And so on and so on, you can probably see that this gets exhausting quickly. Even if you might have a clear opinion which ones of those are glitches other peoples opinions will differ and the discussions will drag on and any potential glitch like that requires month(s) long discussion here on the forum to reach a concensus if that particular trick can be included in the glitchless category or not. Finally the result is an ever-growing list of pretty arbitrary rules, which will be annoying in many ways:

• 100% of the runners will be dissatisfied with some decisions on the list
• Whenever a runner discovers a new trick it needs to be brought to the forum to be decided whether that is a glitch or not, resulting in new long discussions and potentially changes to the rules -> this doesn't really encourage people to find ways to beat the games faster
• the rules are not constant and might change, so runners need to stay on top of the ever-changing rules
• new runners are met with a long, discouraging list of arbitrary rules to memorize, and might end up never trying because of the effort feels so dull
• good runs will be invalidated because the runner didn't remember the subpoint three of glitch 19
• good runs will be invalidated because a runner accidentally performed a glitch that is easy to reproduce accidentally
• a new glitch is found, the community decides (after another month long discussion) it is banned. Later somebody realizes the glitch was actually used already in a 5 year old run. Do we invalidate the run that we've been okay with for 5 years or then randomly allow this one glitch?

All in all, we have to spend tons of effort to maintain a separate layer of rules on top of what the code lets and doesn't let us do, and it will lead to lot of ambiguous situations.

The alternate viewpoint is so much simpler: we all have the same code in our hands that with same input produces the same output. Let's just embrace that and see who gets to the end fastest. This way the rules stay simple, runners are encouraged to find faster ways to beat the game, and (in my opinion) running is more fun and less memorizing which strategies are banned and endless discussions of which tricks to ban.

Most games seem to have come to this conclusion and allow glitches. See any Spyro run for example, within 5 seconds of the start of Spyro 2 Any% WR we're out of bounds ( ). Basically all games I've ever taken a look at seem to be fine with glitches, including other popular games of the era like Spyros, Crash Bandicoots, Crocs and Tony Hawk's Pro Skaters.

All this said, ultimately the point is of course to have categories that make speedrunning the game fun, so if people want to run and maintain the rules of glitchless category then of course go for it. I'm just writing this to make sure you know the implications and to defend the point of view that there should at the very least be a category that allows glitches :)

(Sorry for the gigantic post, had to split it up because went past max length :D)

I'm not going to be standing in the way if we decide to have a glitchless and glitchy category for The Final, and I'm fine if the run I did is transferred to a category something like "The Final glitched". However I think having a "glitchless" category comes with many issues...

So let's go down the route that we have a "glitchless" category. That means we have to define what are the banned glitches in this game. This results in a lot of tough calls which are ultimately subjective opinions on what you feel like was maybe a developer error. Some examples of what I think are some of those tough calls:

• At 2:30 ( ) I jump through three heater blocks. This clearly breaks the logic of the puzzle, the point probably was that going through that way should be impossible and the player is supposed to find a way to the exit through the teleport. But all I did was simply move fast... In particular, I do the corners quickly by turning and immediately jumping after that, which is what people do in their runs all the time. If this is a glitch is the turn + quick jump a glitch everywhere and should not be done anywhere in any run? If it's a glitch only in certain situations we need to define all the situations where it is considered a glitch, which is a rabbit hole of it's own...
• At 2:07 ( ) I again break the the point of the puzzle with some jumps in between the buttons that activate the lasers, as well as picking up the key while jumping off the trampoline even though they're on different blocks. I'm just jumping a little off-center of the blocks, that's all, and again that's something everybody are doing all the time, in fact it's really difficult to jump dead-center of the block every time. But it did kill what I think was the point of the level that you need to go back and forth to activate the lasers in a complicated way that ultimately lets you go through. Glitch or simply precise movement? And similarly to the point above, if this is a glitch is the very basic movement strategy of jumping off-center of a block a glitch everywhere or only in certain situations?
• At 4:29 ( ) I do a series of quick movement on crumbling blocks, which lets me finish the level using a shorter route that probably was intended. Looks a bit more to the glitchy side to me but a case could be made that I'm again simply just moving fast enough not to fall with the crumbling block. Also, if this is a glitch, is this a glitch when adeyblue in their Arcade Any% WR does a 180 on a crumbling block? At 3:22: ( ) Looks like both tricks work on the same principle that a crumbling block lets you do about two actions if you're quick enough.
• This is from SaturnKai's TAS, 2:46: ( ) SaturnKai jumps precisely over the pill, saving about half a second. I've managed to do this myself outside runs too so it's not a TAS-only trick. Here the impact is small, but should be considered anyway to be consistent, and maybe somewhere in the game a jump like that could skip say the pill that makes you jump two block instead of one, breaking the game more seriously. Simply a precise jump or a glitch?
• Pause skip is IMO pretty clearly a glitch but causes another problem: if you manage to pause the game accidentally during a run, is the run immediately invalidated? You could potentially gain unfair benefit...
• There are glitches we don't know about and might be doing accidentally all the time. Who knows if dying once in level 12 makes the ball go slightly faster for the next 5 levels? How do we deal with the situation when somebody ultimately finds this out and we realize some old runs have accidentally performed the glitch and gained benefit from it?

Hi, sorry for reviving an old thread. I've recently taken up Kula World speedrunning and have been confused about the categories.

I have to say I side with Dima here with separating IGT and RTA properly as different categories. In essence they are different categories and you employ different strategies depending which timing method you focus on, Dima already explained the reasons so I won't repeat those here again.

To me it looks like people generally agree that they are different categories but because the categories are sort of there already there's no need to change anything. However I'd say that in practice having IGT and RTA listed in the same category creates some annoying problems:

• By looking at the scoreboard I can't tell whether the runner aimed for a good IGT or a good RTA time
• Related to the previous one: when I submit a time to the scoreboard I don't really know how well I did because the other times on the scoreboard may or may not have tried to achieve the same thing I tried to achieve with my run, I can't really tell
• Because each runner can have only one time listed on the scoreboard of a category, runners cannot have a good IGT time and a good RTA time (there's no one run that achieves both)