Casual vs Hardcore-competitive in the ZSR community

Oh yes, another silly rant about issues in the speedrunning community. More specifically, the Zelda community If anything, I feel like this is one of the biggest problems that the speedrunning community has that needs to be established because otherwise, the community will just continue to hurt itself.

Pretty much the majority of "speed drama" that happens on Twitter tends to involve conflicting views between casual speedrunners and hardcore-competitive speedrunners. That's normal, right? Well, it is completely normal that there will be two sides of people with conflicting viewpoints in any community. However, the biggest problem here in the ZSR community is that neither side is willing to consult with each other in a civilized manner to come up with a middle ground of an issue that caters towards both casual and hardcore-competitive speedrunners. Because of this, almost every debate ends up resulting in both sides saying "our side is correct, and those who think otherwise are wrong" and no compromise is made.

The one thing that I'm sure everyone in the community can agree on is that speedrunning should be about having fun. However, everyone has their different definitions of "fun" in speedrunning. Fun in speedrunning could mean: improving yourself, exploring a game's depth and optimizing it, sharing experiences with other speedrunners, and competing with other times. Nothing is wrong with how you like to enjoy your hobby, but when you want to enforce something that only suits the needs of one side of speedrunners and everyone else doesn't find it to be favorable, then that's where problems arise.

Hardcore-competitive speedrunners obviously enjoy the competition aspect of speedrunning, and naturally, they want to have a policy or leaderboard system that fits their competitive needs: such as not allowing runs on any type of inaccurate emulator for competition (including ones officially released by the 1st party company, Virtual Console in this case) regardless if it's advantageous or not, and standardizing to the original console of a game for the sake of accuracy. While this suits the competitive needs for a hardcore speedrunner, this hinders community growth and is unfavorable to the rest of the community.

The main thing that casual speedrunners care about is just playing the game and having fun, so naturally they would think that nothing is wrong with the policy and system. However, when a hardcore-competitive speedrunner brings up an issue, they often retaliate with "nothing is wrong with the current system. Stop complaining." While there in fact is nothing wrong with the system for the casual speedruners, there is still plenty of flaws with the system that doesn't suit the hardcore-competitive speedrunners. This hinders competition in the community.

One could argue that "speedrunning doesn't need to be competitive," but remember that a bunch of other people have different definitions of "fun," which may include the competitive aspect of speedrunning.

Both sides here are spending more time arguing that their side should be favorable, instead of consulting to each other in a civilized manner for a policy and system to have a middle-ground that caters towards both casual and hardcore-competitive speedrunners that everyone can agree with. I feel like this needs to change now. If you actually care about the state of the ZSR community, I suggest help making this change.

-Apasher