What are your pet peeves in maps when speedrunning?

[baja blast rd.]

As a mapper, I am curious! 

[GarrettChan]

Forcing me to pickup a Chainsaw.

 

(I somehow tried to type Chinasaw many times. Maybe I'm home sick a little bit)

Edited July 26, 2022 by GarrettChan

[Rayziik]

I feel like I have the voice of hundreds of other speedrunners behind me on this one:

 

32 x 32 switches inset into the wall by 8 or more map units.

[Master Medi]

I'm currently going for Ancient Aliens D2All and one of the things that I find most annoying is caco clouds, there's always at least one cacodemon that slides away when shot with the rocket launcher 😞

[Xyzzу]

• Glides in general (I can't do them nor do I care to learn)
• Crappy monster teleport batteries/closets (read this for mapping wisdom, please)
• Linedef skips
• Re-triggerable timed lock-ins
• Lack of crushers, instadeath floors or other things to make picking off monsters on ledges and stuff not a chore to do
• Switches that can't be pressed easily because they are thin, inset deep into a wall or there are other linedef triggers without the PassThru flag near them
• Rooms full of perpetual platforms and slow lifts you have to traverse
• A general lack of alternative routes
• RNG-reliant infighting (or just inconsistent setups)
• No care given to -nomonsters or coop; you must wait out lock-ins instead of being able to technically leave right away
• Shitscanners everywhere
• Weirdly angled walls that cause elastic collisions
• Monsters placed directly on blockmap lines
• Keys bars you have to open individually
• Solid 2-sided lines that run diagonally, messing up movement when you run into them
• Curved stairs or stairs with low ceilings
• Infinite height (monsters or things that block you above or below your field of view)
• Places too dark to see important switches
• Spectres
• Not enough health and/or ammo to play at a comfortable pace
• Things you have only once chance to pull off (such as a jump to a secret)
• Mandatory SR50
• Floors that are bumpy AF
• Wind, current, and friction floors that also fuck up movement 
• -complevel 9's ledge behavior that makes monsters fall into an unreachable place
• -complevel 11 in general
• Slow doors or too many doors
• Thin ledges, especially with bends; thin bamboo pole platforming while we're at it
• Reliance on Spider Masterminds in general
• Certain Icon of Sin fights (you know the types). Also the fact that unedited Icons take forever to end the level, leading to the possibility of accidentally pressing "use" as they're dying and thus ruining your run
• Turret/ledge monsters with too much space to move, causing you to miss shots
• Monsters just barely within reach of your autoaim
• Forced weapon switching by way of aforementioned shitscanners or a berserk pack
• Sector type 11 death exits (put a voodoo doll on the teleport destination to make exiting instant!)
• Maps where you have to memorize switch sequences/solutions to elaborate puzzles
• Text screens to button mash through
• RL/BFG shoot prevention not removed in MBF21 WADs
• No change to either invulnerability palette or pain palette (my eyes!)
• The chainsaw
• The five-minute timed door secret
• Moving sectors that can get stuck if activated too fast
• Sectors that can gain or lose the secret property
• When a map breaks in the "intended" complevel
• Reliance on cyberdemons in general (infighting rockets, close quarter dodges that are impossible to react to, "get fucked by my one rocket before I infight with something else, idiot", "get fucked by my sudden pacifism, idiot", "get fucked by my invisibility-induced aim, idiot", "get fucked by my fourth rocket when two-shotting me, idiot")
• Flying monsters in wide open spaces (especially with no block lines)
• Inconveniently placed block lines (for both players and monsters)
• Lack of armor
• Pistol and shotgun slog, or chaingun slog in Doom II
• Walkover lines right in front of doors that can also be activated manually
