umihime would you be interested in running sun ce´s nightmare . new game sun ce. you have to unlock him first so its not just an any % probably have to unlock seweral characters before acessing sun ce. i think its a cool quest / campaign . same with dian wei when he have to save cao cao.

all items all orbs all horses sounds very intresting really wonder what character you would start with and are you gonna be on hard mode the whole time? or do you have to go in to chaos

You would start the same way you do for Unlock All Characters. Start with Huang Zhong's Mosou mode first stage on easy mode, but you're clearing with P2 Ma Chao so you can get Hex Harness and two weapon chances on Ma Chao. Then you'd save and do Ma Chao's Mosou Mode and then the rest of the game you would be playing Ma Chao as P2 as you unlock all the characters, weapons, items and horses. You would never be playing Chaos, and you'd primarily be playing on Easy. You'd only ever play Hard for the 4th weapon and the orbs. You'd probably only start playing Hard (with the exception of Ma Chao's 4th weapon) once you've already unlocked everyone - doing Dong Zhuo, Yuan Shao etc on Hard, well after Ma Chao is maxed stats and hard mode is barely slower than easy.

i nailed a run on new game all free modes 12 stages fresh save, it was an 1 hour and 4 mins run on easy. umihime seems to be a fun run. maybe you should test it ? im gonna upload it tomorrow

free mode 12 stages 100 % with all forces might be longer though maybe 1:15 but its cool then we have a shorter category if people are intrested in that

Okay a lot of posts here, I'm not sure I tracked all of it. I agree that the default run should be any% where the finish line is the credits of any char from a new save. The anthology isn't a really fun run, since it's repetitive, and of course Shu is just a nightmare. I like the individual character ng+ since the appeal for many people is their favorite characters. As for free mode, 100%, and items, I personally wouldn't run any of them. Like I mentioned, I once did an all 4th weapons equivalent for warriors orochi 3U, and really enjoyed that since it requires knowledge and in game skill.

Three misc. 1) I can upload a save file of a mostly complete dw5 for emulators to download if it streamlines new players. 2) we should also tackle the question of XL. 3) it's best practice that new categories are not created until a run is actually submitted for it. Keep that in mind.

free mode new game speedrun all 12 stages is interesting though . 1 did a 1 hour run think it could get down to 35 minutes . free mode ng+ will be different though cause its more battles. a fresh save speed it up. but then you got no weapons , no horses and no buffs/items. free mode new game hard all 12 stages might be harder though.

when i look at it more it seems that freemode all new game 12 stages is harder than the dw5 new game any % .and its more interesting. and on free mode you can chose 12 different characters for each free stage if you want to you are not limited to 1 character. i might consider to have free mode as default. imagine if you could go in and unlock gan ning and then do free mode but then maybe you unlock more stages and it would not be worth it i dont know.

do we still want to have ng+ anthology categories though? im not a fan of them at all. but i could consider learn wu anthology and wei anthology .

a new game save cao cao and a new game sun ce s nightmare would be interesting they are unique quests for DW5 . save cao cao is dian weis campaign btw.

this is what i want for the dw5 board

1 free mode 12 stages ng speedrun

2 any % Ng

3 save cao cao %

4 sun ce´s nightmare

5 changban/cheng du %

6 gan ning /zhang liao %

7 WU 100 %

but i dont know how to treat the difficulties if we would locking everything at hard. feels very hard for new players.

umihime and sunsaint would you be ok to have all categories at hard. or do you want easy and normal categories. ?

Ok, i see u guys point when it comes to anthology, shu mostly, i agree. What about if anthology includes all kingdoms and u pick 1 out of the 4 and run it? All 4 kingdoms will count to same leaderboard, this will naturally funnel runs to the fastest route right now so instead of WU 100% do Kingdom 100%. Dunno, honestly i just like anthology cuz of the theme of running a full kingdom but if a cut is necessary i dont mind takin it out.

