Hello everyone! I want to ask the community and moderators to consider allowing the usage of emulators in speedruns. I know this is a controversial topic so I'll try my best to be considerate of those who disagree.

I'll start with why I'm invested. I found myself a couple of weeks ago getting back into MKWii which I had saved on my laptop for ages. I redownloaded dolphin and I fell back in love with the game. After a bit of grinding, I was desperate to see if there was a 100% category for the game. There is, obviously. But issue was that the rules for MKWii stated specifically that emulators were not allowed. That sucked because my Wii remotes had quit working years ago and I hadn't touched my Wii since.

So why were emulators banned in the first place? Simple; the community based time off of real-time and not ingame time so any form of fast loading was valuable. Emulators would be extremely unfair to someone using the real console because the console was dated. This is also why ISO loaders were banned. Now though, time is based on the ingame timer, which was intelligent because the WiiU had an advantage in loading time over the Wii. But, emulators and ISO loaders were kept banned. In every post I had seen until then, that was the reason emulators were banned.

Moderators have now mentioned that another reason to keep them banned is the usage of TAS features on Dolphin. I think that it can be difficult to tell a TAS from other speedruns but almost always there are ways to tell. One good sign a speedrun is not a TAS is if the recording comes from a livestream, because guaranteed start boosts and wheelie chains are really the only two possible TAS things you could do live (This information was gained from a TASer I asked, I personally am not informed on the specifics of tools). Alongside, checking emulator speedruns specifically for TAS would not be an extreme job if emulators were allowed because likely the core community that has existed would still be a majority of actual console players, since it has been a console-only leaderboard for years.

I believe that introducing emulator runs would allow many people to begin speedrunning the game. A large bit of the Mario Kart Wii community spends time using modded games and playing on emulator casually. These people could be potential speedrunners, or may be interested in trying it but cannot because of the current rules. The cost of rebuying a Wii or the game for those who do not have one is starting to increase since the console and game were released over 15 years ago. I look on eBay and the average price of a Wii is around 100 dollars or more. The cheaper ones, which are around $70, are often from sketchy sources or websites. The game now ranges from $30-80. It is no longer viable for every person to rebuy the game or console they already once owned, especially if they can still play it through an emulator. This makes speedrunning seem gatekeeper.

Although dolphin does have TAS tools, there are multiple GameCube and Wii games that allow emulation in their speedrunning. Wii Sports, Mario Sunshine, and Super Smash Bros. Melee are just a few. The Games that do have emulators banned oftentimes do not have ingame timers and usually want to prevent faster loading times, such as Donkey Kong Country Returns or the Mario Galaxy games. This would not be a concern anymore because of the usage of ingame time for most run categories. I believe that it is very much a debatable topic for the Wii in general.

If the moderation team or community still feels it is unfair that emulators like Dolphin are being compared to actual console runs, they could add a new run category or on default, hide runs marked as using emulator in each category. The latter would not add more categories or clog any room for what some players and members of the community might consider "real runs".

Please consider my request, thanks.