What's up gamers,
Thank you all for participating in The Tempus Cup so far, and I hope you enjoyed our lovely stage 1 maps. I'll make a few clarifications here since there seems to be some confusion.
1. Jumping happens online.
Somehow this seems to be contentious, but it's an open secret: almost every map record is on Tempus; almost every single active jumper plays exclusively on Tempus/ECJ/JA/etc., and the vast majority of jumpers never play offline at all, unless it's to test a map before it's added to servers.
At one point this was not the case! In the days of trigger_hurt regen and rockethops, a lot of people played offline. Luckily, we have been saved from the
hodgepodge of issues with offline runs by Tempus, which prevents all of these simply by virtue of being online and centralized. Precise run times and consistent CPs are great too!
2. Allowing offline runs creates a perverse incentive.
The inarguable advantage presented by playing offline (mostly for demo) drives most competition offline, which simultaneously gives an advantage to players familiar with it (despite having no bearing on ordinary jump speedrunning i.e. Tempus), as well as forcing ordinary Tempus players to take the time to set up and acquaint themselves with a very different environment. Since Tempus is the de facto standard for jumping, this is alienating to much of the playerbase. For example, even though Vice has a substantially better connection to Tempus than I do, I would definitely do better in competing with him online, since he has considerably more time spent playing offline. This skill should not factor into placements, since online runs are the standard.
Furthermore, many jumpers at all levels have no desire at all to ever practice offline, since they play jump as warmup/practice for competitive play and wish to have a consistent environment between the two.
Additionally, Tempus has a very open community regarding runs and strats; any demo or time is available for download for anyone on request (unless, however, someone abused admin to hide that specific demo). No matter how well an offline competition is structured, it will never get close to approximating this. No matter how possible it may be for someone to conspire to practice offline until the last minute and then run online, it will still be vastly more open, and perfect is the enemy of good. Props to soup and song for streaming their offline gameplay, despite the massive potential for creative timesave on jump_beryllium!
3. Server complaints are irrelevant for the vast majority of players.
There are currently 14 North American servers, 10 European servers (+2 RU), 6 Oceania servers, and 4 Asian servers. For players in covered regions, there has been no real difficulty in securing servers to play on throughout the first stage, especially since many of those servers are rank restricted and nearly all contenders are of sufficient rank to play on them. At the time of writing, it's prime time in EU, and there are no fewer than 5 servers on stage 2 maps, covering all of the sub-regions. This is simply not a concern for anyone who has actually been playing online so far.
I am on record stating that I would have spun up temporary servers for any underserved region if, for example, Asia servers had gone down before the start of the competition. Song made no attempt to contact me, or any Tempus admins about this, and in fact stated many times that he was done with jumping and wouldn't participate anyways. Even after streaming attempts, he said he wouldn't submit unless it was WR. I'm not going to spend the time and money to run a KR server if he's not willing to even ask for it seriously, offer to pay for any part of it, or go 2 weeks without trying to wipe and quit playing.
Initially, the entire event was going to be online only; it was only due to a miscommunication that this was not the case. We decided to allow offline times for stage 1, rather than make a rule change mid-stage. We considered giving players with a legitimate reason to play offline (hass, syph) the option on a case-by-case basis, but this proves difficult to enforce fairly and also grants them the aforementioned inarguable advantages over the rest of the competition.
Once again, thank you for playing in this free entry competition, and I hope you have fun competing in The Tempus Cup on The Tempus Network.
Poll