I've been comparing the playthroughs of the Glitchless MM7 runs of the two German runners and there is a significant difference in the damage that droids do to them compared to my runs where I use a Shield potion, as well as the ai of them. Traviktox told me that there is in fact a difference in how the spawns act and that there are less enemies in areas like the wine cellar. Wouldn't this effect the time of runs using another version considering the increased possibility of deaths and using strats that wouldn't be necessary in the German version to avoid dying?

Usually people run the fastest version. Only when the speedrun differs a lot, then there is the option to split the leaderboards. But for me there are only small differences, not really worth to split.

I also think that it doesn't make sense to split the leaderboard. Like Traviktox said people run the fastest version. Another point is our Might and Magic 7 community is very small and it does not make much sense to have more dead categories. i know this game from my childhood and i start speedrunning in english version and was thinking what the heck, never saw this enemies in wine cellar. So after category change i switch to german version, because it's easier :)

I would think that based on the changes made to the game the German version would count as a modified version of the game like Grayface patch, but if its okay based on language versions than obviously running in the German language would have to be optimal. Luckily gog already has it.

Come on now, you can't call a first-party localized release "modded". People should be able to do runs on any official release. And like namefaker already said, it doesn't make sense to fragment the already tiny community.

For what it's worth, I personally don't like it either, but it is a very common thing in speedrunning. Often it's just text length (like japanese vs english) but I'm sure there are numerous examples of notable gameplay differences between regions.