Ways to troll speedrunners
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@mott555 Okay I don't know how to spoiler.
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@mott555 said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@mott555 Okay I don't know how to spoiler.
<details><summary>spoiler text here</summary>
details here...NB: needs to be a blank line after the summary tags :person_shrugging_light_skin_tone:
</details>
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Speedrunning comes down to one thing: optimization. So what you really want to do is attempt to obsolete any way to optimize the running time. So things that are static time, such as a mandatory five minute cutscene won't really affect speedrunning that much.
Defeating optimization
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Insanely harsh progression checkpoints. We all know that people are supposed to obtain items and progress through the plot in a very specific order. To do so otherwise is heresy. And heretics deserve to be punished, say, like making a key item to defeat the final boss unusable. The only thing that should be displayed upon a failed sequence check is a cryptic "You have been damned to perdition."
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Forced slowdowns. Add in tripping mechanics where the probability of tripping gradually rises based upon the length of the current play session, and how long the player has been running. It should be adjusted so that clearing half of the game in one session should cause a trip every ten seconds.
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Whitelisted boundaries. Everything should be a region that causes instant death by default. Only the actual play area should have the effect lifted. This could be accomplished by giving the player an "in-bounds" hidden status effect.
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Not-really-RNG. For example, GTA speedruns are highly dependent on whether or not the speedrunner is able to find a fast car or taxi to quickly get to the next thing. You can tie this into the fatigue timer and spawn fewer attractive choices as the timer goes up.
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@sumireko said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Add in tripping mechanics where the probability of tripping gradually rises based upon the length of the current play session, and how long the player has been running. It should be adjusted so that clearing half of the game in one session should cause a trip every ten seconds.
I'm pretty sure FIFA has this exact mechanic for online play.
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How Pokemon trolls speedrunners:
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@boomzilla said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
NB: needs to be a blank line after the summary tags
Not necessarily. For some things, you need to include the blank line... mostly markdown stuff that has to be at the beginning of a line.
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@anotherusername said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Or just write code that doesn't have wall/floor clipping bugs.
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@hardwaregeek FWIW, 3D games after 2010 were pretty good at avoiding clipping issues. The current main problem everyone seems to have is extreme horseback hiking.
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@hardwaregeek said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@anotherusername said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Or just write code that doesn't have wall/floor clipping bugs.
I want to make a game engine where the camera is allowed to go through walls but it doesn't show things that are on the wrong side of the wall. So you'd never have the camera taped to the back of your character's head, and as an added bonus, the game engine would know where all the walls and floors are so it could just check to make sure the player didn't move through one on each frame.
I also had an idea for a navigation mesh that was mostly static but could have multiple roots (like a boat's navigation mesh being separate from the walkable areas in the harbor it's in) and some parts would dynamically connect (like a ramp that lets you from the dock to the boat or a drawbridge).
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@gąska said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@hardwaregeek FWIW, 3D games after 2010 were pretty good at avoiding clipping issues. The current main problem everyone seems to have is extreme horseback hiking.
3D games after 2010? Like Skyrim? or Ocarina of Time 3D? Both of those came out in 2011 and both of them have clipping issues that let you skip basically the entire game.
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@ben_lubar PRETTY good.
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@anotherusername said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@boomzilla said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
NB: needs to be a blank line after the summary tags
Not necessarily. For some things, you need to include the blank line... mostly markdown stuff that has to be at the beginning of a line.
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@adynathos said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Make an RTS game:
- resources take time to gather
- buildings and units take time to build
Booo! 0 points for creativity!
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@jaloopa said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Have an alternative movement, like rolling, that's slightly faster than walking but increases the scale of the level just enough to cancel it out
"Oh, it's not increasing the FOV, that's the actual level getting bigger for a second or so..." :D
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@anotherusername said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Or just write code that doesn't have wall/floor clipping bugs.
If you can do this I'd kiss your face. Shit falling through things is apparently a very difficult glitch to get rid of, been trying it for years...
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@jaloopa said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@gąska said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Usually it's the last input before the final boss is down
Long cutscene before the boss attains its final form, which is a pink fluffy bunny that goes down in one hit
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@hungrier said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Pretty much anything that's pure RNG is already a troll for speedruns.
Oh, man, that's so much fun! Watching them try and try and try over and over to squeeze just a few milliseconds off of their time, and then, WHAM!!! I drop a random encounter that blows up their time like a balloon in a vacuum and they have to start all over again.
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@boomzilla said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
needs to be a blank line after the summary tags
That was fixed.
