On the topic of pausing for WRs

I'll be concise, in my WR attempts of Strategy Climb (MBP Advanced) I have started to pause at the start in order to make it faster. It allows me to jump off the edge into an edge hit instead of the wall hit that hitgod did in his run. This is slightly faster and would allow me to beat the WR if I grinded it for long enough. I use the pause both for timing and for camera adjustment (I pause several times before hitting the edge) to make the trick possible. We talked about this in the discord server but I would like to bring it up here as we discussed a potential solution.

What are your thoughts on pausing specifically during WR runs? A proposed solution was to change the game so that a run that included a pause will not submit to the leaderboards. I personally quite like this solution as it does not intefere with casual play, while also preservig the spirit of the competition by only having runs without pauses in them be WR.

I personally quite like this solution as it does not intefere with casual play

Pausing invalidating a run will still interfere pretty badly with casual play IMO. Going for colored name, which while I wouldn't call it "casual", is at a level where pausing to get an advantage is basically completely negligible and forcing someone to restart because they had to pause at some point in their 7.5 minute TTOTS run is just a bummer. Especially since I think pausing at the competitive level is not very common, only really finding use in a few levels.

I don't think there is a clear objective answer to this problem which solves the problem for everyone with no downsides. Invalidating runs due to opening the pause menu, at any level, seems overkill to me and will negatively affect casual play.

I agree that the use of pausing to gain an advantage is something frowned upon and should be avoided. I think a good proposal which has been brought up before: Modify the .rrec file format to store when the player pauses and for how long. I don't know many details about the rrec system but from the small amount that I've looked at the code I believe this should be possible. This doesn't need to be shown when playing back the rrec (at least not by default), but should be knowable by moderators to see when a player pauses. When WR runs get submitted to the leaderboard with pauses in them (which you can know since it's stored in the rrec), the moderators can look it over manually to decide if the pauses gave the runner an unfair advantage and decide to not allow the run through.

Edit

What are your thoughts on pausing specifically during WR runs? A proposed solution was to change the game so that a run that included a pause will not submit to the leaderboards.

My reading comprehension might be next to none LOL, Kalle are you suggesting that only pauses during WR runs would case a run to be invalid, and not for all casual runs? In that case, I see how you mean it won't affect casual play and I can agree. I still think we should find a way to store pauses in rrecs (which again I don't think is too hard with how rrecs store data in small chunks). That way, WRs that get sent with a rrec file containing pauses can be manually reviewed by the moderators with some sort of guideline on which pauses constitute invalidation, and or course the mods have the final say for any weird edge cases

thearst3rd wrote:

I personally quite like this solution as it does not intefere with casual play

Pausing invalidating a run will still interfere pretty badly with casual play IMO. Going for colored name, which while I wouldn't call it "casual", is at a level where pausing to get an advantage is basically completely negligible and forcing someone to restart because they had to pause at some point in their 7.5 minute TTOTS run is just a bummer. Especially since I think pausing at the competitive level is not very common, only really finding use in a few levels.

I don't think there is a clear objective answer to this problem which solves the problem for everyone with no downsides. Invalidating runs due to opening the pause menu, at any level, seems overkill to me and will negatively affect casual play.

I agree that the use of pausing to gain an advantage is something frowned upon and should be avoided. I think a good proposal which has been brought up before: Modify the .rrec file format to store when the player pauses and for how long. I don't know many details about the rrec system but from the small amount that I've looked at the code I believe this should be possible. This doesn't need to be shown when playing back the rrec (at least not by default), but should be knowable by moderators to see when a player pauses. When WR runs get submitted to the leaderboard with pauses in them (which you can know since it's stored in the rrec), the moderators can look it over manually to decide if the pauses gave the runner an unfair advantage and decide to not allow the run through.

Invalidating all runs, including the non-WR runs, would be very harmful to casual play, but I don't think Kalle means that. I believe the context here is strictly for world records instead of all online runs.

Given this, I cannot imagine any scenarios in which Kalle's proposal harms casual play, so I have no problem with it.

Lol yep I just edited my post after rereading Kalle's original post. I have preschool level reading comprehension apparently

I never pause during my runs. Doing so just feels scummy somehow. As far as I'm aware pausing doesn't manipulate the physics of anything so there's nothing you can do with pauses that you couldn't do without pausing. That being said what you can do is have a macro to spam escape and do a sort of ghetto slow motion gameplay which I think is very much scummy and definitely should not be allowed. Lastly there's the issue of collecting your nerves which I think I've changed my stance on. I'm not convinced one can practically achieve that, if I were on WR pace and I pause to collect my nerves I think in the time I spent paused I would only get more nervous. I suppose it's not impossible but I'm less convinced now than I might've been 6 months ago or whenever this originally came up.

I quite like the solution Kalle and I came up with where WR and or PB runs won't be submitted, though I think it has to be carried as far as Awesome and Ultimate Time runs, else someone could still pause scum to get a 2nd place time. I don't think PT/GT runs are competitive enough to need this. Another solution that Petal proposed that I'm not opposed to is having .rrecs store the data of when pauses happen and then that could be manually vetted by mods if the run is suspicious or something like that. I think having both wouldn't be awful.

Yes, to make it extra clear: I suggest that only runs that break the current WR would be blocked from being submitted to the leaderboards. Any other run would still be valid and saved normally.

I am sticking with only WR runs to straddle the line between between pro-pausing and anti-pausing. If someone wants to pause spam to beat an AT then I say let them do it. It's a single player achivement and doesn't really affect anyone else. But a WRR is a big competitive thing in this community, so that's where it really matters. If a .rrec can store the data for when pauses happen, then why not let them do that too. I am not tech savvy enough to know if they actually can, though.

Doomblah wrote: I quite like the solution Kalle and I came up with where WR and or PB runs won't be submitted, though I think it has to be carried as far as Awesome and Ultimate Time runs, else someone could still pause scum to get a 2nd place time.

I think even awesome times aren't competitive enough where pausing is an issue. If just scrutinizing WRs isn't good enough, then I think it could be up to some N leaderboard placement (like, top 10 on a given level). If you pause during the run, the game will remember you did that, and if you end up submitting a score which passes the cutoff, it won't be verified, but maybe a rrec (which hypothetically now stores pauses) can be sent to the moderators who can decide amongst themselves if the pausing was beneficial by some given guidelines.

I know that some people believe that the act of pausing at all in a run is scummy, but I don't think that is a belief that should be forced on all players, especially those just trying to get ultimate times. I strongly believe that if disallowing the use of pause is going to be something that will be enforced, that it should only affect those truly at the top level of competition.