Lovare, the prizemaster at ESA (European Speedrunning Association), posted a pastebin alleging several incidents of sexual harassment committed against her.
It's not sexual harassment for people to get into and out of an elevator with you or for you to be in a room alone with someone. And also "someone I won't name said something I won't repeat" perfect 10/10 bait.
Also holy fuck how do you put all the addendums about attire when you stream like this. May as well just dress like a stripper and go "my eyes are up here".
Lovare, the prizemaster at ESA (European Speedrunning Association), posted a pastebin alleging several incidents of sexual harassment committed against her.
lmao, it was a matter of time before ESA started getting their own incidents leaked. Wasn't her husband on the ESA staff too, so he did nothing when all this was going on?
Man I am so unplugged I genuinely had no idea SGDQ was coming up until just now, when it started apparently 1 minute ago according to the timestamp on your post.
It's crazy to think that a decade ago I was literally marking my calendar to remember the next GDQ and scouring the schedule to dog ear all the ones I wanted to see live. Hell, I even brought in a third (lmao) monitor to work during my IT days just to put up the GDQ stream so I could watch it in between doing stuff. But then they made trannies and gross perverts their pets and the entire event went straight to hell. Haven't donated, haven't watched, haven't even acknowledged it in well over half a decade now.
Anyways, I anticipate seeing clips and highlights of any funny stuff posted here.
Anyone rememeber and creator on youtube that made videos about speedruners being salty all the time? I could've sworn it was something like Salt Mines or Salt Streams or something?
Edit: He would focus on more obscure speedrunners. One of them was a CS player that nuked his streaming career by yelling Nigger into his mic like 100 times before breaking his keyboard.
Edit edit: I goofed again. He did one video regarding speedrunners that would rage. Every other video would be about mostly obscure streamers with massive anger issues when losing. One guy he covered would constantly be breaking his keyboard and it looked like he was living in his parent's basement.
Another person he covered was a guy that looked like he lived in a basement and would constantly spit on his face cam. Anyway, I'm off to the vidya forum. Pretty sure he got nuked, because the person first mentioned lost his shit and nuked his twitch stream by screaming nigger over and over. Can't even find that person through Google searches.
Anyone rememeber and creator on youtube that made videos about speedruners being salty all the time? I could've sworn it was something like Salt Mines or Salt Streams or something?
Anyone rememeber and creator on youtube that made videos about speedruners being salty all the time? I could've sworn it was something like Salt Mines or Salt Streams or someth
No, I'm aware of him. Love his speedrunning documentaries. I'm beginning to think his channel may have gotten nuked. I'm gonna go full autistic and see if I can find his channel on my old youtube subscribe list. I know I was subscribed to him. If I find him, I'd suggest watching. If I remember correctly he did one video on speedrunners and how insane they can be. Most of his videos were more on salty obscure and not so obscure asshole streamers like LTG. I'm probably in the wrong thread honestly. So, I apologize for that. Ended up in this thread and two brain cells knocked together and I figured I'd ask here.
Another event finished, time for another write-up (late again because I'm lazy)
SGDQ 2024 managed to raise $2,573,570.39 for Doctors without Borders. This doesn't translate to good viewership though, because once again, the trend of losing viewers continues. According to https://gdq.alligatr.co.uk/comparison/ the viewer count never went over 100k, reaching it's peak at 83 917 viewers, just before the Super Metroid run. Thankfully you don't need viewers when you have sponsors! Throughout the whole event they had a meter that would count how many dorito emotes were typed in the chat. They were often shouting stuff like "Let's show some love for Doritos" too, as if stalling for actual donations wasn't enough (they also asked people to spam redbull emotes AGDQ so the shilling is in full force)
Now to the runs themselves:
You can notice at a first glance, the highest ratest run was Katamari Forever. However if you take 15 more seconds and look at the number of votes compared to other runs, remember that 4cuck devs got rid of the poster counter for no reason at all and look at the runner, you will quickly come to the conlcusion that it's not genuine appreciation that led to such a good score.
