so I asked about this in the discord and got an answer of no because not enough people run it as compared to Mario64(kind of an unfair comparison if you ask me). However, I was looking at other Digimon games and Digimon World DS only has 3 runners in it much less than this game and it has a separation of emulator vs console. So my question again really is why can this game not have a separation.
Emulation wasn't even allowed for DW4 in the past (technically it was, but runs were hidden, which imo is the same thing). But then the emulators got more accurate with the loads and I was able to prove they weren't faster, so now they are allowed to compete, albeit using console is faster.
As for the mario64 thing, it was just an example of game that has multiple separations because there are enough people interested in running and getting competitive with them. If there were a whole bunch of people interested in getting better at PS2, a whole bunch on Xbox, another on wii, etc, then sure, it would make sense to separate. As it stands, though, there is no such demand; hell, we don't even have half a dozen active runners across all possible combinations of hardware and categories, so there isn't much of a point to split.
For the rest of the series, I can't say anything. At best, I have ran Digimon World DS, and while I do plan on doing some testing on emu VS console, I have not yet done so to request any changes or defend current practices.
I get what you're saying I just don't understand why a game with far fewer runners, in general, gets a split like that but this game does not.
alternatively, instead of using RTA, could we remove load times from the overall time so that it's fair across all platforms? currently I'm running on the most recent emulator and my load times are for some reason faster than console so the runs can't be excepted on the leaderboard but if loads were removed then all emulator versions and consoles should be comparable. I understand that would make verifying runs take slightly longer but it'd make the game more accessible. The only issues comparing the 2 at that point would be frame rates in areas such as the outer core and the ps2 exclusive skip on nume nume river.
Copy pasta from discord, just for reference:
"Loadless poses a rabbit hole. If you are going to take loads away, you might as well use the PS2 and make Any% 30min longer RTA just to save ~2min of ingame time.... But then if loads don't matter, you might as well use PS2 emulator to drastically cut load times AND remove lag.... But then if we are going to allow emulation because it's faster and easier, we might as well just allow dolphin with speed up data transfer to have next to no load screens to make it a lot faster, thus bringing us back to square one."
