Rando

"Hey, did you know there's an Item Randomizer for OoT?"  This phrase showing up in the speedrun discord would change my future, for both better and worse.

I'd been playing OoT for about 3 years when I read this.  I began by just watching the popular streamers of the time - ZFG, SVA, RunnerGuy, NarcissaWright - and before I even picked up a controller I was familiar with the most broken glitches in the game from RBA to wrong warps, and with the movement tech like superslides and optimal rolls.  Starting with All Dungeons, I learned quickly that my ability to grind a category for time was basically non-existant.  So I would pick up new categories to learn the different setups and glitches only to put it down after completing one or two runs for something new.  Around this time I also discovered bingo and a little later Beta Quest.  Both scratched the OoT itch for a while, but Bingo at the time was a bit locked down in its opening route, and Beta Quest left me more confused than satisfied with the premise of shuffling around the entrances.

That's about the time the Item Randomizer came out, and oh boy was it perfection.  It required vast swathes of knowledge to be optimal, everything from low% strats to everyday glitches to just knowing where things are in the world.  It was a dream come true.

Item randomizers weren't a new concept by any means.  A Link to the Past had been around for a couple years prior, and the current version of the OoT Item Randomizer was created by an old alttpr dev, AmazingAmpharos.  It started off pretty simple with few features, but it was enough to attract some attention, in particular from a former OoT speedrunner by the name of ATZ.  Together they created the Accessible Ruleset by taking inspiration from the recently created Glitchless Restricted ruleset and giving it a few tweaks.  The goal was to have races and ultimately a tournament that everyone could participate in with little to no prior knowledge.  At the time, this was a fantastic idea particularly with the goal of growing the community.  Unfortunately, that would not hold true for long.

With all the exposure that the first 3 seasons of the tournament brought, the community grew exponentially.  However, underlying all of this was something not seen by all and yet something that's present to this day.  Being the face of the community, having the distinction of attacting hundreds of viewers to Twitch, and thousands of players to the discord, the now Standard community was garnering a rather two-faced reputation.  To those on the outside, they were welcoming and clearly how the game should be played - or at least that was the story.  In the community discord, however, there was an attitude of elitism bolstered by the aforementioned events.  That indeed this was the way to play the game... the only way to play the game.  Any questions people had were seen through this lens and assumed to be that way, despite there being no right way to play the game.

I should point out at this point that these views were not shared by all, nor was it the majority opinion.  It was simply a very small vocal minority who unfortunately had the validation and support they needed to continue.  Being the way many people found the community, however, and being unknowingly pervaded by the tournament restreams - then the most popular way to find the community - it slowly grew into a more pervasive mindset.

Over time, a few glitch-based and otherwise alternative rulesets were attempted.  However, due to the general attitude of the times, few players would even try them and they became dead on arrival.  No amount of exposure or helpful infrastructure would assist in growing these alternative ways to play as the general consensus by this point was set in stone.  It also didn't help that a rift was forming between the rando and speedrun communities, due to rando regularly shuttling players to the other discord for any assistance that wasn't rando-specific.  And since by this point the rando game was very different from base OoT, it got quite annoying to keep having to answer questions on faulty assumptions.

Seasons 3, 4, and 5 of the tournament went by, but not without a lot of kerfuffle.  Largely coming down to how hints should be handled, players and organizers took for granted that any change of the rules to allow players to have more options during a race would be a bad thing, and instead relied on arguing about nearly meaningless changes to the settings and hints pervayed the discussions around what should be done for these tournaments.

A general theme of speedrunning and other quasi-speedrunning endeavors is that a community is built up to help one another beat a game as fast as possible within the confines of what's possible within the game.  However, what happens when the dominant way of playing a game quickly is inherently competitive, and yet moreover you have free access to change the underlying game in any way you wish.  If you guessed entitlement, you were right.  It was around the season 4 mark that the standard tournaments took over everything.  The world would seemingly stop and begin revolving around them.  No matter if there were players who didn't care about it, no matter if there were players who never played in a tournament or with that ruleset, all revolved around the tournament.  This also meant settings.

Standard/Accessible has had a pretty long history of being close to the developers and people who are able to code the randomizer program to suit their needs.  The ability to change the game they're playing like this with little to no pushback or vetting by the community at large has long since led to a general attitude that they can do what they want.  Not only has it created an air of snobbery and a "this was made for me" attitude, it also led to the new players and other racer's attidude that any new tech introduced need be programmed around or otherwise was not for them.  As a result, new strat development and player skill increase was stifled.

Over time this bled even further down the chain to the developers themselves.  With the increased knowledge and skill provided by the Ocarina of Time Decompilation Project, some took it upon themselves to "fix" the game upon which the Item Randomzier stood.  A different attitude thus emerged with some that they were creating their own game, and not just making a fun little project based on a beloved classic.  Some changes were justified, but most were superfluous and needless, only leading to futher alienate those who love OoT the most.

This brief history of the rando community shows the power of a validated vocal minority.  The fake power we give people is incredibly dangerous and has the potential to poison otherwise good people.  So I'll leave this with a warning.  Rando is on a terrible path and needs to change.  That change will be difficult and will need the support of the most powerful in the community.  It will take a strong will as it will be extremely hard to fight against the vocality and long-seeded entitlement present in the most poisonous parts of the community, but it needs to change.

The community has some genuinly fantastic people, and I've met some wonderful individuals.  But the nuke needs to be dropped sooner rather than later, and I wish the best of luck to all those involved when it does happen.