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Am I right in thinking that the following rules that are currently listed in the rules on speedrun.com for StarCraft 1 and Brood War are also required for this competition?
* Cheat codes, hacks (maphacks, memory watchers, etc...), and macros are banned.
* Audible game sound is required.
Update (28 Jan 2025): because the OP says to register and add my attempts at speedrun.com, I'll assume that all the rules listed on speedrun.com need to be followed.
Another question:
- Main Prize: Person who holds the world records for the longest time (collectively throughout all six campaigns) will win extra $5,000.
- Days for the Main Prize will be sum up from each campaign.
Just to clarify, am I right in thinking that this is calculated as the total number of individual days that I hold SC - Terran (i.e. including multiple periods rather than just the number of days in the longest period) plus the total number of individual days that I hold SC - Protoss plus ... etc for the other campaigns?
Update (28 Jan 2025): I gather that I am correct, based on my interpretation of previous posts.
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Maybe it's overkill, but to avoid cheating using AIs, you might also consider requiring video to show someone operating a physical keyboard(/mouse) and possibly audio via microphone (to hear keypresses/clicks and voice if they speak), rather than just virtual video/audio. It's not unexpected that that during the competition period, a tech company or someone writes & trains an AI to be good at playing the StarCraft campaigns via a virtual keyboard/mouse (e.g. using existing speedrun videos), and I doubt that you would want them just submitting in-game video/audio to be eligible.
Update (28 Jan 2025): as I haven't received a reply about this yet, until instructed otherwise, I'll assume only in-game video and in-game audio is required (i.e. virtual keyboard/mouse keypress graphics or microphone/webcam required).
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Northern Ireland24347 Posts
On January 25 2025 21:35 Quatari wrote:
Maybe it's overkill, but to avoid cheating using AIs, you might also consider requiring video to show someone operating a physical keyboard(/mouse) and possibly audio via microphone (to hear keypresses/clicks and voice if they speak), rather than just virtual video/audio. It's not unexpected that that during the competition period, a tech company or someone writes & trains an AI to be good at playing the StarCraft campaigns via a virtual keyboard/mouse (e.g. using existing speedrun videos), and I doubt that you would want them just submitting in-game video/audio to be eligible.
Does such an AI exist? I mean it could, but I’d imagine it would probably cost more to train such a beast to outdo the best human runners than you’d make from winning a contest like this.
I guess it might be a rule to prevent Tool-Assisted Speedruns being done, if that were a concern.
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Well, tech companies like DeepMind are working on building a single AI to be good at playing a very wide variety of video games. SC/BW campaign speedruns might be something they could try it on, as it has a simple reward (i.e. faster is better) and it's single-player, so actions are relatively predictable (although there's some RNG due to the initial seed, which is initialized based on what the mission start time is in seconds). I'm not saying they would necessarily be any good, but who knows, especially if they are trained on existing speedrun videos, VODs, old streams, and stuff on the internet about StarCraft, like Liquipedia, TL.
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Can missions can be done in a different order than chronological order? E.g. so I can do the StarCraft 1 Terran mission 3 (Desperate Alliance) last, because that's the mission to survive for 30 minutes, so I'd rather avoid that until the rest of the attempt has been done in a record-breaking time. This would be such a time-saving measure for participants, as we could tackle the hardest or most unpredictable missions first, and minimize time wasted when restarting from scratch. I expect it would lead to even better world records at the end of the competition, because participants would probably focus more on the missions that they want to improve.
Update (28 Jan 2025): the rules written on speedrun.com currently only mention a particular mission name as the first mission, but "final mission" doesn't mention missions by name. Does "final mission" mean the final mission of the run, or the final mission if doing them in chronological order? It might seem strange to do the missions in a different order than chronological order, but what does it matter, so long as all the required missions are completed? Allowing a different order would help participants to avoid wasting time. I also notice that only the "All campaigns" run's rules says "in chronological order" - the race-specific campaigns don't. Is this intentional, or an oversight? I suggest updating the rules on the website to either say "in chronological order" or e.g. "(missions may be completed in a different order than chronological order, but only where other rules do not prevent this)".
Please confirm that $ means USD, thanks.
Update (28 Jan 2025): as I haven't received a reply about this yet, until instructed otherwise, I'll assume $ means USD.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but I'm also assuming that the Brood War Zerg mission Dark Origin (secret mission) can be skipped, as in 7thAce's current world record.
