Guild Wars Speed Clear Records

Have a look at this draft and let me know if something should be changed: https://forms.gle/zoajunEZRStxq12B7

> If the STANDARD category exists, what should be the process to allow/disallow new 3rd party tools? CHECK ALL YOU WOULD BE FINE WITH.

You need to leave another option here because the only choice that isn't completely and utterly dumb is to follow a mechanism that automatically deems new features okay or not. I repeat, for the fiftieth time, that a category that is based solely on the subjective desires of a few should NOT exist.

The next question shall be removed because that shouldn't even be up for discussion. You can't leave out of meta records that break rules of a current ruleset to be competing with new/current record attempts. Imagine someone had gotten a 45 before BLJ's were banned in 70 star and people would now have to compete against a time that isn't possible (or remotely realistic) anymore.

> If the STANDARD category exists, what should be the process to allow/disallow new mechanics that do not require a 3rd tool (for example a new coindrop/slowload)?

Last I checked categories were based on third party tool usage, so this question is for another poll - or the fourth part of the poll.


You also need to consider to tell people that keeping a "standard" category means keeping that stupid name. The whole thing only resurfaces when you propose banning features from TAS. There doesn't appear to be an option to remove standard, restrict TAS and create a then-third category with another name.

All of your points except the last one are your personal preferences, which is completely fine but I do not see a reason to change the questions and their answer options. You once again seem to imply you are the only reasonable person here and if everybody was just as objective and logical as you are we would not have to vote at all. That is not how it works, sorry - and repeating it 50 times does not make it more correct. If a majority of the community shares your opinions, I am sure we will see that reflected in the results. At least you now had yet another chance to present your arguments.

And about the last point, why the name standard might not be ideal, I see no upside whatsoever in changing it now. It is just about labeling, it does not matter how the categories are called (Pure, Standard, TAS or P, S, T or A, B, C or 1, 2, 3), it just matters what ruleset they refer to. Right now everyone does understand what each name means.

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Anyways, people had some time to give feedback about the draft and we found and fixed some issue with the answers of other respondents being visible.

I would propose we let the survey start tomorrow evening and have it run for about 2 weeks. If the number of responses is very low (<20 after to weeks) we can prolong it.

My answer to the PURE question (should instance timer be allowed) is contingent on whether or not the standard category exists. If standard exists, PURE should be completely pure, and anyone who wants a timer can accept the standard classification. If there is no standard category, it seems much harsher to call a record TAS just for using a timer. This isn't a huge issue for me personally - I would accept the outcome either way - but if there's a way to consider this option within the vote, that would be nice.

I do not think this is problematic enough to warrant changes.

That being said, I do not mind too much either way. If more people have strong feelings about what Misty just said please speak up asap and we can potentially change the pure section to account for the conditionality of standard existing.

Unfortunately there currently isn't even an option in the poll that would reflect my view. It seems the only available option for a standard tier would be to have it based on arbitrary decisions of a few people who may not even be competing in the scene for records in a few months anymore. We'd just run into the same issue again of having to vote about new bans/unbans every few months which I can't even begin to describe how stupid it would be.

You once again seem to imply you are the only reasonable person here

I do not believe that I'm the only reasonable person here or that there shouldn't be a vote, but I am confident that my view is the only one that doesn't result in a huge clusterfuck. This is an old game with a tiny speedrunning community, we shouldn't have regularly debated arbitrary rulesets 100x the size and complexity of the most active speedrunning games.

At least leave an OPTION to base a tier on objective measures and common sense.

There is exactly 1 objective measure to differentiate categories: Is a 3rd party tool being used, yes or no.

The moment a category differs from that, there will always be ambiguity. If there were objective measures and "common sense" (which by the way is already highly subjective in itself) that could be applied to the intermediate category, then we would not need this vote. But there is not and therefore we do need to vote.

So yeah, unless you can provide this other objective measure you are talking about (...curious why you have not done that yet btw) that everyone will agree with because it is so logical, unambiguous and common sense, we will proceed as planned. In case you for some reason can not provide this overarching truth, I think how you should vote to remove as much ambiguity from the ruleset is pretty clear.

