The Future of SDA

2015-01-22 02:50:39 pm

All the things

Times are changing. The speedrunning community is significantly different from what it was five years ago. Heck, a lot of things have changed from just months ago. SDA has changed too, but a big question comes up again and again: are the changes within SDA keeping up with the growth of the community and the hobby as a whole? SDA's mission has remained solid and stable, but there's a very real question how this mission should evolve to best fit things moving forward.

Before I go any further, I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a call to arms. This is not a crusade meant to drag out the admins and interrogate them on why this or that hasn't been fixed/changed. This is about the vision of what SDA represents and the role it should aim to have within the community going forward.

SpeedDemosArchive has stuck to its mission statement pretty solidly since it started accepting speedrun videos: To host high-quality videos of video game speedruns, where quality is just as much about gameplay as it is the video itself. This was especially valuable in the darker days of the Internet, where bandwidth and video services were scarce, and capture ability was lacking. Much of this has changed; capture devices are plentiful, YouTube and Twitch reign supreme, and consumers have more bandwidth available to them than they know what to do with. Yet the mission statement hasn't changed. This may or may not be a bad thing, which I'll cover in a bit.

SDA has a few roles in terms of the resources it presently offers the speedrun community.
-Speedrun Archive. You will not find a wider collection of videos anywhere, and it is free to runners and viewers alike. This is not as valuable as it once was since videos can be uploaded to YouTube or saved as highlights on Twitch, but as a hosting service solely intended for completed speedruns there isn't a more comprehensive source anywhere. There's also some peace of mind knowing that some future policy change (see: Highlights) isn't going to wipe recordings from your channel.
-Collection of Knowledge. Having a communication medium with permanence is critical to keeping up the "state of the art" for many games years down the road. This also follows for the Knowledge Base. To keep this up, people have to want to add content; I am unsure of any objective metrics for this, but the best I can say for now is that progress feels slow. Many runners try to coordinate through other mediums, like Skype or IRC, which is a losing plan for future runners who don't know what has and has not been explored.
-Central Community Hub. This deserves its own mention because there are few other places with the brand exposure that SDA has for speedrunning. If people pick up speedrunning in any capacity, they will know about SDA. Whether they choose to join and participate with it is another matter. SDA has resources for new runners, but they have to feel like the site is useful to them in the long term or else they end up not giving anything back.
-Mark of Quality. Some people may disagree with this, but the fact is that the current quality standards for gameplay are very high. This exclusivity is a big motivating factor for pushing times lower across all games, not just the most competitive ones. The phrase "submittable run" has merit because it is not tied to any current or future record, but just means that the effort and result of the run are significant. This is actually a huge role, as no other current speedrunning resource provides a generic goal for any run to shoot for beyond the runner's own quality standards.

These roles are all somewhat interconnected, but they're being supported to varying degrees by the community and site. Now the question becomes, are these the roles it should focus on moving forward? The core mission statement of SDA is dated; pretty much everybody realizes this in some capacity. But dated does not mean obsolete. It still means that SDA exists as a quality standard without claiming to be the sole authority on categories, World Records, rules and otherwise. This is convenient from the perspective of staff resources and consistency, but it also means that the overall speedrunning community is free to decouple themselves from SDA should the paths diverge. The paths are indeed diverging. To quote a statement overheard from AGDQ, "Speedrunning overall has seen exponential growth, but SDA's growth is merely linear." If the roles SDA is supporting are no longer adequate for the community, it is time to re-evaluate its efforts in those roles.

So now we get back to the original question: how do you think SDA's mission or roles should change to keep up with the changing times?

A key missing aspect I think is that SDA is solely SDA at this point. People from the larger community come to SDA for its namesake and, prior to this year, for GDQ coordination. With Games Done Quick now as its own entity, there is no guarantee that it will continue to operate through SDA (this is purely conjecture). The remaining content is catered towards runner collaboration and archival; viewers and casual runners don't have a lot to grab on to. On that front, one solution is to change front-page updates to cover general speedrunning news as opposed to just submission announcements. You can see similar models in popular fighting game community sites, such as Shoryuken.com and Smashboards.com. This does nothing to inspire more people to submit though; that's something else that needs to be dealt with reform to either the mission, the submission system, or both.

There are many, many ways to re-imagine the purpose of SDA. The big thing is not to think of the site as the problem, but the goals of the site. Even in writing this piece I had difficulty not going off-topic to discuss radical redesigns and other off-the-wall ideas. There are many problems that can be solved by throwing programmers and graphic designers at something, but this is not one of them. Focus on the roles rather than the product. If the vision is something that people are passionate enough about, the necessary talents to achieve it will find their way to realize it. We just need to find that new vision. What do you think it should be?

Thread title:

Times are changing. The speedrunning community is significantly different from what it was five years ago. Heck, a lot of things have changed from just months ago. SDA has changed too, but a big question comes up again and again: are the changes within SDA keeping up with the growth of the community and the hobby as a whole? SDA's mission has remained solid and stable, but there's a very real question how this mission should evolve to best fit things moving forward.

Before I go any further, [b]I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a call to arms[/b]. This is not a crusade meant to drag out the admins and interrogate them on why this or that hasn't been fixed/changed. This is about the vision of what SDA represents and the role it should aim to have within the community going forward.

SpeedDemosArchive has stuck to its mission statement pretty solidly since it started accepting speedrun videos: To host high-quality videos of video game speedruns, where quality is just as much about gameplay as it is the video itself. This was especially valuable in the darker days of the Internet, where bandwidth and video services were scarce, and capture ability was lacking. Much of this has changed; capture devices are plentiful, YouTube and Twitch reign supreme, and consumers have more bandwidth available to them than they know what to do with. Yet the mission statement hasn't changed. This may or may not be a bad thing, which I'll cover in a bit.

SDA has a few roles in terms of the resources it presently offers the speedrun community. 
-[u]Speedrun Archive[/u]. You will not find a wider collection of videos anywhere, and it is free to runners and viewers alike. This is not as valuable as it once was since videos can be uploaded to YouTube or saved as highlights on Twitch, but as a hosting service solely intended for completed speedruns there isn't a more comprehensive source anywhere. There's also some peace of mind knowing that some future policy change (see: Highlights) isn't going to wipe recordings from your channel.
-[u]Collection of Knowledge[/u]. Having a communication medium with permanence is critical to keeping up the "state of the art" for many games years down the road. This also follows for the Knowledge Base. To keep this up, people have to want to add content; I am unsure of any objective metrics for this, but the best I can say for now is that progress feels slow. Many runners try to coordinate through other mediums, like Skype or IRC, which is a losing plan for future runners who don't know what has and has not been explored.
-[u]Central Community Hub[/u]. This deserves its own mention because there are few other places with the brand exposure that SDA has for speedrunning. If people pick up speedrunning in any capacity, they will know about SDA. Whether they choose to join and participate with it is another matter. SDA has resources for new runners, but they have to feel like the site is useful to them in the long term or else they end up not giving anything back.
-[u]Mark of Quality[/u]. Some people may disagree with this, but the fact is that the current quality standards for gameplay are very high. This exclusivity is a big motivating factor for pushing times lower across all games, not just the most competitive ones. The phrase "submittable run" has merit because it is not tied to any current or future record, but just means that the effort and result of the run are significant. This is actually a huge role, as no other current speedrunning resource provides a generic goal for any run to shoot for beyond the runner's own quality standards.

These roles are all somewhat interconnected, but they're being supported to varying degrees by the community and site. Now the question becomes, are these the roles it should focus on moving forward? The core mission statement of SDA is dated; pretty much everybody realizes this in some capacity. But dated does not mean obsolete. It still means that SDA exists as a quality standard without claiming to be the sole authority on categories, World Records, rules and otherwise. This is convenient from the perspective of staff resources and consistency, but it also means that the overall speedrunning community is free to decouple themselves from SDA should the paths diverge. The paths are indeed diverging. To quote a statement overheard from AGDQ, [u][i]"Speedrunning overall has seen exponential growth, but SDA's growth is merely linear."[/i][/u] If the roles SDA is supporting are no longer adequate for the community, it is time to re-evaluate its efforts in those roles.

So now we get back to the original question: [b]how do you think SDA's mission or roles should change to keep up with the changing times?[/b]

A key missing aspect I think is that SDA is solely SDA at this point. People from the larger community come to SDA for its namesake and, prior to this year, for GDQ coordination. With Games Done Quick now as its own entity, there is no guarantee that it will continue to operate through SDA (this is purely conjecture). The remaining content is catered towards runner collaboration and archival; viewers and casual runners don't have a lot to grab on to. On that front, one solution is to change front-page updates to cover general speedrunning news as opposed to just submission announcements. You can see similar models in popular fighting game community sites, such as Shoryuken.com and Smashboards.com.  This does nothing to inspire more people to submit though; that's something else that needs to be dealt with reform to either the mission, the submission system, or both.

There are many, many ways to re-imagine the purpose of SDA. The big thing is not to think of the [i]site[/i] as the problem, but the [i]goals[/i] of the site. Even in writing this piece I had difficulty not going off-topic to discuss radical redesigns and other off-the-wall ideas. There are many problems that can be solved by throwing programmers and graphic designers at something, but this is not one of them. Focus on the roles rather than the product. If the vision is something that people are passionate enough about, the necessary talents to achieve it will find their way to realize it. We just need to find that new vision. What do you think it should be?

Radix

2015-01-22 03:07:48 pm

I'm addicted to games

Maybe SDA already succeeded in its mission. Speed running is now crazy popular. 10 years ago it was a tiny niche. Some of my own coworkers (in a company of ~150) were watching AGDQ without me telling them about it - word of mouth has spread its audience very far indeed.

If the records on SDA are dated, only the runners can fix that. Submit a better run.

moooh

2015-01-22 03:15:51 pm

Exoray

If we succeeded with our original mission, we just need a new mission. We're far from done here Cheesy

Will be interesting to hear what people say and if those things are in line with what we have in mind for the upcoming years.

