DDraceNetwork

Freezy

Hello dear DDNet Admins, it seems that you have deleted the most recent finishes on Adorenarine. I find it kind of disturbing that you did not made any further investigations nor provided any explanation on that matter. There was a "skip" in the map that allowed players that were at a further place (around 25 %) in the map to get players from a previous point in the map. This skip was intentionally in the map according to Konsti (Screenshot 1); I don't think it's justified to delete those ranks, given that conjectural mood swings of the mapper are facing 20 hours of work. You could arguably say that we did skip the map, however, as mentioned above it was indeed intended. Additionally, players must've played the map in a legit way to even get to this place - meaning you do not only punish the players that got skipped but also the ones that still played the map "legit". I don't think I have to state out further why those are not supposed to happen. I can pretty confidently say that one tee finished that played the whole map in its intended way through the whole map. However, this tee still took advantage of the increasement of players (which by itself is not a skip) - meaning it would simply be a disadvantage to others if they cannot finish the map the same way (like it is the case after the fix). Furthermore, I don't think the circumstances justify this fix to be meant serious as Konsti is publicly known in this community for cheating and skipping maps. Konsti also has another map on the Insane server (namely Shockwave) which had a skip quite similar to this one which for whatever reason was not fixed nor leaded to any deleted ranks and is well-known as it is even the thumbnail of a youtube video on Grk0ne's channel (Screenshot 2) - same mapper, same server type. I think that Konsti's request was shaped by double standards and that the taken measures are disproportionate as each of us still invested around 20 hours on running this map.

00:40

ban konsti

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fv

I have a question. What is everyones opinion on mappers being allowed to edit their maps to fix issues? As long as mappers are allowed to fix bugs, we have to delete ranks when they do, remember that when answering.

depends on the issue, a design issue is ok, a gameplay issue, unless its a big skip i think its better to not fix

Since ddnet exists the way of going always was that mappers can ask for an upload of their fix if unwanted issues come up. The only thing where fixing maps was very inconsistent was, when the mapper didnt care about it or is not playing anymore at all. In that case fixing the maps was pretty arbitrarily. For example that crazy cut n9 did on one of these verification maps that wasnt needed in my opinion and also the mapper didnt want/didnt care for it. There was no straight line if maps getting fixed or not. But in case of the mapper wanting it fixed and applied a version for it it was pretty much accepted in 100% of the cases.

we shouldnt base a future rule/solution solely on what we do in the past

09:24

otherwise improvements cant be made

they want to clear the solution for those cases. And that should be to get away the inconsistent ways of dealing that happened in the past.

You don't have to constrain your answer to the past. I'm just looking for opinions about what you think is the best course moving forward

09:42

I should have asked in #general actually

I don't think ranks should ever be removed, unless actual cheats were involved. If skips aren't noticed by the mapper and the testers, then it's on them, not the players... Getting your time randomly removed because a mapper decides they didn't like a skip you used, feels wrong. Bug fixes that don't change gameplay would be fine. Skips have been widely embraced for a majority of this game's existence. I think having a public ghost system similar to Trackmania would probably make skips feel less problematic, embracing the creativity of the community.

I mean i gave a license to my maps somewhen that ddnet is allowed to edit my maps on their behalf and i guess thats the case for the most mappers now (cuz we talked about licenses for the steam release) but in general the mapper unverstands the best about his own maps and knows if theres unintended things that heavily changes the idea of the map. So the mapper should have the last word about it. I do like skips in different ways but depending on the circumstances skips are overpowered or downgrade a map from brutal to moderate 1 (Unbalanced for example) and it doesnt make sense to keep those up.

You should map in such a way that these skips are impossible to do

Often skips appear after years of the map being online because new skills and physics being discovered. And mistakes happen

New tech should be embraced, let the game evolve, if it ends up changing older maps, shouldn't it be seen as a good thing?

09:54

Punishing players for mapper / tester mistakes is bad. There will be people that used skips in older maps, that think skipping in such a way is fair, then they get their times removed in some new map, it's not consistent.

09:55

If we were to enforce this rule, we would've needed to have done it from the start, in my opinion... Even then, it's not how I think a game like this should be handled.

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Skeith

If we were to enforce this rule, we would've needed to have done it from the start, in my opinion... Even then, it's not how I think a game like this should be handled.

(FWIW Konsti is sort of right about us usually allowing mappers to fix skips if they are still around, but those were mostly startline skips)

The whole point of speedrunning is to find clever ways to save time, if people end up finding map breaking skips, they shouldn't be punished for it.

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im sure there were a lot smaller and bigger gameplay related fixes applied by mappers that were accepted. In most cases it works pretty uncomplicated without a big discussion coming up. Startline skips were fixed in any case if they were detected without asking the mapper

Somehow forcing /team players to play the map legitimately would be nice, I guess

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Skeith

The whole point of speedrunning is to find clever ways to save time, if people end up finding map breaking skips, they shouldn't be punished for it.

these are 1:1 my words in the past when i was arguing against fixes. I pretty much still think so but in my opinion there is an amount of tolerance about the impact of the skip. And i dont like the idea of keeping map breaking bugs online when it leads to a big part of the map becoming totally useless. Mappers put effort into their parts and then people just fly around the map or something. For example Delirious. A wonderfull creative and fun map that legit takes about an hour. But today people play a maximum of 3 parts straight into finish which i think is super sad.

Sure, it's a shame. But it could've been entirely avoided if the mapper simply walled it off