I was in a discussion today with the leaderboard moderator for Melatonin today, and ended up left with an interesting question. There are two categories for that game that are relevant here: All Levels and All Stars and Rings. The first category is just Any% with the requirement to also complete all the levels, and the second category is like All Levels, but also requires completing the "hard mode" variants of each level (in addition to the normal mode), and get the highest (non-perfect) score in all of them.

The discussion was about what would be between them. You could make a category that needs all stars, which excludes the hard modes, or make a category to also do all the hard modes, but not necessarily get the highest score in them. Right now, there's nobody pining to run those categories, but the discussion was over how to handle it if they do get run. The moderator was saying to just make them additional categories (most likely misc. categories), but I had another thought.

In my view, separating categories by the scores you get doesn't make much sense as, assuming perfect skill at the game, it doesn't take longer to get a better score. An all stars run could trivially obsolete a normal all levels run. My idea, then, was to use a variable to indicate the score the run got, and let users filter by that. The problem I see is handling run obsolescence. An all stars run could obsolete an all levels run, but an all levels run that doesn't get all the stars can't obsolete an all stars run. From what I can tell, variables can only be set such that all values obsolete each other or none do, so they can't be used for this ordered relationship.

Is there a way to do this with variables? If not, is there a better way to handle this kind of relationship between runs? Would adding this functionality to variables as a feature to the site be helpful for other games' leaderboards? Additionally, for filtering by these "ordered" variables, it would be nice to have an easy way to say "filter by this value or better" instead of having to select all the values individually to get that.

This is very unnecessary. I would just have a variable that has "All Stars" if you really want to track that, and then let the users manually filter using the provided options. But if you're only going to have the one category anyway, what's the point?