As long you don't use macro's like turbo buttons you should be fine. People speedrun switch games even on a DDR pad after all.

I was thinking of picking up this game but I noticed the length. This game lends itself very well for an IL leaderboard and it would allow people to more easily ease into the run. If you don't have 3 hours you can't do even a single run but with an hour you can practice a lot of levels.

Reposting because of rollback as well. Requesting mod for https://www.speedrun.com/Ice_Story for myself and cetormenter, current mod is MIA and a lot of runs are awaiting verification.

Edit because I forgot to mention: Mod has been contacted on twitter but no response has yet been given. Some of the unverified runs are 2 weeks or older (my own are 14 days old as of writing).

I agree with disallowing, same as premium currency and double cash mode, just removes the challenge

I'd say make seperate boards per flatform, and within those boards only the maps that actually exists within that platform, so the platform shouldnt need to be put in the name of the map itself

I'd say Name, Time, Platform would be fine, reverse is only relevant on some maps, so took make another category for it feels a bit redundant. If the other lab upgrades cannot be turned off then we should indeed allow the usage of it, I wasn't aware of that. Double cash should probably be off yes, makes even the hardest difficulties a joke.

Autoplay is available on all platforms, so no reason to ban it. Specialist buildings should be fine, as long as people state which building they use at what level in the run description/title. I'd personally say no monkey lab boosts, it takes too long to unlock it all from a new save, so it would create a barrier for people wanting to run this game, and the game is doable without them just fine. I'd also say no special agents either, there is nothing stopping you from just farming monkey cash and then placing a billion bush agents at the start of the track. Or a billion of another agent for that matter. You missed whether maps are allowed to be played in reverse, on some maps it makes a significant differences, i'd say it's fine as it allows for more optimisation options.

As requested by Jumpyluff I made a version comparison between the paid versions and the free flash version.

tl;dr: Paid version and flash version are basically different games whether in terms of maps, towers or mechanics. The only difference between mobile and steam is that the thee premium items (bigger beacons, double cash, healthy bananas) are paid for using in game currency on steam but with real cash on mobile. Skip to bottom for board recommendation.

Full version:

Paid exclusive maps: Beginner: Checkers, Patch, Roswell Intermediate: Bloon of Clubs, Wattle Trees, Workshop Advanced: Long Range, Phase Portals, U-Turn Expert: Benguela, Double Double Cross

Flash exclusive maps: Beginner: Hill Giant, Pumpkin Patch Intermediate: Ice Flow, MOAB Desert, Snowflake Advanced: Downstream Expert: Spooky Castle

Maps that are shared but have difficulty inconsistency: Dune Sea is intermediate on paid but expert on flash Water Hazard is expert on paid but intermediate on flash

Paid exclusive towers: Bloonchipper, Heli Pilot, Monkey Engineer

The flash version has a lot of extra premium items purchaseable with real cash. These items are implemented on the paid versions through either the research lab or the fourth level of the specialist building. The flash premium items are equal or greater in power in comparison to the paid implementations. Furthermore because part of the premium items on the paid version are implemented through the specialist building only one can be active at a time with a disadvantage for another tower, whereas the flash version can have all active at once without any downside.

Board recommendations: Because of version difference there should be seperate boards for runs done on the flash version compared to the paid version.

I would recommend banning premium items, they trivialize higher difficulty settings and force mobile players to pay more (about 12 euros more) for an even playing field.

Suggestions as for the boards themselves: -Level leaderboards for all level and difficulty combinations -Beginner%, Intermediate%, Expert%, Advanced%, Extreme%: All levels with that difficulty in any order, again subcategories for all difficulty settings -All Special Missions; any order, self explanatory -All Maps: self explanatory, subcategorie for all difficulties again

I have some suggestions for rule / category changes:

Rule: Need to specify any premium upgrades / research / building / cash injection used/active. Reason: Reference mostly, so we can see exactly what someone used to beat that map. Maybe a strategy is only viable with that building or with a minimum research threshold and it would be nice to know it.

Rule: Specify that all tracks need to be played from round 1 to 50 to prevent people fast tracking. Reason: It reduces the time it takes for maps without any good reason. Either that or allow it for everything for consistency, though I'm personally against that.

Category: Split PC and mobile Reason: They have different maps (mobile has two less than pc) and mobile is faster meaning an optimized mobile run cannot me beat on pc, having them compete if unfair.

Category: Split any% into beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert and extreme. Reason: Although I can understand not including extreme as it requires you to pay to enter unlike the other difficulties excluding expert seems arbitrary, is there a reason why it is excluded from any% currently? Another reason to split is that a current any% run takes too long, the only one currently available is 3h 40m and uses fast track for all tracks (and once again, excludes expert). Splitting the any% runs on map difficulty might make it more viable to run as optimized runs should only take between one and two hours per difficulty (without fasttrack).

So I was watching the any% run when I noticed the average map time is <4 minutes , which is weird considering the fastest map time is 5:50.

Looking into it a bit better I noticed he uses fast track, starting at round 26 every track. From the rules: "Timing begins when level 1 on Monkey Lane starts." He didn't start at level 1 so unless the rules are outdated or I am missing something this run should be invalid.

Run in question: http://www.speedrun.com/run/oy2k3x6y