I think the changes are an improvement because at least some of the characters are categories, but also a step back, especially to runners who want to play on normal, who now have invested time in a category that no longer exists and without warning.

I'm not sure why normal and hardest were cut as difficulties. Yes, I read the logic, but I don't see why the difficulties need to be cut. None of the difficulties were cut for Streets of Rage 2 and that board seems to be doing just fine. Normal still has some differences from Easy and Hard and Hardest has some differences from Hard and Mania so I don't see what's so bad about including them as difficulties. It's not the end of the world if some categories have 1 or 0 runners.

At least include normal difficulty because that was a difficulty people were actively running on before this sudden change. It is cruel to screw over some runners over a sudden leaderboard change that had no prior announcement.

Also, at the very least could the retro characters be extended to SoR1, SoR2, and SoR3? They're miscellaneous categories anyway so why not differentiate between the style of retro games. You could also make the characters subcategories since it's all hidden unless if you click misc. anyway.

tl;dr: This game is naturally going to have a lot of categories and I'd rather have messy leaderboards (and maybe extra mods) that include most people's tastes than making the leaderboard look clean for cleanliness sake and shut out people.

P.S. It's also misleading to solely make the default category any% and not specify whether it's story or arcade. Maybe make arcade a clickable categoryAlso, will ILs be a thing? Seem like they should since there's a stage select.

I completely agree with the points on difficulty. It makes little sense to cut them as there are clearly differences between each difficulty, and many people have spent a lot of time running normal already.

As for the retro characters, personally, I think they should also be separated per character, but at least separating them per game would make more sense than bunching them all together, as Shiva would be the only character in that category, and what is the point then?

And as far as the messy argument goes, I don't think that the websites design flaws should limit the amount of categories this game has. Let there be all the categories and for people to be able to submit what they want.

And as a final thing, this is not a hot and big speedgame guys, the arbitrary restrictions are only gonna cut down on the already relatively small number of runs this game will get. Why limit it? Open it up and let people have fun.

What is the difference between difficulties in sor2? I bet sor2 has similar values, and it still got all difficulties. So why can't we have them?

I stand by the point, Hard is indeed the "Normal" mode of SOR4, people will have absolutely no trouble adjusting to playing on Hard since it's the same mode, IF they actually were working on the run, i take the blame for not implementing this earlier. The devs made that unclear trying to emulate SOR2 difficulties name.

On the cut difficulty side, well, in SOR1 they are and SOR3 only have 3 default, on SOR2, the success of this board is in most part due to a lot of "let's play posted" it's a popular game by itself and very easy and accessible. Even a simple console separation was enough to provoke a riot on this board so it's just staying in this state so far. I still think there's way too much difficulties for nothing.

The game is young and comparing a completely different speedrun to this one isn't the good idea. There's minutes of differences due to RNG, Health value change on 2, SOR4 got nothing, it's a matter of a second, for what we know it could just be exactly the same speed because the AI is the same, Values are the same, you only take 34% more damage on spamming your special which is less used overall and recovered on combo loops.

As for the retro characters, i agree with you.

The rules state Story mode is not allowed because we can easily splice runs. I can Name them Arcade back even with Boss Rush mode being down there. There's no problem with that.

I'm sorry, but saying that taking 34% more damage from specials is not a big enough difference is just wrong. The speed at which you can go in fact directly correlates as to how many specials you can use, and being able to use less in fact does slow you down and is a significant change in what strategy you would use per stage.

And that is not the only difference, enemies on Hard vs Normal are also 20% more likely to use their special moves, which also would make Hard different from Normal.

I agree there is a significant difference between normal and hard, and they should be separate categories. The other thing is you start with fewer lives, you do less damage to enemies and you take more damage when you are hit.

[quote]Hard is indeed the "Normal" mode of SOR4[/quote]

What does this even mean?

i think the Normal mode is called "Normal". If Hard mode were normal, it would be Normal. It isn't normal, because it's Hard.

Hope this helps, since you seem to disagree with the developer's own opinion of their difficulty labelling and also the concept of words meaning things.

Welcome, I'm a new mod for this game, and I'm trying to sort things out.

Anyway, I'll make a new sticky post or Izumi will, but Normal and Hardest are categories again. The miscellaneous retro category for single-player has been sorted out into Streets of Rage 1, 2, and 3, and the characters in their respective games are now sub-categories.

Boss Rush is a sub-category in arcade simply because it's less of a headache to do so than making a separate boss rush category for the main characters and all the SoR1, 2, and 3, characters.

Anyway, I'm locking this thread because it's been resolved.