Follow Up Event after Duck Season

[Overbeing]

Having an annual or semiannual event for the community seems like a great way to bring semi active players back and interacting at the same time. Holiday dash and duck season speed run contest both did a good job of doing that, but having set times when things like that happen (like in the summer and/or over the holidays) is important so that players know to return.

And that has me thinking of how to follow up my event Duck Season. I feel like a got a good number of things with the event right, as well as learned that I knew even less than I thought I did, and I'd love to work with the community to polish the concept and follow it up at some point.

I would love your feedback for how a season 2 would work.

Here are some brainstormed ideas:
Player built and chosen levels, maybe choosing the levels could be an event of it's own and get players building more levels.
Duck season versions of the levels so that we can patch some issues with older levels for the event that would be on an event profile.
Better defined rules about glitches and cuts.
Rules chosen by the community

Some questions:
What rules would you change or add?
How would you adjust the structure? Did you like the 3 week structure?
How many levels should be included in the event? Was 30 a bad number?
Is there a better way to time speed runs than the ingame timer? Can a better timer be implemented into the game?
What types of levels would you want to see in the event? A wide variety? Levels designed for speed running? Casual classic levels? New levels designed for the event? Frusts? Rng? Levels where skips and glitches are specifically allowed? Hats allowed? 
What stat distribution rules should there be?
What rewards should be up for grabs? How was the prize structure for duck season?
When should the next event of this size be?
How were the duck time challanges? Too easy? Inconsistent?
What levels were fun to run? What levels did you dread having to speedrun? Why?

[Overbeing]

I feel like one of the issues I had was as a level maker, and not a speed runner, I wasn't the best person to be defining rules and making decisions for speed running. But I didn't want to involve players that knew the answers because I wanted them to be able to be competing in the event, not running it. The advantage of me running things is that I stuck at this game, so I wouldn't have competed anyhow.

But now that season 1 is history, we have the opportunity to learn from last time, but I wasn't in the thick of it. I didn't compete. So I don't know what it felt like to participate, which is why I would love feedback to make a potential season 2 even better.

[~JBG~]

It was fun to compete, even though I really only had the time to do the first week of the contest.

I'd love to have a semi annual contest.

Here are some brainstormed ideas:
Player built and chosen levels, maybe choosing the levels could be an event of it's own and get players building more levels.
Duck season versions of the levels so that we can patch some issues with older levels for the event that would be on an event profile.
Better defined rules about glitches and cuts.
Rules chosen by the community

Player built/chosen levels sounds nice, only issue might be that those players might have an upper hand on their own levels but not like that matters much.
If older levels are chosen then it makes perfect sense to have a "duck season variant" of the level so any glaring issues about the levels can be fixed.
I personally like having glitches and cuts allowed in speedrunning contests but can understand that maybe not everyone is into that. I liked how the levels that had too big skips in them in duck season got updated in the later weeks, could do similar if there are big glitch skips in levels.

Some questions:
What rules would you change or add?
How would you adjust the structure? Did you like the 3 week structure?
How many levels should be included in the event? Was 30 a bad number?
Is there a better way to time speed runs than the ingame timer? Can a better timer be implemented into the game?
What types of levels would you want to see in the event? A wide variety? Levels designed for speed running? Casual classic levels? New levels designed for the event? Frusts? Rng? Levels where skips and glitches are specifically allowed? Hats allowed? 
What stat distribution rules should there be?
What rewards should be up for grabs? How was the prize structure for duck season?
When should the next event of this size be?
How were the duck time challanges? Too easy? Inconsistent?
What levels were fun to run? What levels did you dread having to speedrun? Why?

Not sure what rules I'd change or add aside from allowing some form of glitching.
I did like the fact that the event went 3 weeks and had level updates throughout each week.
Amount of levels I think should be tied to how long the event is planned to run. 30 was a lot of levels but it was pretty fun when I had time to do runs.
Sadly the best way to time it would be to count frames, I guess we could also try to have a timer running when doing runs kind of like how speedrunners do. Hopefully a better timer can be implemented to the game even though I doubt it.
I think a variety of level types makes it fun. Makes it a bit more chaotic and ups the chances for some people to make better runs than others based on their differing skills.
Stat distribution is tricky imo, gotta find a nice middle ground for people that aren't extremely high ranks and people that have moderate ranks.
I think the prizes were good, exp rewards were good. Would be fun to get new sets/parts/hats but that's all depending on the game being updateable again.
Duck times were easy for the most part but I don't think that was a bad thing, they could be made more difficult but then it's just a question of how you'd determine those times.
I personally liked the levels where you could find skips the most haha the long levels were somewhat of a dread to run since late mistakes meant you'd have to redo the entire level again but I think that's fine as long as there aren't too many of them.

