Half-Life completed in 21 minutes?

[DavidTheWin]

A speed run is done at full speed including deaths and reload times by playing the game as it was intend.

 

The entire speedrunning community uses a different definition to you, and all are happy with it and accept the rules for categories and what a valid speedrun is. If they don't like a particular category, e.g. glitched, they will run the glitchless category instead.

 

It seems like literally everyone who complains about glitches in speedruns has never heard of the concept of using categories. Do you think that if someone could find a way to sprint a marathon that it would be cheating? 

[MadZee]

I'm facepalming so hard right now. "Playing the game as it was supposed to"? Nope, speedrunning = the shortest possible time taken to beat a game. Glitches that have been left in the game are completely valid. And deaths, btw, happen because of a player's error, so not dying is a major part in speedruns.

[rentaspoon]

The entire speedrunning community uses a different definition to you, and all are happy with it and accept the rules for categories and what a valid speedrun is. If they don't like a particular category, e.g. glitched, they will run the glitchless category instead.

It seems like literally everyone who complains about glitches in speedruns has never heard of the concept of using categories. Do you think that if someone could find a way to sprint a marathon that it would be cheating?

Yeah I would if they cut corners and jumped over barriers to take shortcuts.

I've heard of categories as it use to be something like a pistol speedrun but glitched? that's just an excuse of making the game easier just so you can have a medal.

Unlike what they teach in school we're not all winners

I'm facepalming so hard right now. "Playing the game as it was supposed to"? Nope, speedrunning = the shortest possible time taken to beat a game. Glitches that have been left in the game are completely valid. And deaths, btw, happen because of a player's error, so not dying is a major part in speedruns.

That's fine if thats what you think but your talking to someone who use to and still does live speedruns in lan clubs the old school way and the proper way, that's what I'm pointing out, death occurs in that type as you tend to make mistakes.

And what's the point of not playing the game as it's intended?

[MadZee]

That's fine if thats what you think but your talking to someone who use to and still does live speedruns in lan clubs the old school way and the proper way, that's what I'm pointing out, death occurs in that type as you tend to make mistakes.

And what's the point of not playing the game as it's intended?

"oldschool" and "proper" do not necessarily go together anymore. Times change. The modern definition of speedrunning is get to the end of the game as fast as possible, with any exploits you can use. Since there are categories, you can still be oldschool and play not glitched, but every non-modded/hacked run is legit, even if it is in a category you dont like.

And why shouldn't you restart if you die? If you want the fastest time possible, dying doesn't help.

[DavidTheWin]

Yeah I would if they cut corners and jumped over barriers to take shortcuts.

I've heard of categories as it use to be something like a pistol speedrun but glitched? that's just an excuse of making the game easier just so you can have a medal.

Unlike what they teach in school we're not all winners

That's fine if thats what you think but your talking to someone who use to and still does live speedruns in lan clubs the old school way and the proper way, that's what I'm pointing out, death occurs in that type as you tend to make mistakes.

And what's the point of not playing the game as it's intended?

 

Let me make my example clearer. There's an event called the Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon, a 544 mile foot race that takes about 5 days for a world record runner to complete. In 1983, the world record was about 7 days and the strategy that the runners used was to run for same 17 hours a day then get 7 hours sleep (or some variation of that). In 1983 though, a 61 year old potato farmer called Cliff Young came along and beat the record by about 2 days, finishing in 5 days and 15 hours by doing two major things differently. Firstly, he didn't sleep for those 5 days and secondly, he was running slightly differently in a way that allowed him to run for much longer periods of time, albeit at a slower pace and now this is how most people run ultramarathons. You can liken the old strategy to a "glitchless" speedrun and the new strategy to a "glitched" speedrun. It was perfectly legal by the race's rules but you can bet some people had a problem with it. Similarly, using glitches doesn't break the game's rules. 

 

I'll say that again, using a glitch doesn't break the game's rules. A glitch is using the way the game is programmed to do something that the developers probably didn't even realise was possible. If a developer oversight makes it possible for a button to be pressed through a wall, then pressing the button through the wall doesn't break the game's rules in any way at all. As far as the game is concerned, pressing the button through the wall is a completely valid thing that it can allow to happen. Similarly in Portal with ABH (accelerated back hopping); when the player reaches a certain speed, the game applies a force to the front of the character to slow them down. However when the player is going backwards, this force only serves to speed them up. ABH is perfectly legal within Portal's rules and the fact that it's only possible because of the rather sloppy way of trying to fix a player's speed that Valve implemented.

