Recently I've been running Any% D-4 on Allstars. It's a great category (with the exception of D-3). I was thinking that it would be awesome if there was a separate category for FDS. I would run this and could see many others being interested as well. I suppose you would wait for the fanfare at the end of 8-4, hit start to go back to the title screen and then hold a + Start. (obviously 8 stars would be needed) It's a tiny bit awkward during that transition, but it's not that bad. The route would be very different from the Allstars version and D-3 isn't such a nightmare. Seems like a lot of fun. Thoughts?

My suggestion is to just start doing runs yourself. If it is truly an interesting category, you should be able to generate interest based on your initial runs. It certainly sounds like it could be fun based on your description. Considering Any% D-4 already has a Save and Quit, I don’t think it’s super awkward or anything to have that transition to the letter levels. I think there will probably be some concern about starting runs, as you need to beat the game 7 times before each attempt which would inevitably have people looking at using save states/modified versions of the game in order to get past this barrier, but that can be discussed after interest is generated.

My mentality when it comes to leaderboards is that new categories shouldn’t be added unless there are actual runs of them. Besides some obvious ones like Any% and 100% for most games, creating categories before runs is just speculation that usually ends up cluttering the board with very little benefit.

There’s that “If you build it, they will come” saying that is thrown around occasionally, I’d follow that.