This has come up before; see e.g. https://www.speedrun.com/smw/thread/t46ap. Using the practice cart was my suggestion as well, if we were going to do it at all.

But in the first place, a level leaderboard just doesn't make much sense for SMW. The first problem is the scale of it. At a minimum you have 98 levels, which is a lot but maybe manageable if we put in the effort. But there are tons of restrictions and start/end states for every level. If you try to count how many actual IL categories could be theoretically relevant, the number is well over 1000. Even if everyone active in RTAs switched to doing ILs now, it would be a major effort to just get strats and competent ILs for every such category. If you go with a reduced set of categories (perhaps just "small only" and "anything goes") it is more manageable but less useful. Games like SM64 don't have this issue because there is no equivalent powerup system that affects how you play the levels. I don't think any other retro 2D Mario games have IL leaderboards, but even if they did it is a much less complex issue for them because of fewer powerups and fewer levels.

The second problem is that, even if the boards are theoretically manageable at an administrative level, we would need people to actually submit to them. When we did have IL leaderboards 5 years ago they were mostly empty. Less than 1/4 of all the categories had even a single entry. When they did, often they were runs that were not even of comparable quality to what a top RTA runner would do in an average attempt. There were a handful of unique strats and a couple more runs with well-known strats done particularly well, but even most of the "WR" runs on the boards were just not impressive in an objective sense. If everyone uploaded all their IL PBs, it wouldn't be a problem, but good luck getting even a single RTA runner to do that. An IL board where most of the entries are empty and most of the filled ones are not especially good is just not a good showing for the game.

The final problem is that those of us who are active in doing ILs for this game really don't care for it to be competitive. The primary motivation is finding and demonstrating new strats. If someone comes along and beats one of my times by a few frames using the exact same strats, that's great, but I'm not going to go back to the level just to shave another frame off if I don't have anything new to add (and smw's mechanics ensure that there are basically always going to be frames to shave off in any nontrivial IL). If there were a number of serious IL runners who want to have that competition (whether or not that group includes me) it might be worth the effort to work through the other issues. But so far pretty much everyone who actually does serious ILs and strat finding just isn't interested, and the people asking for IL boards have been relative newcomers.

By all means, I encourage interested people to do ILs and if you do find something new share it in Discord. That doesn't require a leaderboard though, and until a leaderboard is solving problems rather than creating them I don't think it makes sense to have one.

It is fairly difficult to define what constitutes "all coins" in SMW. Because of how the game tracks coins you've collected in a level, collecting one coin in one room may make one or more coins in a completely different room fail to appear; and on the other hand some coins can be collected multiple times by going into a different room first. Multi-coin blocks have a time limit rather than a coin limit, coin snakes don't really have a practical limit, and block duplication allows for getting multiple coins from a single coin block. Yoshi can swallow enemies to get coins as well. Those and many more reasons are why people haven't really run such categories in the past even though many suggestions to do so have been made.

Your suggestion, to get around that essentially by specifically listing which coins count, is workable (though impractical for anything longer than 1 world). Regarding your question, I don't know which block you are thinking of that will give a Mushroom or Coin depending on whether Mario is big; the only similar thing is that there are blocks that will give a star or a coin depending on whether Mario already has star power active, but none in world 1.

It is probably worth mentioning that one can collect all the coins in the sublevel of YI3 by doing a Yoshi jump. There may be other methods like a p-switch jump or shelljump.

Your definition of a category being "dead" doesn't make much sense to me. A category isn't dead when it gets a great run. It's dead when no one cares to improve it. By that measure, 11 exit is surely not dead right now. It had a WR just about 2 weeks ago, and probably more to come relatively soon.

If anything 11 exit is more alive right now than it has been in some time. A new strat was found in the ghost house where one gets doorfly into the second room and flies under the boo ring. (Not to toot my own horn but I am the one who found this strat and it was first implemented with some slight modifications in glitchless runs by SilverStar and later in cloud runs by Area51.) Assuming you are not doing stair clip (which isn't consistent at all and hasn't been in a WR run in a long time if ever) it also allows a faster room 1 strat, which overall saves about 0.6s. The current WR includes this strat but beat the previous WR by only about 0.3s, so it's actually executed worse than the previous run when the strat improvement is taken into account, meaning there's relatively free timesave now whereas there wasn't much before.

