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While we thought we had escaped the first round of interface patches last week, it turns out that today, an update rolled out that effectively nerfed the two types of interface mechanics we used to improve our BA gameplay.
To be brief, inside the BA instance, the game works in 6 second intervals - everything is tied to this timer. Mobs spawn every 6 seconds, the hammer/logs respawn every 6 seconds, the wave checks every 6 seconds if everything is dead and decides to end it or not, and every fifth 6 second interval, the call changes.
However, this 6 second timer is (through spaghetti code) attached to the person that holds the scroll. This means that if the scroller is somehow stalled, then the game pauses the 6 second timer until the scroller is unstalled, then continues. This stall, however also pauses other things; notably, eggs shot from the cannon do not deplete during the stall duration.
Now, there are two types of stall, interface (or "soft") stalls and animation (or "hard") stalls, as well as two different priorities inside the wave. For example, the wave-end check has low priority, and as such, it can be interrupted, or rather, pushed back, using only an interface stall. On the other hand, a call change has high priority, and an interface stall cannot stop a call from changing. However, a cooking cape emote is a long animation stall that will prevent the call from changing for as long as the scroller character is performing the animation.
As an example of how these are used, this is how we do wave 2: on the west side, there are 4 ranger spawns and 5 fighter spawns. The first four of each spawn during the first call, while the last fighter spawns 30 seconds in, and 1 tick later, the call changes, making it "normally" impossible to kill it during the first call. However, during that 1 tick, the scroller can do a small 2 second animation stall that stops the first call from changing, allowing a second attacker to finish it off during that period. On the east side, there are 3 runner spawns. The last runner, no matter how well you perform your defender role, will always die as early as 37.8 seconds. The problem with this is that the wave checks if all mobs have died at 36 seconds and again at 42. So under normal conditions, we would have to twiddle our thumbs for 4 seconds until the wave decides to end naturally. We can solve this by instead using an interface stall from 36 seconds to 37.8 seconds, pushing the wave-end check to happen once everything is dead, effectively speeding up the round by 4.2 seconds.
We use these sort of mechanics to speed up every wave consistently. We can appreciate some people consider these things to be bug abuse, but I'd like to point out that actually, you can produce a lot of these interface AND animation stalls just by playing ba normally. For example, trying to put up a prayer will give you an interface stall saying "barbarians do not allow you to use prayer here", or shooting the cannon as scroller will dupe eggs, as well as stop the call from changing (an action that certainly could be considered normal). There are other actions like opening your settings menu, repairing a trap, or equipping an elemental shield that also produce these sort of stalls.
However, today, both of these mechanics were nerfed considerably, and honestly, I think the entire speeding community are burnt out. Through my small description, it's hard to communicate the amount of skill that takes to manage a tick-perfect control of these stalls, not just from the scroller performing them, but from the metas in the other roles surrounding them. BA speedrunning is easily one of the hardest and most unique pieces of gameplay in the entire game and it has been obliterated in one update. We understand that something had to be done with regards to the item dupes happening, but we all do hope that our mechanics will one day come back to us.
Here's an example run of one of the fastest BA runs to ever happen, and will probably never happen again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dODPAWI2gXE
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