Ghostwheel

2015-01-22 05:10:22 pm

The artist formerly known as Qxy

I don't think SDA necessarily needs to change to keep up with the times or the community. The community isn't really a solid entity and even if a majority end up diverging from SDA either because other dedicated sites exist for those game franchises (Zelda, Metroid, etc), or because active and competitive games are often discussed on IRC, raced on SRL, and have major discussion hubs in prominent runner's channels, there's still a place for the people that need an SDA.

The standard of a submittable run keeps motivation and discussion going in runs or categories with less competition, or competition spread out over a longer period of time. Sometimes I want the rush of watching a new record even if it will likely fall within the week, but other times I want to see the run that stood the test of time, the run that the runner himself thought was good enough not to attempt to improve for a while. Streaming has changed the flow of how a lot of people want to interact with speedrunning, it hasn't moved against the kind of goal SDA has, but runs orthogonal to it. A person may want to stream and compete for different reasons; now that speedrunning is bigger, you can gain a decent following off of doing well at single segment attempts, being entertaining and putting your personality into the stream, and being a part of your game's community/the speedrunning community. It kind of makes sense that a lot of people wouldn't think about submitting their runs to SDA because that's not what they want out of their own experience. The great thing about the explosion in recent years is that now speedrunning has a lot to offer, and it attracts people who wouldn't be interested in SDA but are drawn to other aspects. Even more, they are generally active, giving us a richer community, better runs, and the ability to have strong marathons like GDQs. But even in light of this, I don't think we should forget about the kind of people that SDA is still very right for, I don't think we should try and eclipse its original goals or make it more like everything else for the sake of trying to fit in.

The policy of avoiding new game threads has kept over 10 years of info on games in rich forum threads even before the KB was revived. New runners can explore the game's history, even understand what the community is or was even if it isn't terribly active at the time they're researching. They can post incremental progress, and as has happened to me, months later find more interested people and build the community. With how often IRC, Skype, and Twitch chat are used to exchange info nowadays, I think SDA's role as a permanent forum for all of speedrunning is now more important than ever. Even if a lot of conversation goes on somewhere else or a lot of info, runs, and resources are on another site for a certain game, a KB entry linking to those pages, or pointing out where you can find the community and summarizing the run route history could go a long way. Even one necrobump in a game thread when the route gets changed or the community gets revived can go a long way. As a community, I think we can find ways to use SDA to keep that avenue open for newer people instead of leaving information scattered, outdated, or gone.

I don't think SDA necessarily needs to change to keep up with the times or the community. The community isn't really a solid entity and even if a majority end up diverging from SDA either because other dedicated sites exist for those game franchises (Zelda, Metroid, etc), or because active and competitive games are often discussed on IRC, raced on SRL, and have major discussion hubs in prominent runner's channels, there's still a place for the people that need an SDA.

The standard of a submittable run keeps motivation and discussion going in runs or categories with less competition, or competition spread out over a longer period of time. Sometimes I want the rush of watching a new record even if it will likely fall within the week, but other times I want to see the run that stood the test of time, the run that the runner himself thought was good enough not to attempt to improve for a while. Streaming has changed the flow of how a lot of people want to interact with speedrunning, it hasn't moved against the kind of goal SDA has, but runs orthogonal to it. A person may want to stream and compete for different reasons; now that speedrunning is bigger, you can gain a decent following off of doing well at single segment attempts, being entertaining and putting your personality into the stream, and being a part of your game's community/the speedrunning community. It kind of makes sense that a lot of people wouldn't think about submitting their runs to SDA because that's not what they want out of their own experience. The great thing about the explosion in recent years is that now speedrunning has a lot to offer, and it attracts people who wouldn't be interested in SDA but are drawn to other aspects. Even more, they are generally active, giving us a richer community, better runs, and the ability to have strong marathons like GDQs. But even in light of this, I don't think we should forget about the kind of people that SDA is still very right for, I don't think we should try and eclipse its original goals or make it more like everything else for the sake of trying to fit in.

The policy of avoiding new game threads has kept over 10 years of info on games in rich forum threads even before the KB was revived. New runners can explore the game's history, even understand what the community is or was even if it isn't terribly active at the time they're researching. They can post incremental progress, and as has happened to me, months later find more interested people and build the community. With how often IRC, Skype, and Twitch chat are used to exchange info nowadays, I think SDA's role as a permanent forum for all of speedrunning is now more important than ever. Even if a lot of conversation goes on somewhere else or a lot of info, runs, and resources are on another site for a certain game, a KB entry linking to those pages, or pointing out where you can find the community and summarizing the run route history could go a long way. Even one necrobump in a game thread when the route gets changed or the community gets revived can go a long way. As a community, I think we can find ways to use SDA to keep that avenue open for newer people instead of leaving information scattered, outdated, or gone.

BaronHaynes

Edit history:

BaronHaynes: 2015-01-22 06:25:21 pm

BaronHaynes: 2015-01-22 06:25:09 pm

BaronHaynes: 2015-01-22 06:21:12 pm

BaronHaynes: 2015-01-22 06:20:54 pm

2015-01-22 06:18:17 pm

Strange days, incredible days

@Ghostwheel I'm piggybacking on this quote a bit to share some larger thoughts, so this isn't meant to be a lecture or anything, dw:

Quote from Ghostwheel:

The standard of a submittable run keeps motivation and discussion going in runs or categories with less competition, or competition spread out over a longer period of time. Sometimes I want the rush of watching a new record even if it will likely fall within the week, but other times I want to see the run that stood the test of time, the run that the runner himself thought was good enough not to attempt to improve for a while.

I like the idea of an archive that represents interesting moments across a game's history, but I'm not sure if SDA's current format actually does this. For one, a lot of runs up on the site are incredibly outdated or of poor quality, being the first known time for their game and never updated because everyone involved since then is still going for improvements or doesn't want to submit a run slower than the record. My own game, Mega Man 5, is a good example. There have been a lot of notable runs of that game that stood for a long time, from Exo's 37:18 to Ohon's 36:35, not to mention whatever was done on it in the years before I followed the game. But all we have on SDA is a very unoptimized 44:12 from 2008. That's partly our fault for not submitting anything since then, but there's many, many factors behind that: Exo and Ohon both played on emulator, many recorded console times weren't up to SDA video quality standards, the game never stopped being pushed long enough to be worth the wait for SDA's long verification process, etc. Historically, SDA has had a lot of relevant runs that stood the test of time, but it also hosts a lot of bizarre, ancient runs simply because that was the last time that game's community used SDA. But someone getting into speedrunning from watching a GDQ event won't know that.

It's not entirely fair to fault SDA for not being accurately representative of the history of every game it hosts, since that's not what it purports to do. But it is kind of strange to have such a huge quality/relevance gap across all the games it hosts. It's a problem that emerged partly as consequence of the growth and decentralization of the community, but I feel like the site's own barriers to entry play a bit of a role. The design still looks like 1998, volunteer staff unfamiliar with the games write the synopses and newsposts for them (Syphon Filter 3 is described as "a Metal Gear Solid-style game" when the two play nothing alike), verification takes an extremely long time, there's no history preserved on the game pages (the most recent submission completely replaces the previous one and all its comments, which WOULD be something cool to archive), and the archive is only as representative of the community as the number of community members participating. SDA has never tried to be the hub for the community in the streaming era, but I feel like it became less relevant than it could have with some retooling and evolution.

I think the best thing SDA could do it revamp the game pages to incorporate the knowledge base and forum thread as well as all accepted runs for the game, not just the current one (it always felt strange to me to willingly delete community history like that). Having links to external resources like leaderboards or RTA wiki would also be really good, or even include links to the game's runs at GDQ events if applicable. Make the game pages more robust and provide context (mostly in the form of links to existing resources) and I think the backbone of the site would be much stronger and we might see more submissions from game communities that don't feel like submitting runs is worth it. If SDA is less insular and at least acknowledges the other places to find information about a speedgame, as well as consolidate its own resources into a single page rather than make you dig through the forums and game pages and knowledge base separately, I think everyone would benefit at no expense to the site's vision (no WR claims, no outside links to other speedrun videos etc.)

The other big thing would be to streamline the submission>verification>front page process. The last run I submitted (Snapshot) took 6 months to make it to the front page, and it had already been accepted for most of that time. I don't know what it's like on the back end, but it's hard to get excited about getting a run on SDA that interested people saw half a year ago. Verification took several weeks too, understandable for a fairly unknown game, but it also took 3 weeks before it was even eligible for public verification, when it could've been pushed there immediately. Finding where to verify runs is still weirdly cumbersome and it's strange to have to wait days or weeks for the run to become available, rather than watch and review it right away when you're already interested. Again, I don't know what the back end is like, but getting a submission through the site's bureaucratic machinery is a big obstacle for people.

I would also ease up on the video and audio restrictions, allowing lower quality (i.e. Twitch) encodes and non-game audio like runner commentary. Most people don't bother to separately record the game audio outside of whatever streaming software they're using anymore. There should probably be some standards on what's acceptable, but I'd imagine a decent majority of great runs are simply not eligible for SDA anymore because of this restriction, and it doesn't seem necessary to me. I understand if people disagree on this one, but it would open up a LOT of potential submissions.

I've been on SDA since 2005 and I'd love to see it go another 10 years or more. I think it can be more relevant beyond GDQ events, and provide interesting history and a knowledge base for the speedrunning community along with an archive of high-quality runs. Whatever happens, it's great to have been (and continue to be) a part of it.