I'm pretty sure, anyways.Edit: 'd
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@ben_lubar said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
I also had an idea for a navigation mesh that was mostly static but could have multiple roots (like a boat's navigation mesh being separate from the walkable areas in the harbor it's in) and some parts would dynamically connect (like a ramp that lets you from the dock to the boat or a drawbridge).
That's been a feature request in UE4 for a while now. We'd really like that too, since the teleport movement mode uses nav meshes to figure out if you can teleport somewhere, and nav meshes don't work very well with moving objects...
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@djls45 said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@boomzilla said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
needs to be a blank line after the summary tags
That was fixed.
I'm pretty sure, anyways.Edit: 'd
Pretty sure the blank line is required for browsers that don't natively support details, unless @anotherusername fixed it and I didn't notice.
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@rng said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@hungrier said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Pretty much anything that's pure RNG is already a troll for speedruns.
Oh, man, that's so much fun! Watching them try and try and try over and over to squeeze just a few milliseconds off of their time, and then, WHAM!!! I drop a random encounter that blows up their time like a balloon in a vacuum and they have to start all over again.
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@ben_lubar said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@djls45 said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@boomzilla said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
needs to be a blank line after the summary tags
That was fixed.
I'm pretty sure, anyways.Edit: 'd
Pretty sure the blank line is required for browsers that don't natively support details, unless @anotherusername fixed it and I didn't notice.
It also ensures that your spoilered content doesn't show up in a preview when it's all at the top of your post.
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@adynathos said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Randomness.
For example you have door A and B and a long path and a short path. Which path is behind which door is determined randomly once you enter it, and you can't come back to take the other door.Depending on the game, just use a bit of randomness to tweak a few of the global/level constants ... like gravity or game time. Subtly adjust the interaction range and/or the bounding volumes of things. Or slightly speed up/slow down AI entities randomly. Not enough to make most normal players notice, but enough to trip up people who rely on getting the timings right.
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Nothing annoy them more than a random hit-tester.
Just make the hit-testing result of object random, so something you can pass through an object, and another time you're blocked. Sometimes your bullet can hit enemy, the other time it'll just pass through without damage. And when you move, sometime you'll fall into "hole of non-existent" and have no way to come out.
They'll decide they would rather play other games in no time.
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@weng said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
... How do I not even remember what the final boss if HL1 even was?
It was like a cow's stomach on spider legs. EDIT: oh wait Ben's right it was like a floating angry baby. The cow stomach on spider legs was an earlier boss.
Basically imagine the most disappointing final boss you can. Got it? The final boss of Half-Life was twice as disappointing as that.
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@benjamin-hall said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Halo has a plot?
Halo 2 is the best-written FPS game of all time.
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@blakeyrat said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@weng said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
... How do I not even remember what the final boss if HL1 even was?
It was like a cow's stomach on spider legs. EDIT: oh wait Ben's right it was like a floating angry baby. The cow stomach on spider legs was an earlier boss.
Basically imagine the most disappointing final boss you can. Got it? The final boss of Half-Life was twice as disappointing as that.
I googled this and... I'm no longer sure I actually beat HL1.
Despite knowing for a fact I've seen the final cutscene (in an era predating youtube)
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@weng you still have time to do it again!
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A game that has no end goal.
This isn't to say there are no achievements or other progression markers, just that there's no definitive "You've finished the game!" point.
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@Tsaukpaetra I was going to say "Like Minecraft?" but then I remembered that it does have a story mode with an end-game goal.
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@djls45 Killing the dragon is technically an end-game goal, but what do you mean by 'story mode'? If you're talking about Minecraft Story Mode, that's a completely different game - if you haven't experienced Telltale's style yet, it's basically a cross between a movie and a visual novel.
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@pie_flavor Is it? Huh. I was thinking of the dragon thing, and I thought that was the story mode, but I guess I was wrong there. I've not played it myself. I've only seen a couple other people play it and a few videos of people building things like "parkour" challenge courses and stuff.
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@djls45 Minecraft the base game is entirely open ended, the dragon just has a lot of game-endiness about him (literally named the Ender Dragon, located in the dimension The End, etc.). But the game doesn't stop there, and in fact there's content that's unlocked just from killing him, with the resulting portal leading to the outer islands which have things like teleportation fruit, glider wings, and monsters whose drops are important crafting ingredients for higher levels of automation.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
A game that has no end goal.
This isn't to say there are no achievements or other progression markers, just that there's no definitive "You've finished the game!" point.
There are actually some hidden win conditions in Dwarf Fortress that are so hidden that they're just made up by wiki editors and don't actually have any effect in the game.
