Hello runners, I have been thinking to ask this question to the community for long time.

As you know Easy mode cannot be run at the moment. I think the original rationale behind this was that either “Easy mode” is considered a meme difficulty or that Easy difficulty is not present and cannot be selected in the PAL and NTSC-U versions of the game.

Personally I don’t see why we should be barring runners to have a go with Easy mode which is an integral part of the game. It’s up to the individual runners to decide if something is “meme” or not, running it or not, and it’s up to the runner to decide to buy and use a NTSC-J copy or not. Additionally, going forward NTSC-J will become the new Meta for PC when we will finally receive the ReBirth patch, making Easy mode widely accessible.

Another pros I see is that "Easy" mode may succeed where other categories have failed in attracting runners. As you all know, Any% Hard, Low% (both Normal and Hard) and 100% are all tedious categories for different reasons, while Easy mode Any% and Low% (at least psychologically) would have no entry barrier. At the moment runs, runners and effort are really concentrated around Any% Normal only.

You may have concerns about Easy mode becoming the new norm or standard, but I assure you that Normal mode will continue to be the standard, so much so that we would anyway default to Normal mode when you look at the leaderboard. Just like this happens in the Resident Evil 3 Remake leaderboard https://www.speedrun.com/re3r (defaulting to Standard) even though an easier mode exists (and Standard has more runs than Assisted). Another example is Metal Gear Solid 3, where the leaderboard defaults to the European Extreme category https://www.speedrun.com/mgs3#HD_Edition_PS3 and that category has indeed more runs than all other difficulties.

The only cons I can see is that, someone may argue that the leaderboard would start to become cluttered. Adding Easy as difficulty means adding de facto 10 new categories due to all permutations. However, I have already a plan to modify the structure of the leaderboard when we will be adding Rebirth and/or DoorSkip which itself would exponentially increase the amount of categories. The change I have in mind will make the leaderboard less clattered, keeping all categories but just organized differently. This is not the time to do that job yet, but I hope you can trust me on this one. The restructure will require a lot of work and so I rather talk about this and do the work when ReBirth finally materialise.

That’s just a coincidence, but recently “Easy mode” (called Light) was finally added also in the Resident Evil 3 og main leaderboard after the community demanded so: https://www.speedrun.com/re3/thread/0z1sk . That category partially existed already, but it used to be relegated to the “category Extension” until few days ago and limited to only for PC runners and limited to only Any% Taiwan, probably because considered a meme category or so. From having only 1 category now they have 24 separated Easy mode categories in the main leaderboard.

What’s your thought about this?

As for me, I don't think it's so necessary now... We have enough categories for running for now... I mean that we might wait for some more people there. I just don't see any sense of adding more categories now. Moreover, we have already have a new one – 100%. This one is not optimized at all...

But it's my opinion. The power is in the community :D

Same for me. The idea of more categories quite scares me, but no one is really forced to run in all categories. I think even for RE3 Light mode was kind of unnecessary, but I might be missing some nuances. The thing is also that RE3 community is much wider than the DC2 one, so I can see, at least statistically, runners being interested in easier modes, while here we are only a bunch of madlads.

@Nazzareno Well if you compare us with RE3 yes we are less runners, however if you compare us with any Metal Gear Solid game they have less runs and runners than us. Nevertheless, they always have all available difficulties in the leaderboard in any game and leave the choice and sensibility of which difficulty to run to runners. What I'm arguing for is to leave the decision to the singles rather than barring an option. I think Easy should have been there all along from day one. That's all.

To clarifying, I'm not arguing this for myself. I don't even have the NTSC-J version for the PSTV, I have the NTSC-J for PS2 but not a PS2 :D Just it has always stricken me the fact that Easy difficulty was not there when available in the game. usually you have all difficulties in the speedrun leaderboards.

Yeah, it's fine for me to add the category, even if the leaderboards are going to look enormous, but more DC2 is not more happiness for me, so I might be biased.

My opinion:

We are just a bunch of active runners, some actions may require a larger community to decide if they are good or not to the environment (also to prevent small groups to control the entire fate of this community (is easier if we are less))

My pov is that if u are a new runner searching for interesting games to run, and you see a game with A LOT of empty categories or with just 1 or 2 runners, it doesn´t encourage you to run it a lot (unless your really love that game and you don´t care about the competition at all)

I would be totally negative to this IF "Easy" mode was an invention of a modder or so, but it´s already in the game so i will vote YES to this WHEN we are much more to decide. For now, for me, it´s a "not yet"

And to the JP meta thing / door skip / etc i´m not on that boat too, but i guess this is a war for another thread.