@Ghostwheel I'm piggybacking on this quote a bit to share some larger thoughts, so this isn't meant to be a lecture or anything, dw:

[quote="Ghostwheel"]The standard of a submittable run keeps motivation and discussion going in runs or categories with less competition, or competition spread out over a longer period of time. Sometimes I want the rush of watching a new record even if it will likely fall within the week, but other times I want to see the run that stood the test of time, the run that the runner himself thought was good enough not to attempt to improve for a while.[/quote]
I like the idea of an archive that represents interesting moments across a game's history, but I'm not sure if SDA's current format actually does this. For one, a lot of runs up on the site are incredibly outdated or of poor quality, being the first known time for their game and never updated because everyone involved since then is still going for improvements or doesn't want to submit a run slower than the record. My own game, Mega Man 5, is a good example. There have been a lot of notable runs of that game that stood for a long time, from Exo's 37:18 to Ohon's 36:35, not to mention whatever was done on it in the years before I followed the game. But all we have on SDA is a very unoptimized 44:12 from 2008. That's partly our fault for not submitting anything since then, but there's many, many factors behind that: Exo and Ohon both played on emulator, many recorded console times weren't up to SDA video quality standards, the game never stopped being pushed long enough to be worth the wait for SDA's long verification process, etc. Historically, SDA has had a lot of relevant runs that stood the test of time, but it also hosts a lot of bizarre, ancient runs simply because that was the last time that game's community used SDA. But someone getting into speedrunning from watching a GDQ event won't know that.

It's not entirely fair to fault SDA for not being accurately representative of the history of every game it hosts, since that's not what it purports to do. But it is kind of strange to have such a huge quality/relevance gap across all the games it hosts. It's a problem that emerged partly as consequence of the growth and decentralization of the community, but I feel like the site's own barriers to entry play a bit of a role. The design still looks like 1998, volunteer staff unfamiliar with the games write the synopses  and newsposts for them (Syphon Filter 3 is described as "a Metal Gear Solid-style game" when the two play nothing alike), verification takes an extremely long time, there's no history preserved on the game pages (the most recent submission completely replaces the previous one and all its comments, which WOULD be something cool to archive), and the archive is only as representative of the community as the number of community members participating. SDA has never tried to be the hub for the community in the streaming era, but I feel like it became less relevant than it could have with some retooling and evolution.

I think the best thing SDA could do it revamp the game pages to incorporate the knowledge base and forum thread as well as all accepted runs for the game, not just the current one (it always felt strange to me to willingly delete community history like that). Having links to external resources like leaderboards or RTA wiki would also be really good, or even include links to the game's runs at GDQ events if applicable. Make the game pages more robust and provide context (mostly in the form of links to existing resources) and I think the backbone of the site would be much stronger and we might see more submissions from game communities that don't feel like submitting runs is worth it. If SDA is less insular and at least acknowledges the other places to find information about a speedgame, as well as consolidate its own resources into a single page rather than make you dig through the forums and game pages and knowledge base separately, I think everyone would benefit at no expense to the site's vision (no WR claims, no outside links to other speedrun videos etc.)

The other big thing would be to streamline the submission>verification>front page process. The last run I submitted (Snapshot) took 6 months to make it to the front page, and it had already been accepted for most of that time. I don't know what it's like on the back end, but it's hard to get excited about getting a run on SDA that interested people saw half a year ago. Verification took several weeks too, understandable for a fairly unknown game, but it also took 3 weeks before it was even eligible for public verification, when it could've been pushed there immediately. Finding where to verify runs is still weirdly cumbersome and it's strange to have to wait days or weeks for the run to become available, rather than watch and review it right away when you're already interested. Again, I don't know what the back end is like, but getting a submission through the site's bureaucratic machinery is a big obstacle for people.

I would also ease up on the video and audio restrictions, allowing lower quality (i.e. Twitch) encodes and non-game audio like runner commentary. Most people don't bother to separately record the game audio outside of whatever streaming software they're using anymore. There should probably be some standards on what's acceptable, but I'd imagine a decent majority of great runs are simply not eligible for SDA anymore because of this restriction, and it doesn't seem necessary to me. I understand if people disagree on this one, but it would open up a LOT of potential submissions.

I've been on SDA since 2005 and I'd love to see it go another 10 years or more. I think it can be more relevant beyond GDQ events, and provide interesting history and a knowledge base for the speedrunning community along with an archive of high-quality runs. Whatever happens, it's great to have been (and continue to be) a part of it.

Naegleria

(user is banned)

2015-01-22 07:29:01 pm

More focus on knowledge base. It's extremely underrated and few people use it.

tekkie

2015-01-22 07:30:11 pm

~

Quote from Naegleria:

More focus on knowledge base. It's extremely underrated and few people use it.

Agreed; it's extremely important.

Brossentia

2015-01-22 07:39:42 pm

No pain, no gain

At this point, I feel that SDA is starting has been the central hub for the community, but that has been changing, mostly because the site isn't doing much to encourage that central feeling. In my opinion, this is something the community needs. Here's what I feel would help.

1. A community-focused front page. Simply put, SDA mostly plans the big marathons, but not much else happens here (aside from some planning in the forums). By having news and updates that take the entire community into consideration, this will help everyone know what's happening. I have to go digging to find out what marathons or events are happening; the information is out there, but I don't have one place that reliably has it. SDA could do that.

2. A knowledge base that's worth reading. I have no clue how many people use it, but I don't think many do. Strategies and information are huge to learning how to run a game, and there's no place that has a good repository. I think most people visiting SDA don't even know it exists.

3. An inclusiveness of videos outside of those submitted to the site. I know some people like the videos here, but they almost seem unimportant now; almost everything is outdated. If I want the best speedrun, I go to YouTube first. I feel that the site holds back when it only posts about videos on the site when, in reality, much better runs are out there.

Those are my thoughts. Again, these are mostly with the thought that the community would greatly benefit.

At this point, I feel that SDA is starting has been the central hub for the community, but that has been changing, mostly because the site isn't doing much to encourage that central feeling. In my opinion, this is something the community needs. Here's what I feel would help.

[b]1. A community-focused front page.[/b] Simply put, SDA mostly plans the big marathons, but not much else happens here (aside from some planning in the forums). By having news and updates that take the entire community into consideration, this will help everyone know what's happening. I have to go digging to find out what marathons or events are happening; the information is out there, but I don't have one place that reliably has it. SDA could do that.

[b]2. A knowledge base that's worth reading.[/b] I have no clue how many people use it, but I don't think many do. Strategies and information are huge to learning how to run a game, and there's no place that has a good repository. I think most people visiting SDA don't even know it exists.

[b]3. An inclusiveness of videos outside of those submitted to the site.[/b] I know some people like the videos here, but they almost seem unimportant now; almost everything is outdated. If I want the best speedrun, I go to YouTube first. I feel that the site holds back when it only posts about videos on the site when, in reality, much better runs are out there.

Those are my thoughts. Again, these are mostly with the thought that the community would greatly benefit.

__sdfg

Edit history:

__sdfg: 2015-01-22 07:59:30 pm

2015-01-22 07:50:55 pm

D:

Quote from Aaron_Haynes:

I think the best thing SDA could do it revamp the game pages to incorporate the knowledge base and forum thread as well as all accepted runs for the game, not just the current one (it always felt strange to me to willingly delete community history like that).

This would be pretty cool. It would draw more attention to the knowledgebase (it seems everyone agrees this could use more activity) and hopefully encourage people to discuss runs in the forum (which also seems kind of dead lately).

Also, while I know most of the old runs are preserved on archive.org, having a way to flip through them without having to deal with the archive.org search interface would be really helpful. And it would preserve the comments -- the (defunct) Historical Records KB page says to use the Wayback Machine to get comments for runs submitted in the last 6-7 years. Hopefully, if this were implemented, the comments for runs obsoleted during that time could still be recovered. >_>

[quote="Aaron_Haynes"]I think the best thing SDA could do it revamp the game pages to incorporate the knowledge base and forum thread as well as all accepted runs for the game, not just the current one (it always felt strange to me to willingly delete community history like that).[/quote]
This would be pretty cool.  It would draw more attention to the knowledgebase (it seems everyone agrees this could use more activity) and hopefully encourage people to discuss runs in the forum (which also seems kind of dead lately).

Also, while I know most of the old runs are preserved on archive.org, having a way to flip through them without having to deal with the archive.org search interface would be really helpful.  And it would preserve the comments -- the (defunct) [url=https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Historical_Records]Historical Records KB page[/url] says to use the Wayback Machine to get comments for runs submitted in the last 6-7 years.  Hopefully, if this were implemented, the comments for runs obsoleted during that time could still be recovered. >_>

Vulajin

Edit history:

Vulajin: 2015-01-22 08:11:39 pm

2015-01-22 08:10:52 pm

All of the staff will be reading this thread, and we're very interested to hear what the community thinks -- even [and especially] from people who have determined at some point that SDA is not a relevant site to them. If you would do us the favor of telling us why SDA is or is not relevant to you, we're more than happy to listen.

SDA has been something for a long time, but that does not mean that is the thing it is meant to be forever. We want SDA to be a major part of the speedrunning community. At present, it's debatable as to whether that is the case or not. But there is nothing debatable about our desire to be relevant and to fill a useful role in the community. We are looking to do what it takes to make that happen.

AlecK47

2015-01-22 08:53:02 pm

I think the sense of insularity and detachment from the community is probably the single biggest obstacle SDA faces as of now, and there are some design ideas already posed here that could alleviate a significant amount of it.

Personally, I have long wished obsoleted runs could have a presence on their game page (except, perhaps for cheated runs and the like), even if it's nothing more than a link to the archive page. Outside of a couple offhand comments, I don't think I've really talked about it much, but I think it would be a neat feature that would significantly improve the archive portion of SDA. It would be no small task, but much like the selection of highlights and bloopers from the marathons, I have no doubt that at least certain elements of it could be crowdsourced.

The idea of a more community-focused front page may be the best I've seen here, though. Things are happening all over, and places like ZSR, ffspeedruns, etc. are highly unlikely to disappear any time soon. Anything from WR's, new glitches being found or smaller marathons and events being held, can be legitimate and interesting news, and I see no reason why an event planned and hosted elsewhere like SRL's Get Started Speedrunning events couldn't be plugged on the SDA front page, for example. Brief updates on things happening in the community would be tangible evidence that SDA and its staff acknowledge and appreciate the community as a whole. Again, perception is one of the biggest problems SDA faces right now, and putting something right out there on the front page is a great way to make new efforts get noticed. There are a lot of people who follow many different parts of the community as well, and social media helps greatly on that front, so I'm confident that people willing and capable of filling the role of a "this week in speedrunning" kind of post can be found.

