I don't really like the "intentional RNG manip" name. I would just go with RNG manip, the name doesn't really clarify in a clear way the category anyways, and having a word that talks about "intentions of the runner" makes the category look a bit silly imo, no RNG manip sounds more appropriate

First, I wanted to make everyone notice that no RNG manipulation is not a restriction of gameplay, but a restriction of the speedrunner's intentions while playing, and I find this completely hilarious. Also I don't get why people are so willing to have competition in an environment where rules are not clear. When I speedrun I am not willing to do what others tell me to do, but I'm willing to look at the environment I am in (that is defined by the rules of the run), and solve an optimization problem that is finishing a run under those rules in the lowest time possible. If the rules are not clear there is no optimization fun, you don't even know what you can do and what you can't, and can't tell if someone with a better time is in the same environment or not, but whatever, to each their own. I guess people enjoy different things.

Anyways, if you are fine with it, you could make some "no console reset" (imo during run) rule to restrict the manipulation strategy with a clear solution (trying to restrict knowledge and console resets for the starter deck is really stubborn imo), but that doesn't stop knowledge of manips from helping, and maybe eventually easily outclassing the blind hope strats method.

If you really want to make this legacy category thing and stop RNG manipulation, just make the rule "a run belongs to the no RNG manipulation category if and only if the moderators of the leaderboard agree so" and (one) problem solved. It annoys me the idea of something like that existing on the leaderboard, but I'm not gonna bitch about it.

For the arrangement of the categories, do whatever you want, I don't care. Everything seems pretty fine for me (sufficiently arbitrary categories not in misc makes me kinda laugh, but again, I'm not gonna bitch about it, it's fine)

Well, we need solid evidence to try and make the option of cheating as unlikely as possible, this isn't solid evidence towards the 000 happening on a normal disk, since there is an easy way to fake all of this out. Anyways, if we get good evidence that this happens on a normal FM disk on Mergy's console, I feel like the most reasonable deduction would be to guess that his console causes the glitch, which would still arguably be unfair but not as bad as flat out trying to cheat. I am still waiting to see if anything relevant is found from the research to explain what could cause this glitch other than a modded iso or a hardware malfunctioning, but I don't think anything will be found.

I was waiting for based Froggy to post his research results to comment. First of all, I don't consider 10 year old obscure youtube videos reliable documentation about yu gi oh forbidden memories, so I don't really think we should care about some old video showing glitched cards when the person that made it could have easily used cheats to try to get cards to beat this game (many people did since it's so hard). Given this, we have only one sample of this situation happening in the speedrunning history. Since a lot of gameplay has been done over the years, if we try to assume that it's a legit mechanic, it must be some insane rare situation. I am not going to exclude a priori that the glitch could be cause by some insanely rare perfect set up in the in game variables (unless really good reverse engeneering proves the contrary), but it's more than a far fetched situation. So if we assume that there was something different in Mergy's set up, then we are left with 2 possibilities. Either his game was modded, or there was a malfunctioning in his hardware. The hardware malfunctioning could be something like a scratched disk or his modded console affecting the gameplay. I feel like there is close to no way that the scratched disk was the cause, it would have to be an extremely precise malfunctioning that causes a very specific effect, and the same goes for the console, but maybe the odds are better, since it happens that minor emulation inaccuracies can cause rare glitches that don't affect the gameplay often, but still, if it's the console it should have a chance of happening in any of his duels (not rex only I assume, unlike a disk scratch over the part holding rex drop rates), and it only happened to him once in all his farm duels ever, sounds really unlikely. So let's consider the last option: the game iso was modded. We know that a iso modded in a way that the sum of Rex drop rates is lower than 2048 will reliably give a chance of winning the 000 glitched card, and modding the drop rates is a reliable way to cheat without leaving any proof of cheating unless someone analyses your iso. Also, Mergy could have easily used a burned iso modded with the FM hacking tool to obtain the desired cheat, but that can be said of basically anyone (even normal console users I guess if they disk swap maybe). Finally, his luck in his speedruns hints towards a possible cheat. A combination of above average drops and above average easy mode by the opponents could easily be caused by modding the iso with the wide spreaded hacking tool. So we have the opportunity (cheating is easy), a hint (luck is far above average) and a extraordinary situation (the never happened elswhere glitch). If we don't get any more information from the research over the game code, I feel like not doing anything would be a slap in the face of any runner of this game and in the face of the credibility of this game's speedrunning too. If we decide to do something I guess we could either assume that it was the console (in that case any time achieved by Mergy on that hardware should be invalidated), I would be fine with it kinda but many people wouldn't, and I can't blame them, or we could assume with huge odds of being right that he was on a modded iso, either because he screwd up in the burning of his disk and picked up a modded iso in his PC (yeah, sure), or because he just cheated to get the WR / get viewers / get donations. I feel like the number of hints towards cheating that is needed to call out for cheating in many communities is on average lower than what we have here right now. There is something wrong when all your runs get on decent WR attempts, arguably 2 hours faster than average runs, and you get WR with the final 6 playing nothing stronger than a 3200 attack monster, the nitemare fight was even 100% won (unless he forgot to remove meteor dragon form nitemare deck, in that case he could fuse MBD Kappa ) since his stronger monster was Twin headed thunder dragon.

So we are discussing whether to put Any% or arbitrary no press down left at the same time on the v letter in the save file menu% as the first category. For me not arbitrary >>>>>>>>>>>>> arbitrary, and also faster > slower. Also I have seen multiple people run Any% right now, so I don't see the problem, board is gonna fill up. (also any single arbitrary% time corresponds to the definition of any% as well, so you can fill up the leaderboard with those times at any time :^) )