[TRUC]

Would be down to fool around again whenever it's back

As for feedback and suggestions, I think it's good that different events/contests have different formats and rulesets, especially when it comes to racing. I've hosted or participated in a of them in the past few years, and as far as I'm aware we won't ever have a perfect setup with the limitations we have via the game or the platform (pun half intended).

30 levels was a lot for someone who kind of went in casually, but the target times for the duck bonuses were not rough for the most part, so I don't think it was a problem, especially given there were 3 whole weeks to get them all. Made a lot of sense within the prize and point system to encourage any kind of participation but still favour those who put in more time overall.

As for the levels and actual rules, like I said previously, I don't think we'll get an ideal magical recipe, but Season 1 worked well. A level cap was nice, and the levels had built-in hat restrictions. Glitchless/clipless is usually the preferred format for those big general events but if more people want access to those things, why not ? Level-wise I think it would be better to have a little less levels that are heavily reset prone (major difficulty spike somewhere, RNG galore, and gimmicky stuff), as it easily gets tedious, but once again it wasn't particularly noticeable personally when I went through Season 1. Whether or not to go to user-made levels for the next set is entirely dependent on how much you want to manage different aspects of it. Wouldn't mind going back into the LE to try and make some interesting levels, though

[Tejs]

would be cool if we just simply added new sets for instant activity and prestigious solid rewards for joining various events

the issue is now that staff is inactive and we are grasping at straws when that really shouldn't be necessary, I doubt adding new sets is hard and lots of people have been willing to design them

[~JBG~]

would be cool if we just simply added new sets for instant activity and prestigious solid rewards for joining various events

the issue is now that staff is inactive and we are grasping at straws when that really shouldn't be necessary, I doubt adding new sets is hard and lots of people have been willing to design them

Hopefully updates to pr2 will happen soon.

[Camer the Dragon]

The introduction of new levels weekly and keeping the old ones playable for the contest is a really good idea, it helps with choice paralysis and being overwhelmed (if starting at the beginning) but also letting you refine times until the end of the contest. I think 8-10 levels released per week would be a good number to go for
The timer should be local (i.e. removing lag), since the game runs at a weird 27fps and recording software is usually not a clean multiple of this it'll be weird to perfectly count, but 60fps should be fine to show all frames. This'd take more work but would be fairer for people further from the servers and if you randomly got a bad ping spike during the end of your best attempt
Rank 40 would be good for stat distribution (decently high cap of 190 points, but also decently quick to obtain if you exp farm)
RNG should probably be kept quite low unless there's a level where the entire gimmick is that it's an RNG level
Duck Times were good, they were a good minimum goal to go for personally (even if I didn't push much past them usually due to availability and such)
I forget if this was allowed or disallowed in the contest, but head glitches (specifically those) should be allowed

[Master Raiden]

Duck Season was a very enjoyable speedrunning contest and wouldn't mind seeing a second season of the contest.
This will mean the rabbits will have to wait another year for their season to come around

Things I liked:
• Variety of Levels - Each level brought a unique gameplay experience and unique challenges which made the contest very interesting. It really opened up a lot of viable strats, using vastly different stat combos and hats to achieve the best time which encouraged creativity, and we certainly got a lot of that!
2.8 COWBOY is the first Cowboy level I have ever seen in a speedrunning contest and 3.1 Adept is a frusty level that allowed skilled frusters to showcase their precision.
• Custom Stats and Hats - Some speedrunning contests in the past did not let players choose the stats they use, and most of them banned hats entirely. But Duck Season showed that giving players more freedom can lead to some mind-blowing speedruns. And it was a lot of fun to try out different stat and hat combos and seeing what worked.
• Incentive for Participation - Offering EXP prizes for each level every single week, plus having a Duck Time to beat made it easy for people to participate in the contest and get something out of it.
• Levels Loading Quickly - I like playing with Art on, so it was nice to see how quickly all the levels loaded.

Things I didn't like:
• Dependence on Item Luck - As someone who enjoys speedrunning levels to death, having to rely on item luck to get a solid run on some levels was annoying. Instead of spending one hour grinding a level, I would have to spend far more time because I only have a 2-3% chance of getting the right items in each attempt. I remember playing 1.9 Water 51 times in a row without getting a Speed Burst which was not enjoyable.
• Glitches not well-defined - I don't think there was any agreement on what counted as a "glitch" in the contest. Sometimes I discovered a neat shortcut which, in my opinion, did not involve any glitching, only to later realize that the shortcut is not allowed.
• Overpowered Alien Eggs - This was mentioned in the Discord server, but the Alien Egg level in the contest had a massive impact on the final results. For a contest centered around speedrunning, I think game modes ike this which depend largely on luck should be separated.
• Quantity of Levels - 30 levels to speedrun in three weeks is not exactly a small amount. While most of the 13 participants submitted runs for all levels, only about 3 or 4 of them actually had the time to grind out competitive runs for all of them. As someone who did that, it is quite time-consuming, and the race for the grand prize mostly comes down to who has more time on their hands. Weekly submissions revealing strats helps this though, so this isn't exactly a big problem and maybe nothing needs to be changed. It is certainly much more manageable than speedrunning 67 levels in 2 weeks in LoTW: Holiday Dash.