Update (28 Jan 2025): I originally wrote "The Reckoning" but I meant "Dark Origin", so I've edited it above. I notice there's a rule written on speedrun.com now that says "The secret mission, Dark Origin, is not required.", so I'll assume that's the case for this competition.
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Am I right in thinking that each "day" will be according to speedrun.com's time zone (which time zone is it exactly?), or does the website show the date in my local time zone? If it's the former, I notice there's a "History" page that would presumably allow the organizers to know who "won" each day for a campaign, throughout the entire year, without needing to look up the leader at the same exact time every day.
Update (28 Jan 2025): not all listed players seem to appear on these pages, so maybe the pages only show a limited number of recent notifications, or perhaps throttle notifications somehow, which might lead to problems figuring out the winner for each day for each campaign, after the fact. That's up to the organizers to deal with, but participants might consider backing up the relevant speedrun.com web page (is the Wayback machine working again?...) as soon as they upload a new world record, as evidence in case there's a dispute.
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The organizers could also say in the rules something to the effect that the organizers reserve the right to disqualify participants for evidence of cheating or other behavior that are not in the spirit of the competition, at the organizers' discretion.
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To be clear, pausing the timer for bathroom breaks or AFK etc is not allowed, right?
Update (28 Jan 2025): I haven't had a reply about this. https://www.speedrun.com/support/learn/site-rules says "The time of the run is the time in the video from starting condition to ending condition. It is not the time shown on the timer program, which is started and ended with human error." and Site Bans for "Splicing and/or faking/falsifying runs for any reason" and General Gameplay Rules considered cheating include "Segmented runs (runs performed in multiple sittings, often with each segment retried many times until it is made as optimal as possible) are most often disallowed.", so unless instructed otherwise, I'll assume nothing like this is allowed, and if there's a dispute with participants that do this, this post could be used to show precedence.
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Northern Ireland24347 Posts
On January 26 2025 12:29 Quatari wrote:
Well, tech companies like DeepMind are working on building a single AI to be good at playing a very wide variety of video games. SC/BW campaign speedruns might be something they could try it on, as it has a simple reward (i.e. faster is better) and it's single-player, so actions are relatively predictable (although there's some RNG due to the initial seed, which is initialized based on what the mission start time is in seconds). I'm not saying they would necessarily be any good, but who knows, especially if they are trained on existing speedrun videos, VODs, old streams, and stuff on the internet about StarCraft, like Liquipedia, TL.
If a company like that did give it a shot, they’d let you know because ‘look at what we did’ is much better for their image and funding, rather than hoovering up a few hundred dollars in small contests such as this.
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Okay, there are a lot of questions you asked. I can answer some of them as a speedrun.com moderator and not as an organizer of this event.
1. Speedrun.com rules apply.
2. Common sense speedrunning things apply. You don't have to worry about an AI taking over. There are standards in speedrunning that generally don't have to be said.
3. Play the missions in order. A player should be able to start a new profile and complete the run the same way.
4. I can't be certain, but SRC doesn't track the time that a run was done at, so thie history function should work. I'm expecting to keep a backup/have people post in the discord though.
5. SRC mods can disqualify runs if we think something illegitimate is going on. We're really hoping not to have to do that though.
6. The run is real time, so if you take a break, you're spending your valuable run time doing it. Or time on Desperate Alliance. Only one of those is valuable.
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Thanks for the speedrun.com moderator take. Unless the organizer(s) say otherwise, I'll assume that all your answers apply for this competition.
This point would probably always end up being irrelevant, but it might be a source of disputes. It's probably unlikely, but in case of run time ties by different players submitted on the same date, does only the first uploaded submission to break a record (i.e. just in terms of <minutes>:<seconds> shown) on the same day win the prizemoney for that day and onward until the record is broken, or do the players split prizemoney evenly per player until the record is broken, or are split-second timings taken into account and only the best time at the end of the day matters? Note: at least for individual levels, speedrun.com shows all tied players (e.g. https://www.speedrun.com/sc1/levels currently shows ties for the individual missions "Terran 04: The Jacobs Installation", "Terran 09: New Gettysburg", "Zerg 02: Egression") and I don't know whether there is enough info in the History page to tell which was uploaded first.
Unless the organizer(s) say otherwise, I'll assume that each "day" will be according to speedrun.com's time zone (whatever time zone that is).
I'll assume that $ means USD. There are many dollar currencies, but it would be pretty misleading if the organizers don't respond and eventually pay in some other dollar currency.
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Any updates on this? The first post hasn't been updated with the current world record holders. Who is keeping track of who has the world record on each day?
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EPT
