I think this should work fine. The only way I can imagine it being a problem is if there's ever a situation where we lose the first frame of the dade-in due to the capture being too dark. This doesn't seem likely to be an issue, and I'm sure we can figure something out if there's ever a problem.

The ending doesn't matter as much, since as long as we wait until the fade out has definitely started, we'll only ever be adding extra frames to the time (not ideal, but at least it won't give any advantage).

It's worth noting that the standard we've used for playing the original/USA version unofficially (e.g. on emulator) has been to ensure that the loading times are slower than that version on PSTV (the fastest known official way of playing it) rather than NamCollection, since the mechanical differences between the two versions are just enough that getting NamCollection's loading times on the USA version could be considered an illegitimate advantage.

I do check NamCollection on emulator every so often. It gets better every time I try it, but it's still pretty slow and inaccurate by speedrunning standards. My guess is that it will continue to lag behind Klonoa 2 in terms of emulation accuracy, simply because Klonoa 2 makes more typical use of the PS2 hardware than a game that's trying to look and feel just like a PS1 game. It might be worth revisiting the question of allowing emulated runs of Klonoa 2, though.

I know this has been mentioned in passing previously, but it feels like a pretty major oversight that lists of following and followed users seem forced to be publicly visible, and that there's no way to avoid notifying people that you've followed their user page. The lack of advance indication that a notification will be sent in the first place also doesn't seem great.

The fact that you can hide which games you're following (a holdover from the previous design, if I remember correctly) makes it just completely baffling that no similar privacy control is available for the lists of followed and following users. The privacy implications of sharing a list of followed users are much more obvious than they are with a list of followed games, so it seems like an obvious mistake to only have an option to disable the latter.

For a personal example, I made the "mistake" of following everyone who actively runs a game that I moderate, and now I feel like I'll be sending a bad signal if I either missed someone or forget to follow any new runners in the future, because that'll make it look like I'm somehow favoring some runners over others, when that's not the case at all. I understand that most people likely won't read that much into it, but it's just not a message I want to send and I'd prefer to avoid taking that risk at all.

My next thought was "oh, I just won't follow anyone, problem solved" ...but since everyone I followed already got a notification that I started following (which I didn't realize would happen), having my list of follows forced to be public will implicitly let people see that I stopped following them if they look at it after getting the notification, and I really don't want to leave people wondering why I started and then stopped following them, when the real reason is just that I concluded that the whole "follow" system seemed poorly thought out and I decided to disengage with it altogether.

I'm sure it's partly my fault for assuming anything, but I was just expecting this feature to let me have a user's latest runs show up in my main feed, not automatically send them a notification them that I'm following and then make the follow publicly visible on both their and my profile, with seemingly no way to disable any of this whatsoever.

I don't normally voice opinions about overall site updates, but this new functionality was enough of an unpleasant surprise that I thought it was worth drawing a bit of attention to it. I can absolutely see why the current behavior might be desirable for those who want to use this site as a social network, but again, it's really just the complete opposite of what I was hoping for, and I imagine others who moderate games may have similar concerns to me.

Adding the ability to hide both the "followers" and "followed" lists from my own profile would at least be a good start toward addressing some of these issues, I think.

The only concern I'd have is to make sure it's worded such that it allows for temporary dips below 50 FPS, both because they're pretty inevitable even on console, and because measuring a variable frame rate actually gets hairy and even reliable tools often give different values because of how they sample the value.

If we're going to go with 50 FPS requirement, I'd say require the run to stay above that on average, with dips below 50 FPS lasting for more than a few seconds potentially invalidating the run.

And yeah, any intentional FPS abuse, even when it stays within otherwise allowable limits, should probably be explicitly banned at least for the main categories.

Regarding Low IGT/Pause Abuse, I think the way it was before (or at least the way I believe it was before) made a lot of sense, and honestly nothing here is changing my mind at all about that. That is: keep the pause abuse (or whatever we call it) "category," and don't split it up by difficulty.

