With TSC submissions being down since March and the site's infrastructure growing more outdated by the second, it's finally time to put some IL leaderboards up here. The change won't happen untill after SGDQ as I simply won't have the time, but I wanted to get this thread up ahead of time to list how I intend to structure the boards, as well as gather some input from the community about several points.
Rules:
- Video is required
- Emulators are banned
- Pausing to help with QTE's, tricks or movement is allowed
There will not be a transfer of any existing statistics from TSC or other sites. The sheer workload would be huge as is, even more so if we contact every person to ask if they're ok with having their stats transferred to begin with. A lot of stats on TSC are without video to begin with, so even if we did a stat transfer, it would still result in an incomplete board. The intention is to give these boards a fresh start and let the people decide for themselves whether they want their stats here or not. This will make the boards start out empty of course, but if the community wills it, the boards can evolve into the primary IL boards on the internet.
The boards will be structured by stage, with a subcategory for Day and Night. DLC stages will be included in the main boards. Some stages will not have the same amount of Day and Night stages, but unfortunately the site does not allow me to pick and choose which stages get which subcategory, so a few will have to remain empty.
I intend to keep emulators banned for the forseeable future as emulators for this generation are still in its infant stage and lag plays a significant factor in Sonic Unleashed, giving emulator runners an advantage.
Since it was such a hot point of discussion in the past, if people want we can have a variable for whether a run uses pausing to gain an advantage or not. Both options will be shown by default as both are valid, but this way the people that want to see the best runs without pause usage can easily filter for it. Based on people's playstyles in the past, he ruling for this would most likely be that pausing for QTE's does not qualify a run for pause advantage, but any other scenarios do. Please let me know what you think on this topic as the result of this will be decided by what the majority of the community wants.
If you have any thoughts about any of the above or something I didn't mention, post here. It'll be a while before the change is implemented, so you'll have plenty time to get your thoughts in.
Lastly, keep in mind that verification will take a while during the initial wave. Especially since this is not the only game that will be getting IL boards. Should the workload become too large for the existing mods, I'll be sure to recruit someone from the community to help verify.
The only thing I think could be done better, is instead of having stages as ILs and subcategories them with day/night, is having the stages of the areas and time (say, Windmill isle Day, Windmill isle Night, etc) and have subcategories of all possible stages (1, 1-2, 1-3, 2, etc). I think it will give the ILs leaderboards a better view, even if some combination will not be possible and adding bosses will have a lot of empty space
I tried it out and since the site doesn't do horizontal scroll bars, it makes the "view all" page look very cramped. It sorta works when the stats are empty, but once you get times and usernames in there it'll be very squished together. 
I feel like going for a more vertical view would work better, considering the amount of acts that exist on some zones.
Rethinking about it, 8 different sets horizontal might be too much, but what if we have it limited only to 5, and add subcategories for the spesific stages that have extra ones? Like this pretty much https://ibb.co/JBp9hM9 This kind of sort seems to work well with sa2b for example https://www.speedrun.com/sa2b/individual_levels Only disadventege is that the "extra" levels won't be shown in the view all section. The reason I'm afraid of vertical view is that I feel it would feel very messy to work with so many different stages, the avrage area will need like 5-6 different stages, and x8 areas we're already having so much to scroll for just reaching the bosses section, and I feel like it wouldn't be nice to search for spesific stage like this. Yet again both options have advantages and disadvantages given how restricted the site is so I'm not sure what would work better honestly.
5 columns does indeed work (any more would be too much), but I feel like any solution that hides a few specific ILs in subcategories looks both horribly inconsistent and takes a bit of appeal away from those ILs. Not to mention the inevitable "why is there no seperate categories for the -2 stages?" questions.
I understand the fear for a giant vertical list, but for games with many acts & variables I feel like it's the least obnoxious option. While the dropdown menu would be long, it makes submissions more straight forward as well, rather than needing a 3rd dropdown menu only for a few ILs.
So based on restrictions, right now I'm intending to structure the boards like this. If there's any suggestions to have this be different, I do ask that you please keep the following things in mind as they are undesirable over just having a longer list of stages of stats as the solution
- Subcategories for a column category are not gonna be shown on the Show All page or in the list on the sidebar.
- Too many column categories are gonna squish the horizontal width of the field, making it so times and names possibly won't fit properly. Right now the max for making it look decent seems to be 5 columns.
As for the current method, some things that could be changed depending on people's wishes:
- Bosses mixed in with their respective zones, instead of bunched up
- Bosses bunched up by day/night instead of in order of appearance
- Non-DLC stages and DLC stages bunched up respectively, instead of mixed in like the current setup
Additional notes:
- Times for Eggmanland must be submitted under the Day category
....................................................................Day................Night Windmill Isle Act 1 Windmill Isle Act 1-2 Windmill Isle Act 1-3 Windmill Isle Act 2 Windmill Isle Act 2-2 Windmill Isle Act 3 Windmill Isle Act 4 Savannah Citadel Act 1 Rest of the Acts Eggmanland Egg Beetle Dark Gaia Phoenix Dark Moray Egg Devil Ray Dark Guardian Egg Lancer Egg Dragoon Dark Gaia