 

Often, the line between glitch and mechanic can be blurred too. Take "drop-reloading" in Borderlands 2 as an example. Rather than sitting through the 2-3 second reload animation, you can use the game's intended functionality to drop and pick up the weapon faster than you can reload it, and in Borderlands 2 when you pick a weapon up it comes fully loaded. Dropping the weapon, picking up the weapon, picked up weapons having full clips are three separate examples of fully intentional game mechanics, but when combined allow you to go from an empty gun to a reloaded gun faster than if you were to use the reload function. Is "drop-reloading" a glitch? It's quite hard to say, even from the incorrect view that the developer's rules must be followed rather than the game's rules. For now, Gearbox seem to be OK with it, but if they turned round and made a patch that made it so that any weapon you picked up has no bullets loaded initially and said drop-reloading was a glitch, no one would be surprised. That still wouldn't mean that it wasn't allowed by the game's rules.

 

As for "making the game easier just so you can have a medal", that's both wrong and insulting. You can see quite clearly that their aim is no problem and that playing the game through even on hard would be a trivial effort for them and I can guarantee you, a no scripts hard glitched run of half life is much more difficult than a glitchless run. On top of that, most glitches you see are much harder to get to work than playing the game properly. Take bunnyhopping for example, even if you were to do it with completely awful technique, is still many times harder than simply running/sprinting in the game. Doing it at Quadrazid and Co.'s level of consistency and smoothness is to using the "intended" walking mechanics as driving a Formula 1 car is to driving a normal car down a straight, empty road.

 

As for complaining about what is and what isn't allowed in a speedrun, allow me to refer to David Sirlin, specifically the chapter of his book "Playing to Win" called "Introducing the 'scrub'" http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/intermediates-guide.html 

His book focuses on competitive fighting games (and competitive games in general) but I think his definition of "scrub" works well for those who say that glitched speedruns don't count:

 

 A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about.

 

This doesn't 100% transfer to speedrunning, as speedrunning rules are pretty much all self-imposed and the existence of categories are themselves self-imposed rules on which speedruns fit into those categories, although the difference is that all categories are equally as valid. Sirlin later goes on to talk about what the scrub might call "cheap" tactics, similarly to how people insult "glitched" speedruns (bold added for emphasis):

 

In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn't attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

 

The difference in speedrunning is that different "cheap" tactics have their own categories, for example Portal has both out-of-bounds and in-bounds categories. Both are equally as valid speed runs. Limiting yourself to only glitchless runs is perfectly fine, so long as you don't attempt to invalidate other categories. At your LAN parties, if you do a race and you do a glitchless run and the other person uses bunnyhopping, that would be cheating yes as you are both playing the game using a different set of rules. If you were to both allow bunnyhopping, or neither of you used any glitches, both of these two new situations would be perfectly OK because you are playing the game by the same rules. That's what it boils down to, pick your set of rules and don't claim that playing the game any way apart from your own way is wrong.

 

 

 

As an aside, you guys were arguing about deaths in a speedrun and it seemed as though you were arguing the same point without realising it. In speedrunning, it's generally not preferable to die (there are cases where dying is beneficial, e.g. where respawning will get you to your destination faster than travelling there) and in most cases, avoiding death is definitely a thing that runners want to do. In a single segment speedrun, if you die during it then either you accept the time loss that the death would cause you, or you restart and try again. During a race, restarting wouldn't be acceptable of course, but if you're just trying to beat a PB or even a WR, restarting on a death is completely acceptable, why continue with the run when you know you can't beat your goal? You could argue that finishing the run is good practice, which is all well and good on say a 30 minute speedrun, but what if you die towards the start of Final Fantasy X, which is a roughly 10 hour speedrun? You aren't obligated to go through the next 10 hours before you're allowed to try again because that would be ridiculous. On the other hand, accepting the time loss isn't always bad either, take for example the case where you died 10 seconds after leaving the respawn area but you know that later in the run you died 10 minutes from a respawn area meaning that you had to spend 10 minutes to catch up. If you don't die again, you could save a whole 9 minutes and 50 seconds of time. Choosing whether or not to restart on a death is entirely down to the speed runner (and if they're in a race of course) and there are reasons why you would both want to and not want to.

[v3nture]

bump from the grave because this bothers me

I've heard of categories as it use to be something like a pistol speedrun but glitched? that's just an excuse of making the game easier just so you can have a medal.

 

The glitches that that are done do not make the game easier to complete; the glitches make it faster. Go watch that live stream archive and you should realize that a lot of these glitches take a lot of practice to be able to do and execute perfectly.

edit

 

it's easier to shoot your way through everything than use the glitches that are used.

[rentaspoon]

snip

There is a few reasons why I stopped responding to this thread:

¤We weren't going to agree on anything

¤These were MY opinions

¤I was taking this thread off topic

If anyone want to express there opinions about this to me please PM me, I will read them and I might respond.

Please don't bump this thread anymore if it's something I said.

Please