In the coming weeks it would not be surprising if a 9:44 happened, and 9:43 is at least plausible with current RTA strats if extremely difficult. Beyond that you are looking at p-switch jump, stair clip, ultra-fast zips, SW4 shell strat, and other (highly inconsistent but in principle possible) timesaves. A human theory "perfect" run with all the fastest strats is solidly sub 9:40 at this point though it is inconceivable that anyone would pull off a run with all the fastest strats.

Also, I'd agree with auth that, especially for a new runner, focusing too much on WR is a bad idea. The vast majority of people running a game like SMW will never be WR holders and still have fun. Even getting sub 9:50 will require an immense amount of time and effort. Getting to WR level means beating out folks like Area51, xpaco5, and RetroBob, who have 3-5 years of experience and comparable amounts of time in this game to the people you listed in SMB1; it isn't something you can do in just a couple months.

People have done comparisons before (dots for RTA, and someone else (maybe Amaraticando?) for TAS). PI to get cape in yi3 is slower both in RTA and TAS in 11 exit compared to getting cape in dp1. (You said any%, but the real any% category is 0 exit and that category already ends faster than you can complete even a single PI.) It's not an enormous amount slower, but enough that you'd either need to find a significantly faster setup for PI or some new use of the cape beyond just the movement optimizations it allows between yi3 and dp1. It is possible that there could be some application in some meme categories with unusual requirements, but in those cases it's worth keeping in mind that it's also possible to get cape in yi2 by item swapping a flying block in the sublevel. There doesn't seem to be any other realistic use of PI beyond just getting a cape early (higher powerup states are either useless or take a long time to get to), but if you have an idea by all means test it.

Also, I'll just mention while I'm here that, as best I can tell, no one (including Seth and furious) who seriously runs 0 exit thinks this should be a valid strategy, at least in any meaningful SMW category. The current discussions in the community are not over the validity of the runs.

Rather the discussion is over what the appropriate rule is to rule out this sort of run without invalidating any future legitimate runs. It isn't so simple as "you can't touch uninitialized RAM" because some legitimate routes could use uninitialized RAM (which actually is not very random even with a hard power-off). Nor can one easily say "you need to do a full power cycle" because in some cases even 30s would not be enough to accomplish this and requiring a 30s reset between runs would make the category very bad to run (and invalidate probably every current PB on the leaderboard). I don't know what the right rule is, and so far there has not been much discussion, and we may not even have all the technical research done to state the "right" rule, but whatever it is, these runs won't be considered valid 0 exit runs.

I don't think I understand what Masterjun is saying there, but as far as I can tell there is no way to warp directly from the title screen directly to the credits using this technique. A 0-second time should still be impossible for this "category" if I understand things properly.

When doing ACE (such as credits warp) there are generally 2 pieces. The first is setting precise values in RAM which will be read as the desired code (the payload). The second is crashing the game in such a way that the game jumps to the written RAM and executes it as code, and then returns to normal operation (the exploit).

Using dirty RAM bypasses the first step. In the case of the speedrun this saves time because much less shell positioning is required (a small amount is still required to get the game to follow the correct codepath to get to the prewritten RAM). But it doesn't allow you to intantaneously execute the preinitialized RAM; you still have to crash the game to get execution to jump to the code you wrote. Incidentally, in the current TAS, the payload is loaded via controller registers during the crash itself, and so using dirty RAM for a TAS would only save frames.

As far as I know there is no way (in SMW) to crash the game without entering a level. The fastest way to do it is to eat the first chuck in YI2; even Masterjun's (admittedly old) fastest crash TAS () does this. In a game like SMB3 it would be possible to crash the game in a matter of frames via a buffer overflow, but knowledgeable people have told me that is completely impossible for SMW and that we can't crash the game from the title screen. And if the game executes normally without crashing, execution should not get anywhere near the uninitialized RAM we write. It does read, and even execute (a small portion of the game's code is actually written in RAM rather than ROM for optimization reasons), some RAM addresses, but they are all initialized at startup and so can't be used for this kind of ACE.

