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Thanks to Breath of the Wild, I've recently enjoyed watching a few speedruns and it's amazing to see the number of glitches in BoTW. Check this out https://www.

Thanks to Breath of the Wild, I've recently enjoyed watching a few speedruns and it's amazing to see the number of glitches in BoTW. Check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEtHpCfi_DE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEtHpCfi_DE I also don't understand how anyone can accept speedrunning through glitches as a world record, but I guess if everyone does the same run with similar or the same glitches then it's fair? Seems like it just becomes a race to know every glitch in the game. EDIT: I just want to say thank you to the replies that explains the mechanics and categories of speedrunning.

fredleblanc 7y ago
They break it into categories. 100%, Any%, glitched, glitchless, etc. To set a record with glitches doesn’t put you against people that run without them.
- Figs 7y ago
  Yeah, to give some examples, [1] is a world-record ("WR") Hollow Knight Any% run with "No Major Glitches" ("NMG") completed in 33:07 just a few weeks ago. [2] is an Any% run that takes full advantage of glitches, and is over 10 minutes faster as a result (20:21 from November last year). [3] is an example of doing a complete 112% (i.e. getting everything that counts towards the regular completion percentage plus the DLC), and consequently takes over 3 hours. (That particular run was 3:23:34 from last June.) I mostly understand what's going on in the first -- a few minor bugs get used (like falling faster when the menu is open) and it takes advantage of things like changing the language to Chinese to skip text faster as well as quiting to the main menu to warp back to the last bench, but primarily the run depends on exploiting mechanics that are intentionally part of the regular gameplay but which allow the player to sequence break (like dying deliberately by the charm vendor to spawn your shade so that you can bounce off the shade while fighting it to get into the Resting Grounds quickly) and knowing exactly how to move to get through areas as fast as possible. For [2], I'm honestly not sure what is even going on for a lot of it. I think the speedrunner gets outside the level geometry by exploiting a bug with how loading works? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFZy2gtwpI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFZy2gtwpI4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAw-_uYhAlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAw-_uYhAlU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCOmg5kpCM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCOmg5kpCM8
xena 7y ago
A lot of the glitches in breath of the wild are just systems of the game interacting in weird ways. There are sometimes "glitchless" categories, but sometimes it's very difficult to figure out what is and is not a glitch. Calling something a "glitch" or not is a surprisingly subjective thing. To one player it may be a legitimate use of the bullet-time mechanic to turn frozen enemies into physics cannons while shield-surfing on them. To another it's a glitch. A lot of what gets decided as for the run comes down to the amount of time that using that strategy results in. Lowest wins. Any% in breath of the wild means "kill Ganon ASAP".
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  This can get super heated. There was a controversial "glitchless" run of Mirror's Edge at GDQ a few years back... Sometimes people make a "no major glitches" or "no OOB" category, where specific glitches are disallowed, but others are allowed.
  - nineumbrellas 7y ago
    If we're thinking of the same Mirror's Edge run, that was meant to be a joke and to bring to light the ridiculousness of a "glitchless" run as a lot of things can be interpreted as a glitch or not.
    - steveklabnik 7y ago
      Interesting! Thanks for this; this happened just as I was getting into speed running, and I, like many others apparently, didn’t realize that, but I did some googling over lunch and it appears this was the case! Thank you for the extra context.
huffmsa 7y ago
Playing the meta is part of the game. If you're not loading in other code or using 3rd party assistance, it's fair. Understanding the buy strategy in CSGO doesn't make you a "cheater", in means you understand how to stretch the game to it's limits. Mike Vrabel taking penalties to burn the clock might seen unfair, but he was just leveraging the rules as written to improve his chances of winning.
- SloopJon 7y ago
  > Mike Vrabel taking penalties to burn the clock might seen unfair Certainly not unfair to do it against Bill Belichick, who did almost the exact same thing earlier in the season--first time I'd ever seen a delay of game or false start penalty declined.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  > Understanding the buy strategy in CSGO doesn't make you a "cheater", in means you understand how to stretch the game to it's limits. the economy in cs is a core mechanic of the game. I don't know of any buy strategies that are even close to considered "exploits". a better example would be illegal boosts. in the old days, there were many OP positions you could get into by boosting on top of other players (or even throwables in midair). each competitive league would have its own lists of illegal boost spots for each map. boosting on throwables was almost always illegal. you could also do stuff like defuse through walls, which was always illegal. bunnyhopping was something of a grey area. some leagues allowed it, while others didn't. it was eventually patched out of the default game settings behind an svar. allowing literally anything that didn't involve loading external code would have severely broken cs:source. there were even ways of replacing assets that would effectively give you wallhacks without injecting any code. these decisions always comes down to "how much does this deviate from the balance designed by the developer?" and most importantly "is the game still fun with this behavior?"
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    All good points, but additionally: sometimes it's good to wait and see where a glitch takes a game, rather than banning it straight away because it 'breaks' the version of the game that everyone has been playing so far. A classic example is the Quake series, where the movement mechanics that gave the games lasting appeal were all originally accidental. (And Carmack even briefly patched strafe-jumping out of Q3, before quickly reverting -- but only because his fix caused other problems: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/02/quake-3-john-carmack-strafejumping/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/02/quake-3-john-car...) David Sirlin also writes well about this sort of thing (with more of a focus on 'cheap' use of intended mechanics), though his tone could be offputting to people who think hyper-competitive videogaming is a bit silly: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win
Ocerge 7y ago
Sorry for the downvotes. For the speedrunning community, somebody pointing out that using glitches during a speedrun is cheating is a bit like making an obvious joke about somebody's last name. Not the first time they've heard it, and won't be the last :)
- michaelbrooks 7y ago
  I only pointed it out because I wanted to understand the reasons, especially when world records are being set. However, I accept your apology and reasoning for downvoting me, and I would never point it out during someone's speedrun since I would just want to enjoy their achievements.
steveklabnik 7y ago
For some extra context here, the "100%/any%" thing comes from Metroid, which would give you a percentage score at the end of the game. So "any%" came to mean "literally anything goes, get to the end of the game." This culture has carried over to games that don't explicitly tell you how much of the game you've completed.