Ideas for the future:
• Fix Finish Lag - Not really an issue with the contest, but it would be nice if the times are calculated locally. There used to be a working, modified version of PR2 that displayed the number of frames it took you to reach the finish, so there should be a way to calculate times locally to eliminate the issues with finish lag.
• Prevent Hiding Strats - I understand that the Duck Season contest was structured so that people could share their strats each week and build on top of everyone's runs to get better and more optimized runs each week, but with the grand prize favoring the one who outpaces everyone else, hiding strats can be advantageous.
To fix this, it would be better to not pitch players against each other, but instead make them compete with the timer. You can do this by setting a Duck Time and reward players with EXP prizes for each second they are below the Duck Time. This should encourage collaboration between participants where everyone works together to get the fastest time possible on each level.
I think this could be a fun challenge if you joined forces with an experienced speedrunner to set some tough times to beat. It would be like a Pro vs Jiggmin's Village kind of contest.
• Prevent Copying Strats - If you still want players to compete against each other, I'd personally prefer if people weren't allowed to copy other people's strats. Routing levels and finding the best stats and hats to use is a big part of speedrunning and it would be unfair for someone to get beaten by someone else who stole their idea.
• Community-Approved Rules - I agree with your idea about getting the community to agree on the rules and glitches allowed to make things clear and fair for everyone.

Questions:
How would you adjust the structure? Did you like the 3 week structure?
Given what you were trying to achieve with this contest in having different stages of optimization for people's runs, I think the structure was designed really well. It also offered people opportunities to play for prizes every week which I liked. People could join the contest at any time and have something to play for.
How many levels should be included in the event? Was 30 a bad number?
30 levels felt a bit on the higher end, but it depends what you want. If you like seeing creative strats, then more levels to showcase that would be better. If you want to see smooth, optimized speedruns, then fewer levels to allow players to perfect their runs would be better. Personally, I prefer the latter.
What types of levels would you want to see in the event?
I liked the wide variety of levels in Duck Season. Most of them were fun to play and speedrunable, but there were also levels like 1.8 -Gravity, 1.3 Objective, 2.8 COWBOY and 3.2 Stats to keep things interesting. I think variety allows people with different skillsets to shine, so I would like to see that continue.
Also, we were quite lucky with this contest. Most of the levels are on All Time Best, so they must be the best levels in existence.
What stat distribution rules should there be?
Some people have said that the contest should use Rank 40 stats, but I think Rank 50 stats are fine. Most people should be Rank 50+ by now.
What rewards should be up for grabs? How was the prize structure for duck season?
I really liked how prizes were distributed throughout the contest. Giving out prizes for submitting runs and beating the Duck Time was good for incentivizing participation, and extra EXP prizes for being in the Top 5 for each level and getting a good overall time at the end of Week 3 also heavily rewarded players who put in the time to do well.
When should the next event of this size be?
Once a year would be fine for me. As mentioned before, contests of this size are quite time consuming, so I don't think I would want this to happen more often. If it does, I probably won't want to complete 100% of it. 
How were the duck time challanges? Too easy? Inconsistent?
Some of them were quite easy while some others were a little harder. Maybe they could have been a little harder overall, but there are always other players' times to beat if you want a tougher challenge!
What levels were fun to run? What levels did you dread having to speedrun? Why?
I am a fan of clean speedrunning with no weird gravity, forced stats, frusty/glitchy parts or item luck. I particularly enjoyed 1.12 Laps. It was a well-designed level with some thinking involved with the stat blocks. Racing through the level with three different sets of stats was a unique challenge and it felt like I was playing three different levels instead of just one.
I didn't really like 3.1 Adept because it was frusty and I am bad at frusts and never ended up getting a run I was happy with 
I also didn't like 3.4 Exploration that much either mainly because of the Ice Wave. It is such an inconsistent item and many runs were ended because I wasn't in the perfect position when I used it. The Jetpack part is also very punishing. You can lose a lot of time if you are slightly imprecise with your movements and touch the nets. I was afraid of messing up there in every run I did.