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Author Topic: Beginnings 2013  (Read 8247 times)
Offline  The BQE
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k

i know im not good but i figured i would at least be able to beat stage 3 (really stage 2).
   
Rocketman
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Posts: 518
No tears now; only dreams
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.


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Offline  RNC1839
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Posts: 23
Holy Library of Congress Batman! It's a wall of text!

<rant>

I think the main problem surrounding this competition is that everyone seems to be forgetting that this is one week per map.

In one week the best will win which is going to piss off the people who complain about not being really good. For what ever reason everyone that I've encountered that complains about not being the best feels entitled to being better instantly somehow. This of course leads to the entire 'up and coming' argument. But like Afterglow said it's a stupid argument with loads of fallacies. I mean I consider myself to be 'up and coming' do I win suddenly? No of course not because I haven't earned it. You need to earn your rank among the best and that will involve hundreds of hours of practice. For some more time, for others less. Also this is over one week people who have done more speedruns are better at learning maps and getting top times. Meaning there will be a considerable gap between the good, average, and bad. Look at void for example: 40.2 seconds between me and the number 10 spot. I'm clearly not the best and I don't do many speedruns. Another point is that if some one genuinely can't finish a map that's perfectly fine. This competition was built with this in mind. The best people will win it's meant to be like that to test everyone. It's not like all the best people will just fart through every map. When a new map is released and is more difficult it's more difficult for everyone.

In one week the best will get annoyed that they didn't get a perfect run. This is also stupid because this competition isn't like Skillsrank where you can spend a year grinding a map and get the best time. You have one week and at the end you submit your best run. On both of the runs I've submitted and the one I'll submit for stage 3 they haven't been perfect, but I still submitted them. By not submitting you're letting people that do submit beat you by default. It's only one week long, once these maps get thrown onto Skillsrank servers then this idea will make sense.

I'm a mid tier (small) jumper and I don't expect to get close to the top time, but the fact that so many people are making it so easy for me really devalues my rank. When Afterglow first said 1000 people could be participating I said "alright I'm going to try for top 200 and see how I do" but now I'm 11th. And it annoys me because I didn't beat anyone who's better than me, and they didn't beat me, they just quit. I don't feel I deserve 11th, but since no one better than me wants it I'll take it.

This isn't a competition to find the best jumper, Skillsrank already does that. It's a competition to find the most flexible best jumper, and that flexibility is what really counts.

</rant>

As far as difficulty it is a real bitch to nail properly with out just copying another map entirely. The only solution (which is too late to use anyway) would be to have two people make all the maps, one doing the solly and one doing the demo. But I understand how much of a bitch that would have been on the map makers. I have been saying over the past week that typh should have been stage 4; however, this leads to the problem of getting another map to fill the gap. I've also been hoping that stage 4 is going to be basically the same as typh in difficulty otherwise stage 6 will just be soar times 3. Also if each map were piss easy then in one sense it would have been better because it would see who had the best strategies, but it wouldn't answer who the best jumper is, which is a big part of this comp. It really is too late to change any of the maps and I hope that after the comp non of the map makers dumb down there maps because so far they have been good just more difficult than most of us were expecting. And honestly all of my hatred towards typh has been because I'm speedrunning it.



one week


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Offline  alle
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Posts: 103
gayyst
I agree with most stuff, but, skillsranks isnt a very accurate way to find the best jumper  (Just look at afterglow being #1 lmao)


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rip2pac4lyf
   
Rocketeer
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Posts: 424
Skilrank doesn't mean anything. *Looking at Geboo*


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Offline  X_DIAS
Rocketman
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Posts: 643
The world is a cube
bitches, you solly jumpers don't get to complain about ppl not competing with you


one idea for next year (eventually), would be to get all maps ready before the comp, and have someone (who wouldn't be running) decide how to rank the maps in weeks. sure it will not be perfect, becasue of subjectivity (yes, tissue is much easier than devils), but would defenatly be better

i know AG wanted to give the mappers some room to finish the maps till their week was uppon them (and i know at least 1 case where the map is not finished yet), but that resulted in this problems.

anyway, i hope all this fuzz doesn't disencourage a competition next year
   
Offline  Rob123
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One of the big issues is difficulty in normal map run vs speedrun strats. I feel like my void map matched sexydev pretty well, for any normal runs. However, I put in a lot of tough strats, particularly after seeing how orbital played out. I personally prefer seeing a top 10 with larger gaps, so that run #1 actually looks and is way more impressive than #5 or something. I was happy to see QuBa get a great run that stood out. I probably should have clarified earlier with AG whether normal or speedrun difficulty was supposed to match.

