dck wrote:It doesn't seem different to me from getting any other really remarkable item at a point where it is relevant.
There are already fast races if one would want to remove the "luck based" part of scoring depending on the existence of boots of running, and it's not like when your objective is to go fast the game's races have to all stand on equal footing one to another (since they've not being designed for any of that).
Imagine this scenario:
1. I'm playing let's say DDBe. My first DDBe finds PDA on D:3. He proceeds to rush to Orc after finding Makh's altar, hits Lair around 5k, and has 2 lair runes around 10k. This isn't a super remarkable pace by any means, I just chose 10 so that I can convert aut easier.
2. Now imagine a second DDBe that finds runboots on D:2. This character can spend a greater amount of time healing, running from fights, etc., basically placing themselves in less dangerous combat, and still have the same AUT as the first character, even though they took more turns. He saves roughly 1000 aut just by walking.
I like (1.) better because at least the player has put themselves in challenging situations sooner in order to save time as a consequence of their find. The second player can put themselves in less challenging situations and still spend the same amount of time just because of runboots.
Also, it's not like I want to remove luck entierly here, just saying that with autscoring, certain items like runboots causes luck to translate into score in a way that I think is worse than, say, an early PDA would. You still have a bunch of other items that are useful in keeping your time down. The biggest offender is ctele (since it does the same sort of thing as I explained above) but that could well be gone in 0.16 anyway.
Also, regarding different races, I, and at least a few other players I know who like to do speedruns, like to aim for species highscores instead of class ones. I mean, getting something like the #1 score is cool and all, but species is a big part of crawl's difficulty slider, so it's hard to compare the "value" of a score across species.
edit: If you are just trying to get the highest score period, my opinion is that nothing can come close to VS/DD/Sp. Of course no one wants to play nothing but those 3 races unless they are very determined to get the top score. So, maybe you try to get the fastest score with a given race, since it allows for a variety of different characters to be played.