As for the actually good runs, TrackMania Sunrise is a solid ~50 minute run where a French chud does cool tricks and doesn't let the announcer say a single word after she cuts him off once. It's also advised to watch the run with french acordeon music running in the background
Another good run is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by Dr4gonBlitz, with good gameplay, techniques, commentary and CavemanDCJ on the couch
Speaking of Caveman, he always hosted Evil Zone tournaments during these events and they decided to show the Finals on stream this time
But this is modern GDQ we're talking about, so no one cares about actual good runs, instead our main goal is to milk as much donations as possible by spreadin epically wholesome atmosphere. Just like with this run of Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB played by a dog. They already did a Gyromite run by dog during AGDQ2024 but since it got a lot of views online outside of the usual viewerbase, only a fool wouldn't do it again!
GDQ staff really love showing themselves off even if it means hurting the actual quality of runs presented. A great example of that is a run of Rabbit and Steel (totally not an ad segment btw) where you can see the left side consisting of Aco (a pajeet tranny) and Frozenflygone talking non stop and the right side playing the game in silence.
Then again this shouldn't be a suprise considering what happened at Frost Fatales on one of the hidden test channels they use for different cameras
This is a married woman btw
And that's the main takeaway from this event. The actual good day of GDQ are long gone, but so is the cringe era. Nowadays the only people watching this are either obnoxious people seeking validation and 5 minutes of fame or haters, and the people who participate this are mostly people who use these events as a platform for themselves (especially the organizers). Oh, and if you think you can always just watch ESA for an actually fun event, I've got bad news for you.
This is the schedule for ESA Summer 2024. Not only is once again a non 24/7 event, they also decided to get rid of stream 2, which is a real shame, since that's where you could always switch when stream 1 didn't appeal to you. It also served as a way to show off more ridiculous runs like the 23 hour FFXIV run or TLoZ: Twilight Princess low%. Combine that with a lot of people abandoning ship after Lovare's doc and the future looks really grim. But we'll see on July 20th 2024
Thanks for coming back to do another write-up. As lackluster and boring as GDQ (and by extension speedrunning as a whole) has gotten it's still interesting to see the numbers laid out. COVID really did a number on the event though because prior to the pandemic every GDQ event was something of a pilgrimage for speedrunners aspiring to get their name out there, even as GDQ itself continued to deteriorate. But now the organizers willingly allow vtubers and feature people via remote stream who aren't even at the event. It's really cheapened the entire show because even when it was full of trannies kissing and flashing their fucking balls to the camera at least you actually had to make the trip to the event and it was still sort of a "big deal" in that way. Now it's absolutely nothing. Beyond worthless.
I did not watch a single stream. No one posted any funny clips. You are correct, not only are "the glory days" of GDQ long gone but so are the cringe days. We will never see another "can you stop in the middle of your Zelda speedrun so I can tell you that I've been knitting this retarded scarf because my dad died please pity me" (or whatever). Even the thread for speedrunning events in general in the Games forum languished and got bumped like three days into SGDQ.
I don't expect good things from ESA looking at that schedule. Real shame.
Is there any full rundown of the ongoing downfall of ESA? Looks like a ton of volunteer staff resigned after the situation around Lovare. People wanting Edenal to resign. No longer listing staff on their site. Now they're having a hiatus with no winter event this year.
ESA Summer 2024 has ended and just as expected, the whole event had a ghost town atmosphere surrounding it.
Starting of with the numbers, this event managed to raise a mere $57,514 for Alzheimerfonden.
This is a terrible result, as they couldn't even hit their (already low) goal of $70k. To make things worse, if you compare it to ESA Winter 2024 with it's pretty bad amount of $85,146 raised for Make A Wish, that gives us 27,632 dollars less this time. Having only one real sponsor (Glorious) made things harder, after all there is a reason why GDQ gets so many big donations from this guy called "Anonymous". While they didn't bring as much as the ESA staff hoped to, the donation incentives did lessen the reputational damage of the event, though it was done at the cost of copying classic GDQ tactics, such as stalling and pandering (reminder that just before ESA Winter 2023 they were considering skipping any "trans rights" style messages from donators)
This is also yet another ESA which BigJon couldn't attend. I'm sure this were devastating news for the 2 people who donated to his GoFundMe [A]
As for the runs:
Mirror's Edge was a nice relay race, which was a nice watch. What made it an even better watch was when a ginger called Myths came up and failed a major skip three times in a row, causing the other team to get a heavy lead while he looked as he was about to burst into tears.
