Hey everyone. Originally, I wasn't going to do a follow-up on my previous announcement, but so much time has passed and some more unforseen changes have been made to the board since then that it's now only logical to give you an extra update about it all. I'm trying my absolute best to keep all of this cohesive, 'cause truth be told; I hate it when it comes to writing such articulate posts like this, and the fact that I accidentally closed out my browser yesterday while I was trying to finish this same piece of text really doesn't help me out. Anyway, what's this leaderboard renovation all about?

CATEGORIES' REIMAGINING

Last time, I thought making the Purple Guy minigame no longer necessary for finishing a run was a huge change, but this time each category got some kind of tweak in one way or another. Speaking of that minigame, and what I think affects the Any% category the most is that it no longer matters how exactly you let the game's ending to play out, the time for your run will now end as soon as you hit 6 AM on Night 5, just like it does for most of the other categories. Funnily enough, the next category on the list - the Good Ending no longer requires you to reach 6 AM at all, the time now ends as soon as you finish the Happiest Day minigame, which is when the Good Ending star is handed out to you. 3 Stars has remained untouched, except for the fact that it no longer has an option to be run on the old 2015 mobile devices port, which is now exclusive to the 100% category since the 4th star was never added to it. The Secret Minigames (new name for it) category has arguably had the biggest change to it, with it being a properly laid out run requirement. I'll be honest, the category never made much sense to me with the way it's been set up; some of the levels in it you would beat by reaching the exit in the plain sight, some with an exit you would reach by failing the route required for the Good Ending, you would reach a dead child on some of them, and one you would just straight up fail to count it as "beaten". Needless to say, the category was all over the place and runners just did whatever. The initial idea was to remove this category all-together and rebrand the Happiest Day category as "Good Ending, New Game+", but after receiving the backlash from this decision, I've decided to go with a compromise that should work for most people. I can't tell with full confidence if all of you are happy with this outcome, but this is a change that just had to happen at some point and is hopefully one everyone will be able to adapt to.

LOAD-REMOVED TIMES IMPLEMENTATION

This is something that had to be added sooner or later for this game, and I'm very sorry that it happened much later in its lifetime, but this has finally happened. This game no longer ranks the runs by how fast they are at face value, it now fully takes into account your loading times! The backlog of runs I had to go through and retime was quite an enoromous amount for one person, and it's no wonder I couldn't do it all in time with my original March deadline (LOL), but by dedicating a week or two to get it over with, what was meant to happen for literal years, at last, has come to fruition, and you are no longer bound to fall behind in ranks if you simply can't have the latest gaming setup on your hands.

MISCELLANEOUS CHANGES

Among other changes, some small things have also been added that just make the board look nicer and a tad bit easier to navigate. In my previous update, the different platforms you could run the game on have been made universal for every category, but it's no longer the case now. As alluded to in a previous paragraph, the Android/iOS Legacy version is no longer runnable for 3 Stars category, since it ONLY has 3 stars, so it automatically counts as the 100%. Additionally, I was mistakenly under impression that you could replay the hidden minigames from the extras menu in that old version, until realizing that those minigames are literally given to you only after beating a night, and that you were still able to play Nightmare Aggressive on it, so I should have realized already that the second option in the extras menu is "Cheats", not "Minigames" (for context, I did remember that there were only two options in it and the first option must have been to view the characters, I just didn't put two and two together, hah). Anyway, the categories dedicated to the minigames now combine Android and IOS into "Mobile" and all the consoles (don't feel like naming them all) into "Console". Final thing worth mentioning is that the multiple instances trick introduced in FFPS is fully allowed in this game, too, now (one of the reasons why you no longer need to finish Night 5 for the Good Ending, since it would pretty much render it and Any% as the same category), with a bit more leniency towards load-time removal.

And, this sums everything up I wanted to tell you about the changes that took place. As far as things go, this is the definitive FNAF 3 Leaderboard update, and if things do get tweaked later, it'll be comparatively smaller. Over three and a half years ago I've given out a lot of ideas on how this board could be improved, and me being the one to add all these changes in the end is pretty poetic. I can finally put all these events behind me, and I really hope I could deliver a good update to you all. Massive thanks to everyone who's read all of it, and I'll gladly moderate this game for all the time that I'm still destined to be the moderator for it. Bye-bye, and happy running :)

Hey everyone! Let it be known, I've stayed up a bit later than usual tonight just to post this announcement at the right time, since by the moment you're reading this- it's officially been a decade since FNAF 3 was released to the public! It's a giant chunk of time to think about, and even though I personally wasn't yet aware of the franchise at that point (and even then, I'm not a big fan of this game anyway), I still felt like I should dedicate this important update in honor of this game's big anniversary, simply for how impactful it was in making FNAF games actually speedrunnable and for me in general. The page for this game was somewhat neglected when I got my hands on it, so I've tried my best to catch up with as many things as I could by the time this announcement is published. Here you can have the list to the most important changes I've made and what I will finish making in the near future:

• You are now allowed to start your runs by pressing Load Game (as long as the night number is at 1 when doing so, of course)
• The Night 5 Minigame is now not necessary for completion in any of the categories and instead you can restart the game as soon as you're given the star in the 6 AM screen (this is to follow the general "last player input" idea when ending a run), and that will either be a prompt to stop your timer in Any% or Good Ending categories, or let you continue onwards onto Night 6 in the longer categories
• Consoles have all been split into individual subcategories to compensate the difference in navigating the menus and computing power of each of them
• Legacy version of the game has been wiped entirely from the leaderboard, with the exception of old mobile ports made by Scott, since the nights' length in them isn't affected by your specs (unlike the PC version)
• The leaderboard will contain Load Removed Times in addition to Real Time Attack

The last change is supposed to take place somewhere before the end of the month, since I have not only this game to worry about. Until then, you can familiarize yourself with the new look for this page, and leave any thoughts or suggestions you have down the line. Thanks for taking your time reading this and bye.

Edit as of March 31st: the leaderboard will obviously not be retimed before the end of this month now, as 200 different runs is quite a lot to go through. I will not give any deadlines, since I don't have any and there honestly shouldn't be one. Just know at some point all of your runs will be retimed soon.