fredleblanc 7y ago

They break it into categories. 100%, Any%, glitched, glitchless, etc. To set a record with glitches doesn’t put you against people that run without them.

Figs 7y ago
Yeah, to give some examples, [1] is a world-record ("WR") Hollow Knight Any% run with "No Major Glitches" ("NMG") completed in 33:07 just a few weeks ago. [2] is an Any% run that takes full advantage of glitches, and is over 10 minutes faster as a result (20:21 from November last year). [3] is an example of doing a complete 112% (i.e. getting everything that counts towards the regular completion percentage plus the DLC), and consequently takes over 3 hours. (That particular run was 3:23:34 from last June.) I mostly understand what's going on in the first -- a few minor bugs get used (like falling faster when the menu is open) and it takes advantage of things like changing the language to Chinese to skip text faster as well as quiting to the main menu to warp back to the last bench, but primarily the run depends on exploiting mechanics that are intentionally part of the regular gameplay but which allow the player to sequence break (like dying deliberately by the charm vendor to spawn your shade so that you can bounce off the shade while fighting it to get into the Resting Grounds quickly) and knowing exactly how to move to get through areas as fast as possible. For [2], I'm honestly not sure what is even going on for a lot of it. I think the speedrunner gets outside the level geometry by exploiting a bug with how loading works? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFZy2gtwpI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFZy2gtwpI4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAw-_uYhAlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAw-_uYhAlU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCOmg5kpCM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCOmg5kpCM8

xena 7y ago

A lot of the glitches in breath of the wild are just systems of the game interacting in weird ways. There are sometimes "glitchless" categories, but sometimes it's very difficult to figure out what is and is not a glitch. Calling something a "glitch" or not is a surprisingly subjective thing. To one player it may be a legitimate use of the bullet-time mechanic to turn frozen enemies into physics cannons while shield-surfing on them. To another it's a glitch. A lot of what gets decided as for the run comes down to the amount of time that using that strategy results in. Lowest wins. Any% in breath of the wild means "kill Ganon ASAP".

