Hey y'all,

Long time no see.

I've reached out to a few runners of the game via twitter and some mods of other communities about how we can level the playing field for runners on different consoles in the categories that use RTA timing. There seem to be 4 primary lines of thought.

Gonna preface this by saying this shouldn't affect Bowhemoth or ILs, since those already use IGT.

0. Make no changes and keep the leaderboard as it. I think this is just lazy to not try and fix this, but it's still an option to consider

1. Have a moderator (probably me, Moosh), retime all new runs and old runs. The leaderboard would then include both times but be sorted by time without loads. This is the most work intensive fix, but it's just figuring out when and where the load times are, then just manually retime runs without loads.

2. Split each leaderboard between consoles and PC versions. This is the easiest and simplest solution, but this already turns the already sparce leaderboards of any% and SSA any% into even smaller ones. This also doesn't address the issue of Wii U times still being significantly slower than Switch / potentially Xbox times IIRC, but that could be achieved with another leaderboard split, but that just makes the visual aspect of the leaderboard being divided a bit worse.

3. Go the Sonic 2 route and calculate run times as sums of each in-game level's time. This is also a pretty easy fix, but introduces some new questions about excessive waiting on the map or how deaths factor into the final run time (as mentioned earlier), so that would require further discussion.

4. Take the NSMBW approach where high-level runs are subject to different timing conventions (for example, in SSA any%, a time of 15:00 on Wii U being retimed without load times using method 1 or 3, but a 15:00 on PS4 not being retimed for not reaching some other threshold). This doesn't address any actual new timing methodology, but does make it somewhat easier to moderate (though, Runbow isn't exactly getting a lot of traffic on the regular, so overworking the mods isn't that big of a deal right now).

I would love to hear anybody and everybody's thoughts on this matter :)

Hey small update regarding timing going forward.

Since we have times on both the Individual Level leaderboards and the any% leaderboards now, Alex and I thought it'd be a good idea to clarify how the leaderboards are currently set up.

The any% leaderboard is pretty much the same, except there's the addition of milliseconds when you go to submit your run, both for IGT and RTA times. Since we don't have any% runs that need to really be timed down to the millisecond (as of yet), just leave the milliseconds box blank for both IGT and RTA times when submitting new any% runs. If you do fill it out, we'll just set it back to 000 ms. Once we get to a point where milliseconds are critical to settling high-ranking tie breaks, then we can just go in and retime your run to include both times down to the millisecond. Please keep including using Livesplit times as RTA times (if you choose to include your RTA time at all, remember me and Alex always retime RTA manually) and your in-game time displayed on the final cutscene as the IGT (which we double check but don't need to retime or anything).

The IL leaderboard is a bit different since the levels are significantly shorter. Here, please fill in the milliseconds box when submitting new ILs. Once again, your RTA time will be what you time with Livesplit or some other method *(should you choose to include it), and the in-game time will the final time from the end level cutscene (the level door opening, the cutscene at the end of A-top, or the cutscene end of the Owl fight) minus what the timer started at for that stage or sequence of stages. Just like for any% times, Alex and I will manually look at over both times before verifying an IL, so you don't need to stress out timing or retiming anything yourself!

If you have any questions regarding this or anything else, feel free to reach out to me (]Moosh/MCMooshroo) or Alex (nim_smg1)!

I understand WHY we would do this, but would it just be a nice quality of life thing to make it so we don't have to watch the credits to finish a run of these categories?

There's no input required from grabbing the trophy to unlocking the 3 medals and can already determine if you're getting all 3 on the trophy grab.

And I'm not just saying this because the current rules invalidate my current wr in 435 Medals lmao.

I would retime Nara's run if we did change this