I have attempted to contact all IL runners of this game, however a couple left no contact method. Please reply here if you wish. The message I sent out:

Hello. You are receiving this message because you have a run on the Super Mario Run individual level leaderboards. I have been attempting to change the individual level timing for single levels (NOT full worlds) to use in-game time (IGT). However, this issue has been a bit divisive so there is now this poll. Please read the reasons for and against switching to IGT within this pastebin: https://pastebin.com/mbU5pUUy

You may vote three ways: IGT RTA Don't care

No response after several days will be taken as a vote for don't care.

Cheers, Tall

I have been thinking for a while that some of MaxDragonSoul's IL times are too good to be true. Unfortunately his lack of video has made it difficult to get any concrete evidence for this, but I believe I now have enough. However I am not accusing him of cheating: please skip to the final paragraph if you wanna see what I have to say about the evidence and don't care about the evidence itself.

A good example is Shoot into the Wild Blue (Mario) (http://www.speedrun.com/run/y67ldp1m), where his claimed time is 9.82. The strat described is ¤slower¤ that the one done in the 28 star TAS WIP ( at 8:58) but his time is only 0.09 slower than the TAS. Even with the same strat, getting this close to the TAS would be pretty ridiculous but with a slower strat it is frankly impossible. That TAS time was improved by 0.3, but it was using an even faster strat: . The 9.73 strat was perfectly optimised.

Another example is Over the Rainbow Black Box Star (Wario) (http://www.speedrun.com/sm64ds/Over_The_Rainbows_Black_Box_Star#Wario1). Unfortunately for this one Max did not provide the exact time, just that it was 7.xx. Using a ledge grab strategy I was only able to get a low 9s time. Admittedly I was grabbing onto the black box instead of the cloud but I think this should be very close to if not faster than grabbing the cloud as you can then ground pound instantly to get the star. I then managed to perfect a strategy that skips the ledge grab entirely, getting me 8.4: . This is still not 7s, even using a faster strategy than Max.

The final time that confirmed my suspicion that something was wrong was this one: Princess's Secret Slide Sub 21 Star (Mario). Here is my run, 21.9: http://www.speedrun.com/run/zxv204ky. And his run, supposedly 20.9: http://www.speedrun.com/run/m3dgok6z. My run is pretty clean and I doubted strongly that an entire second could have been saved. And it turns out that 20.9 is actually FASTER than the TAS time for this star: in the 28 star WIP the time is 21.1 (). So this time of his is evidently impossible.

I am not accusing MaxDragonSoul of intentionally cheating, and don't believe his runs should be removed. What I believe has happened is a timing error: he has started timing when he gains control rather than on the first visible frame of the level after the black screen. Using this timing method my ledge grab Over the Rainbows run would have been around 7.7s, and my faster strat one a low 7, both tying what he got. This error of around 1.5s, or slightly more or less depending on the course, would explain his other suspicious times too. This is hopefully what has occurred, as then all that needs to be done is the time from the first visible frame to gaining control for each level needs to be calculated, and then added onto each times. I will stress again this time will be different for each course. This theory seems the most likely and it would also explain him beating 3 of the Big Penguin Race times by 1s. If this was malicious he would not have provided explanations of strats used for most of his runs, so I do just think this is a misunderstanding with how runs are timed. Hopefully it can be resolved with a few hours of editing runs, and none need to be removed. Having a direct way to contact him would have alleviated the need for this thread, but sadly all he has is a dead link to a YouTube channel on his profile. Ideally he will see this thread naturally, and worst case scenario a mod simply links it within a rejection message. I hope no action is taken until he makes a response, as although I highly suspect there has been a timing error of some sort, it might not be exactly what I described.

Edit: I also wanna mention that some of his runs are almost certainly timed ¤correctly¤: his Goomboss Battle switch star time (http://www.speedrun.com/run/yl9v462y) was only a few frames slower than what I got today, 13.98 vs 13.8. And I changed up my strat a little to save a few frames at the end with a long jump, so his time seems like exactly the time I'd expect to see after grinding my old strat. So I'm a little more confused with what's going on now :P

Thanks to the front page showing the most recent runs, I have been seeing this a lot recently: runs that are not speedruns but are in fact aiming for highest score, using rules such as "Put your score in the milliseconds slot." speedrun.com does provide variables which can be set up to display a score along with a time (example http://www.speedrun.com/boxboy/Score_Attack_3#Bunny_ ) but it is not intended for the time column to be used for tracking score, as a run taking as long as possible to get the highest score possible is not a speedrun. Is there any intention for speedrun.com to accommodate score runs as well as speedruns in the future, or will the games doing this be dealt with?

Here are some examples of games doing this:

http://www.speedrun.com/flappybird http://www.speedrun.com/Happy_Jump http://www.speedrun.com/Crossy_Road#High_Scores http://www.speedrun.com/Ball_King#High_Score

http://www.speedrun.com/pt (All the Misc categories) http://www.speedrun.com/Piano_Tiles_2 http://www.speedrun.com/White_Tiles_4_Piano_Master (Arcade, Speed and VIP modes and ¤many¤ Misc categories)

http://www.speedrun.com/googlepacman (High score categories) http://www.speedrun.com/Google_Doodle_Soccer_2012 http://www.speedrun.com/chinesenewyear2013 http://www.speedrun.com/Pony_Express_Google_Doodle_2015 http://www.speedrun.com/Google_Doodle_ICC_Champions_Trophy_2017_Begins

These are just the ones I found after maybe 15 minutes and I'm sure there are many more. For at least some of these games a leaderboard for score runs exists elsewhere, for example https://cyberscore.me.uk/chart/168804 for Flappy Bird. As this is a speedrun site I don't think these games/categories belong on the site, unless one day there is an expansion of scope and score runs are also included.

This game seems very suited towards using the in-game timer, particularly for Individual Level speedruns. Using IGT opens up several interesting routing options, such as waiting on pause blocks or using bubbles in an interesting fashion. For example, you can use a bubble in 1-2 to move forwards, and I was able to save a second from the record: https://twitter.com/Really_Tall/status/845822269003829248

Using IGT also eliminates the problem of inconsistent loading/lag spikes. In that same video, I get a massive lag spike at about 0:28, and by using IGT that doesn't affect my time.

IGT could also be applied to full game runs, by adding up the IGT of each level and having that as the final time, similar to what is done with some Sonic games. I'm more interested in ILs but it would be worth considering.

All in all I think IGT would make ILs a lot more interesting, easier to time, and fairer between devices. The only downside is re-timing runs, but there are currently not too many so that should be easy enough to do. I really hope the IL leaderboards can be switched to IGT, and maybe the full game ones too :)

P.S. Please add android as a platform, the game recently released on it.