I laughed when I saw the note in the changelog recently. It was something like “removed added collision on an underwater pipe speedrunners enjoyed”
I guess it’s hard to walk the line between pleasing hard core gamers and speed runners vs more casual gamers. The speed run community takes advantage of glitches that in many cases make gaming worse for the more casual folks. It’s probably one of those things that devs have to keep in mind in choosing whether to eliminate a bug/glitch or leave it.
It’s not that hard to work through honestly: If a bug/glitch hinders the fun/experience for the end user, remove it. Otherwise leave it alone.
This way speed run strats are left alone while things that frustrate users are fixed.
In Tunic, the devs patched a “glitch” that let you spam a powerful spell at low mana cost but then added a way to enable the old behaviour with a code hidden in the patch notes. Probably my favourite interaction between speedrunners and devs!
It could be that a bug that makes the experience less enjoyable for the majority getting fixed, also ends up inadvertently fixing a bug enjoyed by speed runners. I mean, some of the bugs speed runners use are touchy like that, with them being just inherent properties of how certain mechanics were coded and changing just a value of a thing can make that Speedrun glitch go bye bye. Like the glitch that lets you go straight to the end credits in Castlevania just by going up the stairs at the end of level 3 a specific way so you ensure a bit is a certain value when doing the transition. If they did anything to alter the values of a jump or moving or added another way to reset that value back to default, or even changing the default, that glitch would either be done differently or wouldn’t work anymore.
Here’s (some of) the half-life 2 devs watching a speed run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_PdwL5Y8g
