Map Filters Website Update + Community Feedback
Dear community,
For the past few months we have been working on labelling all the available kreedz.com maps according to these three main categories:- Difficulty- Length- Type
*You may notice there's a X-D category as well, but more on that in a future newspost.
We believe that this would serve as a massive quality of life update for people who want to pick a specific map they'd like to play, or to simply satisfy their curiosity based on the fun data the filters provide. With that being said, let's take a deeper look into the methodology behind labelling all of the maps:
1. Difficulty
We have introduced 10 different tiers of difficulty, ranging from 'Beginner' to 'Death'. When it comes to difficulty, we tried to take into consideration the actual difficulty of the jumps, rather than how risky the map was. For that reason, fu_extreme may have a lower difficulty than mojito_xiaoheifenbhop, even though it may be just as hard/harder to nocheck the map.
Overall philosophy behind difficulty tiers:
Beginner:
Maps which could be almost entirely passed by just pressing W and the jump key. Some jumps may require 2-3 inefficient strafes.
Easy/Easy-Medium:
Still mostly passable with W-only movement, but would also often require some basic airstrafing. Bhop maps are also included here as long as there aren't more than 2-3 chained bhop blocks.
Medium, Medium-Hard:
Maps which actually require from the player to properly sync and time their strafes and bhops. Quite easy if these two techniques are dominated with relative ease on a basic level, but very difficult for complete beginners not knowing the basic concepts of Kreedz.
Hard, Hard-Extreme:
Maps which require high level precision of the aforementioned skillset for almost all types of techniques. Players who pass them are visibly quite advanced in their skill level. Nevertheless, advanced players can still pass these maps with relative ease. They usually include longer bhop sections with different height elevations, a ton of precise highjumps and strafe jumps on climb maps, and up to 250-255 longjump blocks and/or comparable distances for other LJ techniques.
Extreme, Extreme-Death:
Maps on which even the advanced players can get stuck on a certain jump or section for an extended period of time. Only the best of the best are capable of smoothly finishing these kind of maps, making them look like they are mere 'hard, hard-extreme' maps.
Death:
The highest difficulty tier a map could have. Even the best KZ players will often get stuck on certain jumps there. Moreover, we rarely (or if at all) see a smooth/close to perfect run on them, as they usually require several attempts on every single jump, even with checkpoints.
*Exceptions:
• Maps which have two routes (e.g. bkz_wallblock) have their difficulty judged according to the route. So bkz_wallblock with the shortcut has a harder difficulty than the [full] route which doesn't take it into consideration.
• Maps which have big shortcuts, but do not have a [full] route have an adjusted 'middle ground' difficulty. For example, kz_man_dreaming's latest WR has a potential extreme-death tier shortcut landed, but the map doesn't have a [full] route. In that case, the entirety of the map is taken into consideration, so it is neither 'easy' or 'extreme' difficulty, but more 'medium'. Mind you, only a few maps are like that in the map pool because the majority of them already have a secondary route, but nonetheless it is important to mention that this is quite subjective at the end of the day. In some future updates, we will add exceptions on the map page indicating the difficulty of the map with and without its shortcut/s.
• Difficulty is also based on the highest display of skill that exists. In other words, even though in 2006 kz_cg_extreme was actually considered an extreme map, by modern standards, that is at most medium-hard difficulty. If in the distant future the norm would be that more and more maps appear to be twice as hard as some of the current death tier ones, then all other maps would have their difficulty adjusted, rather than creating a new difficulty tier.
2. Length
Length was divided into five main categories with a -/+ 10% difference for time taken into account:
Very short: Below 40 seconds.
Short: Between 40 seconds and 2 minutes
Middle: Between 2 minutes and 5 minutes
Long: Between 5 minutes and 10 minutes
Very Long: Above 10 minutes
Completion time is judged according to the ideal nocheck world record run. This is why you may notice that a big chunk of nocheck extreme or extreme-death records that have above 10 minute runs may not be necessarily labelled as 'Very Long'. That is because the runner simply failed to have an ideal run and was likely stuck on a certain jump or stage for a long time. The reason for this is to take the difficulty out of the equation because of the following example:
- If a map has only 5 jumps total, but all 5 are 275 DCJ blocks, then the map would likely have a 'death' tier difficulty. Nevertheless, the real length of the map would be simply 'Very Short', since under ideal conditions, one would finish the map in about 15 seconds.
- On the other hand, hb_mart is likely one of the longest death tier maps in existence, while simultaneously one of the hardest i.e. death tier difficulty + Very Long length.
