Uhh...I know, it's almost been a year at this point, so this is old news...but hey, we got a new secondary Admin this year, and I NEED to talk about him!
After last year's community update, our very own atz decided to leave. That's just fair. He gave everything he had since OoTR was founded, and sometimes, one just needs to move on. Maybe stuff didn't develop the way you envisioned...that's okay. One's contributions never fade. And the gratefulness stays. And atz will never be forgotten. Anyways, we want to look forward today...
I have to say: When Chimp stepped up, I felt big relief. Why is that?

Well frankly, it's a very personal thing: Even if it often doesn't seem that way, leading a community the size of OoTR (and that means over 48000 Discord members just for the main discord) is not only a lot of work, but also mentally challenging. All these people from all over the world, with strong beliefs, their own principles and culture, and age 12 to 50+ - it's completely normal for there to be clashes. And that's before you start talking racing and competitive arguments.
And from the get go, I knew Chimp was willing not just to get his hands dirty (he's a monkey after all...), but also willing to share the load in this regard. To share the toll it takes to handle cheating cases when you actually feel unsure, to share the toll it takes when a big fight between subsets of the community breaks out (for example the disconnect between the french and english racing scene), and to share the responsibility when it comes to big decisions and giving everyone the feel that you are available for them and able to share your time with them.
I think his impact on the community has been gigantic already, and I am grateful for every single day he's willing to work next to this chaotic, impulsive and stressed human being that is known as TreZ. Thank you bud!

Oh, so sweet... the scent of a fresh release... always such a thrill. To be honest, for 6.0 and 6.2, I've not been a big part of development. This changed with 7.0.
With our lovely maintainers TR and Zannick taking a step back, last year we were wondering..."hey, who's gonna maintain the project now?". And well, it was clear that this wouldn't be me. Heh - who am I kidding. But then two people stepped up BIG TIME:
ShadowShine57 and Cuphat decided to pick up the role.
They didn't get a shiny introduction, they didn't ask for any benefits, they just arrived and started working. Frankly, we all should be incredibly gracious for their work. Being a maintainer can be a tough job. People expect you to develop features, to accept PRs without question, to solve any issue within hours. And with so many old and new contributors showing up and providing their ideas, it's also a freaking lot of work. Seriously.

But they managed. They pushed through, and the two of them are the one big reason OoTR v7 is OUT and became one of the, if not the biggest release OoTR ever had. While only playing a minimal part, I'm proud that I was able to be a part of it, contribute with ideas and feedback, do a few minor changes myself (big shoutouts to oidamo for finally pushing for the GUI update!), and I think if we all, contributors, staff, and maintainers, keep up the spirit and the motivation and the creativity that defined v7 development, the future for OoTR as a software will have fantastic things in stock. One massive example of this is the next paragraph:

Yea. It actually happened. Those of you who've been around since our humble beginnings in 2018 know that custom player models were the thing that everyone always wanted and that we always said wouldn't happen here. Remember the term "display lists"? But yea, look at us now.

I want and need to give a hefty shoutout here to not only our very own ShadowShine and Maple who kept pushing and made this happen, but also to the ModLoader64 community, who had this for a while and helped us a lot to get it on the road, even with the added challenges of us requiring platform parity. Every race ZSR restreams since I am thrilled to see how people decide to customize their models, next to the meanwhile sheer insane amount of cosmetic options, and it brings great joy to the entire team. This was a project between two different communities, not even talking the leads, but individuals within these communities, and the results are fantastic.

I hope you all are as excited as we are to finally have custom player models.

While we are extremely pleased with how ootrandomizer.com has been growing, the website has not seen major updates in a while. It's why I am glad to share two new pages that we have added:

Tournament Qualification Standings

The season 6 qualification races have wrapped up, the top 64 and 128 are chosen, but we felt it was about time these standings are reflected on OoTR.com - so here they are. Faster, better, searchable - and accompanied by an archive of all OoTR main tournaments. We hope you enjoy. In addition, we'd be happy to provide the same service for other qualification based tournaments in the community - let us know.

Development Info Page

As I mentioned before, the amount of contributions and crazy creative and highly skilled contributors in the community is one of the huge staples of OoTR. Many of these devs maintain their own forks which cool custom features that have not made it to the main fork yet or maybe are not planned to be added. This page will feature all of those forks and share infos about them...before you click over to their own ootr.com generator page to get your fix of daily OoTR madness.
Wanna get your fork added? Let us know! Every developer can get their own fork on the website with a small web tool to deploy to the website, provided that the fork is reasonably different from any of the existing options.