As for video quality, I'm really of two minds on that. I think there's definite value in having a good quality video of a run that doesn't have a stream overlay and/or the runner talking to his/her chat along with (or even in place of) the game audio, but the idea of being able to take a lower quality capture of a good run than might be considered acceptable at this time is at least worth discussing. Just how much more would be OK, I don't know, and I can't say I even have a very strong opinion on the matter. Regardless, video quality is not at all my area of expertise, so I'd personally like to hear some ideas from those who have more knowledge on the matter.

Finally, the KB has been discussed before and I think that something should be done to promote it more and I approve of the suggestions so far (links on a game page, especially). One of the best things to do would be to get good coverage for more games, as a more comprehensive list of games with good resources would naturally generate more interest and respect for the KB. Linking to other sites for games that already have equivalent resources on said sites was also an idea that was floated earlier, and I think it should at least be reexamined. Being able to find the information is more important than hosting it, as far as I am concerned, so why not set up a stub page linking to Game X's wiki/tutorial/whatever elsewhere if it's a good source, assuming there are no complaints about doing so? And for that matter, I can't see any good reason why the hosts linked to would mind that more people are going to be able to find and use their resources. Of course some games' pages already do this to some extent (like how F Zero GX links to fzerocentral), but I really think it would be a good idea to do it for more many more games, as quite a few have excellent resources elsewhere.

I think the sense of insularity and detachment from the community is probably the single biggest obstacle SDA faces as of now, and there are some design ideas already posed here that could alleviate a significant amount of it.

Personally, I have long wished obsoleted runs could have a presence on their game page (except, perhaps for cheated runs and the like), even if it's nothing more than a link to the archive page.  Outside of a couple offhand comments, I don't think I've really talked about it much, but I think it would be a neat feature that would significantly improve the [b]archive[/b] portion of SDA.  It would be no small task, but much like the selection of highlights and bloopers from the marathons, I have no doubt that at least certain elements of it could be crowdsourced.

The idea of a more community-focused front page may be the best I've seen here, though.  Things are happening all over, and places like ZSR, ffspeedruns, etc. are highly unlikely to disappear any time soon.  Anything from WR's, new glitches being found or smaller marathons and events being held, can be legitimate and interesting news, and I see no reason why an event planned and hosted elsewhere like SRL's Get Started Speedrunning events couldn't be plugged on the SDA front page, for example.  Brief updates on things happening in the community would be tangible evidence that SDA and its staff acknowledge and appreciate the community as a whole.  Again, perception is one of the biggest problems SDA faces right now, and putting something right out there on the front page is a great way to make new efforts get noticed.  There are a lot of people who follow many different parts of the community as well, and social media helps greatly on that front, so I'm confident that people willing and capable of filling the role of a "this week in speedrunning" kind of post can be found.

As for video quality, I'm really of two minds on that.  I think there's definite value in having a good quality video of a run that doesn't have a stream overlay and/or the runner talking to his/her chat along with (or even in place of) the game audio, but the idea of being able to take a lower quality capture of a good run than might be considered acceptable at this time is at least worth discussing.  Just how much more would be OK, I don't know, and I can't say I even have a very strong opinion on the matter.  Regardless, video quality is not at all my area of expertise, so I'd personally like to hear some ideas from those who have more knowledge on the matter.

Finally, the KB has been discussed before and I think that something should be done to promote it more and I approve of the suggestions so far (links on a game page, especially).  One of the best things to do would be to get good coverage for more games, as a more comprehensive list of games with good resources would naturally generate more interest and respect for the KB.  Linking to other sites for games that already have equivalent resources on said sites was also an idea that was floated earlier, and I think it should at least be reexamined.  Being able to find the information is more important than hosting it, as far as I am concerned, so why not set up a stub page linking to Game X's wiki/tutorial/whatever elsewhere if it's a good source, assuming there are no complaints about doing so?  And for that matter, I can't see any good reason why the hosts linked to would mind that more people are going to be able to find and use their resources.  Of course some games' pages already do this to some extent (like how F Zero GX links to fzerocentral), but I really think it would be a good idea to do it for more many more games, as quite a few have excellent resources elsewhere.

ING-X

2015-01-22 09:02:13 pm

umad

Hello,

I'm actually very glad this is getting brought up. Back when I started speedrunning in 2009-2010, SDA was still the center of the community, and what I liked about it was that speedrunning wasn't just a competitive endeavor - it was almost like an art form. It was about working toward creating a final product that would serve to represent the game you were running, and that would be etched into speedrunning history by being put on the SDA page for the game.

Back then, most games only had one (maybe two) people working on a run for each category, so working on a run felt very meaningful - it was like you were working to create something that no one else was going to do, something that would really mean something. I had that experience when I was working on my Majora's Mask run, and although it was frustrating, the sight of the end goal gave me motivation, and in the end it was all worth it when I finally struck gold with a finished product. I was beginning to work on doing the same thing with Twilight Princess in late 2011 and early 2012, but I ended up stopping due to personal life struggles and going on a roughly 2-year hiatus. By the time I came back, everything had changed completely - every game/category now had tons of competition, and world records were getting beaten left and right. Speedrunning had shifted from being an "art" to being more like a purely competitive endeavor, and while this has resulted in AMAZING progress in nearly every game, it has left SDA - the home of the old form of speedrunning I had enjoyed so much - more or less in the dust, as many posters in this topic have pointed out.

Personal reminiscing aside, the issue (as I see it) is that the competitive goal of having the fastest time for a particular game/category (the "world record", as we now say) has become divorced from the artistic/creative goal of making a run to represent the game/category on SDA. In the past, these two goals more or less went together: runs submitted to SDA were almost always the fastest known time for that game/category, and usually remained so by the time they were put up on the site. The competitive and artistic aspects of speedrunning blended seamlessly together because the community was relatively small and (as a result) runners were usually competing with the current run on the site rather than directly with each other. But this is no longer true; as the community has gotten larger and competition has gotten more fierce, SDA has become incapable of keeping up, and those interested in competition for world records have looked elsewhere to showcase their runs.

This has created a tension between the competitive and artistic sides of speedrunning. The people constantly going for world records in the most popular games have moved on from SDA, while the people (like me) who are still just interested in making new runs for SDA have become discouraged from doing so because of the negative stigma behind submitting a run that isn't the world record. The most egregious case of this was ZFG who submitted an OoT any% world record to SDA a couple of years ago, only to retract the submission when the run was beaten by a few seconds because it wasn't the world record anymore. Another example is my own case: When I came back to the speedrunning community early last year, my interest was in finishing my old project of getting a new Twilight Princess run up on SDA (which no one else seemed to have any interest in doing by that point), but I was discouraged by the prospect of submitting a run that wasn't the world record. What if I got a run that was very clean and by all measures acceptable for SDA submission, but was (say) 30 seconds off the world record (which isn't much in a 3 hour run)? What would the other TP community members think if I submitted that run? Would they reject it during verification? Would someone else get a world record run and submit it themselves to nullify my submission the day afterwards? These questions kept running through my head, and that (combined with the stress of re-learning a game I had already known so well in the past) resulted in me just giving up out of a lack of motivation.

I suspect that dead-ends like this are very common and have resulted in many runners seeing little to no point in submitting to SDA in this day and age. Competition can be a great thing for encouraging faster times, but it can also discourage people from wanting to put in the effort to submit to SDA if they're afraid that their submission is going to either be rejected (because someone else has a faster time) or immediately obsoleted by a new submission before it even has a chance to get on the site. It might be tempting to deal with this problem by making SDA more like a leaderboards site (where 2nd-place submissions still get on the site), but I feel like that would destroy what made SDA so unique in the first place. What SDA needs is a business model that takes into account - no, takes as a central premise - the fact that getting a run on SDA and getting the fastest time in a game have become two separate and sometimes incompatible goals.

I spoke earlier of speedrunning having 2 aspects: the competitive aspect, which consists of getting the fastest time in a game, and the artistic aspect, which consists of getting a finished product put up to represent the game. What the past few years have shown is that SDA excels at serving as an engine for the artistic aspect of speedrunning, but is simply not compatible with the competitive aspect once competition reaches a certain level. This is not a bad thing - in fact, I think it could be what makes SDA unique from the other speedrunning sites out there today. It has been said many times that "SDA is not a world records site"; what we need to do is update our image and policies to better reflect this.

Hello,

I'm actually very glad this is getting brought up. Back when I started speedrunning in 2009-2010, SDA was still the center of the community, and what I liked about it was that speedrunning wasn't just a competitive endeavor - it was almost like an art form. It was about working toward creating a final product that would serve to represent the game you were running, and that would be etched into speedrunning history by being put on the SDA page for the game.

Back then, most games only had one (maybe two) people working on a run for each category, so working on a run felt very meaningful - it was like you were working to create something that no one else was going to do, something that would really mean something. I had that experience when I was working on my Majora's Mask run, and although it was frustrating, the sight of the end goal gave me motivation, and in the end it was all worth it when I finally struck gold with a finished product. I was beginning to work on doing the same thing with Twilight Princess in late 2011 and early 2012, but I ended up stopping due to personal life struggles and going on a roughly 2-year hiatus. By the time I came back, everything had changed completely - every game/category now had tons of competition, and world records were getting beaten left and right. Speedrunning had shifted from being an "art" to being more like a purely competitive endeavor, and while this has resulted in AMAZING progress in nearly every game, it has left SDA - the home of the old form of speedrunning I had enjoyed so much - more or less in the dust, as many posters in this topic have pointed out.

