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