There's been enough interest (not to mention existing runs) in the category that just deleting both it and those runs doesn't seem justified at all. The only harm I can see in keeping it is that it adds one extra tab and that it potentially means that people might choose to run that category when they could be running the "more competitive" categories instead (which doesn't even really seem like a bad thing to me, but I can sort of understand why someone might prefer to have most people competing in a small number of more active categories). Either way, right now nothing about keeping it seems nearly detrimental enough to justify essentially erasing a way of playing the game that people are already doing and interested in exploring further.

Keeping it the way it was allows it to serve as one catch-all that allows "everything" (non-hardware dependent) the game makes available to minimize the in-game time, including swapping difficulty (BOTH for strategic reasons and potentially to warp to checkpoint). This also means that future exploits that are discovered which may need to be regulated in other categories will generally continue to have a home here.

Likewise, having this category split by difficulty doesn't really make much sense to me; in other categories playing on higher difficulties is interesting specifically because it makes things, well, difficult. But allowing things like checkpoint warps (and even support mode itself to be honest) really seems to undercut the reasons why someone would want to play on hard in the first place, and I haven't seen any real interest in having Low IGT runs divided up this way either. Besides, since swapping difficulty mid-run is already excluded from the other categories, having it permitted in the "anything goes" category seems quite reasonable. Note that I don't think making the Low IGT category difficulty-irrelevant needs to imply anything about how difficulty is handled in other categories.

Again, if I'm not mistaken, what I'm proposing is essentially how it was in the previous iteration, when Low IGT was listed as its own "difficulty." I don't think there was anything fundamentally broken about doing it that way, and so far I haven't heard any proposal that I think is clearly superior to doing it that way either.

@Harutomo This is another possible complication found by Tsu (つかさ) on the discord. It IS possible to get both buttons on one controller on PC using only official software, but it's still clearly unintended. https://discord.com/channels/162351381963866112/999994923367534603/1002782797901086780

Unfortunately I think this means an "external software" rule wouldn't really make sense, as it would only affect certain types of controller that can't do it this other way. This also doesn't seem to work on console.

I do seem to remember there being some fairly strong opinions on both sides of the issue regarding the controller binding issue, though, so it's probably worth taking the time to actually get some real data about how the majority feels.

I agree that this shouldn't delay the leaderboard, but if we do open up submissions for this category we probably should add a note in the rules that this issue isn't decided yet. That way people will be prepared for the possibility that runs might need to be removed and that we may need to go back and ask people what tools, etc. were used.

I have absolutely no opinion on the issue of whether to ban binding two controllers to one. There are probably other games that have exactly this same situation (not just analogous, but actually the same) so it might be worth looking at them, but I don't know of any off the top of my head and I'm not sure if I feel strongly enough about this issue to go looking for them right away (although I probably will at some point if no one else does).

Regardless of how that's decided, though, I definitely don't think we should require any additional proof standards, especially not platform specific ones, based on what we know currently. The FPS display already seems like an unfortunate hurdle (but ultimately probably worthwhile, mainly to avoid accidental "cheating"). Obviously an input display is a nice thing to have, both as a verification aid and more importantly (in my opinion) as something to help other people learn the run more easily, but I'm not sure it should be granted any official, special status. I certainly don't think it should be a requirement on any platform.

This is a minor point, but I'm mostly just curious if I'm missing something. At the moment I'd be inclined to drop the bit mentioning the lower value of 30 FPS; I think the 60 FPS cap is the salient point and I actually find it a bit unclear as to whether the mention of 30 is suggesting that you can set the cap to 30 so that the game never goes faster than it (which isn't something available to console players, so not something I'd love) or if it's suggesting doing something to try to keep the frame rate ABOVE 30, which isn't really something that shows up as an option using the most common methods. That's simply because the assumption by e.g. most video driver software is that if you cap the frame rate at 60, you want the game to run as fast as possible up to 60. And if your computer can't keep the frame rate above 30, well, an option that says "I want the frame rate to be between 30 and 60" is typically just going to be wishful thinking (barring things that dynamically adjust quality, etc. which I don't think is going to be relevant here at all).

