TL;DR: It's not.

Once I managed to get the glitch working to its full potential on my own device, I started working through the game to get an estimate on how much time the glitch would save or lose over the course of a full game run. I'd also considered finding a point where one could take an intentional death to remove the glitch if and when it starts to bleed time.

Unfortunately, because of physics-dependant mechanics like the tracks and drafts in World 2, the glitch starts to fall behind very early on. But the biggest roadblock was in World 7. Because switching characters also ends the glitch, there are some 7-X levels that prevent its usage in the rest of the game. Since Worlds 2 and 6 lose so much time, and no time saves in 8 onwards are accessible, the blue glitch ends up being much slower.

I've included a link to my spreadsheet if you want to see my results, make suggestions, or try to improve some of the times yourself (a lot of my times are very rough with plenty of mistakes).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lbk1oUmbteYqxszU83YOYUlAgiWkXtEUtu74k5_7CUY

At this point I'm just done. I made it clear I wanted to consider the opinions of those who were involved with the speedrun community, and yet of the three people you showed, two are not. I even pointed one of them out already and you included them anyway. On top of that, the only argument of theirs being shown is that the glitch is supposedly "unfair," which I have been to trying to show us unproven. I guess they only want to get your side of the discussion. The whole community-majority argument just comes off as disingenuous, and that's being optimistic on my part.

As a moderator, I'm supposed to make decisions for the community based on what that community wants. Unfortunately, its members seem to be uninvolved and willfully misinformed — or at best, wildly impatient. Instead of feeling trapped like this, I'd rather just quit and let someone else with more aligned interests be in charge. I can't handle that kind of responsibility. I'd make someone else mod on my way out, but only the super mod and site staff can do that. Sorry. I don't plan to return to this thread, so don't expect anything more from me.

If there rally is a majority on Discord in favor of splitting, then we'll do that. I don't want to commit to making an account right now so I'll take your word for it. In my defense, though, I specified "in this forum" already, so I didn't make any assumptions about other platforms.

For completeness I'll go ahead and answer your other questions.

Would I find this hypothetical 1 second run fun? Why not? I think the blue glitch is fun and you don't. Why should this other glitch be different?

The reason I was wanting to do more testing was demonstrate that there may not be as much of a hardware discrepancy as you think there is.

Regarding players that don't want to use the glitch: what about players that don't want to wall jump? What about players that don't want to use turbo dash? What about players that don't want to use air stalling? What about players that don't want to use clips? Do we need a new category everytime someone doesn't like a strat that saves time?

Edit: @Petit_Saturne It's not that your not being heard, we just have very different opinions on what we want out of speedrunning. And the method you showed in your video isn't one I'd considered, so thanks for that.

As I mentioned in the video description, all I did was turn on my phone's battery saver mode.

I don't agree with the notion that we should split the categories based on a lack of understanding of a glitch.

I'd like to point out that retro was the first to suggest waiting. My suggestion, as of my last post, is to investigate this further in an attempt to make the glitch as fair as possible. Assuming my proven method isn't sufficient, I have several ideas to help with that. To reiterate, I don't think we should, nor have I heard of any other community, split the categories on the grounds of "I don't get it."

Regarding a vote, I'd only take it seriously if it was kept to the community, which, respectfully, has only really had three participants in this forum, one of whom deferred to the other two.

From the site rules: "Site staff will consider involvement of community members with the game when evaluating consensus. A 51-49 vote may not be a clear consensus, and we do not want to change the leaderboard every time community opinion shifts slightly, or someone new runs the game for another vote."

Players who don't like the glitch don't have to use it.

I want to do more testing on this later, but I think I've demonstrated that there's still more to learn and it's too early to draw any conclusions about how fair the glitch is.

For those not aware, this was how my attempts at this went before:

Figured out the hardware discrepancy: it's lag. Not a solution, just some more information.

⚠️FLASHING LIGHTS WARNING⚠️

It would be nice if we had some sort of precedent to reference, but I can't think of any examples of a game that 1) has a glitch that dramatically alters the game's physics, 2) has an IL leaderboard, 3) is only faster with the glitch on some ILs but not others, and 4) has variegated glitch effectiveness between devices. Bonus points if the glitch can't be conveniently turned off. I was thinking of comparing to Melee and Elden Ring, but their glitches are always faster. The closest example I can think of would be Betsrighter and crouch-fly in Portal 2, with crouch-fly maybe being the best analogy to blue glitch.