The reason we went with this way of labelling length was because we cannot know the skill level of every jumper when it comes to how that would affect the length of the map. For instance, in extreme cases, even bkz_goldbhop can be considered as a 'very long' map depending on the jumper. This is why difficulty filters will help out every jumper determine what his own realistic completion time would be. The easier the map, the closer the WR is to the actual completion time.
Even X-D maps were judged this way, because even though some death tier maps may have a record of 30 minutes WITH the usage of gochecks and mpbhops, that usually means the jumper had a big amount of gochecks, which artificially extend the actual nocheck/first try completion of the death tier map. For that reason, it is important to differentiate the length between death tier maps themselves, since some of them are also very long, as is the case with hb_mart (Death, Very Long) in comparison to hfr_hb_toffifee which can be passed in under 5 minutes (Death, Middle).
*Exceptions:
• Similarly to how difficulty was applied to maps with a secondary route, the length is also judged in the exact same manner. If we go back to the bkz_wallblock example, the length of the map with the shortcut is 'Very Short', but for the [full] route it's simply 'Middle'.
• All maps which have a big shortcut but not a secondary route have also been addressed in the exact same way. I.e. the length is 'in between' the shortcut and the [full] route. So for kz_man_dreaming, the length is 'long' since without the shorcut it would have been 'Very Long', and with it it's simply 'Middle'.
3. Type
We narrowed down type to five main categories:
- Bhop
- Climb
- Slide
- Mix
- Special
A short explanation for some of the types. While 'Bhop' and 'Climb' are quite self-explanatory, the rest may be a bit more confusing:
• Slide: All kind of slides are added here, be it longslides, steepslides, duckslides, slide longjumps, and every other variation you could think of.
• Special: All maps which are mostly based on the following techniques: longjumps, doubleduck stairs, AXN, gravity, deathrace/deathrun/freerun types, water strafes, speedboosts, maps with a lot of movable objects, 2D maps, and every other uncommon technique/type which may cover the entirety of the map.
• Mix: All maps that have a combination of at least two of the four other types (Climb, Bhop, Slide, Special) will be labelled as 'Mix'.
What percentage of the map has to belong to a certain type to be considered as such?
- For Bhop, Slide, Climb, and Special, they need to be at least around 70% for the entirety of the map.
E.g. bkz_goldbhop is about 70% bhop, even though it has a 30% climb part. For that reason, it is mostly considered a pure 'Bhop' map.
*Disclaimer: For 'Special', if 50% of the map is 'AXN' and the other 50% is 'Longjump', then it would still remain as 100% special. Different variations of the special filter aren't taken into consideration yet, so we wanted to simplify it with a single one.
- For Mix: As much as 65% of one type and 35% of another type. This could also mean that if a map was 65% climb, 5% special, 10% slide, 20% bhop, then it'd be still labelled as 'Mix', and not 'Climb'.
*Exceptions:
• Same as previous exceptions, maps with two routes may be categorized differently when it comes to type. If a shortcut leads you to a section which consists of only bhops, which would equal to the entire route being 70% bhop, then it'll be labelled as 'Bhop'. However, if the [full] route consists of mostly climb, then it'd be labelled as climb.
• Maps which do not have a secondary route, but still have a big shortcut will be judged according to a mix between the two hypothetical routes. If we use the previous example as a map which doesn't have an official route, but it makes use of a big shortcut, then that would be neither 'Bhop' or 'Climb', but rather 'Mix'.
4. Map Filters Suggestions and Feedback:
First of all, you can already see all filters and play with them by going to this page. You can do a lot of different combinations. The possibilities are endless. For example, you can mix different difficulties and see the all records of both 'easy' and 'hard' at the same time. Alternatively, you can see only one of them, but mix it together with a specific length and/or type. It all falls down to what you want to see.
Taking everything into consideration, kreedz.com's map pool exceeds over 1000 maps, so the likelihood of us making some mistakes when labelling the maps is quite plausible. For that reason we have created a specific discord channel where you could share your suggestions or feedback in regards to map filters for all of difficulty, type, and length. As long as you provide a good reasoning and explanation based on the aforementioned principles, we may update the filters associated with the map. Thank you!
Click here to access the map filters feedback discord channel!
I also want to send special thanks to everyone who contributed with the map filter project, in particular:
r0byN, g-Lp, Radioactive, rawe, marc0z], ShoCk, phayzeeVW, R3AL
5. YouTube Links for all Records
A few words about this small project which was initiated a few months ago. Now you are able to simply click on the YT icon next to a record, and that will redirect you to the respective YT world record video. I wanted to highlight this because we've been slowly adding the links over the past few months. In particular, I want to express my gratitude to everyone who was involved in adding the YT links, as all of them fastened the process by quite a bit in the past few weeks.
So special thanks go to: rawe, Radioactive, marc0z], g-Lp
Yours,
Kreedz.com