tl;dr: Race on therun.gg, in real time, with cool stats, graphs. Easy, fun, and fully free.
It has been a while since the last update, since updates are mostly done through Discord and Twitter. Today is special however. You can now do speedrun races on therun.gg! Races are fully real-time, so you can track your position and status live during the race, all tracked automatically by LiveSplit.
But first, let us talk about 2023. The start of the year was pretty slow. I had worked very hard throughout 2022 and the beginning of 2023 for the Live page and the LiveSplit Component, and I was slightly burnt out after. I still built the tournaments feature, and did a lot of improvements on the site, but took it a lot slower.
Thankfully, due to our fantastic supporters, I could easily keep the site running while not doing too much work on it. Around September last 2023, I felt fine again and decided to work on the next big feature: Races!
The site is completely free and has no ads. If you can afford it, please consider supporting us. It keeps the site running and allows me to build more cool stuff!
Now, on to races! Back in 2013, when I started speedrunning, races were a BIG deal. SpeedRunsLive was the place to be for everything speedrunning. At the peak, over 4000 races were done there every single month there. I, myself, did well over a hundred races on the site.
Unfortunately, SRL is not very active anymore. Out of nostalgia, I decided I want to build my own version of races. I figured it could integrate nicely with the live data, and I could do some really cool stuff with it. And I did.
The big difference between racing on therun.gg and other sites, like racetime.gg and speedrunslive, is that you can track all participants in real-time throughout the race. It is like playing Mario Kart, but with speedrunning. You will know who is ahead, how far the tailgaters are behind, and you will get a cool graph of the entire race status.
My main goal when designing the feature was that it has to be easy, fun, quick and free to create, join, participate in and spectate races. Creating a race is a matter of entering the game, category, and pressing Go. Joining a race is one click of the button. Playing in the race is just... Doing your run. The LiveSplit Component will automatically start, track and finish your race for you.
In addition to that, everything about your race is manually modified easily.
Creating a race is easy. All you have to do is be logged in with Twitch. Hit the Create new Race button on the races page, and you will be taken to the Race Create form. The only things you must enter are the game and category, but there are many optional customizations:
Now, hit Create Race and your race will be done in a second or two. Invite fellow runners to join and you are good to go!
Participating in a race is just as easy. When the start condition has been fulfilled (everyone is ready or the starttime has passed), the countdown will start. You can just do your run like you are used to.
I recommend using the therun.gg LiveSplit Component, which will allow the site to track you during your race. You will also appear on the Live page if you enable it! When you use the component, all of the race will be done automatically. When you finish your run your final time will be recorded automatically. If you reset, you will be abandoned from the race automatically, etc.
Any action can be overridden manually on the race page. You will see buttons to manually abandon, manually unabandon, manually finish, manually unfinish, and much more.
That is fine! Your run will not be tracked live, but you can still join the race. When you finish your run, just hit the Finish Race button on the race page. The site will guess your time based on how long you took to press the button, but you can always manually adjust your time.
As you are used from me, I love stats, and I incorperated a bunch of them for races.
Every user that has done races has a Race Profile. Click your name from the race page, or check your profile to see your race stats, and go to your race stats from there. You can see your past races, your total stats, and your stats per game/category you have raced.
I spent a lot of time to implement a custom implentation of the Elo rating system. You will have a rating for every category you run. It starts at 1500 and increases or decreased based on your performance.
For every category, there are leaderboards for many stats:
Lastly, you can see stats for every game, and for every category. Go to the main /races page, and check out the stats on the right side of the page. By clicking through, you will find many cool stats!
There is much, much more to say about races, but this blog is already extremely long, and I want you guys to just go have fun and do some speedrun races! I worked extremely hard on this feature, and I sincerely hope you will like it.
Thank you for checking out the site, reading the blog, and supporting me!
Joey