What frustrates you the most when trying to record a demo?

Whenever I am bored and decide to do a little speedrun of a wad I like, I just seem to bump into things or get stuck on some walls.
What are your opinions on what frustrates you while attempting to record a demo?

Shotgun guy doesn't die to 5 pistol shots.

For me the worst thing is that moment where I begin to feel like what I'm trying to achieve starts to depend more on luck than on skill, which basically means that I just need to redo the same stuff again and again many times, waiting for good infightings or whatever. At that point the whole exercise turns into something very absurd, similar to the Sisyphus story. But I guess smarter and better players could look at some of my attempts and pinpoint the stuff that I'm doing wrong and should improve on. I have this bad tendency to just stick to one strategy without changing much. So at least partially these annoyances are my own fault I suppose.

Looper said:

Shotgun guy doesn't die to 5 pistol shots.

Yup, pretty much stuff like that. Shooting through things, especially in PrBoom+.

Another big pet peeve of mine is having to walk over thin ledges or go platform jumping (a little bit is OK, but it's easy to overdo it). Falling down somewhere is by far the most sucky reason to cancel a speed run. I much prefer dying. Yes, you can improve your skill just as with wall bumping and such, but it's not the type of skill I would like to spend much time on. Doom isn't Mario Brothers.

I think imp not dying to a single SG shot is my least favorite damage RNG part of Doom.

Screwing up a winning demo. Like MM MAP27 UV Speed. Almost 4 years ago... I tried again many times and I still didn't succeed. http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/964325/#post964325

I really don't mind RNG not in my favour, it can be funny sometimes.

My least favorite is when a pinky just won't move when you need it to. Also same with 4shockblast, I hate imps not dying to one SG shot.

When the best demo you've ever done gets ruined by random reasons at the end of the map.

I'd say now probably getting hit by revenant or baron projectiles. They really hurt, and I usually feel like it's my fault for letting it happen. Of course there was the time in m218 where my mouse went out of control for a short while, which quite possibly cost me a successful run, but that was more funny than frustrating.

In TAS: Monsters blocking the way when you have no time / ammo to kill them.
In regular demos: RNG luck and... my emotionality. Whenever I'm trying to record a long, hard demo, my hands start to shake and if I fail it, I just go insane. :p I wish I wasn't so emotional...

Memfis said:

I begin to feel like what I'm trying to achieve starts to depend more on luck than on skill, which basically means that I just need to redo the same stuff again and again many times, waiting for good infightings or whatever

I always rely on luck in my demos. When I fail something, I just repeat the same actions over and over again until everything will be perfect (it won't work in uv-max demos though). I used this tactic in 3hafinal.wad map29 pacifist and it worked pretty well.

When after bothering to record a demo, almost nobody watches it anyway.

Flawed hitscan checks -> shooting through things.

Flawed player's melee checks -> easy to take damage while berserking or chainsawing any enemies.

Impossibility to look up/down in a map I don't know.

Impossibility to cheat when I get stuck or something.

Note: I'm not a speedrunner, I typically play with a ZDoom based port and occasionally record FDAs in PrBoom-plus. I know I know, some of these points are directed against non-ZDoom ports in general instead of recording demos, I have it associated together.

http://82.66.133.154:85/Autre/Coop-20120629-003806.png

Here's one that manages to be both frustrating and funny: When you're trying to run past a pinky or specter and they run left and right in exactly the same manner as you, stopping you cold. Not so much fun if you get a rocket up the ass in the process.

-Getting a good UV-Speed time and then looking at DSDA to see what I beat, only to find that there is a pacifist faster than my run.

-Monsters being dicks.

Getting to a sweet spot where I reliably go very close to my goal (say, ending .20 away from my target time in a short grind), but no dice, so I start changing details a little... and I only get worse and there's no way back to the more polished effort.

Like memfis, I tend to get hung up doing a single chosen route, spending 50+ tries trying to execute it just right, often getting pissed about imps that take more than one berserk punch or a cacodemon not dying in two super shotgun shots. Later I find that some of those luck-driven things I spent so much time, both my own time from retrying and in the final demo performing what could have been easily bypassed and shown in another demo. I think I have a tendency to deliberately do things until I find something critically challenging and for some reason consider it to be the fastest way of doing things.

When in a long(ish) demo, where the crucial point comes toward the middle or the end, you have to go through the easy initial part over and over. No sweat when it's only a few tries, just cruising; the cruising turns into mental bruising when it's a few dozen. In the end the easy part grates on you harder than what's supposed to be the real challenge(s) of that run. It becomes an unholy grind and you start to hate that first level(s) with passion.

I have Switcheroom E1M1 specifically in mind, although this applies to pretty much any episode/full game run, of course.


But there's one thing worse than all of that (isn't there always):

j4rio said:

When after bothering to record a demo, almost nobody watches it anyway.

Never_Again said:

I have Switcheroom E1M1 specifically in mind, although this applies to pretty much any episode/full game run, of course.

Yep.

The unholy trinity: mob manipulation, damage manipulation, linedef skipping.

ClumsyDoomer said:

if I fail it, I just go insane. :p I wish I wasn't so emotional...

Both of us.

Kotzugi said:

When you're trying to run past a pinky or specter and they run left and right in exactly the same manner as you, stopping you cold.

In the unholy name of ass, amen!
Edit: waiting for shit. a) HR2 map09 as a nightmarish example. b) Skipsec.