• Monsters that teleport around a bunch, making you wait for them to stop
• Small windows you have to adjust speed and or angle to jump into
• Extremely tight "do this fast or die" voodoo doll timers
• Reliance on monster movement pathing to run past, escort to open a door or just deal with them
• Too much time spent collecting armaments at the start
• Inconsistent voodoo doll scripts
• The possibility of spechit overflow or all ghosts bug in -complevel 2 maps
• Vital items you have to bump or grab
• Jank jumps such as Doom II MAP14
• Lack of ammo for the GOOD weapons 
• Perfectly good wallrunning ruined by breaks (i.e. vertices) in the wall linedefs
• Good ol' zero presses or void glides into zero presses ("wall hump to victory, idiot" because the mapper didn't put the switch far enough from reach or used a walkover line)
• Secrets you have to hover over to tag because they're too small and/or inset into the ground 
• Piss filter when picking up a ton of items
• Extended time over a 20 damage floor with a radsuit and being at the mercy of the suit leak
• Trigger lines too close to instapop monsters
• Frame drops from either too many things or too much detail
• Earrape from an army of freshly-awoken cyberdemons or revenants (imagine hearing that every time you run a map)
• Lots of narrow pathways to navigate 
• Lots of unsmooth 90-degree corners to steer past
• Pillars, things and other random shit to get stuck on in the heat of battle
• Reliance on barrels in general: barrels placed up above that randomly get blasted towards you instead of away when you shoot them, barrels that just don't blow up with any of your hitscan weapons (no RL :c?), barrels that get body blocked by monsters placed beside or in front of them...)
• Maps where you must punch a lot (hello, untampered berserk RNG and crap hit detection)
• Faraway switches you must stop to aim at
• Long fast lifts you have to anticipate the things at the top of
• Monsters hiding behind fake walls with space for them to move
• Deep water colormaps that mess with your vision
• Walls that look identical to floors (or lack borders) that you can't see the edges of
• Monsters that can fight conveyors, making their movement erratic and thus making them hard to target 
• Unbalanced custom monsters (monsters that move too fast, are overpowered, or have A_KeenDie at the end of their death sequences making it possible to crush them before that activates and ultimately softlock the map). While we're at it: tag 666/667 actions that can activate twice and softlock the map
• Parts (or God forbid, ALL) of the map is hidden even with a computer area map
• Maps where you have to anticipate the last monster dying before you press the exit switch you're waiting right in front of
• Self-referencing sectors that bleed out from a lack of a border sector to contain them; self-referencing sectors where the physical extent of them is unclear
• Fake 3D bridges that are jank even outside of coop
• Mandatory archvile jumps where the archvile could go up against the ledge you're trying to jump up, archvile jumps where the direction of the archvile matters severely in the angle you get launched at, archvile jumps where multiple are present and thus take more control away from the player, archvile jumps where the archvile is easily distracted by monster crossfire
• Maps with stuff that's too loud or obnoxious for you to hear crucial teleports or sector machinery in time
• Maps with excessive amounts of grind (killing tons of monsters with repetitive effort) or cleanup (the big scary fight is won, now you must kill all these useless monsters with little threat). Both contribute to padding the runtime more than they should.
• Doors that could just stay open but you can accidentally close with a twitchy finger
• Maps where the most fucked or choke-prone part is at the very end (bonus points if it's a long map or the last one in a set)
• Maps where you make ONE mistake and the run's dead