Personal reminiscing aside, the issue (as I see it) is that the competitive goal of having the fastest time for a particular game/category (the "world record", as we now say) has become divorced from the artistic/creative goal of making a run to represent the game/category on SDA. In the past, these two goals more or less went together: runs submitted to SDA were almost always the fastest known time for that game/category, and usually remained so by the time they were put up on the site. The competitive and artistic aspects of speedrunning blended seamlessly together because the community was relatively small and (as a result) runners were usually competing with the current run on the site rather than directly with each other. But this is no longer true; as the community has gotten larger and competition has gotten more fierce, SDA has become incapable of keeping up, and those interested in competition for world records have looked elsewhere to showcase their runs.

This has created a tension between the competitive and artistic sides of speedrunning. The people constantly going for world records in the most popular games have moved on from SDA, while the people (like me) who are still just interested in making new runs for SDA have become discouraged from doing so because of the negative stigma behind submitting a run that isn't the world record. The most egregious case of this was ZFG who submitted an OoT any% world record to SDA a couple of years ago, only to retract the submission when the run was beaten by a few seconds because it wasn't the world record anymore. Another example is my own case: When I came back to the speedrunning community early last year, my interest was in finishing my old project of getting a new Twilight Princess run up on SDA (which no one else seemed to have any interest in doing by that point), but I was discouraged by the prospect of submitting a run that wasn't the world record. What if I got a run that was very clean and by all measures acceptable for SDA submission, but was (say) 30 seconds off the world record (which isn't much in a 3 hour run)? What would the other TP community members think if I submitted that run? Would they reject it during verification? Would someone else get a world record run and submit it themselves to nullify my submission the day afterwards? These questions kept running through my head, and that (combined with the stress of re-learning a game I had already known so well in the past) resulted in me just giving up out of a lack of motivation.

I suspect that dead-ends like this are very common and have resulted in many runners seeing little to no point in submitting to SDA in this day and age. Competition can be a great thing for encouraging faster times, but it can also [b]discourage[/b] people from wanting to put in the effort to submit to SDA if they're afraid that their submission is going to either be rejected (because someone else has a faster time) or immediately obsoleted by a new submission before it even has a chance to get on the site. It might be tempting to deal with this problem by making SDA more like a leaderboards site (where 2nd-place submissions still get on the site), but I feel like that would destroy what made SDA so unique in the first place. What SDA needs is a business model that takes into account - no, takes as a [b]central premise[/b] - the fact that [b]getting a run on SDA and getting the fastest time in a game have become two separate and sometimes incompatible goals.[/b]

I spoke earlier of speedrunning having 2 aspects: the competitive aspect, which consists of getting the fastest time in a game, and the artistic aspect, which consists of getting a finished product put up to represent the game. What the past few years have shown is that [b]SDA excels at serving as an engine for the artistic aspect of speedrunning, but is simply not compatible with the competitive aspect once competition reaches a certain level.[/b] This is not a bad thing - in fact, [b]I think it could be what makes SDA unique from the other speedrunning sites out there today.[/b] It has been said many times that "SDA is not a world records site"; what we need to do is update our image and policies to better reflect this.

AlteisenRiese

2015-01-22 09:27:28 pm

Old Iron Giant

I think the biggest thing SDA needs right now is a gigantic overhaul, this site has looked the same for years and years, its still kind of cumbersome to navigate and its still full out outdated runs for certain games.

This place is like an old internet museum sometimes, I really feel it needs to be overhauled, not saying you need to modernize shit or add sigs or whatever, but the site needs a ton of work to bring it into the 21st century.

I don't have any faith that any of it will happen, I remember like 2 years ago all big the SDA guys had this stream talking about future, site overhaul, leaderboards, all kinds of stuff and none of it ever happened.

Also agreeing with Naegleria, site needs way more resources for people interested in running, if you could get people involved it would be better as you could have speedrunning resources in spanish, swedish, etc.

TheMG2

2015-01-22 09:38:24 pm

Quote from AlteisenRiese:

I think the biggest thing SDA needs right now is a gigantic overhaul, this site has looked the same for years and years, its still kind of cumbersome to navigate and its still full out outdated runs for certain games.

This place is like an old internet museum sometimes, I really feel it needs to be overhauled, not saying you need to modernize shit or add sigs or whatever, but the site needs a ton of work to bring it into the 21st century.

I don't have any faith that any of it will happen, I remember like 2 years ago all big the SDA guys had this stream talking about future, site overhaul, leaderboards, all kinds of stuff and none of it ever happened.

The leaderboards were srl not sda, and they were canceled in favor of the speedrun.com leaderboards. http://www.speedrunslive.com/news/announcement-13-11-14/

About the sda stuff, I asked about this a while ago. The response to that: https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/question_about_announced_developments_to_sda_talked_about_last_year.html

[quote="AlteisenRiese"]I think the biggest thing SDA needs right now is a gigantic overhaul, this site has looked the same for years and years, its still kind of cumbersome to navigate and its still full out outdated runs for certain games.

This place is like an old internet museum sometimes, I really feel it needs to be overhauled, not saying you need to modernize shit or add sigs or whatever, but the site needs a ton of work to bring it into the 21st century.

I don't have any faith that any of it will happen, I remember like 2 years ago all big the SDA guys had this stream talking about future, site overhaul, leaderboards, all kinds of stuff and none of it ever happened.
[/quote]
The leaderboards were srl not sda, and they were canceled in favor of the speedrun.com leaderboards. http://www.speedrunslive.com/news/announcement-13-11-14/

About the sda stuff, I asked about this a while ago. The response to that: https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/question_about_announced_developments_to_sda_talked_about_last_year.html

Crow!

2015-01-22 10:28:46 pm

What's that gemma?

SDA's "planning" subforums are a bit odd in that the standard is for there to be ONE thread for each game. Someone looking for information finds threads that are grouped by era of console, rather than by series. Individual threads can be very difficult to navigate once they exceed 20 pages' worth of information.

Would there be some sense in having, for those games which actually have SDA videos, the discussion for each game somehow attached to the game page? Even just adding a link to the planning thread and a link to the Knowledge Base would be nice, but I can imagine a lot more functionality than that.

Mr. Kelly R. Flewin

2015-01-22 10:47:43 pm

Learning to Stream

SDA is NOT a WR site... I don't know why people keep presuming that it is... and that's a huge stigma that needs to go.

People dream big, yeah... but there's this thing called... Real Life. It's not just a comic strip [Though the RL comic strip is cool]. It takes a lot of people to make the magic all go down and happen, and with life being as it is, that can make something dreamed of to be done in a single month... take a decade. No fault of anyones... it happens.

And I am speaking from some experience here... a long time back [2004], I helped a webmaster slowly but surely port over the Twin Galaxies website from the dinosaur of disaster it was, into something not too shabby for its time. There was just a handful of us doing all the porting and believe me, it was EXTREMELY time consuming. At that point in my life, I literally had nothing better to do and I threw myself hardcore into it, with weekends literally dissolving away in the blink of an eye with only a few small breaks to eat, toilet and sleep.

But that was with the several of us dedicating ourselves as much as we could and all of us not having any real things in our lives to keep us away from working.

If we had distractions of real life as we do now... yeah... that site would still be beyond craptacular. [I have not been there since I retired... I took a bow and left to pursue life and integrate myself more into the community here... which I've kinda sorta done.]

The one thing I can positively say to all of this, the more the community offers suggestions and ideas, the more this site can grow. The more whom have the know how and can help and offer to lend a hand... the more likely things can actually develop and become reality.

This community is HUGE, the site is HUGE! It takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to help build an empire.

Let's see how we can come together as a whole and raise a rank of volunteers whom the site admins feel are sincere and can bring the noise and get this party really started.

SDA is NOT a WR site... I don't know why people keep presuming that it is... and that's a huge stigma that needs to go.

People dream big, yeah... but there's this thing called... Real Life. It's not just a comic strip [Though the RL comic strip is cool]. It takes a lot of people to make the magic all go down and happen, and with life being as it is, that can make something dreamed of to be done in a single month... take a decade. No fault of anyones... it happens.

And I am speaking from some experience here... a long time back [2004], I helped a webmaster slowly but surely port over the Twin Galaxies website from the dinosaur of disaster it was, into something not too shabby for its time. There was just a handful of us doing all the porting and believe me, it was EXTREMELY time consuming. At that point in my life, I literally had nothing better to do and I threw myself hardcore into it, with weekends literally dissolving away in the blink of an eye with only a few small breaks to eat, toilet and sleep.

But that was with the several of us dedicating ourselves as much as we could and all of us not having any real things in our lives to keep us away from working.

If we had distractions of real life as we do now... yeah... that site would still be beyond craptacular. [I have not been there since I retired... I took a bow and left to pursue life and integrate myself more into the community here... which I've kinda sorta done.]

The one thing I can positively say to all of this, the more the community offers suggestions and ideas, the more this site can grow. The more whom have the know how and can help and offer to lend a hand... the more likely things can actually develop and become reality.

This community is HUGE, the site is HUGE! It takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to help build an empire.

Let's see how we can come together as a whole and raise a rank of volunteers whom the site admins feel are sincere and can bring the noise and get this party really started.

Omnigamer

Edit history:

Omnigamer: 2015-01-22 11:19:57 pm

2015-01-22 11:18:00 pm

All the things

Quote from AlteisenRiese:

I think the biggest thing SDA needs right now is a gigantic overhaul, this site has looked the same for years and years, its still kind of cumbersome to navigate and its still full out outdated runs for certain games.

This place is like an old internet museum sometimes, I really feel it needs to be overhauled, not saying you need to modernize shit or add sigs or whatever, but the site needs a ton of work to bring it into the 21st century.

I don't have any faith that any of it will happen, I remember like 2 years ago all big the SDA guys had this stream talking about future, site overhaul, leaderboards, all kinds of stuff and none of it ever happened.

Also agreeing with Naegleria, site needs way more resources for people interested in running, if you could get people involved it would be better as you could have speedrunning resources in spanish, swedish, etc.