I know both the Crash and Spyro remakes on PC both say "Your FPS must be capped between 30 and 60 FPS." I think those games might actually have an option for either 30 or 60 FPS on console which would explain its relevance on PC (does someone know for sure?), because otherwise I have to admit that I find it a bit confusing why 30 FPS is mentioned there too, or what exactly it's asking for (again, does it mean the frame rate should never go BELOW 30, or does it mean you're allowed to cap the frame rate at 30 if you want, which would seem weird if such a thing were NOT available on console).

Whether to start with a glitchless run or not is pretty much completely up to you. Some people prefer to start that way and other people like to start by learning skips first, and it doesn't really seem to make any difference in the long run (unless you get bored and want quit altogether, in which case I recommend switching categories before that point).

One thing to consider with this particular game is that it's new enough that skips you learn now might eventually turn out to be irrelevant when new things are discovered, but that will almost certainly apply to some degree with any potential glitchless category as well.

If you're not aware, this game is much, much more closely related to the Wii Klonoa than the original PlayStation version. A lot of the movement quirks (most of them even) carry over directly from that version. A lot of skips from the Wii version that make use of things have been disabled in the Phantasy Reverie series with invisible walls, so even there a lot of the tricks don't really carry over completely.

Most of the glitches in the original PlayStation version don't apply at all in a direct sense, although a lot of them are similar in spirit and effect to stuff in both the Wii version and this one.

For PC runs, I'm inclined to say for now we should accept runs played with the FPS capped to 60 and with the steam FPS overlay (or a similar 3rd party overlay) shown onscreen for the whole run. Based on my own testing and what people on the discord mentioned about other games, the counter occasionally displaying values a slightly over 60 (e.g. 61, 62) shouldn't be considered a problem. We'd potentially want to ban values that go dramatically and persistently below 60 during normal gameplay just to be safe as well (of course it's expected that the framerate will occasionally drop below 60, especially during loading screens).

If it turns out that the frame rate issues are more minor than feared, the rules could always be relaxed, but for now this seems like a safe rule based on what we know.

Well, at the moment it does seem like RTA isn't going to be easy to do in a way that's even reasonably fair. Loading times don't even seem consistent from one playthrough to the next (I've already seen a variation of more than a second for a single load screen on the same machine). The line between "unfair" and "wrong" still seems pretty blurry in this case, since right now there's no reason to think there's a way to majorly abuse the IGT by e.g. freezing it for an entire stage or something. And using RTA as the primary method would certainly eliminate any possibility of easily having comparisons between runs on different platforms, which I know isn't really a big deal for a lot of people, but not having to split by platform seems like something to strive for if it can be done without sacrificing the integrity of the run.

You're not at all wrong that the costume swap might be a more interesting/fun trick if it's restricted (implicitly) to scenarios where it saves real time, so that is an interesting consideration. To me the question is just whether there are enough benefits to using RTA to make it worth finding a way to deal with the potential unfairness with loading times, platform differences, hardware etc.

I'd be curious to hear your personal experiences with games where RTA ended up being a better choice even when IGT initially seemed like a reasonable choice for making things fair. I haven't seen it happen so maybe that just makes it seem less real to me.

That's true, but I'd personally say changing between difficulties ought to just count for the lowest difficulty used. So if you only swap between hard and normal I don't see a reason (yet) that the run shouldn't still count for the normal difficulty category. Unless there's a way to abuse this that I'm not thinking of.

Well, Monkey Ball is a really good example of games where pausing makes a significant difference in how it's played. But I agree this game probably doesn't seem conducive to anything like that...

except that the costume swap trick (and/or difficulty swap which seems like it might be a viable substitute for people who don't have access to the costumes) ALREADY requires pausing, doesn't it? I didn't even really think of that until just now.

So my thinking with the pausing is that there are actually already some frame perfect tricks; stopping the timer admittedly doesn't necessarily help with them, but that could change in the future. The game is still only a few days old so, as with the costume swap issue, I'm not sure it's wise to make assumptions about what strategic advantage something does or doesn't provide until we gather a bit more data.

So all other things being equal, I think I'd probably lean slightly toward allowing pausing with a variable for it. It seems to work well for Sonic 2, and I tend not to find it necessary to add additional rules on top of what the game itself permits you to do unless there's a really compelling reason that the developers overlooked, especially for IGT-based categories.