Everything I just said is conditional on using dirty RAM only. If instead, we alowed for corrupted SRAM, there is a known save-corruption glitch which would allow for an effectively instantaneous credits warp. This was demonstrated fairly recently in this video: (and can be used to much greater effect such as Seth's "jailbreak" mod). For that reason a credits warp "speedrun" with corrupted SRAM really would be trivial in SMW. But the runs that are being discussed here don't require this glitch (though they do induce it as a completely unnecessary side effect) and could be done on a cart with no initial save data. One thing I am not completely sure of is whether it is possible to load a save file listed as clean on a cart which also has corrupted SRAM and have this warp to credits instantly. I wouldn't be surprised if this is possible but the runs in question did not do this.

So, starting with uncorrupted save data, I don't see any way to warp to the credits faster than we can eat the first chuck in YI2, or about 34s by RTA timing. That's way faster than the runs in question, but not 0s by any measure. That said, obviously Masterjun knows more about this than probably anyone else in the world, so if I'm wrong about anything here he or anyone else is free to correct me.

We used to have IL leaderboards for SMW, but they were a huge mess. There were too many levels and categories and most of the best runners didn't bother participating. The times that did get posted were often not even as good as normal RTA times. So the boards were removed. There have occasionally been suggestions of remaking them, but most serious IL runners (myself included) don't want it to happen so it's not likely to.

SMA2 is very close to SMW. In the majority of levels the fastest strats are identical with Mario (Luigi is a whole extra basket of problems). The physics and the level design are both mostly the same. SMW is also far more popular than SMA2 as a speedgame (more than 10 times as many runners). So if we couldn't make it work for SMW, I don't really think the mods will be very interested in trying IL leaderboards for SMA2.

As a note, your YI2 and YI3 times can both be improved by a game-second without cape, or several game seconds with cape.

Yeah I think the main problems are practical, not with the principle of the idea. I'd start with just 2 categories, namely Small Only (where I'd also ban switch palaces and maybe even beating Funky) and Unrestricted (where the only things that would be banned are glitched item box and PI states). There will be some strats that are pretty useless, like YI2 with cape, and some that would technically be possible but wouldn't actually come up in RTA, like bringing a Yoshi into VS1 secret. I don't see either of those as a huge problem but that's just me. That's already 191 categories of ILs (98 for each except 5 of them are not possible small only), so I don't think including any more than that initially would be a great idea. If we were to branch out beyond that later, "No Cape" (obvious), "Lunar Dragon" (obvious), and possibly "Glitched" (i.e. allowing glitched reserve items) would be a few natural choices but it would depend on what people actually want rather than anything else.

191 ILs is not as impossible to manage as one might think. It's a lot, but there are a lot of SMW runners, and most of the exits already have good videos somewhere. I would certainly not want to start the boards blank, like they were last time. But I think we could find good times for most of the exits that, if not the fastest ever, would at least not be embarrassing to list. That said, some things would need to be redone, including most notably all of Lambby's small-only videos since they were done on Vanilla SMW (mostly before the practice cart even existed). So it's not completely trivial even just to put up new leaderboards if we decided to do so.

But I just don't think people care about competing over these things very much in the community. If a lot of qualified people disagree and want there to be IL boards I think it'd be workable but my experience is the opposite: the people who are really skilled and have good IL times don't care much (if at all) about defending those times or competing over ILs. For clarity's sake, that's not just me and Lambby. Off the top of my head, Link, Dode, TM, Maestro, SilverStar, Seathorne, Aaron, pogyo, Lui, Mostly, Akisto, Umari0, and reapergoblin all either have current (recorded) IL WRs, or have been beaten by only frames, and they're all primarily RTA runners. I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting or don't know about as well. If a number of people at that level would commit to participating in IL leaderboards, even just for a handful of exits each, I think we could get it to work. But so far I have not heard any indication from any of those people that they would want such boards to exist, and I don't really care much either way (and I don't think Lambby does either). So I don't really see any reason to suggest creating them at this time. That could change in the future though.

I guess I'll weigh in as one of the few people who almost exclusively does SMW IL runs (as opposed to full-game runs). As you might guess, I disagree with Authorblues's philosophical reasons for opposing IL boards.

I don't think the purpose of IL runs is solely to show off strats to help RTA runners; if that were the purpose then it definitely would not be worth having leaderboards. The point of leaderboards isn't to encourage demonstration, but to encourage competition. For demonstrative purposes, the wiki is far more useful than a leaderboard could ever be.