Quote from Crow!:

SDA's "planning" subforums are a bit odd in that the standard is for there to be ONE thread for each game. Someone looking for information finds threads that are grouped by era of console, rather than by series. Individual threads can be very difficult to navigate once they exceed 20 pages' worth of information.

Would there be some sense in having, for those games which actually have SDA videos, the discussion for each game somehow attached to the game page? Even just adding a link to the planning thread and a link to the Knowledge Base would be nice, but I can imagine a lot more functionality than that.

While this is valid criticism for the site, this is simply addressing things as they currently stands. Beautification isn't going to help much if the flaw is in the aim of the site; if general users aren't invested in the content, making it look pretty isn't going to solve anything. On the other hand, if you think the current focus of the site is fine and the only way it should be improved is through fixing up the infrastructure, that's good to know too.

[quote="AlteisenRiese"]I think the biggest thing SDA needs right now is a gigantic overhaul, this site has looked the same for years and years, its still kind of cumbersome to navigate and its still full out outdated runs for certain games.

This place is like an old internet museum sometimes, I really feel it needs to be overhauled, not saying you need to modernize shit or add sigs or whatever, but the site needs a ton of work to bring it into the 21st century.

I don't have any faith that any of it will happen, I remember like 2 years ago all big the SDA guys had this stream talking about future, site overhaul, leaderboards, all kinds of stuff and none of it ever happened.

Also agreeing with Naegleria, site needs way more resources for people interested in running, if you could get people involved it would be better as you could have speedrunning resources in spanish, swedish, etc.[/quote]
[quote="Crow!"]SDA's "planning" subforums are a bit odd in that the standard is for there to be ONE thread for each game.  Someone looking for information finds threads that are grouped by era of console, rather than by series.  Individual threads can be very difficult to navigate once they exceed 20 pages' worth of information.

Would there be some sense in having, for those games which actually have SDA videos, the discussion for each game somehow attached to the game page?  Even just adding a link to the planning thread and a link to the Knowledge Base would be nice, but I can imagine a lot more functionality than that.[/quote]

While this is valid criticism for the site, this is simply addressing things as they currently stands. Beautification isn't going to help much if the flaw is in the aim of the site; if general users aren't invested in the content, making it look pretty isn't going to solve anything. On the other hand, if you think the current focus of the site is fine and the only way it should be improved is through fixing up the infrastructure, that's good to know too.

Gaël

2015-01-22 11:23:23 pm

personally, I feel like SDA has failed as an archive when they became irrelevant to entire communities by refusing decent runs despite verifiers acceptance because "they felt the category wasn't worth it" or when they kept timing runs with absurd timing method disregarded by the runners themselves.

Also like others said before, one thread per game (or sometimes series) is completely ineficent. Nobody want to go throught a 50+ pages thread started almost 8 years ago to find information on a useless-at-the-time trick to see if it could be useful with newest knowledge, and the search feature on the forum doesn't make it any easier.
The KB is a great idea but it just doesn't work it's mostly empty because 99.9% of the speedrunning community doesn't know about its existence.

I don't think SDA should change its video quality requirement because I like the idea of being able to find a clean recording of a run, but SDA should make a better job at informing people that it isn't a WR site, linking to leaderboard and other communities hub

personally, I feel like SDA has failed as an archive when they became irrelevant to entire communities by refusing decent runs despite verifiers acceptance because "they felt the category wasn't worth it" or when they kept timing runs with absurd timing method disregarded by the runners themselves.

Also like others said before, one thread per game (or sometimes series) is completely ineficent. Nobody want to go throught a 50+ pages thread started almost 8 years ago to find information on a useless-at-the-time trick to see if it could be useful with newest knowledge, and the search feature on the forum doesn't make it any easier.
The KB is a great idea but it just doesn't work it's mostly empty because 99.9% of the speedrunning community doesn't know about its existence.

I don't think SDA should change its video quality requirement because I like the idea of being able to find a clean recording of a run, but SDA should make a better job at informing people that it isn't a WR site, linking to leaderboard and other communities hub

Mystery

2015-01-22 11:28:33 pm

What I would find amazing is a portal or a hub that brings together runs and speedrunners from different games and communities into a single place so that it becomes easier to find runs, runners, communication, etc. Looking for a <insert X here> run? Already watched the one on SDA? Then how about watching a recent run attempt by a runner?

So, to me, a good goal for SDA could be to:

Gather runners, so people can more easily find each other. This applies for everyone: runners, routers, people who just want to watch runs, etc.

Gather those runs. People want to watch runs, and that's a big attraction and part of what SDA is about today. But that doesn't mean we should accept low-quality twitch runs without game audio. I believe SDA should try to work with runners to enable them to be able to capture high-quality runs, in addition to streaming.

Mind you, it does not need to be super high quality, but it must be better than the usual twitch streaming quality. To me, the biggest reason I don't watch runners streaming is that quality is often very poor in my opinion. Youtube has also historically been poor in the quality department for many games, although I'm not sure if youtube has raised the bitrate in recent times. The videos does not need to be the latest and greatest. There does not need to be strict requirements on the runs, such as that it must be a new record, or that it must follow a community accepted category.

Anyway, that's a little about the direction I think is good idea. I realize everything may not be possible, but hey, before an action plan is done, one must first have a vision, right?

What I would find amazing is a portal or a hub that brings together runs and speedrunners from different games and communities into a single place so that it becomes easier to find runs, runners, communication, etc. Looking for a <insert X here> run? Already watched the one on SDA? Then how about watching a recent run attempt by a runner?

So, to me, a good goal for SDA could be to:

Gather runners, so people can more easily find each other. This applies for everyone: runners, routers, people who just want to watch runs, etc.

Gather those runs. People want to watch runs, and that's a big attraction and part of what SDA is about today. But that doesn't mean we should accept low-quality twitch runs without game audio. I believe SDA should try to work with runners to enable them to be able to capture high-quality runs, in addition to streaming.

Mind you, it does not need to be super high quality, but it must be better than the usual twitch streaming quality. To me, the biggest reason I don't watch runners streaming is that quality is often very poor in my opinion. Youtube has also historically been poor in the quality department for many games, although I'm not sure if youtube has raised the bitrate in recent times. The videos does not need to be the latest and greatest. There does not need to be strict requirements on the runs, such as that it must be a new record, or that it must follow a community accepted category.

Anyway, that's a little about the direction I think is good idea. I realize everything may not be possible, but hey, before an action plan is done, one must first have a vision, right?

mike89

2015-01-22 11:38:20 pm

SEGA Junkie

I'm really glad you made this topic, Omnigamer, because you just saved me a whole lot of trouble. :p

The way I've come to view the speedrunning community as it's expanded beyond just SDA itself is as a series of tools. As a speedrunner, whether you're a newcomer or a veteran, aside from your own time spent speedrunning as a member of the community you want to contribute in various ways, and the tools within the community let you do that. The way I see it, here's the way everything's laid out now:
* speedrun.com has become almost a one-stop leaderboard site, which has been the big gap in our toolkit for years. Obviously the larger series (Zelda, Mega Man, etc) which had their own leaderboards elsewhere aren't part of that so it isn't truly one stop yet, but all it takes is for the site to link over to those leaderboards and 95+% of the community's leaderboard needs are covered.
* SRL is for "here and now". Not just races any more, but everyone's regular streams, as well as, increasingly, being the first point of call for newcomers after a GDQ event, particularly with the new series of entry level races. As a resource, you're here if you're looking for someone who plays your game, as well as just being a source of entertainment and social interaction. It's almost become our own TV station we used to dream about years ago!
* TASvideos - well, it's kind of in the name. It does also have, however, a lot of information on a more technical level than the average speedrunner probably needs, but the kind of information you might go looking for if you want to get really in-depth with your game.
* GDQ being a separate entity now means it holds a place here too, at least for the parts of the year when they're upcoming. But otherwise there's not really much to say about this.

Which leaves SDA, which has in the past tried to be all things to all people, but isn't really being any of them right now. In my opinion, the answer to "what should SDA be doing?" fits within this framework, but as much as possible without overlapping. Foremost in my mind is information and strategy, ergo the Knowledge Base. But the obvious problem is that it's hidden away. It's a damn shame, too, because I know Mr. K did a lot of work on the way we wanted to have those pages set out, and hardly anyone jumped on it. If I were making news posts, I'd have this front and centre in the next one: this is what we want to create with the Knowledge Base, here's how we want to do it, now just add your expertise in your game!

But overall, I think we need to be asking the question "what tools are missing from the community at large?" And then SDA, or some other service, can fill that void. Importantly, it can't just be us asking that question, but newbies especially. If there's something you would expect to see in the wider community and you can't find it anywhere, then that's a sign that we should direct resources at making those things happen.

I'm really glad you made this topic, Omnigamer, because you just saved me a whole lot of trouble. :p

The way I've come to view the speedrunning community as it's expanded beyond just SDA itself is as a series of tools. As a speedrunner, whether you're a newcomer or a veteran, aside from your own time spent speedrunning as a member of the community you want to contribute in various ways, and the tools within the community let you do that. The way I see it, here's the way everything's laid out now:
* speedrun.com has become almost a one-stop leaderboard site, which has been the big gap in our toolkit for years. Obviously the larger series (Zelda, Mega Man, etc) which had their own leaderboards elsewhere aren't part of that so it isn't [i]truly[/i] one stop yet, but all it takes is for the site to link over to those leaderboards and 95+% of the community's leaderboard needs are covered.
* SRL is for "here and now". Not just races any more, but everyone's regular streams, as well as, increasingly, being the first point of call for newcomers after a GDQ event, particularly with the new series of entry level races. As a resource, you're here if you're looking for someone who plays your game, as well as just being a source of entertainment and social interaction. It's almost become our own TV station we used to dream about years ago!
* TASvideos - well, it's kind of in the name. It does also have, however, a lot of information on a more technical level than the average speedrunner probably needs, but the kind of information you might go looking for if you want to get really in-depth with your game.
* GDQ being a separate entity now means it holds a place here too, at least for the parts of the year when they're upcoming. But otherwise there's not really much to say about this.

