Enable the trick mod to take weapons into account for harder completions

Jabra

Perspective

So as surfers go close to perfection, pushing the marginals become harder, harder obv.

The problem in tricksurfing is that you can't push the marginals continuously as in skillsurf where you can improve your time with 1 tick (or even sub-ticks if you are working on that)

This is bad for tricksurfing and has hindered the competitiveness of tricksurfing since ever. Because of how small the ramps on Skyworld are, and how the ramps are tightly connected (on a curve though), Skyworld did well - for example you wouldn't lose so much speed doing one extra deagle wrap, or 1 more main wrap, or going from pyramid to main.

Suggestion

This is not some grand solution for that issue. That's just how tricksurf are. But you can make it less severe, for example, taking no-ducks completions into account (which I have suggested before).

My other suggestion is now to take weapons into account which slows down your prestrafe. For example a really tight trick which maybe seems maxed out could be the trick: "Heard you like rampstrafing" (sry, I can't find any video of it). Sadly, it seems like it is maxed out. But if you now recognized surfers completing it with 250 u/s-weapon instead, then it is probably not maxed out!

So yeah, that's the idea. But, OBV., I don't want the 100 % completion hunters to hunt all the tricks times 5 (or whatever the number of weapons with different u/s walk speed are)!

Gocnak

Currently in Momentum, weapons do not affect player speed in any of the modes. To clarify, you're asking for a toggleable handicap through weapon speeds, so that a trick can be executed with an arbitrary slower maxspeed? Something like run flags could account for that if it was formalized maybe.

Ark_

Gocnak The idea is interesting, but I think weapons is the worst implementation of this concept I can think of. A much cleaner version is to simply have a difficulty slider that scales down/up the relative difficulty via AA/groundAccel/tickrate/host_timescale/other cvars in some standardized formula. This would break up the leaderboards into 100% speed, and highest completed difficulty. If there was a reasonable way to do it, it would also be nice to be able to go the other way and make a trick easier than base as well, which leads to some fun of new hard tricks being first done using easier settings and later being completed at base settings.

Leesriize

On CSS, weapons had a weight iirc, having an AWP sniper in your hands would slow you down, not sure if it was the case while in the air, you could affect the prestrafe with it, the running, a jump/bhop, but I'm not sure if it was effective while surfing / strafing in the air.

zer0k_z

Leesriize weapon speed only impacts airstrafe on low aa settings or if the weapon speed is really low (40u/s if ducked or 13u/s if unducked on 150aa 66 tick).

Jabra

Yeah. I said I was not trying to make some some grand solution, but maybe you should actually just try that.

Just not sure about how extreme intervention that is. I mean to make altered settings a part of the "standard competitive enviroment of tricksurf" when tricksurf have been used to the current settings since 2007-2011. That's why I like weapons because weapons have been a natural part of tricksurf since ever. So it shouldn't be controversial or against "tradition" in any way.

But ofc. I might just be overly dogmatic, and to improve tricks by 100 % speed will still be an option. It's about having an addition, not a replacement of anything.

I do also want to point something out now!

So there might be this issue that you can't continously make a trick harder. But maybe it is not such a general problem. What I mean is.

To make a trick continuously harder on tricksurf it's much about adding steps to the trick and combining these steps. And if you just know just a little bit about "combinatorics", bionominal distribution and all that shit, you know you can create extremely many different paths with not so many elements.

So there might be many opportunities to make a trick continuously harder, but you might be forced to follow some one-sided patterns, e.g., taking many deagle wraps on skyworld.

But you can't do this with very short tricks, with few steps, because very short trick have few steps per definition ofc. So my point is that ... the "wrcp hunters of tricksurf" are strangulated! And the focus on adding steps to make tricks harder on tricksurf is 'discriminating' the wrcp hunters of tricksurf.

You can also look at this point as part of a more general issue. For example on very short stages (instead of very short tricks), surfers tend to become stuck at the same tick. So shortness in general hinders continious improvement! But with 1 sub ticks this will only become an issue at very short stages, and that's alright because, cmon, we don't need to have surfers contesting stages with a duration of 2secs ... That's relates more to kz ...

So yeah ...

Jabra

The reason that this topic is relevant is because that Gocnak wrote once that Momentum will remove the time records.
But all the time records can serve this need for continuous competition! And have so to some extent done this!
I'm not sure whether times should be there or not.
trick.surf community owned by Frag seemed to adore time records in the video exhibited by KSFrecords, even showcasing some shortcuts.
I myself have adored time records.
Are you removing something that was perfectly well-working in a decade and thus create a new issue that this thread is a consequence of!?

I will also to your advantage say that time records do not fit with the purpose of tricksurf, it belongs to skill/speedrunning

Not with skill either! Because of the way the tricks end.
You always have to LAND awkwardly and this creates these dumbass guessing games
where you have to guess the perfect takeoff point from the last surf ramp in order to minimize the time wasted falling in the air above the end, whilst in skillsurf you enter an invisible zone that (vertically) rises up (if the map is zoned properly) at the end, so you don't need to land the end, but just to fly above it.

Though skillsurf still suffer from these zones in some tracks, e.g., surf_collection_njv s1 https://youtu.be/t4_NmrhYKFY?t=3 it's not a huge deal in that stage though - and it is made less bad with drops (because if you fly too high, you will get a bigger drop into the next stage compared to if you had flown low, so your net loss will not be that severe, BUT IN TRICKSURF YOU DON'T DROP INTO A NEXT TRICK XD so yeah MOONING is always gonna be BAD in tricksurf)

Well maybe you could also add these vertically zones to tricksurf? Nahhh, it's quickly getting too impractical ...

But this issue is more about healthy competition than entertainment. And we do play games for entertainment.
Many surfers have enjoyed these time records for a long time?
For example check this shortcut on xdream https://youtu.be/AqpAmqrzH0I?t=19
Isn't it cool? Same guy is in the compilation on KSFrecords and breaks another time record there actually.
I have done tricksurf shortcuts as well.
My first one was for Snowman Gap on skyworld back in 2012 ish, hitting the side of spawn, precursor of the waave walk shortcut actually. It was neat, and there was something like 0.4 secs to be stripped off thanks to that https://imgur.com/a/F2zRlMS

So clearly this is an old respectable culture???

If the % difficulty system (that Ark pointed out) is not gonna be in place,
then I feel like tricksurf is going to lack something without the time records!!!

(btw, I haven't touched the speed records, but I don't think people cared so much about them really, but I won't reject them like that either. Here is a video with speed records being broken by Bogroll https://youtu.be/V5qq7P2NL1o?t=33 I really like how they called it and created hype. He has broken this since https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PV7ck9qj2c without the chat or sounds of speed records being broken though)