I also don't think strats which are useless for RTA right now are pointless; just in the time I've been around there have been quite a few moderate-size improvements (typically 0.5-2s or so) to category routes which originated from IL strats. These have been slow to be adopted in runs, but it's pretty normal that RTA runners, even at WR level, do suboptimal stuff to get a slight edge in consistency in longer categories, which are where the most improvements have been found. But eventually some of these improvements will have to be taken seriously because in categories like 96 exit there are very few large time-saves left to be added; much of the remaining time to be taken off WR other than mistakes is from these moderate time-saves.

The complaint about "too many categories" is also pretty silly under any slightly critical analysis. There are far more possible RTA categories than IL categories. The number of distinct RTA categories is pretty much infinite. People have speedrun "Beat Cookie Mountain, small only", "2016 exit", "17 message blocks, no cape", "99 lives", and "America%", and you can easily imagine other even more ridiculous categories like "Beat all large dot levels four times". However under some conditions which would include all the categories suggested so far there are only finitely many (if still an extremely large number) of possible ILs. Of course the number is still too large for us to ever do all of them but no less so than it is for RTAs. The solution for ILs is the same as for RTAs: you don't compete on every possible category, but you adopt a handful of ultimately arbitrary ones and compete over those. The first 2 obvious choices would be Small Only (no Yoshi) and Any Powerups (same rules as 96 exit). Just like with RTA runs, more categories would be added as they are needed to document competition, not simply because they are possible things for someone to speedrun at some point.

With that said, as a user of the old IL leaderboards, I'm still quite happy that the previous boards were removed, for more practical reasons than the ones Auth cited. I do not want them to be remade. I've identified one core problem related to the community and several auxillary problems related to the implementation of the old leaderboards. I don't think any future leaderboards will be very successful without addressing all of these.

Core Problem: IL runs are (presently) not seriously competitive in SMW, unlike other games.

If someone (e.g. Lambby) posts a new video of an exit which is faster than my best time, I don't feel particularly any more motivated to beat it than before. The people who do ILs right now in the SMW community aren't really that interested in grinding out frames or competing for the best times. We have other motivations. For me personally, I enjoy strat experimentation and documentation.

Other communities (most famously GoldenEye) have made competition over ILs serious business, but for SMW there are really only a few of us who do ILs seriously. In terms of active people who primarily do ILs, it's mostly just me and Lambby. Many top RTA runners have also done ILs of some exits, either for practice or just for fun, but rarely if ever for competition. There are games where top RTA runners have also competed for good IL times; sm64 in particular comes to mind. In comparison, SMW has no history of this; for many exits if you want to know who has IL WR there is a good chance even the person who has it would not know.

If there were 20 people exclusively doing serious ILs at a high level instead of 2, maybe there would be more competition. However, without that competition, a leaderboard is useless. A leaderboard does not particularly encourage people to compete, and so if there is no competition already happening, it serves little purpose. So the first order of business would be actually getting people to compete over IL times, particularly current RTA runners since they are already skilled at the game. I do not know how to go about this nor am I particularly motivated to do so but at the core this is the issue in my mind.

Secondary Problem: The old leaderboards highlighted unimpressive runs.

If there is no serious competition, that doesn't mean that no one will submit times. It just means that the people who do submit times will not be very serious or skilled. As a result, many of the times on the leaderboards, including some claimed "World Record" runs, were really not very good at all. I think that, as an absolute minimum, if a run is going to be listed as a IL WR, it should be at least as fast as the best time top runners would normally get. That standard was not met by many of the runs on the old IL boards. Additionally, if there are faster strats that RTA runners don't do but are humanly doable, I think a big part of an IL leaderboard should be to show off those types of strats. For almost all the runs on the old boards, I could name a faster video somewhere, and in many cases it wouldn't even have to be an IL video. There were maybe 5 really solid ILs on the whole board.

Put simply, the movement in this game is already pretty tight at the RTA level. While everyone can say "I can have better movement if I sacrifice consistency and grind out a lot of attempts" that only goes so far. A newer runner will not be able to beat a top RTA runner just by doing this; you need a good understanding of movement, the fastest strats (or at least close), and high-level gameplay to do a very good IL; even when you know what you are doing it takes a fair bit of time. Almost invariably, the people who do want to compete over ILs are newer runners who (no offense intended) don't really have the necessary knowledge or skills to beat even normal RTA times. As they improve, they tend to also become less interested in the idea of competing over ILs. I'm happy to help newer runners with an interest on these things, but a leaderboard is the wrong medium for that type of assistance.