Edited August 3, 2022 by Xyzzy01

[Poncho1]

Awful teleport closets (I'm looking at you, Memento Mori Map29).

[aconfusedhuman]

Descending staircases which turn or have a ceiling right above them :^)

[Andromeda]

The inability to pacifist troll because of a mandatory shootable switch.

[Decay]

Everything. Not even ironically. Playing Doom sucks.

[Billa]

Maps that rely too heavily on timers. MSCP map 05 and v64 map 10 come to mind... no matter what you do there's a hard limit on the time and you will never ever go lower than that. It's lame in general but especially from a speedrunning perspective it feels like your potential for optimisation and improvement is being limited. 

 

I guess I'd count bad teleport closets under this as well. But at least those are only relevant for max, lol

[Dusty_Rhodes]

My absolute biggest are corners and weird angles to get stuck on. I'm probably just a low skill player but I cannot stand doing well and then getting tagged by a bunch of corners, pulling seconds off of my time. 

[j4rio]

Berserk.

[GarrettChan]

Just now, j4rio said:

Berserk.

I assume the annoyance of this is because you have more responsibility to fill the map with a good Tyson run :)

[Roofi]

- Lack of armor

- a rocket launcher but few rockets

- As D2all enthusiast : forced pistol-start after a death-exit

- excessive height variations where monsters block me from below or above (cacodemons/pain elementals)

Edited July 26, 2022 by Roofi

[NeilK]

I hate fighting a bunch of meat with underpowered weapons. Like for example NEIS E4M7, there is a section were your forced to plasma 40+ Barons of Hell. There is nothing difficult about this it's just tedious. (Gee I wonder why there is no demos for it any category.)  The biggest offender imo is timed secrets. D2TWID map 15 has this and really limits the routing for the map and 2002ADO E1M9 has a 5 minute timed secret which turns the run basically into a UV-speed, where the last 6 seconds are all that matter, which is a shame because it is a really fun max.

[RockyGaming4725]

TNT Map 05. It really brings out everything I hate love about speedrunning. Tight corridors? Running into demons half the time? Shitty routes to progress? Fucking piece of shit stupid fucking shotgun not killing a god damn imp thanks to blockmap fuckery? Support beams that are so tiny yet always stop you in your path thanks to the fucking narrow hallway? Shit ton of barrels in front of a door for literally no fucking reason that will blow up in your face half of the time thanks to hitscanners from across the map? cl4? It can all be done with TNT Map 05.

[D0M0]

Tyson maps

[BigBoy91]

Not beating a record first try.

[Ichor]

You just finished making a map that would make Misri Halek jealous, and inside of a day, someone comes along and cheeses it to the point where it can be finished in all of ten seconds.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

2 hours ago, j4rio said:

Berserk.

 

Genuinely curious why this is?

[4shockblast]

This thread is calling for a Google doc or spreadsheet or something. I'll have to think of some other ideas later to add, since there's definitely more, though. :^)

21 minutes ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

 

Genuinely curious why this is?

I can comment from my perspective, it's basically a combination of two things:

• the berserk never hitting shit because of blockmap nonsense (i.e., being point blank to a demon and seeing nothing collide like 3 times in a row)
• the berserk damage RNG being an absolute nightmare to work with, 2-punch shotgun guys, 3-punch imps, etc.

Basically, berserk runs = run up to an imp, miss 2 shots, take 3 extra to actually kill it, then reset and delete wad, never play Doom again.

Edited July 26, 2022 by 4shockblast

[Doomkid]

Sounds like DeHackEd patches making the first into something far more fast and powerful, like... oh say, a knife or a bayonet, would really make the berzerk experience a lot smoother in general - especially for speedrunners!

 

...but who wold be crazy enough to replace the iconic Doomguy fist, with which he slowly kneads the enemies to death like dough? It's part of the One True Doom Experience™!

[Luleta]

dont respond to this!!

an Abyssal Speedmapping Session is coming up, it's a trap!!!

 

jk.

i personally dislike the most when:

 

• fights lock u in a room for a predeterminate amount of time instead of simply putting switches in spots that are hard to reach without killing all the enemies.

 

• monsters are not threatening and are out of reach, basically being glorified decorations, bound to be forgotten when i uvmax :'(

Edited July 26, 2022 by Luleta

[baja blast rd.]

7 minutes ago, Luleta said:

dont respond to this!!

... it's a trap!!!

 

shhhhh

[Xyzzу]

I took the bait and I'm still taking it!

[El Juancho]

[Argent Agent]

Getting bullshit RNG damage rolls from Revenants
Having Fatso projectiles going through the wall and hitting me

Inescapable pits

[Dusty_Rhodes]

4 hours ago, Doomkid said:

oh say, a knife or a bayonet,

damn, I really wish someone would do such a thing, possibly in a wad with cheesy 80s movie and 90s action game tropes, quality vanilla levels, and banging midis

[aika]

Linedef skips are the first thing that came to my mind. Luckily, those are not so big of a problem in newer mapsets.

 

Also:

- stairs that have a low ceiling you bump into and have to slow down

- boring cleanups

- bad teleport closets

- any use of the monster spawner

- having to try to avoid picking up the chainsaw in a map that has berserk

 

Berserk fighting is interesting, because it's really fun to do casually but can be a nightmare in a speedrun.

 

[xit-vono]

groups of monsters that teleport slowly or randomly

rooms with an excessive number of sides that make movement difficult

decorations that can block the player.

maps that can be finished too quickly, especially for a large map.

height differences that can lead to being blocked by monsters below.