Seasons' Greetings

Seasons, Treasons, Reasons, Other Words that Rhyme with Seasons
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I guess I made some people mad by offering some very specific criticisms of the SRL "Season 2" thing.
As someone who basically pitched and implemented the concept of seasons, I'd like to explain a little about what the intent was and why I think the new thing misses that point.

LET'S STATE IT AGAIN SO PEOPLE DON'T MISUNDERSTAND. I DON'T DISLIKE WHAT SRL IS RUNNING, ITS A FINE IDEA THAT I'M JUST NOT INTERESTED IN. I JUST REALLY DON'T LIKE THAT ITS CALLED SEASONS BECAUSE IT HAS NOTHING IN COMMON WITH THE IDEA OF SEASONS OR "TYPE 2" FORMATS.

SEASONS' CREED: ORIGINS
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I got involved in SRL through puchiedarcy (god bless his soul, RIP). While I didn't do speedruns often, I did some races on occasion, and it got more frequent over time. We talked a lot over lunch speedrunning, cuz we worked together and stuff, and naturally we talked a lot about SRL. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of racing vs grinding on a run (this was the era in which runners reaaaally dedicating themselves to streaming 1 speedgame was really taking off. And eventually, we talked about how to get people interested in racing again. We threw around a crap ton of ideas.

As a competitive person for a long time, I started thinking a lot about this. What do other things to do keep people's interest? To stir things up and keep people coming back for more?
Two things I had played a whole lot of came to mind:
* Magic The Gathering
* Kingdom of Loathing

Both of these things had a similar concept to achieve this same end. It's a format that a lot of things have adopted now, it was generally called "Type 2", but I guess now in MTG its just called "Standard" (because it was so successful, I guess!).

The idea is, every block of time, you basically hit a reset button and all players start fresh, and you have access to only resources from that block of time to play with. This way, new players can jump right in and are the closest they'll ever be to playing on even footing with some of the seasoned legacy players. I wanted to apply this same concept to racing on SRL.

So, we discussed it a lot, started working through the specifics of implementation, and came up with a plan.

THE GOAL OF SEASONS
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So, with seasons, what were my goals when I pitched it?

* Get people interested in racing again, by starting everyone fresh, and giving *specific, long-lasting* goal ideas to get better at over a *long period of time*
* Attract people who aren't even very good at games/speedrunning. This was one of the goals behind having the regular-timed larger races and a small subset of games. You see these things on the races page and think: "hey I can totally do that" and race even if you don't know any speedrun strats.
* Try to grow small communities that play really good games into bigger ones. I remember specifically we wanted Sonic Adventure 2 in Season 1 for that purpose.
* Get people to play a larger variety of games. Speedrunners tend to fixate on one game for long periods of time, by encouraging people to play a large list of games and giving them a long time to dabble in each one, we hoped more people would try each. Who knows, maybe they would fall in love with one?
* Incentivize regular racing over one-and-done races (as had been done before). This would hopefully be accomplished based on how ELO works / ELO decay and the way the leaderboards were set up. We wanted people to play a game a bunch to get on top and to reward gradual improvement over time. This point was actually pretty huge in my mind. I wanted someone to be able to pick up the game at the start of the season and with enough work, get themselves in the top 10 by the end. I had also hoped that this would encourage people who were really wanting to win to adopt some race strats over "teh urn" strats (reliability over risk), I'm not sure if this succeeded. I definitely played this way in races but idk mighta been just me.

WHAT HAPPENED TO SEASONS?!?!
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Basically, by the time season 1 was supposed to end, a bunch of stuff happened, leaderboard plans, new blood, etc.
We had the season end process ready to go as far as I remember, but no one that I know of had figured out what next season was going to contain. And basically, stuff happened, puchie stopped working on SRL for ~reasons~ and that was the end of that, basically.
I mean, I was just a guy who wrote some fun code and raced, I didn't want to take more ownership than that. Plus, I didn't really hang out on IRC or speedrun so I mean, I wasn't gonna get involved.

"DEEP" THOUGHTS ABOUT SEASON II
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Ok well hopefully now you have all the ~CONTEXT~ you need to understand my perspective here. So now that you have this ~CONTEXT~, here's some stuff.

SRL's Tournament thingy has nothing to do with seasons. Not the idea, not the same goals, not the same execution. There's basically no reason to call it SEASONS other than to brand it with SOMETHING PEOPLE LIKED rather than the thing it is closer to WHICH PEOPLE DIDN'T LIKE AT THE TIME.

Bony admitted that it was just branded with season to capitalize on seasons' legacy here: https://twitter.com/bonygrunt/status/969351597963661312

It's basically the same idea of the Showcase Race, which people hated back in the days of yore. Every week there's a race and the winner gets some $$$. That was the idea and people hated it at the time (for reasons I don't quite understand still). Sure, this new tournament offers an additional incentive to participate in all the games, but fundamentally its the same idea.

It misses basically everything I wanted to do with seasons. Again, this is not a problem, but branding it as SEASONS I think naturally ruffles some feathers (especially with me) as a result.

* It does not give anyone long term goals. Keeping the games a secret until the week before shoots that idea in the foot.
* It does not provide an incentive for people not already good at games/speedrunning. The format heavily incentivizes practiced runners who already play a large variety of games, since all rewards are finish in the top 4 or nothing. The lack of an ongoing races in which to improve also provides less incentive to really dig into what a game has to offer.
* It might grow communities? Maybe? This partially depends on game choice, which, again, is secret this time. Plus, the duration of a week does not provide sufficient time to take a deep dive into any particular game, especially since they're all back to back.
* Get people to play a large variety of games: yeah it does this, though the lack of new-player incentives kind of hinders this whole concept.
* Regular races over one-and-done. No, it completely fails at this. Most people will participate in no races beforehand and then "The Big Race" and then never race it again.

Those are basically my problems with calling it seasons. I think there could have been a tournament structure similar to this added around the original implementation of seasons, but that's not what they chose to go with.

If I had to pick my biggest complaint about the format, it'd probably be that the games and categories are some sort of secret. I think this is the biggest hindrance to the concept in general (even outside of calling it seasons). It just makes it feel to me like a mystery tournament with some prep time.

I was originally excited to try out the new games/categories that were picked and race with some buddies, but that's not a thing with the new seasons, so I guess I won't. No big deal, just a little disappointed is all!