Hello everyone,

Something curious arose as I looked into the matter.

I had always assumed the Escudo route would be the way to go for in rally% (without license prizes). Well, it is almost certainly still the case for PAL: Sough's new routing for NTSC-U involves using the Tigra Ice Race Car for the rally events instead, requiring less grinding than the Escudo.

Where's the issue, then? Well, in both PAL and NTSC-U, the Cultus in the Hillclimb race is beatable with the Tigra using a heavily modified setup and, obviously, getting a quick run. However, try as I might, I was unable to repeat the same feat against Escudo. As it turns out, the Escudo ghost is considerably slower in NTSC-U than PAL, rendering the Tigra route unviable for PAL.

As such, I've decided to split the rally% category for each region. While this doesn't concern most people, as beating Cultus with Tigra still requires a decent run, it is still an obvious region difference, similar to NTSC-J any%, albeit in a much smaller scale.

Good point, I've been running gran turismo 2 aspec mod and I've reallized that recently, though... Still here previous admins didn't care much about categories, rather than that cared about which emulator is slow enough for approval. I feel like rallies in ntsc u and pal got very different mechanics and could lead to unfair advantages.

I've been looking over the leader boards the last day or two, and I must say they are a bit of a convoluted mess. I understand the need to negate region advantages, but we currently have 24 leader boards in total for All Rally events, yet there are only three runs across all the boards. I was going to make another forum post about how I was going to tidy up the leader boards a bit, but I noticed this thread hear so thought Id jump on and highlight just the issue with "All Rally Events" to begin with.

As I stated already, I understand the need to negate advantages, I want to suggest and make a move to have these leader boards condensed down to just platforms sub categories. For a start having "Licence Prizes" seems redundant as there is nothing currently in the category rules that states it needs to be a new file and therefore it must be assumed that any car can be used and thus acquiring cars in licences isn't faster.

With regards to the regions and your post above about how NTSC has an advantage due to the Escudo being slower, although the point is completely valid, from my experience in other games; if one version is deemed to have the best advantages for Speedrunning; that is the version people should be running. We live in an age where we can easily acquire all versions and regions of games via Archive.

So, in conclusion I think the the regions should be removed, at least until there are enough runs to actually validate having multiple leader boards for the different regions, because at the moment the runs are just lost in a hailstorm of sub menus and categories.

we currently have 24 leader boards in total for All Rally events

I don't quite understand this. Where did you pull the number 24 from?

having "Licence Prizes" seems redundant as there is nothing currently in the category rules that states it needs to be a new file

True, the rules don't say anything about it, but for every single run on the leaderboard, the runs start from a blank save file.

if one version is deemed to have the best advantages for Speedrunning; that is the version people should be running

I get that, but every game I moderate on the site has regions separated, because, I play on console, PAL specifically, that means I would need to either mod or buy a separate console to play other regions. And before you say "well just run emulator, everyone does that these days", I don't. People should not be handicapped for running a different version, especially if they choose to go with legitimate hardware.