After that run there was the 2nd NES block which was nice because it meant there were more shorter runs compared to the ones that lasted around/more than 1 hour. More importantly though, everyone would witness what was later called the "Hirexen saga". You see, Hirexen was just a normal Polish guy who wanted to showcase 4 speedruns of NES games during a marathon. That doesn't sound too bad, until you realize he was meant to speedrun all those game in a time span of 2 hours, as seen on the schedule [A]
Things would obviously go bad when you don't have any real time for practice between all of these, but I don't think anyone expected him to choke so much during the very first run he did.
Then after a short break he was running the Chip 'N Dale: Rescure Rangers race, where he died in unfortunate places making him lose time, but to make the matters worse, he lost the signal multiple times during the run. It went so bad, that he decided to mercy-kill the run after his opponent won the race.
Panic restaurant was another race, though this time it didn't go as bad, with him finishing under the estimate and even getting close to the lead a few times, but ultimately losing due to a few hiccups. The same could be said about Monster in my pocket which was a nice ending to the saga where Hirexen finally manages to beat a game fast with no problems... Until during the Mega Man 2 relay race he managed to mess up the zip in Wood Man's stage which skips half of the level. He instead loaded the Willy Castle 3 stage by accident, meaning he had to get a game over and restart the whole level, causing the other team to take lead (after they died 2 times during boss fights) which would carry on for the entirety of the run
I touched upon the topic of donation incentives during this event. One of them was a $5k incentive for using a DDR dance pad (or rather dance mat) during a rhythm segment in Super Mario World ROMhack called Grand Poo World 3.
People managed to raise that money after numerous exasperating segments and mid-run interruptions from the hosts. What they got was 12 minutes of failing to make the correct inputs intervened with multiple attempts at recalibration, all to the accompaniment of awkward silence. Eventually the runner decided to abandon the dance mat completely because who cares about five thousand dollar incentives, and continued his attempts at the boss fight using a regular SNES controller (note that this didn't stop him from failing). This whole ordeal pretty much ruined what was a pretty enjoyable final day run. Here's the timestamped part:
Oh yeah, the runner is a cripple btw
I know I only focused on the chokes and trainwrecks in this write-up, but that's related to the main issue of this event. There simply wasn't that much happening. Sure, most runs were enjoyable but there weren't many of the ones that stand out. In my opinion, the best runs were Crash Team Racing and Half-Life, since both of these featured truly impressive gameplay and nice, informative commentary
With an event like this, there's not much to be proud of. That's what even the out of touch organizers by the name of Edenal (who didn't show up at the stream outside of the finale and some donations) and Planks realised. The defeat can be felt from the finale video alone.
Outside of the obvious "-ACK!" jokes, the final part of Edenal's being hanged led many people to believe that it was a symbol of him resigning from leading the whole eve- LOL, NO!
In conclusion, ESA Summer 2024 is a sad tale of how badly a series of bad decisions and a lack of communication can lose all the public goodwill and hurt a great event which people would genuienly look forward too. The fact that many iconic runners absent from ESA Summer '24 will still be attending a much smaller, ESA adjacent event called Benelux Speedrunner Gathering 2024 is also a really bad look. Especially when you consider that Metako moved to Sweden just to be more involved with ESA (see: ESA Legends (which already got cancelled)). The future is grim, with the website only showing that they will be back in 2025
Here are two pastebins talking about behind the scene stuff: Das' pastebin [A] ; GRINKFR's pastebin [A]
Also here's Coolmatty sharing his thoughts on the situation. Keep in mind that he is a disingenous faggot
