Art Izon here with an update on the leaderboard.

• The board is now open for runs.
• All levels have been added, including Events.
• An Events category has been added.
• Rules have been updated. Let me know if anything's unclear and I'll add it or amend what's there.

Still determining a good implementation for Race Mode, open to input on that.

Alright, I have mod for this board now. The previous mod violated several SRC moderation rules and so was removed. As a result, I will be instituting a temporary embargo on runs until the rules are set up, properly this time, as in with community input. Yes, some things have already been altered, no, nothing is set in stone.

I've rejected my own pending run to this end (so it's fair for everyone) and will be resubmitting once the embargo has ended. Should be no more than a week, hoping to have everything set up by 9-18 (Monday) at which point I will be verifying runs. (You could technically submit runs before that, but they won't be verified and you technically run the risk of them getting rejected if they do not adhere to whatever we decide on for rules.)

There's some stuff to discuss as far as rules are concerned, but I'm open to discussion on these and other topics.

(If you aren't sure how to comment on this news post, just click the "read more" button at the bottom and a comment field should show up)

1. Timing method. My first thought is to use RTA just because the game does not have any kind of IGT timer on most story mode missions. However there is an argument to be made for creating a sort of IGT by timing individual missions. I don't mind doing this as mod, and if I did this, I would keep the individual stage times in a publicly-visible spreadsheet for transparency. The upside is that this would reduce the time cost of menuing, to switch characters for example. The downside is that if the game became very active, this would add a lot of extra work. I could add extra mods to compensate, but they might not want to time runs this way. This also isn't permanent, we could switch later if that became necessary. There is also the hypothetical possibility of trying to create a load remover if we do indeed find out that load time discrepancies affect some runners disproportionately, but there is no evidence for that at this time. So to me the easiest still seems like RTA, even though it has some disadvantages.

2. Proof standards. There is no need at present to show the title screen as there has not been an update to the game. It is unlikely there ever will be, since the entire point of being the Offline version of the game is that the game is no longer being updated or supported. If an update does ever happen and changes anything that affects the speedrun, we can revisit this topic.

3. Level restrictions. My thought is to remove the previously stated ones. The only previous justification was that not level-limiting makes the game "too easy." This seems strange, because that's what Challenge Mode is for - it's the same stages as Story Mode, but such that level doesn't affect your character meaningfully. In short, they were particularly arbitrary.

4. Character subcategories. These have been changed to annotations because they add extreme clutter to the board as subcategories (they multiply the number of categories by 130, previously around 58k subcategories) which makes finding runs extremely difficult. I'm fine with the possibility of individual misc. categories for specific characters, particularly for full-game runs, at least in theory. I have also sorted them alphabetically.

5. Difference between any% and 100%. Also what the latter entails for NG+ or NG. Can see an argument for requiring 3 stars on all stages, getting all the purple datas, etc. I don't have so much stake in this one but I thought I'd raise the question.

6. Separation of glitch/glitchless. I have information on exactly one potential glitch but we don't know if it's beneficial to runners yet. We can split this after the fact once more is discovered if it comes to that, and if the community agrees, but for now I'm planning to not separate unless someone can offer a reason to (since there are technically no known glitches and nothing degenerate).

7. Stage order. For NG+ categories, should chapter and stage order matter? This would affect RTA timing method much more than IGT, since being able to do stages and chapters out of order could cut down on the amount of character-switching. I personally am in favor of saying that they do not matter at the moment.

8. Chapter subcategories for chapters 18, 19, and 21. These are a single stage long. My thought is that a chapter subcategory is pointless since they are only one stage and these should just be ILs, but again, open to discussion.

9. All Events category under NG+. It might be neat to have one of these, as the game has a lot of event maps, most of which features varying stage layouts and bosses.

10. Individual Levels. This game has a lot of levels. It has 123 in story mode. 175 Jakob's Ladder on top of that. Then Race mode and events. This is a lot. If players want to run these, I am open to adding them.

On top of all this, I'm open to additional suggestions for what the rules should contain. Also, nothing is set in stone. I'm not the kind of moderator who's not open to change, and want to present a floor for discussion so we can have rules that best suit how the community as a whole (or at least the majority should interests conflict) wants to run the game.