highest place on the leaderboard for an "Overmind" game that happens in Dec 2020 with no sim mods, you win an avatar, or you win cash) that would be the fastest way to find out whether there is community interest that would warrant more formal involvement from faf administration.

It's impossible to justify taking resources away from TMM to put them towards campaign speedruns, unless you could show that (and I think these resources would come from TMM, because making a parallel game mode is what TMM is, you would need the same coders to work on your project maybe)

........
This would be an event hosted by yours truly, where individuals partipicating would be streaming there playthroughs of the mission on twitch/youtube or otherwise. Not asking for FAF Support (well approval to hand out avatars, advertisement by Nine and/or putting in tournament section), but asking if folks are willing to partipicate in such an event. I don't need Special FeaturedMod For SpeedRunning

I thought you wanted to automate the process of "scoring" the runs (by time, types of units made, etc.) which could require significant resources. Maybe it could be done just by modifying the "replay parser" so speedruns could be "scored" completely outside of the FAF client, so the FAF team wouldn't be involved in any way. Or you could just score them by hand/honor system.

.....the games are streamed? And you could like see if someone built an upper tech unit and see the game count time among other things

So gonna: be “formalizing” I’ll be looking to host this Mid Feburary after Janurary SCTA Tournament. Be taking suggestions. For which maps and how scoring is to be done

I strongly suggest you do away with the points system and simply have various cateogies. Otherwise it becomes a contest in who can exploit the point system the best.

That is the point? I want players to 'exploit' the point system. So less likely for 30 minute durdling to Paragon. And for players to try and use arcane niche weird strategies that are entertaining/different than normal.

If people are chasing after points, can that still be considered to be a "speedrun"? For any%, the thing that makes it what it is, is that you don't have to get points, you just have to cross the finish line as fast as you can. For other types of speedruns, you have to meet certain criteria, but otherwise the only goal is to do it as fast as possible. When you have an elaborate, complicated point system, that's not a speedrun at all. It's like a new game.

Here is a speedrun I'd like to see: get to sustained 2,000 mass income per second on Seton's Clutch - FAF version, as fast as you can, with no opponents, in vanilla FAF. ("Sustained" meaning you can't just get 1500 mass/second and then suck on some reclaim for 3 seconds to boost it by 500/s.) You have a single target and whoever gets to the finish line first wins. People would have to be strong at all tech levels, from expanding quickly at t1 to spamming mass fabs at t3. If lower-rated players participated, and made real efforts to improve (including watching high-level replays to steal their strats) they would probably improve their eco skills a lot.

Its more akin to racing than Speedrun. But its still many ways a Speedrun:

1. The best way to score points is fastest completion. Look what you get points for:
   -Completed on First Try
   -Completing Secondary and Primary
   -Not Building Upper Tech Units

The first one is basically gimme points. Through depending I might have your timer reset if you restart. (/shrug but in thay case apply other penalties

Completing Primary goes without saying. Completing Secondaries rewards players taking few minutes to complete them. While same token forcing a dilemna “take me more than 10 minutes to do my secondary?”

The upper tech deduction (which has possibility of adding. “-5 For Each Nuke and T3 Stationary Artillery”). Encouraging player not sit and paragon/mavor/etc.

Its not complicated. Also having the additional acu is same dilemna having player more players (or more percisely more Commanders) make mission time to compete faster worth the hit?

Points are entirely unnecessary to prevent mavor / paragon. The actual goal of trying to finish as fast as possible will aready prevent anything close to turtling, if players are actually trying hard. The points just obfuscate the clear goal for basically no reason. T1 units are already the fastet thing to get going. The game already has enough punishment in terms of time needed to get to high techs.

And putting different player numbers into the point sytem makes no sense. A two player speedrun is fundamentally different enough that trying to compare it will just lead to a speedrun meta were a certain number of players is found to be superior, based on the balacing of the coop map, and from that point on nobody would play any other configuration.

I mean good for you for trying to do this but I would be totally turned off by the points system and just use the typical speedrun categories. That would also mean that supcom can actually become part of the masssive, wider speedrun community that already has established rules for common categories.

The point of a speedrun is to find the most effective way to play the game based on what the game already rewards based on how it works. I have no interest to maximize points that are rewarded in a pretty much random way, and I bet a lot of others wont as well. Point system makes no sense in a Dark Souls or Mario speedrun and it wont make sense in SupCom.

Supcom isn’t Dark Souls or Mario. There isn’t constant action happening. And in many speedruns you do get “points” for certain things. Either in you get time shaved off your final time if you do certain actions. Or you get added time penalty.

The point of these rules are making co-op games more watchable/streamable.

Let me list a number of additional problems here:

1) Your point system will not be balanced
The first few iterations of you point system will not be balanced. Maybe the points for the T1 rules lead to everybody only ever building T1 units. Or the opposite, nobody cares because its not enough points. What do you do in that situation? You cannot change the rules without invalidating all speedruns that have been already made with the first version of the point rules. And if you do, speedrunners will leave faster than you can blink. Nobody likes to spend months perfecting a speedrun to then have the rules changed some weeks later.

2) You could have balanced the maps instead.
If you do adjust the rules over time, and by some miracle speedrunners keep up with that, you might create interesting speedruns. But if you think about it, instead of balancing the points, you could simply have balanced the coop maps instead, giving EVERY player a better variety of choices and a better experience, not just speedrunners.

3) Rule Discoverability
If i watch a speedrun of any game, and i already now the common speedrunning categories, i can simply search on Youtube for "glitchless multiplayer 100% speedrun" and i will know that o will get a speedrun if one exists, that was played exactly like that. I dont have to search in forum threads for weird rules and understand those. I already know all the most important restrictions and conditions. Creating you own rules on top forces people to find and understand this thread and maybe even check for which version of thye point system the speedrun was made.
So you are actually making the speedruns less watchable, because the viewer needs to understand much more to make sense out of the rules. This point is absolutely massive, it impacts how interested non-involved random people that dont read every post made on FAF forums are going to be in FA speedruns.

4) Game balance changes
There is a reason why the speedrunning community likes to stay on a very specific version of a game. Its because of the same invalidation problem as in 1). This isnt addressed here at all. There needs to be a balance mod that either fixes the current balance or is adjusted to some initial version of the game, so that speedruns at least arent invalidated by balance changes, because maps changes are already going to be a pain for speedrunners. This doesnt even exists yet as far as i know on FAF.

5) Community split
Whatever you do, there will be people that just use the existing speedrunning categories already used by thousands of games, often without modifications, and who will ignore your point system. There might even exist some speedruns already. So you end up with two separate rulesets, which increases the chance of the point system having less speedrunners and therefore dying.