TLDR before my whole essay, I am sick of people suggesting categories on the forums. It is an annoying, useless and incorrect practice. Things need to change.

EDIT: There is now a forum on the SMO discord for suggesting new categories. Go here to suggest your categories please. http://www.discord.gg/smospeedruns

I need to preface this by saying that, although I am a verifier for both the CE and Main Board leaderboards for Super Mario Odyssey, this post comes from a non-affiliated position. My views don't necessarily reflect those on the verifying/moderator team and I'm speaking purely for myself.

I need to also mention that I am certain this post will fall on deaf ears and not reach the people who need to read it. Regardless, I want to make this thread to express my thoughts.

I am genuinely disappointed at the state of these forums. I'm not sure what the forums should be, but I can confidently say what they shouldn't be. They should NOT be a place for people do go 'new category idea' and then spew out the worst possible thing you can think of. I don't think anyone expects the forums to be perfect, but every other day there is a new post suggesting 'any% but with x thing not being allowed' and its getting tiring.

There are a few things I want people to take away from this post:

1. What people need to understand, is that these forums are not, and as far as I know, have never been the place to suggest new category ideas. I don't think the ideas being suggested here are good, but even if they are, this is not the correct format to suggest them. That responsibility lies on the google form that you can find here https://www.speedrun.com/smoce/thread/ze0h9 . Any suggestion, good or bad, will not be accepted or even considered until it is placed on that document, so suggesting them through the forums is a waste of time. If you want to talk about the idea of a category before submitting it, the discord is a far more appropriate place to do so. There are more active community members to see your suggestion, and it doesn't come at the expense of clogging up the forums with useless unnecessary posts.

2. The categories you are suggesting are not fun. Listen, I'm not a fan of a lot of the CE categories. I somewhat famously hate 124 moons for example. If it were up to me, that category wouldn't exist. But in defense (for once) of that category, it still has an original idea that is more unique than just 'any% but x modification'. Some categories on the leaderboard still currently fall under that umbrella, like minimum captures, but the difference is they are categories that have some form of interest, and that have some FUN twist. A category like 'no teleports' does not have this. It is the same old any% but with extra backtracking and unfun movement. A category like 'hint toad%' is similar to talkatoo%, but with added literal hours of coin grinding to buy hints. If you're unsure on if your suggested category meets the 'is this fun' requirement, play it yourself. Come back to me and let me know if you enjoyed not being able to teleport or the hours spent coin grinding.

3. This is a bit of a personal gripe, but the notifications are insane for forums. As a verifier, I already have a large amount of notifications a day from people submitting runs. But as it turns out, half of the notifications I get are from people making a new post of 'New category idea: Beat the game while doing a handstand irl!'. It's not fun. I've tried to make light of this by responding to each thread, but its clear that isn't of any use. If anything it just sparks more notifications. I don't mind the numbers next to the bell, but it is annoying when they amount to nothing. If you're submitting a post to the forums, you need to be conscious that everyone who has notifications on for the game your posting to will see what you've posted. There's no need for all these people to see 'any% but..'.

I know this is longwinded, but here's my takeaway from this. If you want to suggest a new category, this is the process;

• If you want to suggest it or get thoughts, join the discord and talk about it in #category-extensions . The discord can be found here: http://www.discord.gg/smospeedruns
• Then if you want to make this category a reality, record yourself doing a run of it, and submit it to the google docs that I've mentioned above. That is, and will from now until forever, be the only way to suggest a category and have it be taken somewhat seriously.

Regarding all the replies to posts submitted here too, while I have contributed to this, it needs to stop. I don't think replying to these suggestions with longwinded reasoning/jokes is doing any good anymore. A simple response linking either this thread or techs ( https://www.speedrun.com/smoce/thread/ze0h9 ) will do a lot more good. I myself need to take this advice as well.

I know this is a long post. But I'm tired. Please just use your head before using the forums. Thanks for reading all this if you have.

The only small response i can give about this (and not taking any opinion here) is that, for point 3, you can go to follow setting of the game and very easily turn off the notifications for new posts in the forum of this exact game, and that's probably something you would want to do given the situation Btw i agree that, love or hate these posts, all the replies shitposting and making fun of it are completly unecesary at this point and just makes things millions times worse lol, just don't answer other than said links and the thread will die alone soon

I agree with this as even I, a person that doesn't verify or moderate anything got 30 notifications about category ideas. You shouldn't be able to submit ideas on the thread. But I just have one small problem. What if you don't have Discord? I can't get Discord at all because I am not allowed to have it. So I request a different way to request category ideas, if possible. Since most people don't have Discord, maybe that's why people are suggesting it in the thread. So if you want to cut out the clutter in the thread, I would highly suggest a different way to suggest categories than the google form.