I felt like I should have worded my forum post better.

Would it be acceptable for a Merciless True End Category to be added if it gains enough interest?

Say 2-3 People Are Willing to run it? because as it stands it's a difficulty that get's no show time on the LBs.

Yes it's a DLC, but it's also Free and Everyone with Persona 5 has access to it. I feel it should be available as a category on the LB.

I stated it in the previous post that I personally deleted due to thinking the wording was bad, That I have someone who is willing and able to help route and even race me in a Merciless run.

It's also come to my attention that other people would like to run it as well.

I understand if a proper reason is given in the end but as it stands it's just not being given rep.

If there needs to be a run before you are willing to add it in as a category then by all means I'll run it myself within 2 months time.

I've stated in the NG+ thread before as to why I(we) think new categories should not be carelessly added as soon as there is simply one run of it. One run doesn't mean anything in terms of the categories progression. See P4 for example. We're trying to avoid those kind of scenarios from happening over again.

In addition to that, yes it's a free DLC, just like a bunch of others. If you start allowing partial DLC usage, people are gonna want more arbitrary restriction in that regard. They want to be able to use X DLC, cause Y DLC is also free and allowed. Even just allowing all the free DLC would trivialize certain parts of the run by quite a bit. I'm not saying whether or not it was a good decision by ATLUS to make Challenge/Merciless difficulty a DLC instead of just having it in the game from the get go. However, fact remains that it IS a DLC.

As far as the "interest" goes. Hearing that some people are interested is good and all, but at the same time I've also heard from tons of other people they wanted to run game/category X. Ultimately, I've never seen them touch that game/category in any way.

Also, as a reminder. Speedruns or categories don't have to be on a leaderboard to be appreciated by the people who want to do them and if there's actual competition and considerable merit to them, they can always be added in the future.

Sounds good enough to me, nothing seems immediately illogical here. Thanks for the response Nev.

Also I can agree with you on people saying they want to run a category or game and never do it. I've seen it a few times already.

If the desire to delete Bad End and NG+ for P4 is really there, then by all means (speaking in terms of Bad End) delete it.

My personal annoyance with the series setup though is the leaderboard consistency with that setup. A few of the games have categories indeed with one actual run in them and those runs have been sat there alone for months or even a year +.

So my question I guess is; how come those but not this if indeed one run of Merciless had been done?

I understand this is the P5 board and the above games are ultimately unrelated, but considering P4 was brought up, when that could be considered unrelated also, I think it is fair to pose this question.

No categories/runs have been removed retroactively at this point, which is basically the reason why it appears inconsistent as of now. Removing runs and/or categories retroactively can be difficult sometimes hence why I/we left those as is for now at least.

The plan is to approach the ideas described above from here on, whether or not categories should or shouldn't removed retroactively on other boards, I'm not sure about personally. Especially since some of them weren't even added by me (See P4 bad end for example). Ultimately it would be great to keep the consistency across the different Persona boards, but then again, as of now P3 is a hot mess anyways for example.

So basically what things are boiling down to is that things just seem to be a hot mess in terms of Persona LBs. Things need to be worked on but not really sure how to move forward? or at the least there's a rough idea of where you want to take things Nev and will be using P5 as the example and from that spread the consistency?

I'm probably just blabbing but I think that seems right?

(In terms of P4, I'm not bothered about Bad End being removed now, at least.)

Just I think it makes more sense to create a category if a run has been done, leave it open and then remove it if no interest was received in a certain amount of time. I think something to consider with a lot of the SMT games (Persona in particular due to their length) is that most people, realistically, are not going to put the time in unless they already know there's competition. Without knowledge of the discord (as far as I can tell most public links on here were cleared out after the /srg/ incident a while back, and it can only be found in 'resources' under specific games now I think) they would have to route the entire game from scratch due to a lot of notes not being posted publicly. This is obviously gonna take a long time if someone truly is doing this, especially if they want an optimized run.

All I'm saying I guess is that there is a difference between say... a one-run category in Persona / SMT and a one-run category in a more popular game that would be more accessible to the common runner. Many of these games have less runners than you can count on a single hand. If a one-run category existed in Super Mario 64 or any Zelda, for example, it'd be kind of odd it even existing but for games like this where the collective, active community is so much smaller it just seems strange, is all.