yo, so it's been brought up that the characters meat ninja and steve are currently not allowed on the IL leaderboards. The purpose of this thread is to solicit thoughts as to whether that should change.

I'm 99.9% certain that the original reason for them being disallowed is a holdover from the ingame LBs, where steve & meat ninja times are not counted (presumably because they get to go straight through walls or obstacles, respectively). But the only thing I can say for sure is that it was already collectively agreed upon before I joined the community, and I've been around longer than most.

If you don't know what Steve can do, you can check this sweet segmented vid from resident steve superfan watchurbaq:

Similarly, for meat ninja you can check this showcase by SupBro

Nah, that's it, really. I don't have much more to say in this post. Should the two characters be allowed on the IL boards? If you have opinions, let us know :)

(if you are curious as to what I think: they absolutely should have a place for ILs, and I'm guessing there was kind of a chicken-and-egg situation beforehand, where this discussion could have (should have) happened earlier, but nobody was interested in actually doing runs, because it wasn't allowed. I'm not necessarily convinced the best place is on the main IL boards. I don't want to write something long right now because I have no real strong opinions either way)

I agree that they should be allowed, for the same reasons. It's been a while tho, so my knowledge is kinda fuzzy

I believe we already effectively have subcategories for each character as is, simply by selecting the character in the filter

Here is the lb for 1-1 with 8-bit meat boy, for example

Yes but that would still be in the whole level leaderboard, alongside the other characters. And that's the issue we're talking about, isn't it?

I'm not really an IL fan/player but I say if people want to run (with those characters) let them.

I mean, they're still part of the game, so not taking them into account seems really unfair. On the other hand, they are way more op than the rest of the characters, so making a separate leaderboard for them seems the most reasonable option to me.

I can't get behind this change. It just changes the leaderboards too fundamentally. Clips are already banned with other characters and clipping through blocks is effectively the main mechanic of steve. The category extensions are a more appropriate place for steve, meat ninja and other clip runs.

this thread was created with the hope that more discussion would happen here, because it's easy for things to get lost in the discord. as it turns out, a lot of discussion is happening in the discord anyways. i'm going to post what i wrote there, re: my current thoughts rn.

1. i do not want naija clips to be allowed on the main boards, and current rules prohibit clips in general
2. it is very hard to propose playing steve w/o clips. and even without them, he could still do many of the same things that make people recoil from naija clips, but better and without any of the pseudo-rng that accompanies naija clips
3. the catext all chars (including glitch chars) + clips IL boards idea that's coalescing seems neat, and also sounds like something that's less likely to starve for attention than the dual IL boards did (although tbh it will still take a substantial hit in traffic, and that's practically unavoidable on some level, should we choose to go through with it)
4. if the question was just meat ninja by himself, i'd probably be strongly advocating for him to be on the main boards, but said catext board might be a better place?
5. regardless of where any of these chars end up, it seems that all of them (including glitch chars) have at least some level of interest and should be /somewhere/, and that we should've had this conversation a long time ago
6. i strongly disagree with the idea that was raised a couple times, about splitting the IL boards up permanently such that there is no combined IL table (by, for example, going from a character variable to subcategories). it would be unwieldly, look ugly, & i am very convinced the combined table draws interest to characters further down the list, because people are reminded they exist and at the very least, if some given individual really does only want to play the record character, that char is more likely to vary by level than if they had to go manually hunting through 20 different submenus themselves. and we'd still have to pick a default character for the view, and no pick would be fair

In the end, we've chosen to implement a clips subcategory for the IL leaderboards, and allow steve/meat ninja/dr. fetus on it. My apologies to ppl who primarily check these forums, but most of the discussion did end up on the discord anyways.

in any case, feel free to submit runs now :)