Advertising unimpressive runs as IL WRs is silly and bad for the community. I suppose I could have recorded mediocre runs which would still beat those and posted those to the boards, but that's a lot of work over something that I ultimately don't care to compete over and the runs still wouldn't have been that good. Apparently, most other skilled players felt the same, and so most of the sub-par runs still got to keep the title of IL WR according to the leaderboard. Doing good runs, up to my standards, for all the categories on the old leaderboards (about 400) would be a monumental exercise which I have little desire to do.

Secondary Problem: The leaderboards were too difficult to use to be worthwhile.

For an RTA runner who got a good IL time in practice, submitting an IL run required the following. Take your video (assuming you were recording; if not too bad because it didn't count) and cut out the level. Upload the video to YouTube (because you probably were not streaming because it was practice). Then time the run, accurate to the frame, and submit it to the IL boards, which required as much work as submitting a full-game RTA. One of the mods would verify it much later (IL runs tended to take a long time to get verified despite being very short).

For a run that you did in practice in a matter of a few minutes, this was simply not worth the effort in most cases. In particular, the requirement to be recording the run live, and the requirement to retime the video accurately, made it mostly a lost cause. Almost all of the top RTA runners never used the IL boards for this reason even when they got good times. If it was a time you were particularly proud of you'd post a video, but submitting it to the leaderboards was an extra step no one wanted. Additionally this made it too much work to put up old times posted before the IL boards, which compounded the above problem of mostly empty boards highlighting sub-par runs rather than the best of the best. I only used the IL boards twice before deciding it wasn't worth the work, and in both cases there was no competition over the time.

Secondary Problem: Unclear how to time ILs.

Historically, IL videos have been labelled by their in-game time. The in-game timer is not particularly accurate; it fails to account for frames in which the game is frozen due to lag, screen transitions, scrolling, and powerup animations, resets on screen transitions, and does not correct for different methods of ending the level (e.g. Yoshi wings vs goal tape). That is not to say that ILs are done to minimize in-game time. Some are, but most are focused on getting the best real time, even at the expense of game time.

This has never been a problem because, as I said before, ILs are not presently competitive. The use of in-game times is little more than a label that makes strat videos easier to find and discuss. It is slightly useful for RTA purposes because during a run you can easily check the game-time while measuring real-time is harder. In-game time is still important; saving a particularly tight game-second is an effective way to show off how much faster your new strats are and a minor claim to fame even though real-time is what matters at the end of the day. But at best it is an approximation and at worst it is misleading to the point of being wrong.

However, competing for real-time in such a short run also has major issues. Invariably, every competitive exit would end up becoming a frame war, and in this game because of oscillating speeds and other nonsense SMW frame wars would never really end. This isn't something anyone currently wants. People who do ILs in the community are primarily motivated to find new strats, not to grind out every last frame, and people who do RTAs primarily would get bored long before then. Competing over real-time also adds an extra step to the submission process of timing your run to the frame, which as mentioned before was a big pain for the old leaderboards.

Secondary Problem: Some stages are just uninteresting.

This is SMW after all. There are plenty of flyover levels. Doing an IL for those levels is usually pretty easy, but because the submission process was the same time-consuming thing for all levels, this just compounded the other problems above of a lot of exits not having times at all or showcasing times that were not particularly good. There isn't much you can do to make these stages more interesting, but at least if the submission process was easier it would improve the chances of someone submitting something decent. Of course another possibility would just be to remove these exits entirely from the boards but that becomes very subjective quickly what is "good enough" to be worth including.

A (partial) solution: The SMW Practice Cart by Dotsarecool is probably the best speedrunning practice tool of any game. It has a timer that, while not perfect, is fairly accurate to real-time (including lag). It allows recording and replaying movies, which would make it possible to get a video of a good IL after the fact (at least for console players; emulator may be too succeptible to cheating for this to be allowed). It also has built-in quality levels for each exit for 4 possible categories. It also has several features (RAM viewer, speedometer, etc) which make times done with it not directly comparable with times in Vanilla SMW, but honestly I don't think any of these make things less interesting. All top RTA players these days use the practice cart extensively for practice, and many ILs are also done on it.