Obviously this pissed off a lot of players when hitting every strat would require crazy grinding. Testing the map was also difficult with it being all closed off. I had about 3 mates who don't speedrun test it, as the better jumpers would have wanted to run it. I gave AG the map about 12 hours in advance, and implemented every suggestion he gave me (full map regen, a seamless tele for the triple, and a couple other small things), to only find him later call it a shit map on stream. Ofc I expected a lot of these responses with people grinding a map a week straight, but it just shows there's probs a better way to run this and help mappers.

Biggest complaint i've had is my use of func_nogrenades. Majority are 16 unit thick (bad)because I was in a rush at the end, however, I stand by the majority of my placements. Final void version will have a couple more solid walls at the start, but if you go through every jump, shootable walls would render many of them way too easy. I didn't want to totally sacrifice the value of the map for normal jumpers, just so people can have an easier speedrun.

Overall it would have been good to have a couple players that are responsible for testing every map, so us map makers know what to adjust. All that being said, 12 new maps in 6 weeks, big efame on youtube and decent donations to the comp is great to see.
   
Rocketman
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Posts: 518
No tears now; only dreams
I gave AG the map about 12 hours in advance, and implemented every suggestion he gave me (full map regen, a seamless tele for the triple, and a couple other small things), to only find him later call it a shit map on stream.

If I said that, I was probably just mad after grinding it a bit and unable to get a good run. I've called every map so far a shit map at some point out of frustration tbh (especially grimace). I don't think any of the new maps are shit, it just gets frustrating flawlessing up to a later jump over and over, essentially wasting hours of time. There were a few runs where I hit both of the big strats (the two ramps after the water jump and the double on the wall pogo), but then failed on a later jump (once where I glitched on the rampslide on third last)... pretty damn annoying. So yea, don't take it personally lol4 8)


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Offline  X_DIAS
Rocketman
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Posts: 643
The world is a cube
   
Fly
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Posts: 55
video games
efame on youtube

only really happens if you make easy as shit maps such as jurf and beef
i liked your map rob it's okay
(but zero is better)
   
Offline  Rokio
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Posts: 11
A competition like this is an interesting experiment at the very least.  As far as speedrunning not being popular, I think that's true and largely due to accessibility.  Plenty of people run the same maps over and over (How many times have you seen 3-4 of the main servers simultaneously running Beef/Quba/4Starters?) but most servers/maps don't make it obvious how to do speedruns. 

I mean, I've been jumping casually for a couple years and this is my first time really trying speedrunning, like making teleport/record binds, etc.   I'm not even sure how speedrunning works on the iT servers now.  There used to be frogs and stuff... I don't know. 

If the process were more transparent I think a bunch of the people who do those maps over and over casually now would get into actually speedrunning them, thus bumping up the number of people who might be interested in this kind of competition.
   
Fly
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Posts: 57
Just call me trey
God damn that is a lot of words on this page. I read most of them, seems to me like this type of tournament is fundamentally flawed, not necessarily anybody's fault. I'm not going to be submitting any more demos for this tournament even though I've enjoyed it so far, I just can't justify the amount of time it takes to grind a map.

But we can all agree that regardless of the outcome of the actual tournament, it's a great thing to get 12 brand new maps to jump on.
   
Offline  The BQE
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Posts: 135
Hell yes.

Also bomb < tholos in terms of difficulty, IMO. 
   
Offline  Hajnal
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i regret not adding more light fixtures, air vents, and doors to orbital.
   
Offline  The BQE
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inb4 jump_airvent
   
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