IL rules
Deleted
7 years ago
England

If level manipulation is something that can be done by everyone, with no extra tools (Game Shark etc) then yes, they should be allowed, because you're not restricting who can do it.

Arizona, USA

With regards to Serious Sam, it's probably done because it's "Individual Levels". When you're bringing in something beforehand and you're using something you can't get in the level then at that point it no longer becomes an individual level.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
Switzerland

"With regards to Serious Sam, it's probably done because it's "Individual Levels". When you're bringing in something beforehand and you're using something you can't get in the level then at that point it no longer becomes an individual level."

That's debatable. With the same argument, you could ban every unlockable thing to be used in an IL. I define IL as "the fastest time for a specific part of a game", how that time is achieved is irrelevant.

If the difference between vanilla and newgame+ conditions is significant enough, you can always have separate categories.

Arizona, USA

"That's debatable. With the same argument, you could ban every unlockable thing to be used in an IL.."

That's considered NG+ IL's but okay.

If the game has a level select there's no reason as to have any other starting point than choosing the level in the level select.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
Arizona, USA

Because the whole point of an IL is that it's individual. When you start bringing in things from other levels then it becomes something else.

Ecuador

It depends on the game/series whether stuff from previous levels can be brought in, which obviously changes with community guidelines set by the runners of any said game. Brief example: could you imagine what multiple F-Zero leaderboards on F-Zero Central would look like if the ONLY ships allowed were the 4-5 you get at the start of the game and nothing that is unlocked later?

Now, compare that to Serious Sam, which is a very different game than anything in the F-Zero series, and the IL rules are unique to that game. You can't bring extra items in, and apparently the community around Serious Sam agrees more along Beardy's thinking. Really, it depends on the crowd around any one certain game, and the rules about ILs will just vary quite a bit depending on what game you speak about.

New Jersey, USA

I agree that a game with level select should simply start with selecting the level. By default, that would make most games' ILs NG+ without needing to specify, which makes sense to me. I thought the point of ILs was to do the best possible level run. There is also the fact that you typically can't select levels individually until beating the level. To play NG ILs, would you need to play through all of the previous levels just to play one level?

Some games would allow for a blank slate at each level select, but some games have NG+ attributes that can't be deselected. It can depend on the game, but I personally feel that IL's should be the best possible. I can understand disallowing certain NG+ attributes to keep certain levels competitive, but not if a player needs to play through the game just to have a save file without that particular thing. If it can simply be deselected, then it seems fair.

Czech Republic

I sometimes really wish speedrun.com would have some general speedrunning rules that would specify these things as it seems like each community has their own set of rules that were created by moderators. Same goes for framerate locking, timer start/finish and other issues.

I recently spoke to one of SDA's admins about ILs and he said the same as andypanther: "I define IL as "the fastest time for a specific part of a game", how that time is achieved is irrelevant."

I agree with both guys. Just because Serious Sam games allow you to choose a specific level via main menu doesn't mean it has to be the only way to do an IL run. Most games don't have this feature, so your only option would be to use a save from previous level, anyway.