Category Bloat
6 years ago
United States

A bunch of NES runners have voiced opinions to me that the recently added misc categories suck. Using a debug cheat as fast as possible to do an arbitrary thing seems like pretty awful category bloat, and people get really annoyed at the quality of the boards resulting from "adding everything you could possibly do with the game". It doesn't seem like there's value in these categories other than this week's 60 second meme.

It also seems to be confusing that beating the game is listed to the right of beat level 20. Viewing the runs I don't really understand why level 20 and 50 are a thing, since they don't really appear to beat the game or be a notable stopping point.

The first thing my eyes go to is a category that doesn't beat the game; if I look further I find hilariously arbitrary 1 minute categories. Can we add "beat level 1"?

There's some balance here between the board being what the runners of the game want and the board being something more presentable to the people using the site. I don't think partial game categories are the worst thing in the world if people are racing them and things like that, but they shouldn't replace beating the game.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Toad22484 and Twintail_Nami like this

I can agree that the full game categories really should be the primary focus of the board, particularly as they may get more attention from the NES community since Darkwing has returned to running Type-B. As such the boards have been rearranged to prefer the 99 levels runs. However the partial game (20 levels, 50 levels) categories will stay, as will the ILs. They've been crucial in encouraging new runners to a game that many NES runners had not really given much attention.

As for the concerns of these NES runners, I will note that I have not heard from any of them directly. I don't know if Rob has. I do not see any messages in here other than this one. I admit I don't give this game full attention much anymore, but I would have expected that anyone with feedback regarding the handling of this board would approach Robf00f, if not me, before bringing their concerns to site admins. My Twitter is linked from my profile, and he has a whole host of social media contacts linked to his.

I will contact him on the Miscellaneous "select warp" categories. They are relatively new and I am uncertain what those entail so I would not be comfortable editing/deleting those without input from him or others who have run this game and those categories.

Edited by the author 6 years ago