If you haven't been keeping up to date with this community recently you might not have noticed but some major changes have been made to the leaderboard.
Game Version Split
First and most importantly, after a landslide community vote it was decided that we were going to split the Board by Game Version for the first time in SA2's history. Previously this was never thought to be necessary as it had always been possible to compete for World Record on any version of the game in just about every Category and/or IL. There were exceptions to this rule but for a long time this statement held true. However in the last few years more and more Version Exclusive Tricks and Rulesets were starting to be applied. While the community liked that everyone could compete under one combined leaderboard, it was beginning to reach a breaking point. As a community we decided to split the boards into three separate versions that are now live: HD | GameCube | Dreamcast.
We believe that this decision not only allowed for more fair and level competition between the versions but allows the communities for each different version to make ruleset decisions that work best for them. For example, Dreamcast has recently swapped to using File Timer as the primary method instead of Loadless! This takes out guesswork for the runner in figuring out whether or not they truly got a new Personal Best and eliminates extra work for the Verification Team in one fell swoop.
New Categories on the Main Board!
For a long time now, the only Tabs we had on the Leaderboard was the decision to look at the New Game or New Game+ board. Now there was quite a lot of discussion on how to move forward with this. Should we move NG+ to Category Extensions? Should we add other popular categories that people enjoy to the main board? As you can see that is exactly what we have done. We have now added: Limited Tech Selection and All A-Ranks to the main boards!
Limited Tech Selection
One of the big holdups we had with our communities version of a Restricted/Glitchless/No Major Glitches category was that it was REALLY had to apply a ruleset to a category like this and have it still be interesting and not super arbitrary. The community had so much trouble with defining this ruleset that we had revamped the category multiple times and people still weren't happy with it. People had many gripes with the category but the loudest of which seemed to be that the category didn't really have a cohesive identity. This time around the Mod Team compiled multiple different categories that we thought worked the best with the Sonic Adventure 2 speedrun and put it to a vote. And as you already know Limited Tech Selection (or LTS) won the vote!
All A-Ranks
The other category added to the main board is All A-Ranks! This category was originally seen as a practice category for 180 but as the Speedrun has grown we've seen more and more people run this category. We're hoping to see this category grow even more now that it's forming it's own identity with interesting routes and strats unique to A-Ranks.
Thanks for reading this State of the Leaderboard! Since we made so many massive updates we wanted to inform the community at large as to why and how these changes were being decided. If you have any questions or concerns about any of this information feel free to respond in the comments below or join the discord to speak with the community directly! GLHF on your next runs!
If you haven't been keeping up to date with this community recently you might not have noticed but some major changes have been made to the leaderboard.
First and most importantly, after a landslide community vote it was decided that we were going to split the Board by G