But since everyone else who has responded both here and on discord seems to be in favor of banning it altogether I think maybe we ought to just go with that for now. I'm not opposed to banning it at all.

I personally don't care one way or another about pausing but it is something worth thinking about. I think the arguments for banning it are fairly obvious, but I think I think one reasonable argument in favor of allowing it is that it allows the "optimal" play within the constraints of the game's timer. ILs generally are good for showcasing things that are humanly possible to do but not realistic for a full game run, so it feels a little weird to add rules that makes it harder to do things than in full game categories. And I wouldn't want to add pausing for all full game runs if it's at all avoidable (although a standard rule against excessive pausing might be reasonable).

I notice the Sonic 2 ILs just have a variable for it (both for ILs and the whole game, in fact), which is an interesting approach.

I think we're actually saying the same thing regarding No Skips, unless I'm misunderstanding: There's not much point in having a bunch of empty subcategories for categories that are already very small, so that pretty much completely rules out having something like "All Visions (No Skips)" as a category on its own. I had originally hoped that a variable within the All Visions category might be a harmless way to give some acknowledgment to people who decide to do it that way, but in the end I realized that it probably wouldn't really accomplish that based on a number of different things including the way the site displays these things. I think that's more or less what you were thinking, as well?

As for the other things, I don't really have an opinion. Having In-Order/Out-of-Order separated would be totally fine I think. But keeping them together wouldn't bother me, either: if I really felt like people were gaining enough of an advantage by playing out of order that I can't keep up, then I'd just have to learn to do it that way too.

Regarding whether either of these are main categories or not, I think there's some pretty strong justifications for either choice there too. Almost all of Klonoa's contemporaries do seem to have at least one main category for 100%/All Gems/All Emeralds/All Whatevers (for sake of completeness I checked at least two games in each of Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Croc, Mario, Spyro, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, and Gex, and didn't find a single exception). That seems like a fairly good argument in favor of having one or both as main categories, but in the other games, those categories are also relatively much more active on average, even when the game overall has fewer runs overall and a less active Any% category. I think ultimately the most important question is whether they're more active because they're main categories, or if they're main categories because they're more active. The former would be a good reason to have them as main categories; the latter would be a good reason not to.

There are also questions of whether having them as main categories is a valuable thing for marathon submissions (which I know has come up in the past) that's worth considering.

I should probably mention that if I had to choose, I'd probably also think having them split into subcategories makes the most sense for something like a "No Skips" version, but I'd be curious to hear from people who are actually interested in submitting runs that would fall into them or have done similar with other games (I'm sure I'll eventually want to try doing something like an All Visions No Skips, but for now it still feels pretty abstract since I haven't really even considered actually trying it).

As for the In-Order or Out-of-Order versions, the fact that they are in a sense still directly comparable makes me unsure about separating them. If (for example) only the In-Order show up by default, could that give a sense that those are the "real" runs and the others are somehow less valid or at least secondary?

No, I was only talking about the much-smaller NG+ categories, not Any% (or anything where there's an existing, active "No Skips" delineation).

Splitting it into different sub-categories (or categories) is always the ideal, but I think there's a practical trade-off worth considering when we're talking about categories that have a very small number of runs to begin with, because there would only be one or two runs in the smaller sub-category and it'd require an extra click to even see them if it's not the default.

And I think that unfortunately diminishes the advantage to having a sub-category a bit. It's true that it's less likely that someone would naively assume that the No Skips runs were just worse if they're on their own separate page, but if there are only one or two of them, it'd also make it much harder (for someone unfamiliar with the game) to tell whether there was effort put into them or whether someone just submitted them because they'd be uncontested in a category that doesn't get much attention.

I'm inclined to give both categories a chance to grow on the main page for now, but I'm also not too concerned either way.

Having at least one main "100%" category seems to make sense in principle for a game like this, and I don't feel strongly about which of the two has a better claim to it in this case.

I was thinking it might be neat to have a skips/no skips variable similar to how we have one for the IGT abuse in Balue's Tower, but it sounds like the site design won't play nicely with it. There wouldn't be too much point in having it if it doesn't show up by default, and the other variables seem more important, so if there's no room for it I'm not really sure how this could work.