I'll wait for approval first, but I want to go ahead and implement the filter in the meantime. It'll give everyone a chance to try it out and give me a way to track down all relevant runs later if I need to.

Just to note: playing on a specific version of a game is extremely common in speedrunning (The first example that comes to mind is Portal) Downloading an older version on mobile is easy, although you lose your save file in the process.

@Petit_Saturne: What are these "rules" that are being changed?

The reason I disallowed the World 7 glitch was because all it does is break the results screen. Your best time recorded in the game's memory is still tracked properly, and anyone watching the run can see how much time each room took. It's more similar to glitches in Mario Kart 64 that show a time of 0 seconds on the initial results screen but never get saved to memory.

Regarding the PC discrepancy, we already have a filter for platforms that can separate them from mobile runs.

@retro6892 I should point out that there are hardware differences between mobile devices, but is it confirmed this glitch doesn't work on PC?

One more problem with making a separate category is the novelty of the glitch. Because the glitch is so new, we don't fully understand how much time it saves — or loses — throughout the course of the game. Calling it game breaking enough to warrant its own category — on the level of sm64 star door skips, wrong warps, or even intended mechanics that cut out large chunks of a game — seems both premature and an exaggeration of its potential as we currently understand it. (It also doesn't change the objective in any way, so that argument would'nt work). We also know fairly conclusively it's slower in many levels, and this is a game with a prominent focus on IL records.

More personally, I don't like the idea of having to jump between categories when trying to submit my own speedruns, since I'll always want to do so on the faster category whenever I can.

Tags are what are used for filtering. If you select "Filters" on a board, you'll have a number of options to toggle such as platform performed on, emulator usage, and obsoletion. The idea is to add a tag for the blue glitch for filtering. We'd likely use the same options as emulator: Hidden, Shown, Exclusive.

The issue with a blanket ban on all glitches is that runs that have them, like 1-4 and 2-1, would still be in competition with the blue glitch. And that's assuming we can come to a decision on what counts as a glitch (one of the main reasons I personally dislike glitchless and NMG categories). I think a better idea would be to isolate just the blue glitch as a separate category and not have a true glitchless one.

The other problem is that this is a small speed game with a lot of ILs. Making a separate category would mean creating 266 more leaderboards that will mostly go unused, especially with the hardware dependency.

Third, the glitch does not save time in all levels. Separating the leaderboards would force anyone who only wants the fastest strats, like me, to have to look at two boards instead of one.

The idea I've considered is adding the blue glitch as a filter. That way runs with and without it can exist on the same leaderboard for easy comparison and better organization, but can also be separated with a toggle for those that want it.

It seems the hookshot disables geometry collision.

Well, I was able to replicate this, but I'm not sure what to do with this information.

Anytime I've ever needed to practice a trick, I would just work on it in whatever level the trick is in — sometimes in story mode to skip the previous rooms. Otherwise, it shouldn't be difficult to recreate an obstacle yourself in the level editor, especially if it's static. If you mean the wall spikes, you can just make a wall, place some spikes on it, then put a checkpoint below for quick healing.

If you want a practice map for other tech, Bghty has a discord link in a video description, but it's more of an obstacle course than something for practice drills.

If you were messing with the level editor at all, it was the exact same glitch. I made a follow-up video on it, but in short it only removes abilities and changes the theme to World 1.

I can understand the logic behind making sub-categories, but doing so to create a separate leaderboard for one single run is, in my opinion, a little silly. Not to mention this glitch has already been reported and will likely be patched out in the future. Even if it's not, this wouldn't be the first instance where a version difference could have split the leaderboard but didn't. There's also the option of downloading an older version of the game and running that in the meantime (the IL rule of needing to play on the latest release is an artifact from before speedrun mode that could potentially be removed). Suffice to say it's far too soon for discussion on complicating the leaderboard.

I've confirmed the glitch was introduced in version 1.2.12 and is not present in 1.2.11 (or at least is not so easily encountered). Looking over the patch notes again I found "Fixed minor visual glitch related to the Companion" which may or may not be relevant. There are of course the unspecified "Other improvements/fixes." Still unsure how to avoid it.