rip jka

Jedi Academy (aka jka) is a game with strafe jumping, much like Quake, Half-life, and many other games. The difference with jka is your speed is not normally maintained when you jump. It's only maintained (and some speed is added) when you jump to a platform that is lower than you one you jumped off of (but can't be lower than your character's height). This tech is called elevation boosts (aka eboosts). This adds added depth to the movement and routing that makes the game different from other strafe jumping games.

Recently someone found that with a certain saber style and a certain attack, you always get an eboost regardless of the distance you fall. This speeds up the latter 2/3 of the game (once you have that saber style) since you can take straighter lines and simpler chains when strafe jumping. Despite being simple, this tech went unfound until now. For reference it saves about a minute in a 28min game.

You'd think that this is great, time is saved and the run is easier and now we get to reroute all the levels! Well, there's been a couple problems: First, everyone who was interested in learning, experimenting, racing, or doing whatever with the game has kinda completely dropped it until this new thing is figured out and all effected levels are rerouted.

Second, while the run may be faster, it's what made it different or unique from all the other strafe jumping games out there. It's now just another game where you strafe jump in a straight line to the end. Routing in the eboosts was one of the coolest parts of the game and now that's gone.

What would you do in this case? Would you have hidden the find entirely? Would you split the categories, splitting an already small community? Would you ban this tech? Would you just move on to other games, knowing this one will never have the same charm it once did?