Thanks for acknowledging this discussion. I would appreciate if we are able to vote on this soon.

But I have to say few things to avoid confusion.

- No one wants to limit someone to play as coco/ngin. No one said that as far as I understood and thats not the point.
- Goal is NOT to bring back people from "golden generation" it's all meaningless speculation who would play the game and who would not. To me at least.
- No one wants to invalidate anyones work and it's hard to see how adding a new comparison method for runs would do it. I hope all those who put their efforts to run the game with all skips stand proudly behind their own runs even if some others would like to compete in some other way.

I'll repeat. If we would care only about fastest possible time we would be playing with warp glitch or using PSP for Any% NMG. It's fastest platform for the category after all.

Alright let's get a round two on this topic. It has been nine months since people voted on (not) having a filter for runs using classic shortcuts/no TA-skip.

Just to recap the vote, there were 19 votes casted, 11 for no and 8 for yes (3 for just filtering no TA-skip). Some active runners were too indecisive to vote and some who haven't played NMG category felt they absolutely need to have a say on the topic. Nothing wrong with that. Just shows that it's really divisive topic that sparks heated discussion.

Now that some time has passed people have had more chances to play the game with or without TA-skip and rethink a bit.

My thoughts on the reasons for a filter:

We are all looking for meaningful ways to compete in CTR. That's why we submit runs to leaderboards.

TA-skip is quite different from any other skip because of its huge risk, big potential time save of insane 70 seconds and finally no consistent setup. It all comes down to resetting enough to finally get past the level and surviving rest of the game. Sometimes you just get lucky and get the skip with no effort, sometimes you need to dedicate your time for grinding thousands of attempts to get decent results. Respect to those who are willing to do that and they do deserve their top placement due to dedication.

Some of us are not willing to throw thousands of runs against a wall to compete with the best players. We still want meaningful ways to compete in the game. And SRcom is perfectly capable of providing tools for it. Creating a filter to see what skips/play style were used in the run would be useful to all players since faster time does not always mean better gameplay. In my case I would definitely want to know what skips were used if I would compare two runs with a time of 50:55 for example. With classic style/skips that would be top tier. With modern style the run potentially got timesave of 70 seconds due to one skip and lacking on all the other levels. Only our standards have shifted but you cannot see what is going on on the leaderboard without digging deep. If all of us truly were interested in lowest time possible we would be grinding frames off of the warp glitch.

In the end it seems like half of the people taking part in the discussion want to compete in the game in a way that is enjoyable and not an insane grind fest. With the filter you could even submit and browse runs with both styles without having to search the mass of obsoleted runs.

So why not simply make use of srcom features and provide players more meaningful ways to compete in the main category. Of course NMG with everything goes would be the standard. No doubt.

Heck if the work for mods feels too big I can do it all myself. I have already gone through half of the runs since June 2020 anyway.

Maybe that's enough. Let's see if your opinions have changed on the matter.

My own opinion on this is also pretty clear.

Make newest version of Mednafen only allowed emulator. Now we are also able to use RedHot's load removed which is already integrated with livesplit. Only downside is that Mednafen is not available for Mac but I guess some sacrifices need to be made. Point on current WR stands but I also agree that there's no reason to remove those times because they are not in any way unbeatable.

There's also enough reasons for CTR to have their own set of emulator rules.

This issue has been under discussion several times on both CTR speedrunning discord and CTR Time Trials discord so I decided to initiate a thread here so that the topic wouldn't be lost under ongoing other topics.

At the moment in the Any% NMG emu category most of the runs have been done with either Mednafen 1.26.1 and Retroarch 1.9.0 (beetle PSX HW).

Some of you may know that during this year I have been gathering data from both console runs and emulator runs. I compared how big of a weight hub movement and load times had on the resulting RTA time.

Mentioned IGT sheet can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KzfMfQpnNhN262IUZ9h-yf9zUT-jK0rldnO6oZcxvF4

Of course there might be a lot of variables I haven't looked into since hub movement is dependable on how optimized runners hub world movement is (plus PAL vs NTSC differences). Also lag plays considerable role here too. Dataset could be much bigger too. But in my opinion this comparison still gives pretty good estimate to which emulator performs better.

Fastest Mednafen hub+load: 17:51.470 (NTSC-U with 3 pauses)
Fastest Retroarch hub+load: 17:32.550 (NTSC-U with 3 pauses)
Slowest Mednafen hub+load: 18:10.460 (NTSC-U with 0 pauses)
Slowest Retroarch hub+load: 18:01.010 (NTSC-U with 0 pauses)
Mednafen delta: 00:18.990
Retroarch delta: 00:28.460
Average Mednafen hub+load: 18:00.914
Average Retroarch hub+load: 17:45.123
Average delta: 00:15.790

As you know, on console hardware side CTR speedrunning is a bit region locked so I made same comparison but with PAL vs NTSC-U

Fastest PAL hub+load: 14:43.940
Fastest NTSC-U hub+load: 14:45.910
Slowest PAL hub+load: 15:02.350
Slowest NTSC-U hub+load: 15:09.970
PAL delta: 00:18.410
NTSC-U delta: 00:24.060
Average PAL hub+load: 14:54.941
Average NTSC-U hub+load: 15:01.942
Average delta: 00:07.001

This makes it pretty clear that Retroarch has quite big advantage compared to Mednafen.

So point of this all is to raise discussion if only one emulator should be allowed for CTR.

That doesn't sound very sustainable solution. Guess it's another feature of the website. Maybe I'll do a feature request or something of that's possible. There's no reason why a single category within a game shouldn't have a different primary sorting method, it's just not implemented yet.

At the moment All Time Trials ranking is broken. Runs should be ranked by In-Game Time by default. On top of that rta ranking fetches completely different submissions which is clearly a bug or not desired feature.

So I guess the only thing left to do before implementing 101% Warpless is to write rules for it.

Here is my proposal for 101% Warpless rules https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pMH7OT1UdOMdTbDZQw_qKfA8yxwCS071RfZaNOtfXzc/edit?usp=sharing

I'm also suggesting that we do a split category like other main categories have. Like Any%/Any% Warpless.

It's normal and happens on console too. Somehow leaderboard gets corrupted.

I seems to be easy task to implement so why not split every main category. There already is disc/vc split on warpless and 101. I wouldn't like the idea of getting a third PS2 if/when current one breaks since I cannot run this game with my ps1...

I'm completely supporting this because with encouraging emulators we are able to make competition more fair and less hardware dependent.

Good points. There hasn't been much competition on that category. I would honestly have it in misc since those categories are kinda for extra challenges like max% anyway.

Yeah, I agree that it's repetitive and it might be a good idea to put it to misc category if runners don't want it to be split category along 101%. For me warpless 101 would be a test of consistency and I would enjoy it.

I couldn't find any discussion about this topic so here is a new thread.

As you know, 101% uses warp glitch twice which helps to skip gem cups almost completely. There was a brief discussion in Discord about splitting the category and as I remember people agreed on it.

What do you think about this?

I support the idea. What is the situation IGT tool? And is it approved that we could have IGT column? Who are making the desicions?