steveklabnik 7y ago
This can get super heated. There was a controversial "glitchless" run of Mirror's Edge at GDQ a few years back... Sometimes people make a "no major glitches" or "no OOB" category, where specific glitches are disallowed, but others are allowed.
- nineumbrellas 7y ago
  If we're thinking of the same Mirror's Edge run, that was meant to be a joke and to bring to light the ridiculousness of a "glitchless" run as a lot of things can be interpreted as a glitch or not.
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    Interesting! Thanks for this; this happened just as I was getting into speed running, and I, like many others apparently, didn’t realize that, but I did some googling over lunch and it appears this was the case! Thank you for the extra context.

huffmsa 7y ago

Playing the meta is part of the game. If you're not loading in other code or using 3rd party assistance, it's fair. Understanding the buy strategy in CSGO doesn't make you a "cheater", in means you understand how to stretch the game to it's limits. Mike Vrabel taking penalties to burn the clock might seen unfair, but he was just leveraging the rules as written to improve his chances of winning.

SloopJon 7y ago
> Mike Vrabel taking penalties to burn the clock might seen unfair Certainly not unfair to do it against Bill Belichick, who did almost the exact same thing earlier in the season--first time I'd ever seen a delay of game or false start penalty declined.
leetcrew 7y ago
> Understanding the buy strategy in CSGO doesn't make you a "cheater", in means you understand how to stretch the game to it's limits. the economy in cs is a core mechanic of the game. I don't know of any buy strategies that are even close to considered "exploits". a better example would be illegal boosts. in the old days, there were many OP positions you could get into by boosting on top of other players (or even throwables in midair). each competitive league would have its own lists of illegal boost spots for each map. boosting on throwables was almost always illegal. you could also do stuff like defuse through walls, which was always illegal. bunnyhopping was something of a grey area. some leagues allowed it, while others didn't. it was eventually patched out of the default game settings behind an svar. allowing literally anything that didn't involve loading external code would have severely broken cs:source. there were even ways of replacing assets that would effectively give you wallhacks without injecting any code. these decisions always comes down to "how much does this deviate from the balance designed by the developer?" and most importantly "is the game still fun with this behavior?"
- retsibsi 7y ago
  All good points, but additionally: sometimes it's good to wait and see where a glitch takes a game, rather than banning it straight away because it 'breaks' the version of the game that everyone has been playing so far. A classic example is the Quake series, where the movement mechanics that gave the games lasting appeal were all originally accidental. (And Carmack even briefly patched strafe-jumping out of Q3, before quickly reverting -- but only because his fix caused other problems: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/02/quake-3-john-carmack-strafejumping/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/02/quake-3-john-car...) David Sirlin also writes well about this sort of thing (with more of a focus on 'cheap' use of intended mechanics), though his tone could be offputting to people who think hyper-competitive videogaming is a bit silly: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win

Ocerge 7y ago

Sorry for the downvotes. For the speedrunning community, somebody pointing out that using glitches during a speedrun is cheating is a bit like making an obvious joke about somebody's last name. Not the first time they've heard it, and won't be the last :)

michaelbrooks 7y ago
I only pointed it out because I wanted to understand the reasons, especially when world records are being set. However, I accept your apology and reasoning for downvoting me, and I would never point it out during someone's speedrun since I would just want to enjoy their achievements.

steveklabnik 7y ago

For some extra context here, the "100%/any%" thing comes from Metroid, which would give you a percentage score at the end of the game. So "any%" came to mean "literally anything goes, get to the end of the game." This culture has carried over to games that don't explicitly tell you how much of the game you've completed.