Free mode and any% from fresh file seems fine, the rest i dont particulary have an opinion, might run after the rules are set.

I would personally keep each individual character open to run, cut the difficulties and have fresh file and ng+ any difficulty, just those 2. Any new (old) player likes to run a specific/favourite character(s), and the mini stages i talked about earlier would be cool to add, cuz every char is default lvl and are fast runs so another low base entry point for new players to learn perhaps.

Edit: About Susaint's points, If it facilitates the entry point for new ppl i dont see why not; Never played XL, it's 2 different entries of the franchise so i would keep it separate even if u could consider XL a DLC to DW5.

but i dont know how to treat the difficulties if we would locking everything at hard. feels very hard for new players.

I think setting the categories in hard only would be a bit too extreme for newer players (especially for NG categories)

I like the idea of Free mode 12 battles runs, probably will run after rules are set if it happens one day

i found anthology a bit too repetitive as sunsaint posted earlier, but I don't really mind if they stay up or not.

Any% seems a fine idea as well

I don't have any relevant opinion on other suggestions, i guess it can make some fun misc. categories if it has to be done

Giving a savefile in ressources for NG+ categories would help newer players so i don't mind it (i think I have a full save i can share if needed) In my opinion, DW5 and 5XL should be still separated (saying that as a 5XL runner)

yeah i also agree that any % new game and free mode new game seems like the best concept for dw5 speedruns.

new game chaos any % and new game free mode chaos will be different though and be longer cause then you need to go in to musou mode and unlock and beat lu bu s campaign to unlock chaos and then do an any % or free mode. it might be a 2 hour run

i could imagine a 100 % being . beat all 4 kingdomes + free mode and then obtain the 4 orbs. to get the 4 orbs you need to go in to hard. then it would be just 3 hours maybe 4 hours. but only 2- 3 runners would run it. maybe all kingdomes would be more interesting like toru said. or just kingdom 100 %

all items also seems grindy and will be a lot rng and i think you need to go in to hard to get all items.

I requested mod status from the site today, hopefully there's no issue since we haven't heard from the current team in a while. Once I'm mod I will start going through the pending runs and add any% and sounds like free mode%. We'll talk more from there but I think the consensus is to still keep each anthology, each character, remove individual level, and streamline the difficulty issue. XL is not going to be implemented here. Thanks for the discussion all, seems like some renewed interest!

yeah sounds good. i think its good to keep the old categories theres some old runners that havent been online for 4+ years its nice history of the game to have the runs up.

Hey all, so I have been given mod status and I'll start working through this backlog. One of the runners who submitted dozens of pending runs is obviously speeding up their emulator so I will get rid of those too. (This runner currently has no times on our boards). I'll delete IL category too.

Also to Umi specifically, I just verified your outdated runs without watching them since you ended up beating their times anyway. Sorry for the notifications and congrats on your records!

Glad you guys have a new mod. If this site would send me a damn email when I get a message that would be really helpful :P

Holy smokes, the leaderboard looks amazing! So clean and streamlined! I think we made the right call removing individual stages, removing normal and reorganizing the categories.

I was mentioning this in the other thread, but we should either remove Chaos from NG categories entirely or we need to clarify the rules for them since Chaos mode requires you to unlock it first. We could add rules requiring you to unlock chaos mode as part of the run, but the rules might too cumbersome to have on main categories especially for new runners to try to parse, so I'd be okay removing them. I'm prolly the only one interested in unlock all characters chaos, but I could live without it.

For NG+ I'd consider removing hard as well - just have the easiest and hardest difficulty for every category. I only saw 3 runs on all of Hard on NG+ and they were all uncontested. But I have no skin in that game and the leaderboards already look so so much better.

Welcome aboard mods o7

Yup, job well done! Much cleaner. I agree in removing both Chaos from Any%/NG categories and Hard for NG+. Chaos's a difficulty designed for late game, locked behind having to clear some musou campaigns and Hard i honestly see no running value in it post game content, but that's me.