Meanwhile...work on a design rework has begun a while ago. This is done by myself, so extremely time limited, but I want to give a quick sneak peak at least.

Looks nice, doesn't it? Please know this is a very early proof of concept.
The design idea is to have a dark mode based theme, a lot less bloated experience, and also less intrusive ad placement. Hopefully, you all will be able to enjoy the new website before the end of the first half of 2023 - but no guarantees here.
Do you have your own design ideas (note that the OoTR GUI is an angular app embedded into the page) or desire to help with implementation? Hit me up!

For many, OoTR is racing. It's often easy to forget that the majority of seeds rolled on the website consists of casual seeds, but either way, within our community, if you are deeply invested into the usual community events, you are either racing or interacting with races.

There are tournaments all over the place, hosted by TSG or the Scrubs community, for SGLive or by members of the main community, and that's not even counting the big main tournament once a year. On top, we have the weeklys and all the side gigs, the language specific tournaments, DDR, RSL, TFBlitz..it's hard to even stay on top. That shows a gigantic desire in the community to stay diverse and to not have racing get stale. This is a very positive desire, but often clashing with the concept of a very competitive environment.

We've seen that a lot during the settings finding process for S6. Many played their own styles, found settings, advertised them to their friends, and when these settings did not become the S6 official ones, some responded with anger. The race moderation is convinced that the settings we have now work great, but others gave up on them, never played them, or are still not happy with the changes. And we take that feedback serious cause every single racer of the community deserves to be heard (as long as they decide to be open and fair about their feedback). So for next year, there are a few more diverse options on the table, and we are planning to involve the community in this earlier. Hopefully, we'll find a great system together that can motivate racers for years to come.

Theres more topics about the scene that are also on my mind, but they will have to wait for another community update to not let this get out of hand here: The amount of increasing cheating cases, especially in season 5, the tension between Standard, glitched rulesets, and those in the middle, racing concepts next to tournaments and weeklys, and more. Especially the last two I mentioned deserves a lot more attention. So we'll postpone this to the next update, which will be out before XMAS 2023, promised!

What a crazy year. Really. We could extend this article by probably another 5 paragraphs. But...eh. Naaah! Too proud to provide a tl;dr - so we need to stop soon.
Thank you for all these crazy milestones. Passing 1 million seeds on this very website, and about 300k this year alone...adding more and more dev forks, creating new modes and tools - this page has grown more than we would have ever believed...just like the fantastic community behind it. And 2023 has so much more in stock! We know you are all waiting for MW2.0 - and at this point, it feels like Duke Nukem Forever, we know that. But rest assured that we're closer than ever, and that some people have seen a proof of concept by now.
So we're getting there, and to be honest, do not expect to write another community update before it's out. And i want to do these more often :P

(Chimp) Ah I remember it like it was only yesterday... The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I was starting my first rando in Season 1.
Now I'm co-admin, we have luxurious quality of life such as a website, racetime.gg (because using IRC can go to hell) and enough bots to fill a factory, and hey we can even shuffle beehives now (Thanks RealRob!)! Good lord. TreZ has summed up the bulk of what I was going to say (no really, I wrote stuff out before seeing what he wrote then deleted most of it) so I'll keep it short. It's been a tough year for everyone, the world climate is harsh right now but I'm glad that we can continue to run this community for you all to seek out that escapism, be it to rush ice and be a meme-lord, or be it full mixed pools OHKO because you really want to punish yourself. I mostly just want to thank you all for every minute you spend in the community, both those that say a lot and those that say nothing and just watch/play in the background.
I hope you all have a great 2023, me and TreZ will still be around to continue to learn and grow, it looks like active development is flourishing again and I'm sure there will be other surprises. As always I welcome any and all feedback on how to foster this amazing community and continue to push it forward.

A big thank you to TreZc0_ (full name) for being a fantastic leader and partner. He loves this community more than anyone, even if he is a pain in the butt sometimes 😉 He has worked so hard behind the scenes and doesn’t get the credit he deserves at times! Lets make 2023 fantastic.
Merry Christmas to those that celebrate it, I hope you all get some peace and rest over the next few weeks, see you on the other side for some more rando!

That's all for now. We want to end with the same words used last time: If you have any feedback for us, know that our doors (read: our dms) are always open. If you don't go forwards, you go backwards, and we are convinced that moving forwards, there is a lot of journey left for all of us.