Hey! We have have a lot to share with you today regarding the growing concern around game-damaging updates from IOI and the future of hitman speedrunning.

1) First, we all hope you are enjoying the new Herbalist Elusive Target, and we are happy to share that the leader board has been updated to include Snoop. Additionally, the ET will be split between the official Elusive Target + Arcade and the new Special Assignment due to differing spawn-point availability. Finally, we will also be changing the elusive target order from chronological to reverse chronological to make it easier for players to find the most recent, and often times most popular, elusive target at the time (https://www.speedrun.com/hitman_woa_ets).

2) Unfortunately, the new ET wasn't the only thing added to the game in the last update, as we also saw game-breaking AI changes (for the second update in a row) to a level we haven't seen before. This update would normally have invalidated nearly all Mumbai skywalk, Hokkaido bomb launch, Sapi tower, and Colorado any% individual level runs as well as all the S1, S2, and Trilogy full-game runs on the leader board (again). Instead, after months of consideration and debate, we've decided that the best way to future-proof ourselves is to allow down patching for all Hitman WoA leader boards. This was something that was previously polled during the last update and saw a majority of players in favor of down patching of some kind after a much less damaging update.

How will it work? All Hitman WoA leader boards will now allow players to down patch to any version from 3.100 to current and submit runs. In defense of fair play, we are banning all versions before the release of Hitman WoA on Steam (3.100) and all tech associated with those versions (Druz wall bang, Berlin utility hole, etc.). We will work quickly to move all applicable NLP runs back to the leader boards and abolish the NLP category in favor of an external spreadsheet for all runs that used still banned glitches. We understand the concern that this may cause console players and I promise I am personally looking into a mutually beneficial solution, but this was something we needed to address quickly considering the number of runs affected by the latest update. Any and all information pertaining to down patching can be found here (https://rekt05.github.io/hitman-downpatching/), including what down patching is, how to do it, and notable patches. We encourage everyone and anyone to reach out for questions, as we understand this is going to take some time to get used to, but we hope, given some time, that we find ourselves in a more stable position with the game we all love so much. Thank you so much for your time and good luckInformation on downpatching Hitman WoA

All Y1 banned runs are preserved and can be found here (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1reUOH0CxtILSQR3VhQs2uZoZ3ONMiaxcEx1VhW3qDaI/edit?usp=sharing).