some thoughts and practical problems:
I am overall supportive of second-based records
Minute restrictions made sense in the past, and still do for many areas and party sizes, but I agree that many (most?) other areas are unbeatable in the current system.
It will still suck that players with money (bots) and time (grind) can beat more skilled players, but I've accepted that.
Tables and tech
Ideally we would have a custom form to submit records that will go into a mod-queue to be approved, and then into an automatically sorted table of records. The custom form would allow people to enter both time, video, category, etc. The problem is that we don't have any of that, and it would require development time in php. This is not my expertise and I don't like it. If someone wants to volunteer to work on this, either in this website or on your own, please do. I'm maintaining (and paying for) this website for the community and because no-one else stepped in to do it, not for the power or ad-money (lol).
Since we don't have the above technology, the moderator has to manually add an entry to the table, which currently looks like this:
Code: Select all
[tr]
[td][TAS][/td]
[td]8 players[/td]
[td][-][/td]
[td](14min)[/td]
[td][url=http://gwscr.fbgmguild.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=2518]Thread[/url][/td]
[/tr]
This is to say (other than thank you Flo), that adding a new entry somewhere in the table is annoying but doable, manually maintaining a rank list is a nope.
in my opinion, the table could look exactly like the current one: one list per area sorted by time, with columns for party size and category (tas/pure/whatever). Just add the seconds to the time, and keep more entries. The question now becomes, when are runs removed from the list? Not sure.
Timing runs
We don't want to require records to show custom software like toolbox. Probably the best solution is to rely on video time (optionally reference tb timer for single-level areas, or add timer overlay afterwards). However we can and should add a compatible timer to toolbox (starts on 1st map load at 00:00, only resets in outposts).
As for multi-level areas, I think the best solution is to just use real time, avoiding map loads is just too much of a pain, and loads are relatively quick on gw anyway. If you don't have an SSD buy one.
Trust
Overall, changing to seconds will require more trust on the community. Any kind of tb-related security measure would be annoying, hard to enforce, and easy to bypass. Time comes from video, and as much as the mods can check, I'm sure people are able to cheat, especially in some of the most tight and sought-after records, like in Fronis Irontoe's Lair.
We'll just have to trust the community and hope for the best. Do I trust this community to not cheat? I'm honestly not sure. I definitely don't trust the community with regards to content, but we haven't had cheaty submissions in a long time. A few submissions that didn't adhere by the rules were generally not malicious. I believe we can try.
More mods?
There are a lots of requests for more mods. Let's be honest here, the GW community is extremely toxic, and I trust very few of you. The last time we asked for more mods we had very few submissions and at the end no-one but for Flo did anything anyway. That said, I'm not against adding more mods, and it would actually be great to have more experienced eyes for uw and dungeon records, especially as second-based records might increase the rate of submissions. I'll try to setup mod applications.