Which leaves SDA, which has in the past tried to be all things to all people, but isn't really being any of them right now. In my opinion, the answer to "what should SDA be doing?" fits within this framework, but as much as possible without overlapping. Foremost in my mind is information and strategy, ergo the Knowledge Base. But the obvious problem is that it's hidden away. It's a damn shame, too, because I know Mr. K did a lot of work on the way we wanted to have those pages set out, and hardly anyone jumped on it. [b]If I were making news posts, I'd have this front and centre in the next one[/b]: this is what we want to create with the Knowledge Base, here's how we want to do it, now just add your expertise in your game!

But overall, I think we need to be asking the question "what tools are missing from the community at large?" And then SDA, or some other service, can fill that void. Importantly, it can't just be us asking that question, but newbies especially. If there's something you would expect to see in the wider community and you can't find it anywhere, then that's a sign that we should direct resources at making those things happen.

Viskiv

Edit history:

Viskiv: 2015-01-23 01:16:19 am

Viskiv: 2015-01-23 12:49:28 am

Viskiv: 2015-01-23 12:41:45 am

Viskiv: 2015-01-23 12:40:01 am

Viskiv: 2015-01-23 12:38:49 am

Viskiv: 2015-01-23 12:36:18 am

Viskiv: 2015-01-23 12:33:16 am

Viskiv: 2015-01-23 12:32:07 am

2015-01-23 12:28:51 am

Figured I'd throw in my two cents as an outsider; I've checked in on the site once in a while for many years but beyond that have had zero involvement.

SDA, as it stands, feels almost completely obsolete outside of the organisation and running of GDQs (as important as that is). Despite billing itself as "the premier community for video game speedruns" (as per the GDQ blurb), it's actually not at all - SRL undeniably took over as a more central hub of the overall speedrunning community years ago during the rise of speedrunning on Twitch, though even then it's not really central and the speedrunning community is highly fragmented.

There are a number of reasons as to why SDA has fallen by the wayside in relevancy. Speedrunning moving to Twitch was a big one; SDA in no way attempted to adapt to streaming becoming increasingly tied to speedrunning, and if people want to see speedruns they watch on Twitch with no need to come here. This is exacerbated by the glacially slow verification process that posts runs months after they're submitted, by which point they're frequently obsoleted already in a world where the speedrunning community pushes games far, far harder than they were pushed five years ago. I'm aware that SDA does not see itself as a world record archive, but the reality is that if people want to watch a run of a game, they're simply going to prefer watching the best run of the game highlighted on Twitch or posted to Youtube rather than an outdated run from months ago... even if it is a higher quality vod than what you typically see from a stream.

The forums and knowledgebase are both of limited use now; as far as knowledgebases go generally the communities dedicated enough to create such a resource just make their own wikis or tutorials, and otherwise information is spread by direct interaction. The most common way of learning about speedruns now is to just talk to people who run the game, and that interaction doesn't usually take place on slow, clunky forums with 20 page threads anymore - it happens on SRL IRC channels, it happens on Twitch chats, it happens on programs like Skype, all of which allow more direct conversation.

SDA maintaining its own way of doing things in the face of change hasn't helped; a few examples of this are the fact that many communities allow accurate emulators for older games and have differing timing standards and category rules. The people who actually run the games and SDA are on completely different pages and it's SDA that failed to adapt to the evolution of the individual communities.

I feel like "failed to adapt" is the main motif of my post; the speedrunning community changed completely over the years but SDA did not. As a result, for the most part the people who care about SDA are the people who were around in its heyday, and not the hugely expanded community that boomed over the past couple of years. At this point, I don't have any proposals for what SDA could do to improve things, but I wanted to provide outside perspective for identifying the reasons why SDA is no longer the "premier community" it once was so that perhaps something could be done about them going forward.

Edit: Actually, after reading Mike's post above, one proposal I have is to really put the knowledgebase front and center. In its current state it's not used for reasons mentioned earlier in my post, but if a push could be made to make SDA fill a central information role, in the way that speedrun.com took initiative in forming central leaderboards, it might actually work out and give SDA renewed purpose. I do think having a strong knowledgebase would be a huge boon to the community at large as many wikis/tutorials aren't kept up to date and outside of those it would be fantastic to have permanent resources for new runners beyond directly asking current runners of the game. However, in order for it to grow, I do think it needs to be pushed hard - simply having the knowledgebase existing obviously doesn't cut it.

Figured I'd throw in my two cents as an outsider; I've checked in on the site once in a while for many years but beyond that have had zero involvement.

SDA, as it stands, feels almost completely obsolete outside of the organisation and running of GDQs (as important as that is). Despite billing itself as "the premier community for video game speedruns" (as per the GDQ blurb), it's actually not at all - SRL undeniably took over as a more central hub of the overall speedrunning community years ago during the rise of speedrunning on Twitch, though even then it's not really central and the speedrunning community is highly fragmented.

There are a number of reasons as to why SDA has fallen by the wayside in relevancy. Speedrunning moving to Twitch was a big one; SDA in no way attempted to adapt to streaming becoming increasingly tied to speedrunning, and if people want to see speedruns they watch on Twitch with no need to come here. This is exacerbated by the glacially slow verification process that posts runs months after they're submitted, by which point they're frequently obsoleted already in a world where the speedrunning community pushes games far, far harder than they were pushed five years ago. I'm aware that SDA does not see itself as a world record archive, but the reality is that if people want to watch a run of a game, they're simply going to prefer watching the best run of the game highlighted on Twitch or posted to Youtube rather than an outdated run from months ago... even if it is a higher quality vod than what you typically see from a stream.

The forums and knowledgebase are both of limited use now; as far as knowledgebases go generally the communities dedicated enough to create such a resource just make their own wikis or tutorials, and otherwise information is spread by direct interaction. The most common way of learning about speedruns now is to just talk to people who run the game, and that interaction doesn't usually take place on slow, clunky forums with 20 page threads anymore - it happens on SRL IRC channels, it happens on Twitch chats, it happens on programs like Skype, all of which allow more direct conversation.

SDA maintaining its own way of doing things in the face of change hasn't helped; a few examples of this are the fact that many communities allow accurate emulators for older games and have differing timing standards and category rules. The people who actually run the games and SDA are on completely different pages and it's SDA that failed to adapt to the evolution of the individual communities.

I feel like "failed to adapt" is the main motif of my post; the speedrunning community changed completely over the years but SDA did not. As a result, for the most part the people who care about SDA are the people who were around in its heyday, and not the hugely expanded community that boomed over the past couple of years. At this point, I don't have any proposals for what SDA could do to improve things, but I wanted to provide outside perspective for identifying the reasons why SDA is no longer the "premier community" it once was so that perhaps something could be done about them going forward.

Edit: Actually, after reading Mike's post above, one proposal I have is to really put the knowledgebase front and center. In its current state it's not used for reasons mentioned earlier in my post, but if a push could be made to make SDA fill a central information role, in the way that speedrun.com took initiative in forming central leaderboards, it might actually work out and give SDA renewed purpose. I do think having a strong knowledgebase would be a huge boon to the community at large as many wikis/tutorials aren't kept up to date and outside of those it would be fantastic to have permanent resources for new runners beyond directly asking current runners of the game. However, in order for it to grow, I do think it needs to be pushed hard - simply having the knowledgebase existing obviously doesn't cut it.

Cronikeys

2015-01-23 01:01:18 am

trying to avoid wall of text

-better forum searching and organization would be a big plus like other people have mentioned. the current system is slow and organized as if sda were still a garage hobby. i still like making new threads for 'obscure' games to pool interest (something that's recommended on the FAQ), but they're usually drowned to page 4 within a few hours

-if there are concerns about srl being the "go-to" site after GDQ then fix that. right now the home page of sda is a whole lot of text on what looks like a 1990s geocities site. there's a place for the news/blog, but it hardly feels like a modern web community when they're talking about things that happened 5 months ago. a more portal-y front page with blocks of info like recent forum threads/posts, recent submissions, "featured submission," "pending runs," whatever. compare tasvideos front page to sda front page

as for the future goals of the site: like others have said, speedrun.com is the 1-stop shop for leaderboards, but imho lbs are only good for two things. 1) finding wr and 2) finding out who runs the game. even if sda wants to maintain the "good run over good time" mindset, revamping the game page to be more of a resource than a single-column "This guy did this run in this time 9 years ago." page that would be cool. linking the knowledge base, game pages, and forum threads together basically.

tldr: sda's fine but organized very poorly. outdated navigation, lack of relevant info on any page, non-integrated resources (the forum, game pages, knowledgebase, site-wide search, and general failure to acknowledge any external sites)

side-note as for future goals: IMHO the speedrunning community needs some sort of overseer for organization of categories and game rules. the current "let the game's sub-community decide" doesn't work in all cases. not saying sda should be a dictator, but some cross-game standardization would be nice to see again

trying to avoid wall of text

[b]-better forum searching[/b] and organization would be a big plus like other people have mentioned. the current system is slow and organized as if sda were still a garage hobby. i still like making new threads for 'obscure' games to pool interest (something that's recommended on the FAQ), but they're usually drowned to page 4 within a few hours

[b]-if there are concerns about srl being the "go-to" site after GDQ then fix that.[/b] right now the home page of sda is a whole lot of text on what looks like a 1990s geocities site.  there's a place for the news/blog, but it hardly feels like a modern web community when they're talking about things that happened 5 months ago. a more portal-y front page with blocks of info like recent forum threads/posts, recent submissions, "featured submission," "pending runs," whatever. compare tasvideos front page to sda front page

as for the future goals of the site: like others have said, speedrun.com is the 1-stop shop for leaderboards, but imho lbs are only good for two things. 1) finding wr and 2) finding out who runs the game. even if sda wants to maintain the "good run over good time" mindset, revamping the game page to be more of a resource than a single-column "This guy did this run in this time 9 years ago." page that would be cool. [b]linking the knowledge base, game pages, and forum threads together[/b] basically.

tldr: sda's fine but organized very poorly. outdated navigation, lack of relevant info on any page, non-integrated resources (the forum, game pages, knowledgebase, site-wide search, and general failure to acknowledge any external sites)

side-note as for future goals: IMHO the speedrunning community needs some sort of overseer for organization of categories and game rules. the current "let the game's sub-community decide" doesn't work in all cases. not saying sda should be a dictator, but some [b]cross-game standardization would be nice to see again[/b]

Nyasupan

Edit history:

Nyasupan: 2015-02-10 02:14:08 am

Nyasupan: 2015-01-23 06:32:02 am

2015-01-23 03:20:05 am

I found a lot of usefull advice i this post, and I think the same of the majority of the replies here.
When I first came in touch with speedrunning 2 years ago I mostly came to this site without knowing his history and I watched some runs of my favorite games. I got into speedrunning more and more and I found out other tools like the reddit page, SRL, the dedicated sites for different communities and more recently PB Tracker nad Speedruns.com and the main "problem" I saw was that the community was scattered between different sites, hubs, and leaderboards. I wasn't paying attention to tat side of the speedrunning world because I was just a mere spectator watching runs and sometimes discussing of funny events in that guy stream or during that marathon. When I was just that, for me SDA was just an archive of runs.