Sylars wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 10, 2021 9:18 am

I do not believe that I'm the only reasonable person here or that there shouldn't be a vote, but I am confident that my view is the only one that doesn't result in a huge clusterfuck.

This is a major contradiction. If other people's suggestions will result in huge clusterfucks, they are clearly not reasonable.

Flo wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 10, 2021 10:10 am

So yeah, unless you can provide this other objective measure you are talking about (...curious why you have not done that yet btw) that everyone will agree with because it is so logical, unambiguous and common sense, we will proceed as planned.

+1 if this is so obvious, you should have no difficulty explaining it to everyone.

Misty wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 10, 2021 11:25 am

Sylars wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 10, 2021 9:18 am

I do not believe that I'm the only reasonable person here or that there shouldn't be a vote, but I am confident that my view is the only one that doesn't result in a huge clusterfuck.

This is a major contradiction. If other people's suggestions will result in huge clusterfucks, they are clearly not reasonable.

Flo wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 10, 2021 10:10 am

So yeah, unless you can provide this other objective measure you are talking about (...curious why you have not done that yet btw) that everyone will agree with because it is so logical, unambiguous and common sense, we will proceed as planned.

+1 if this is so obvious, you should have no difficulty explaining it to everyone.

I am however not the only person with this view, which is why I'm not the only person with a reasonable view here. There is also a stark difference between being a reasonable person and having a reasonable view on something. A lack of experience in an area can lead people to have very unreasonable views despite being reasonable people.

There are plenty objective measures that could be used without a need to re-evaluate every new feature addition.
Example 1: No memory write. All and any externally drawn info is allowed, anything that writes to main thread memory isn't.
Example 2: Anything achievable (outcome based) in the game without tool assistance is allowed. Ok: Hotkey to swap armour out of fight. Not ok: target minipet.
Example 3: Single-action single-outcome restriction. Ok: Hotkey to swap 1 armour piece, move-to hotkey. Not ok: Hotkey to use rezz scroll and skeleton trap in the same press. Auto pcons.
Example 4: no retexturing. Ok: any kind of overlay drawn info. Not ok: changing health bar colour, texmod.

Or anything else the community could decide on. What this has as an advantage is automatic classification and unambiguity about new tool usage. The rules stay simple and easy to enforce. Special cases may or may not be handled with a blacklist (e.g. no sblj to skip 30 star door in 16 star due to historical reasons).

It should be clear at this point that any objective memory-based ruleset to differentiate between standard and TAS will only serve to close the gap between the two and make it almost pointless to have the differentiation except for a few areas. It would be helpful to understand WHY most people are running standard in the first place, and hence determine whether a new hypothetical ruleset would accommodate the preferences of the majority or not.

In my best estimation, people are competing in the standard category for one of two reasons:

1) A standard record is considered better than a TAS record, as it has a more limiting ruleset. As an example, the new 6-man DOA record would on paper be considered more impressive as the same time was achieved under a stricter ruleset. So, people opt to play standard to prevent this from happening.

In this case, you might as well remove standard rather than trying to re-define the ruleset. Then players can compete in TAS without fear of a competitor repeating the time in Standard. The same could also be said for PURE>Standard as for Standard>TAS however, based on the number of PURE submissions, most players are understandably not interested in playing PURE. (Table crowd)

2) Their preference is to play in a category which closely matches the default guild wars experience, with some basic quality of life features. (Boomers crowd)

Note that the "power" of the QoL features here is irrelevant. Having a strict whitelist is the only(?) way to please this crowd. Their preference on which features should be allowed is clearly subjective, but the definition in the ruleset can still be objective and therefore would not be ambiguous.

If there are any other reasons to play standard then I am interested to hear them, but based on the above 2 reasons its obvious that if people vote to keep standard the only "logical" solution to appease the (Boomer crowd) is with a whitelist. If most standard players fall into the (Table crowd) then this will be represented in the vote and we won't have to worry about standard anyway.