I've gone ahead and made three full-game categories. As for ILs, I propose we do three tables for each mission (plus possibly three "hidden" equivalent tables for Raiden, because he's in a tier of his own in terms of speed) where you can use either Snake or any of the Diamond Dogs soldiers, plus any equipment or buddies from your existing save file:

- pure any%
- stealth S rank
- All Tasks (complete all objectives)

I can see some exceptions to this rule (such as in prologue, which I can see only having one category, as the only optional task is during a rail shooter and the only stealth part is one room).

Any thoughts/objections?

Not really, everything said here makes good sense. One thing im curious about tho, will RTA be used, or will we tally up IGT from each main ops? if we did the latter, people wouldnt need to worry about purchasing the fastest version in order to do runs. But at the same time, tallying up IGT might be a bit silly.

For the any%'s, we could use total IGT at the end of each Sahelanthropous fight (Mission 31 for Chapter 1, Mission 50 for Chapter 2) since the game tallies your total play time at the end of each mission. All Missions S-Rank would probably be RTA though.

Oh, and Mission 2 (the Mother Base tutorial) would either need to be RTA on the table, since that isn't timed for some reason, or not included at all.

I'm curious, would the categories be NG or NG+? I'm asking since as far as I've seen NG+ shows all the time you've spent ingame and I can't see how IGT would work with NG+

personally, if it doesnt time you on it, theres no reason in doing it.

sleepingbio it would probably be ng+ ng would take a very very long time.

I would see NG for the Chapter 1 and Chapter 1+2 runs, and NG+ for the S rank and ILs.

So, what would count in regards to in game time then? you are required to do some side ops in order to progress.

Total Time Played is IGT, which includes everything you do, including Side Ops.

ah ok. But if its NG+, will it count everything you did before you start? I'm only concerned about this because im a bit confused on how a run for this game would work.

NG+ is only for the ILs, and NG is only for full game runs.

NG+ full game wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.

e:as for categories, what's there right now makes the most sense to me. If someone wants to do work on a category that isn't there (like perfect stealth), then we can add it in at that point.

NG+ wouldn't work for IGT as it counts all the time you've spent in game.
But what could be done is to also have a NG+ full game leaderboards.
Since this game is a lot like Peace walker in the way that they do the misssions and such it would make sense to have the NG+ in as a full game category.
This also makes it so you don't have to spent time waiting for upgrades or grinding to gather resources so you can upgrade stuff.

It's not like peace walker, in that it's not just a sequence of replayable discrete missions in order. There's a bunch of stuff you can't repeat after having done it once. You can't redo critical side ops. The unlock conditions for main ops is more than just doing the previous main op.

By having NG+ any% of course you wouldn't be able to do the side ops, but there also wouldn't be a need to wait for mother base to hit a certain level to do mission 46. If you are trying to do a full game speedrun.
You also wouldn't need to wait, to upgrade certain items like the "Fulton + cargo 2" which you would need to get in order to do mission 35. So you would be cutting that time away by doing NG+ in exchange for not doing the side ops

The idea of making it separate is that in any%, players are free to use things like the Parasite Suit, Chicken Hat, Weather Changes and Bombardments that would otherwise lower their ranking, all of which considerably change strategies.

I thought that Raiden resstricted S-Ranks. What's the purpose of S-Rank Raiden? I also don't see a useful distinction between any%/any% raiden. Or, at least it should be any%/any% no Raiden/Grey Fox. I don't think the strategies would be meaningfully different, or at least less so than many other S-Rank restricting items.

Edit: Though, I definitely see a reason to have S-Rank/any% distinction on the leaderboards. Those are sufficiently different, and putting them both in the same list just makes things more confusing.

Full game any% NG+ is a bad idea I think. Grinding resources and strategically choosing the right upgrades at the right time is part of the game and should factor in to a successful speedrun imo.

I like things the way they are. Good job setting it up. I think there's a lot of speed run potential for this game.

@your_name_here i don't see why 50 missions NG+ wouldn't be a thing. Of course i'm running it.
As long as people use the same start to finish point, it shouldn't being ruled out in my opinion.

@Entropy4 It's two kind of runs. One run where you have every single thing at your disposale and have to figure the best way to have the better time.
One run, where you basicly rely on having good staff to unlock good stuff(wich is random more or less).
I don't sse why NG+ Single segement all main ops shouldn't be a thing again as long as people do it from the same standard start to finish.
Basicly you just are comparing One category, to another one, wich doesn't make any sense, at all.

i also really wish to see a Fox Hound leaderboard being display without any option to "not hide it".
It's an high standard run that always has been here in the game saga. Let's keep it alive. For Big Boss sake, for my sake BibleThump.

I'm not going to stop you from running the game the way that you want to run it. If you can produce the run and provide consistent rules for it, I'd say that we should track it. Though, I wouldn't really call it an NG+ full game run, as it's sort of a different beast. I don't really have a better name for it, so whatever.

Foxhound in this game is a little weird, because of the per mission 3 mission average system. I guess you could call a run which achieves "Perfect Stealth, No Kills" on every possible mission a Foxhound run.

YNH, exactly, which is why I created the category All Missions, Perfect Stealth No Kills (or Peacenik - PSNK - for short), which is I think is a perfectly acceptable category.

I also added 100% for anyone who's crazy enough to even think about it. Not me, that's for sure.

and bre3zer, while I get what you're saying about not wanting to "hide" a category you're working on, it's nothing to be ashamed of. For instance talon2461 puts a ton of work into Sonic Adventure 2 180 Emblems, and that's considered a miscellaneous category on its leaderboards.