I can understand this type of curve, assuming that the goal is to determine the absolute "best" jumpers, since times in maps that are too easy would be so close for the top people. Of course that also means that after the first couple stages it's only the pros who will be competing, which may be what was intended after all, like eliminations in a tournament.
If it was meant to be a friendly competition to get noob and "pubstar" level jumpers invested more in the jumping community, it could have been handled a bit differently I guess. Maybe that's an option for a future competition. Something where people of lower skill level can still complete the maps, and are motivated to compete with each other, even though they realize that they won't be beating the big 10 or whatever at the top. Losing 70% of your competitors after the first week doesn't seem ideal in any case.
It's also just the fact that this is a first attempt at something like this, and since the maps apparently aren't being tested by multiple people beforehand, it's understandably tricky to balance.
the issue is, Afterglow didn't really designate how hard the maps should have been. if we were given more time and more maps to compare to, the curve would have been much better and everyone should have been able to do stage 3. maps are being tested, but not by the runners themselves as they would have gained an advantage to the maps. This means we (I) am not able to get the spacing and everything correctly.
also bqe you suck anyways 0/10
I gave existing maps as references. You guys just dropped the ball, don't blame me for missing your mark by a large margin. Everyone's maps so far are harder than I intended, aside from Drexen who was intended to be stage 5 but for various reasons is now stage 3.
Soldier:
stage 1 - jump_impact
stage 2 - jump_sexydev
stage 3 - jump_tholos
stage 4 - jump_bomb
stage 5 - jump_klanana
stage 6 - no harder than jump_torii
Demo:
stage 1 - jump_embrace
stage 2 - easier than tissue
stage 3 - jump_ring/revenge
stage 4 - harder than tissue, easier than devils
stage 5 - easier than jump_drexen2
stage 6 - no harder than jump_koi
Demo was a bit wonky as the mappers and I had different ideas about what was difficult. For instance, I don't think devils is necessarily harder than tissue but that's what the mapmaker suggested.
As for the drop-off of players, I suppose it's to be expected. Speedrunning doesn't seem all that popular. It seems to be a thing in TF2 to avoid competition. Dunno why but TF2 seems to attract the most casuals of any game I've played. The thing is also that it can get very tedious to get a good run, which is why a lot of people aren't bothering participating (like torii and aurora). I'd say that all of the top jumpers could have gotten a top 10 time on void (abiding by the existing top 10 times) within 30 minutes to be honest, seems like people just really don't wanna do it. I myself had quite a few runs that would have been top 10 on void but I just didn't bother since it would have made me look noob (like guyyst's time of 1:40; obviously he is better than that). Getting a good time often times means just grinding the map for hours, which is perhaps a flaw of a tournament like this. What if we did something different like a trickjump tournament? I thought about that too, but ultimately judging a trickjump as being better than a different trickjump is purely subjective, whereas speedrunning is not. How little time they took to beat a map is all you need to know.
And it was fairly obvious the top runners would win and there would not be any new comers rise to the top (even though to me, there have been newcomers, such as tusic76). But let me just say that when I conceived of run of the week it was made for primarily for jumpers, more specifically speedrunners. Likewise, the same target audience was intended for this tournament. I would not have allowed a bunch of easy maps in a speedrun tournament designed for speedrunners. Even if the maps were a lot easier, the same top runners would still be at the top (just look at orbital and amazon). I'll say, we've seemed to attract a lot of non-jumpers and beginners who are subscribed to us, which is not a bad thing. But as a whole, their opinion is uninformed and often times flat out wrong. You often see dislikes about a run not being flawless or mediocre runs getting a ton of views for some reason (fribe's pure run notably). "Flawless" doesn't mean shit, only the time, but people don't seem to be aware of that. Like when I have a run where I use a shortcut(s) and I get #1 and people start bitching about it. Correcting them is futile... they just won't know until they seriously attempt speedrunning themselves.
I don't know what kind of incentive could have been used for the noob/newcomer jumpers either... Giving out rewards for non-top jumpers seems really silly and if I did something like make a video of their runs that would also be really silly imo (no one wants to watch a bad jumper, to put it bluntly...). And what if for example jamien decided to participate? There's no videos of him at all, yet he's one of the best soldiers in NA if not the best. Would he have been considered a newcomer? I saw a comment on one of our videos: "I think it would be fun if there was a tournament for up and coming jumpers instead of the top 5 just winning all the time.?" which has 28 upvotes atm. There's absolutely no way for us to verify if a jumper is "up-and-coming."
Honestly, I just think competitions for jumping just don't seem to catch on. There's been shit like jump challenges a long, long time ago on dellort's channel, but it just died off. Nonetheless, I think you'll see that if you look back, jumping's skill ceiling has increased by a lot. There have been some pretty insane jumps and runs the past year... I suppose that was my ultimate goal in organizing this tournament - to bring more buzz to the jumping scene and show how good people can really get. Perhaps after the tournament is over more people would be encouraged and try out jumping seriously. So if a tournament happens next year, we'd see more serious competition.