If instead of having IL leaderboards for vanilla SMW, we had IL leaderboards for the practice cart, this would solve most of the secondary issues. Submissions would be a fair bit easier because you would not need to be recording practice live and could instead record the movie playback. Timing would also be little more difficult than it is for in-game time in Vanilla SMW, and the practice cart's timer is, by now, a good enough analogue to real-time that there would be little controversy in using it. Sub-par runs could be filtered out by requiring submissions to be at least gold/pink tier times, which would also reduce the workload of the mods. In particular, pink tier for most exits requires extremely high-level play that is comparable to (though typically a bit slower than) IL WR times. Times worse than gold have usually been beaten hundreds or thousands of times in RTAs and at that point it doesn't seem particularly worthwhile to keep a leaderboard tally of them.

You would need to make some rules to make it work, since the practice cart has features which are not typically allowed in ILs. For instance it lets you bring Yoshi into castles and ghost houses, which might save time in some places. However this is mostly a technical detail which could be codified in the rules, just like we do with RTA categories.

That said, I do not think this would solve the fundamental issue that ILs in SMW are just not competitive right now. One might hope that simplifying the process and upping the quality requirements would get RTA runners more interested in using the boards, but I have serious doubts how far that would go. I'm not really interested in changing this either. I actually rather like the status quo where IL runs are mostly about finding new strats and executing them, not about grinding out individual frame improvements.

So if I were going to make new IL boards (which I have little desire to do) this would seem to be a better option than what we had previously though by no means a perfect one. LTTP has something fairly similar at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dV2ozAGgDdFZAne8rwG3h0KyOPgIN72pWeRsS1hR2QU/ and they've managed to get a fair bit of participation. I don't know if I'd call that spreadsheet competitive, but it's at least more organized and complete than what we had with the old IL boards.

Putting aside the criticism of the moderators here (which I don't agree with; all interactions I've had with them suggest that they are wholly acting in favor of growth of the community), Akisto's question seems reasonable. There's already a board for extra categories at http://www.speedrun.com/smwext for less optimized/less serious categories. Everything on the main boards is relatively serious and important, so splitting them into miscellaneous and main categories seems kind-of arbitrary. It also seems unnecessary to have a split at all as the header can fit all of the categories if it's simply extended to 2 lines, which is not really a big issue. So it would be nice to know what the split is supposed to signify about the categories and why certain ones are considered main categories and others are miscellaneous.

Actually a few months ago, NCNSW was listed as a main category, and All Castles as a Miscellaneous one. Then one day their positions were flipped on the boards to what it is now. As best I can tell there was no official notice, and the decision was not explained. I tried asking in Discord what the reason was for the change, but no one could give me an answer beyond "Volpey wanted to change it" or something like that. So it seems (to a non-mod like me) like a haphazard decision.

I suspect there was a better reason for the change, but I don't know what it was, and no concrete metric I can think of would rank NCNSW as only the 7th most important category in the game. If the split is based on the number of runners, NCNSW beats out low% and 0 exit. If it's based on the perceived quality of the run, then both as a viewer and a runner, NCNSW seems to be head-and-shoulders over NSW (I've talked with several top RTA runners including multiple leaderboard mods and they all seem to agree with me on this), and at least comparable to All Castles if not better. If it's based on the historical importance, note that prior to the existence of this board, when the leaderboards were on the wiki, NCNSW was actually listed above both NSW and low% (only behind 11 exit and 96 exit), and All Castles and "Credits Warp" were considered miscellaneous categories. If it's based on the relative level of optimization, the top NCNSW runs seem pretty comparable in quality to the other mid-length categories; actually there's probably more realistic timesaves remaining in All Castles than in NCNSW. So I could see a case for ranking NCNSW below some of the current main categories, but not all of them. The case for 95 NC is weaker, but many of the same points apply.

I'm not saying that the current split is wrong, just that it would be nice to have some transparency about how the decisions are actually made. Depending on the reasoning, it could also have an affect on me personally, as I primarily do strat-finding for what seems to be the "major" categories (I have limited time and all that). So if there's a concrete reason to think that certain categories are fundamentally less important, I'll spend less time thinking about them. But if the split is just a product of what is recently popular, I'd probably mostly ignore it and work on whatever I presently care about the most, since popularity seems to change a lot more quickly than strats do.