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This post is deleted!
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@tsaukpaetra said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@jaloopa said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Have an alternative movement, like rolling, that's slightly faster than walking but increases the scale of the level just enough to cancel it out
"Oh, it's not increasing the FOV, that's the actual level getting bigger for a second or so..." :D
Make the FOV narrower and narrower as you move faster, to the point where it becomes next to impossible to navigate at top speed.
Make sure the level has enough randomness that you can't navigate blind, and make the acceleration curve sloped enough that it becomes really hard to not jump from low speed to top speed in a jiffy.
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@zecc said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Make sure the level has enough randomness that you can't navigate blind, and make the acceleration curve sloped enough that it becomes really hard to not jump from low speed to top speed in a jiffy.
Make it so that if the player goes a certain speed for long enough, an NPC appears and challenges them (in a very long-winded, unskippable cut-scene) to a special race that they can't decline, with the penalty for losing being a massive speed debuff for the rest of the session.
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@zecc @dkf I've got a feeling the speedrunners would find a way around both. They're as dedicated to finding fastest routes as 4chan trolls are dedicated to searching & destroying Shia LaBeouf's flags.
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@gąska said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
I've got a feeling the speedrunners would find a way around both.
And it would probably make it more interesting for them, too. That's like announcing "our tool is completely unhackable" to the people who take this as a fun challenge.
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@gąska said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
I've got a feeling the speedrunners would find a way around both.
If you want to be evil, make the thing gated on speed in the earliest stages of the game, but not actually show up until about 60% through.
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@topspin said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
That's like announcing "our tool is completely unhackable" to the people who take this as a fun challenge.
Pinging @sockbot.
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@gąska said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@zecc @dkf I've got a feeling the speedrunners would find a way around both. They're as dedicated to finding fastest routes as 4chan trolls are dedicated to searching & destroying Shia LaBeouf's flags.
I dunno, I feel like if a game did @Zecc's suggestion, the speedrunners would just run blind.
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@zecc said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@tsaukpaetra said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@jaloopa said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Have an alternative movement, like rolling, that's slightly faster than walking but increases the scale of the level just enough to cancel it out
"Oh, it's not increasing the FOV, that's the actual level getting bigger for a second or so..." :D
Make the FOV narrower and narrower as you move faster, to the point where it becomes next to impossible to navigate at top speed.
Make sure the level has enough randomness that you can't navigate blind, and make the acceleration curve sloped enough that it becomes really hard to not jump from low speed to top speed in a jiffy.
Sounds like you should just implement Special Relativity.
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Make actions that despawn objects take time to perform.
Speedrunners will ignore anything they don't need to do and end up lagging the game to oblivion.
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Make a special 'speedrunner mode' which removes cutscenes and some of the annoying animations. Unbeknownst to anyone, bump up the difficulty but in a way that is not easily realized.
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Make levels procedurally generated, and extend/contract them according to total playtime so that you always get to the final boss at extremely similar playtimes?
And do not say anything about this feature anywhere.
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@ben_lubar said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
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Make actions that despawn objects take time to perform.
Speedrunners will ignore anything they don't need to do and end up lagging the game to oblivion.
They'll be just counting frames. Or find the optimal set of actions that let you complete the game without crashing.
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@pie_flavor said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Make a special 'speedrunner mode' which removes cutscenes and some of the annoying animations. Unbeknownst to anyone, bump up the difficulty but in a way that is not easily realized.
This doesn't prevent speedrunning, or makes it any harder. Assuming speedrunner mode wouldn't make the game literally impossible.
@carnage said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Make levels procedurally generated, and extend/contract them according to total playtime so that you always get to the final boss at extremely similar playtimes?
And do not say anything about this feature anywhere.They've figured out double-jumping in Spyro. They'll figure it out too.
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@gąska said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@pie_flavor said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Make a special 'speedrunner mode' which removes cutscenes and some of the annoying animations. Unbeknownst to anyone, bump up the difficulty but in a way that is not easily realized.
This doesn't prevent speedrunning, or makes it any harder. Assuming speedrunner mode wouldn't make the game literally impossible.
@carnage said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Make levels procedurally generated, and extend/contract them according to total playtime so that you always get to the final boss at extremely similar playtimes?
And do not say anything about this feature anywhere.They've figured out double-jumping in Spyro. They'll figure it out too.
Well, I'm sure they'll figure out it's happening. It'll be pretty obvious once people compare videos of gameplay.
Getting to a workaround will be harder without actually modifying the game.
Not that it matters, the thread is about trolling them.