Regarding ILs and why they were removed
Deleted
3 years ago
Dolnośląskie, Poland

Problem is, in some levels there would be hundreds of tied worlds records, and it doesn't really show much in terms of skill. It's almost the same as in SMB1, where you can hold run button from the start, and get the same time as hundred other people. Another thing, it'd be a nightmare to moderate, since there are over 70 levels, where each and every one of them will have to get his own leaderboard, not mentioning the Small Only, No Cape and Lunar Dragon variants.

British Indian Ocean Territory

This has come up before; see e.g. https://www.speedrun.com/smw/thread/t46ap. Using the practice cart was my suggestion as well, if we were going to do it at all.

But in the first place, a level leaderboard just doesn't make much sense for SMW. The first problem is the scale of it. At a minimum you have 98 levels, which is a lot but maybe manageable if we put in the effort. But there are tons of restrictions and start/end states for every level. If you try to count how many actual IL categories could be theoretically relevant, the number is well over 1000. Even if everyone active in RTAs switched to doing ILs now, it would be a major effort to just get strats and competent ILs for every such category. If you go with a reduced set of categories (perhaps just "small only" and "anything goes") it is more manageable but less useful. Games like SM64 don't have this issue because there is no equivalent powerup system that affects how you play the levels. I don't think any other retro 2D Mario games have IL leaderboards, but even if they did it is a much less complex issue for them because of fewer powerups and fewer levels.

The second problem is that, even if the boards are theoretically manageable at an administrative level, we would need people to actually submit to them. When we did have IL leaderboards 5 years ago they were mostly empty. Less than 1/4 of all the categories had even a single entry. When they did, often they were runs that were not even of comparable quality to what a top RTA runner would do in an average attempt. There were a handful of unique strats and a couple more runs with well-known strats done particularly well, but even most of the "WR" runs on the boards were just not impressive in an objective sense. If everyone uploaded all their IL PBs, it wouldn't be a problem, but good luck getting even a single RTA runner to do that. An IL board where most of the entries are empty and most of the filled ones are not especially good is just not a good showing for the game.

The final problem is that those of us who are active in doing ILs for this game really don't care for it to be competitive. The primary motivation is finding and demonstrating new strats. If someone comes along and beats one of my times by a few frames using the exact same strats, that's great, but I'm not going to go back to the level just to shave another frame off if I don't have anything new to add (and smw's mechanics ensure that there are basically always going to be frames to shave off in any nontrivial IL). If there were a number of serious IL runners who want to have that competition (whether or not that group includes me) it might be worth the effort to work through the other issues. But so far pretty much everyone who actually does serious ILs and strat finding just isn't interested, and the people asking for IL boards have been relative newcomers.

By all means, I encourage interested people to do ILs and if you do find something new share it in Discord. That doesn't require a leaderboard though, and until a leaderboard is solving problems rather than creating them I don't think it makes sense to have one.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Cannalyst, mruns and 4 others like this
Los Angeles, CA, USA

There really should be 2 level categories, Clear, where you clear the level normally, and secret exit, where you clear the level via the key.