I understand that a game need more then one category, but some games have so many and most the time games that unpopular like less then 10 active players
example :
https://www.speedrun.com/Captain_Commando#Steam
I think this many categories hurt the game more then help, even for popular games I think there should be a limit
Limiting the amount of categories that can be created will not fix the issue you pointed out. A solution like that will only limit their ability to create an amount of unpopular categories, but they will still be created.
The real problem is that often moderators create categories based on the argument of: "create a category so it gives people more options to run the game" rather than creating them based on sufficient demand for a new category and/or a certain amount of originality that warrants the creation of a new category. The whole problem is simply just a mindset problem and how moderators handle leaderboards varies greatly across SRC.
I have been involved in numerous leaderboards where moderators made an argument for example that creating more categories makes the run more popular as a whole, which it doesn't. To solve this problem, moderators have to understand that creating more categories is not going to get more people to run your game.
To get people to run your game, it needs to often:
- have a certain level of popularity (sad but true)
- have the ability to be picked up easily as a speedrun more so than not. Yes, the difficulty of a run often determines whether people pick up the speedrun or not.
- have a good community plus resources (very important) to back it.
Also I think it's just a matter of covering every single possible possibility, when most of them either make no difference (like platform, such as the linked board) or would never be run anyway (like every conceivable combination of platform/completion level/difficulty level). I've been guilty of that before on boards I've run, though (hopefully) I've rectified it. None of those things matter unless there's demand for it. Put more simply, it's not "if you build it, they will come." It's "if they've come (and if there's realistic demand for it), build it." 99% of the time people will just want to do what's fastest, when it comes to those variables.
If there was a less convoluted way to make subcategories or better way to make the categories fit on one page that could help.
A lot of people don't realize that putting multiple subcategories exponentially increases the number of categories and that too many categories make leaderbards completely pointless. "Oh, let's just put for each category (4) a subcategory for every difficulty (x4) and one for fps setting (x3) and one for New Game/New Game+ (x2)." is what some moderators think and then there are 96 categories and I wonder why you even bother having a leaderboard at that point.