ESA Summer 2019 - Submission Information

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ESA Summer 2019 is ESA’s flagship speedrunning meetup. It will be held in the spacious convention space of the Quality Hotel View, Malmö which we will be happy to call home for some time going forward. ESA Summer 2019 will be raising money for an as yet unannounced charitable cause.

This year we will be switching to a new submission system that we will use in the years to come and build upon over time. Big shoutouts to CBenni who has been putting in a huge amount of hours over the last weeks while constantly having to deal with new feature request from our side.
Please make sure to read the whole post even if you’re familiar with ESA submissions. The rules are not changing much, but I’ll be explaining the new system and a lot of potential questions will be answered right here already.

Submissions will open tomorrow, April 1st, at 18:00 (6:00 pm) CEST! This is not an in season April Fool’s joke.
A link to the page will be included in tomorrow’s announcement as well as on https://www.esamarathon.com .

Timeline

First submission phase: April 1st - April 16th (including)
First Accepts & Cuts: May 5th
Submission phase for chase games and unreleased games: May 23rd & 24th
Final game list and schedule: May 27th

Even though we’re selling tickets at a rapid rate runners will not need to worry about them selling out by the time of the schedule release. If necessary we will hold back tickets to allow all runners to get one.

Our Philosophy

When deciding whether a suggested game will fit into the final schedule, we will consider the following: length, entertainment value and commentary quality. We will be looking at these three qualities over others such as game popularity.
For example, long games (4 hours or more) are harder to put in the schedule due to how many games could be put in their place. Long games can and still will make it in, but will require more consideration than a shorter game.
Additionally, the entertainment value of runners, games and commentary is taken into consideration. If you are running a game that had a limited release, but is incredibly entertaining or has fantastic commentary, your game is still likely to get in. We also place stock in the scenes and communities around these games and previous marathon runs and runner behaviour (if appropriate).

Pitching games that you have not yet learnt or mastered is OK. But you need to show significant (weekly) progress after the point that your submission passes the first cut.

Guidelines

There will be a limit of five submissions per runner. This includes different categories. You can exceed this maximum by being part of a race, relay or co-op run another runner has submitted. These do not count towards your personal total.
If you are submitting races, relays, co-op games or anything else with multiple people, only one runner will be required to submit it and add the other runners on the submission page. The other runner(s) will then be notified and are required to confirm that they are willing to take part in the race after they set up their profile within the submission system. Please make sure that everybody accepts these invites. We can’t accept runs if the participants haven’t confirmed that they’re taking part.

When submitting your game, you will be asked to provide a short description about the game as well as the run/showcase/exhibition, a video showcasing it as well as information about your personal progress in the game. Bonus points for submitting a video with marathon-like commentary!
We suggest adding your times to the speedrun.com leaderboards for your game (or making your own if it doesn’t exist yet!) so we can more easily keep track of your times. If your community uses other leaderboards, please link them in the submission form. If there are no leaderboards relevant to your submission, feel free to just provide a meme of your choice instead to fulfill the requirements of the form.

Your estimate should consider everything that can go wrong. Actively practice no-reset runs and have backup strategies (or savegames) ready in case something never happened before. It is much better to err on the side of caution and overestimate. You will be able to adjust your estimate time later on and you are advised to do so! Don’t add an inaccurate time in the hope that it will appear more impressive and increase the chance that you are accepted.

There is a very high likelihood that we will offer a second stream again at ESA Summer. It will be limited to a single capture setup, so races and Co-Op runs requiring multiple systems won’t be possible. If you want to you can also opt out of appearing on the second stream by including that in your comment.

You are welcome to submit all content including non-speedrun content as long as it has relevance. Non-complete game categories will be allowed provided they are accepted by the individual communities.
We have a similar stance on emulators: presenting the run on the original console is preferred, but if emulators are accepted by the game’s community, they are allowed.

Submitted games must adhere to Twitch’s community guidelines.

Submission Form

As already announced above, we will be switching to a new submissions system courtesy of CBenni.

You will need to register and link your Twitch account in order to log in. Additionally we require you to link your Discord account as well as include your username on speedrun.com in your profile.

The speedrun.com account is required to check your leaderboard times. Discord will be the main tool for all forms of communication leading up to the event and will also be the way for the game selection and scheduling team to contact you.
If you don’t have an account yet, please get one HERE and join the ESA Server: https://discord.gg/esamarathon

If you already know about your availability during the week, please make that known in your profile.

Possible donation incentives/bid wars can also be entered through the form. Keep in mind that those undergo a review process as well and should not add more than five minutes to your run unless justified. We will reach out to you if we feel like one of your incentives is inappropriate or could work better in a different format. A list with all the accepted incentives and bid wars will be published a few weeks after the schedule has been released.

Your submission will remain editable for the most part until the release of the schedule. After that only donation incentives and bid wars can be changed and major changes to things like the estimate are only possible after talking to us.

The Cuts

There will be two rounds of selections:

The first cut will pick out all the games we are interested in and already confirm a good amount of the final picks.
The second cut will happen at the same time as the schedule release and isolate the final game list.

Every cut game will move to a backup list and can still make a comeback if we need to fill in slots that opened up due to dropouts. Games cut in the second round will be given priority in these decisions.
The time in between the first cut and the release of the full game list has the purpose of giving us more time to make our minds up about the more difficult decisions as well as giving runners an opportunity to improve in all aspects (making our decisions even harder).

“Chase Games” and submitting unreleased games

Chase games are games that we would like to have in the marathon but are not yet released by the end of the submission phase. For these particular games and other games unreleased at the time of the first submission phase we will have separate submissions opening up a few days before schedule release and lasting only three days. Please do not submit unreleased games during the first submission phase.

Since game releases that look like they can turn into good speedruns are very scarce in April and May, the only Chase Game for ESA Summer 19 will be Super Meat Boy Forever. Feel free to prove me wrong by submitting runs of other games released in that time.
Important: Just submitting this game will not guarantee it a spot in the marathon. We will hold it and you to the same standards as all the other games.