I know that basketball and hockey all Cups aren’t the greatest categories because they’re countdown based, but they can absolutely still be a thing, and I think it’s only fair that they should be, especially because they’re going to be a part of Any% and 100% (which I plan on doing both of, or at least definitely Any%). The reasons these would work is because of these various things you can do to save time

Making scoring cutscenes happen as little as possible, so u want to make a low amount of baskets/goals, and maybe even to be safe, for Anything you do score you may want to have coins so you get multiple points for just one cutscene.

Don’t use item shots, they pause the timer for like half a second

Grab the ball on face offs and tip offs as fast as possible

Don’t let that one cutscene in hockey happen where the goalie makes a save and the camera goes on him, it pauses the timer for roughly a second

And there’s really probably even a few others I can’t think of rn, but even just that is enough to show that it can absolutely be a thing. I hope you guys will consider it!

Also, I know I haven’t submitted any runs yet, so you may not want to take my word for anything, but I’m going to very soon, trust me

Good points, however I still think it's not worth making a category about it, especially in normal you could do all of these relatively easily and then you basically already have a perfect run Both are available in Sports Mix, Any% and 100% which I think is enough

For hockey, the basic strategy would be to score a single point and camp the puck until the end of the round for 1st, then pure puck camping 2nd, rinse repeat. Basketball would be a bit different, as there is a timer for how long your team can keep the ball. Pretty sure having the other team get the ball and then getting it back would save the time on that case. The main problem with both of these is it requires patience and exploiting the AI for a better run. Remember, every shot and goal from either side takes time, and only having 1 shot per game would save most of that.

I don't see the point of adding onto a 4 month old thread that hasn't been responded to since the day it was made. :/

@LapisBlood no, shots don't take any time unless they're made. Goals do take extra time, shots do not unless they use an item in that shot. It's obvious that all you would want to do is make one goal and then stall, everyone can think of that as the obvious strat within just a few seconds of thinking.

In basketball, the amount of time that you have the ball doesn't make a difference but yes, you do need to keep shooting so you don't get a shot clock violation

If anyone cares, heres a list of all the known ways that you can gain/lose time in Hockey and Basketball (this is only helpful for Any%, Sports Mix and 100% though nobody will ever do 100% so basically only Any% and Sports Mix)

Hockey: Cutscenes that only SOMETIMES play when goalies make a save pause the timer for about 1 - 1.5 seconds, so obv they lose 1-1.5 seconds Scoring with coins makes the cutscene for scoring a bit longer, by maybe a second or 2 Using an item shot pauses the timer for about half a second - 1 second Shooting the puck as time expires will cause the game not to end until it stops, or gets blocked or picked up again. Getting scored on wastes probably around 10 seconds or so (haven't played the game in a while so my estimate may be way off for that) Grabbing the puck off the face off quickly will start the timer as soon as you grab it

Basketball: Tip offs actually do NOT affect your time Scoring with coins makes the cutscene for scoring a bit longer, by maybe a second or 2 Using an item shot pauses the timer for about half a second - 1 second Shooting the ball as time expires will cause the game not to end until it misses, or gets blocked or picked up for an alley-oop by a teammate. getting a shot clock violation loses probably around 6 or 7 seconds (haven't played the game in a while so my estimate may be way off for that) Making the ball go out of bounds (I think the only court this can happen on is DK Docks) loses a similar amount of time to a shot clock violation

My point is, there ARE some in game ways to save time besides the obvious "only score once and don't get scored on" thing. But other than that, these would just be really optimized and hard to improve on, and that's why the mods probably don't want them to be a thing. I think there would be variation on the leaderboards if this got popular but 1) this wouldn't get popular and 2) most people would be within 10 seconds or something of each other.

Hockey seems totally pointless to me. I've played some games in sport mix difficulty and even then it isn't very hard to get pefect time. In hard and spetially easy mode, those would be boring, slow and unskilled speedruns. Basketball is trickyer because of the possession timer and requires much more IA interaction, but although they require more skill than hockey, those would also be really uninteresting speedruns. Imo none of these categories should be added, but I'm ok with it if most of the community is in favour of it

If we made a basketball category I would definitely submit some runs. Even just having the category there would encourage other people to do some runs with it too, so we could probably fill it up. Also basketball really is the best sports mix sport, if not second to dodgeball.

Its a good thought, but it would really be a competition for the highest score, not who can do it fastest. It just sounds like waiting out the shot clock before scoring

We could submit points in minutes/hours or something. I've seen that done before. Or we could see who can drag out a timed game the longest, which could be a combination of scoring, out of bounds stuff, maybe triggering certain cutscenes, etc.

Would it be different categories for each stage? If not it’ll become a rng fest at BJR BVL.

Good point. We could have a multiplier for that specific stage (maybe 1/10 of the points are counted) or something. I'm guessing it would be similar to the other categories where there is the full all cups category and the individual cups.