Some time later I started speedrunning without taking it seriously, I ran dishonored and valkirya chronicles without caring if something was bad or even if I could finish the run. I triet to search for infos on SDA and I found out alone where to search for games, I had to read pages and pages of thread founding out outdated info first and then discover new things. Everything was confused and kinda misplaced, it was hard to find everything I wanted and need without juggling between twitch, chats, threads, youtube, exterlan sites, pastebin links found in someone's video... It was really hard and i felt discouraged in participating because even if I had a general knowledge of the game, everything was confused and I feared that the answer to my question could be the 10th link to an external source. I had to learn by try and error which elements of SDA coul be usefull.

Now I have an organized library of resources, I know more about the speedrunning world, I know where to find vods and infos, what I missed when I was trying to take speedrunning to the next level was the community. I came here, I searched in the forum for the right thread and I came in touch with my game community. After that I logged on IRC/Skype and used that to discuss the game. When I want to find video resources for some game I first go on youtube and search for reference there, then Twitch and last SDA. The real purpose of this site to me has now become the place to be in touch with the community.

This was a short story of my shorter 2 year history with speedrunning but the important thing I wanted to point out was that now we have many services for watching runs and discovering info, many tools scattered across the internet and what I think we miss is a general HUB that can lead newer and older player to the right place, could it be a leaderboard or a wiki page. What I think SDA needs it's a newer way of thinking focused on spreading the knowledge for games, giving the player a better interaction with the speedrunnign community and his personal community. The practical solution to this? I agree with Croonikeys when he says:

Quote from Cronikeys:

trying to avoid wall of text

-better forum searching and organization would be a big plus like other people have mentioned. the current system is slow and organized as if sda were still a garage hobby. i still like making new threads for 'obscure' games to pool interest (something that's recommended on the FAQ), but they're usually drowned to page 4 within a few hours

-if there are concerns about srl being the "go-to" site after GDQ then fix that. right now the home page of sda is a whole lot of text on what looks like a 1990s geocities site. there's a place for the news/blog, but it hardly feels like a modern web community when they're talking about things that happened 5 months ago. a more portal-y front page with blocks of info like recent forum threads/posts, recent submissions, "featured submission," "pending runs," whatever. compare tasvideos front page to sda front page

as for the future goals of the site: like others have said, speedrun.com is the 1-stop shop for leaderboards, but imho lbs are only good for two things. 1) finding wr and 2) finding out who runs the game. even if sda wants to maintain the "good run over good time" mindset, revamping the game page to be more of a resource than a single-column "This guy did this run in this time 9 years ago." page that would be cool. linking the knowledge base, game pages, and forum threads together basically.

and more important I totally agree when she goes:

Quote from Cronikeys:

side-note as for future goals: IMHO the speedrunning community needs some sort of overseer for organization of categories and game rules. the current "let the game's sub-community decide" doesn't work in all cases. not saying sda should be a dictator, but some cross-game standardization would be nice to see again

Closing up with a really personal thought, to me the strong arm of SDA is its forum and I think it could be even stronger. I am italian and we study latin here, whe study how to write and read in latin, we study the meanings of word and we study the etymology of latin words. The word FORUM is a latin word and it was used to describe an open space where the life of the city took place. Every forum were big, decorated with statues and paintings telling the recents event in history to the humble people (most of the time war campaign) but it was the testimony of something that the roman civilization did. People lives took place inside the forum, they exchanged knowledge and resources to live, would it be food or clothes, they used the forum to excange part of thei lives together. I think this could be the potential of SDA, becoming again the main hub for speedrunning.

PS: As I said I am Italian and I'm sorry if I wrote something wrong, my english isn't so good still but will improve with practice Tongue

I found a lot of usefull advice i this post, and I think the same of the majority of the replies here.
When I first came in touch with speedrunning 2 years ago I mostly came to this site without knowing his history and I watched some runs of my favorite games. I got into speedrunning more and more and I found out other tools like the reddit page, SRL, the dedicated sites for different communities and more recently PB Tracker nad Speedruns.com and the main "problem" I saw was that the community was scattered between different sites, hubs, and leaderboards. I wasn't paying attention to tat side of the speedrunning world because I was just a mere spectator watching runs and sometimes discussing of funny events in that guy stream or during that marathon. [b]When I was just that, for me SDA was just an archive of runs[/b].

Some time later I started speedrunning without taking it seriously, I ran dishonored and valkirya chronicles without caring if something was bad or even if I could finish the run. I triet to search for infos on SDA and I found out alone where to search for games, I had to read pages and pages of thread founding out outdated info first and then discover new things. Everything was confused and kinda misplaced, it was hard to find everything I wanted and need without juggling between twitch, chats, threads, youtube, exterlan sites, pastebin links found in someone's video... It was really hard and i felt discouraged in participating because even if I had a general knowledge of the game, everything was confused and I feared that the answer to my question could be the 10th link to an external source. [b]I had to learn by try and error which elements of SDA coul be usefull.[/b]

Now I have an organized library of resources, I know more about the speedrunning world, I know where to find vods and infos, what I missed when I was trying to take speedrunning to the next level was the community. I came here, I searched in the forum for the right thread and I came in touch with my game community. After that I logged on IRC/Skype and used that to discuss the game. When I want to find video resources for some game I first go on youtube and search for reference there, then Twitch and last SDA. [b]The real purpose of this site to me has now become the place to be in touch with the community.[/b]

This was a short story of my shorter 2 year history with speedrunning but the important thing I wanted to point out was that now we have many services for watching runs and discovering info, many tools scattered across the internet and what I think we miss is a general HUB that can lead newer and older player to the right place, could it be a leaderboard or a wiki page. What I think SDA needs it's a newer way of thinking focused on spreading the knowledge for games, giving the player a better interaction with the speedrunnign community and his personal community. The practical solution to this? I agree with Croonikeys when he says:

[quote="Cronikeys"]trying to avoid wall of text

[b]-better forum searching[/b] and organization would be a big plus like other people have mentioned. the current system is slow and organized as if sda were still a garage hobby. i still like making new threads for 'obscure' games to pool interest (something that's recommended on the FAQ), but they're usually drowned to page 4 within a few hours

[b]-if there are concerns about srl being the "go-to" site after GDQ then fix that.[/b] right now the home page of sda is a whole lot of text on what looks like a 1990s geocities site.  there's a place for the news/blog, but it hardly feels like a modern web community when they're talking about things that happened 5 months ago. a more portal-y front page with blocks of info like recent forum threads/posts, recent submissions, "featured submission," "pending runs," whatever. compare tasvideos front page to sda front page

as for the future goals of the site: like others have said, speedrun.com is the 1-stop shop for leaderboards, but imho lbs are only good for two things. 1) finding wr and 2) finding out who runs the game. even if sda wants to maintain the "good run over good time" mindset, revamping the game page to be more of a resource than a single-column "This guy did this run in this time 9 years ago." page that would be cool. [b]linking the knowledge base, game pages, and forum threads together[/b] basically.[/quote]

and more important I totally agree when she goes:

[quote="Cronikeys"]side-note as for future goals: IMHO the speedrunning community needs some sort of overseer for organization of categories and game rules. the current "let the game's sub-community decide" doesn't work in all cases. not saying sda should be a dictator, but some [b]cross-game standardization would be nice to see again[/b][/quote]

Closing up with a really personal thought, to me the strong arm of SDA is its forum and I think it could be even stronger. I am italian and we study latin here, whe study how to write and read in latin, we study the meanings of word and we study the etymology of latin words. The word FORUM is a latin word and it was used to describe an open space where the life of the city took place. Every forum were big, decorated with statues and paintings telling the recents event in history to the humble people (most of the time war campaign) but it was the testimony of something that the roman civilization did. People lives took place inside the forum, they exchanged knowledge and resources to live, would it be food or clothes, they used the forum to excange part of thei lives together. I think this could be the potential of SDA, becoming again the main hub for speedrunning.

PS: As I said I am Italian and I'm sorry if I wrote something wrong, my english isn't so good still but will improve with practice :P

Lag.Com

2015-01-23 05:29:05 am

sda loyalist

I have always seen SDA's role as providing a useful, achievable standard for speedrunning (and speedrun footage). Whether people want that standard or not is up to them.

Mystery

Edit history:

Mystery: 2015-01-23 05:35:41 am

2015-01-23 05:35:28 am

Side note, but...

Quote from Nyasupan:

...I agree with Croonikeys when he says:

Cronikeys is female. Please don't assume gender.