First off, sorry about this post, you may not be able to understand it because I do that a lot.

So, I moderate a game with a lot of ILs (cuphead). In the ILs, we have a difficulty filter for the ILs - simple, regular, expert. This would work fine if we had a single subcategory setting set to all ILs - however, the last two bosses don't have a Simple mode. This means that the OG mods had to make a separate subcategory for all 17 other ILs with the 3 difficulties, and the last 2 with the 2 difficulties.

I've seen this similar problem sprouting up in other games and categories that I moderate, but I wanted to finally ask the question because it was gnawing at me. Technically, the way it is right now works but it isn't very efficient. Why was it done that way? Is it some sort of backend issue that would've made it hard to configure differently?

A solution I would do is I would have instead of Level selector drop down, i'd have some sort of way to view a list of all the ILs / categories and a bunch of check boxes, so you can select which category / IL to have the subcategory on. So instead of having the 19 values before, we'd have just two (one with simple/regular/expert and the other with just regular/expert) and just set the levels accordingly.

I don't know the problems associated with creating such a system, or the reasoning behind it but I wanted to ask anyways. Thanks for bothering to read this mess.

In a game I moderate (SuperTuxKart), we have a similar issue, but we stuck with a single copy of the variable for simplicity's sake (we have over 30 ILs). However, this means that some ILs have a variable which doesn't make sense for them as an option.

An additional issues is that we had to duplicate rules a lot, because the rules are not exactly the same between ILs so we can't just set universal rules, but there are several groups of levels sharing identical rules. If we had the ability to create rules and associate them with a group of ILs (by associating ILs with "IL categories"), it would make things much simpler.

good to know that im not the only one that has this issue. how easy would it be to implement this?

It's somewhat difficult to implement a system into the site that prevents certain combinations and reflects this accurately in the front-end. It's something we want to do, but it's not a short task.

+1 for this feature. It has been a little frustrating to create the same single variable over and over again for each specific level where it applies.