Recently i've seen a lot of people begging for new categories to be made for SM3DW. These range from things like "Touchless" or "Any% No Cat Suit". I wanna discuss why those are a bad idea and why you shouldn't try to make them a thing.

The major thing i want to talk about is "Any% Touchless" or "Any% No GamePad". These categories involve either not using touch strats or not using the Gamepad altogether. They are bad ideas and i will explain why.

First off, Touchless. The main concept behind this one is not being allowed to use the touch screen on the GamePad to perform certain strats, like freezing enemies in place, hitting item blocks, touching ! pads to light them up, dragging baseballs, the list goes on. This category is pointless for the simple fact that it changes literally nothing. The entire route can be done with 0 touch strats and it'll still be Any%. All that would change is you not doing strats that save a few seconds on areas. The difference in time would literally be less than a minute at the very most. It's pretty obvious as to why this is a dumb idea, but the worst is yet to come.

The other arbitrary idea is No GamePad. This is basically a category that was made up by someone who wasn't used to the GamePad controller, and wanted to use a Pro Controller in his runs. For some reason, he thought this warranted a separate category. Here's why this idea would literally never work:

First off, trying to make a different category based on the controller you are using. This can be seen by many as a cheap attempt to just get free WR off an imaginary category. It probably is. It's completely arbitrary for reasons i'll go into later on, but to put it bluntly, it's sort of like doing Super Mario Bros 3, Any% No Sneezing. It's completely pointless.

The reason for this is because, without the GamePad, you are unable to enter Captain Toad stages. These are fast, short stages that give you 5 green stars a piece in less than 2 minutes. This is very important. All of the 4 captain toad levels done in Any% give you a total of 20 Green Stars. This is essential. Not using a GamePad would mean missing out on these levels, losing you those 20 stars and forcing you to make them up with extra stars elsewhere. This would waste an immense amount of time. There are not nearly enough backup stars on the path to World 8 to replace those 20, so you would have to make a lot of detours to other levels and make a lot of very unorthodox route changes and it would basically fuck everything up. I estimate this to be about 15-25 minutes slower than using the GamePad as everybody else does.

There is quite literally no reason to make this category exist, even as a Misc Category. At least Misc Categories have some sort of difference in goal or ruleset. Glitchless? Cannot use glitches. Beat World 1? Just beat World 1. No WW/RBA? Just beat the game without using those tricks. 100%? Beat the game while collecting everything.

Any% No GamePad has no difference other than the different controller. There's no different rules or goals. It's literally just Any%, except using a bad, slow route and giving the category a different name. You shouldn't ask for a new category just because you want to use a different controller. Just do Any% and stop whining about how you can't get used to the GamePad. Want to run Any% without a GamePad? Fine. You can do it. It's an absolutely horseshit idea, but you can do it. Just don't try to make it a different category when it doesn't need to be one.

If you want to come up with an idea for a category in this game, fine. But at least make sure the idea makes sense and isn't just a lame excuse to do something slightly different. Make sure the category has a purpose and something that sets it apart from existing categories.

tl;dr Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

I agree with everything you said in the post. The only misc category I wanna see come back is beat World 5. Active runners dothis category as a race all the time and it meets your criteria for being different enough from any % not to be stupid. Lastly, enough people would and can do it that someone couldn't just get a cheap/free WR