For your algorithm to work you would need to know the time from each moon to each other moon, because the route back may not take the same time. there are 89 moons in sand in total... so you'd need 4005 individual times (maybe more or less, my maths could very easily be wrong), averages on those times including optimal times as difficulty of execution can become an issue. then from those 4005 times you construct your travellign salesman problem. 89! is more than 10^100 or more than googol, so you'd need to find a way to cut down that considerably - at which point you are essentially doing it by hand, which i believe is waht's already been done

how long have you spent practicing the skip?

more runners doesn't necessarily make a better speed game

have you tried watching the videos?

@s8n maybe we make it that you have to include a video that includes some play from the run and then showing the cartridge - just shot with a webcam/phone, to confirm it is a DQIX cartridge?

@s8n i'm assuming that only works for emulators? If so, we could ban emulators for this category. Yes it increases the barrier for entry, but you can get a copy of DQIX for £10 and a DSI to run it for £25 (and it can be run on a 3DS for people who have that), and it will massively help stop cheaters

On the matter of yggdrasil dew: its less the fact that you need them, its more that if i could use yggdrasil dew for a speedrun, then i would retrain my priest up to a 99 warrior/gladiator instead of the healing benefits and just use yggdrasil dew every time i approach getting wiped out.

Also a slightly larger issue that I hadn't thought about - some of the legacy bosses are only obtainable through DLC quests, so do we exclude them from the category, or make have two subcategories for with/without the DLC legacy bosses?

You make a pretty reasonable point about the starting stats and gear, so I suggest there are no limits placed on those, but rather limit use of items in your bag - preventing use of 99yggdrasil dew, elfin elixir, etc. - that way even if there are savefile edits, they can't have an unfair advantage

after reading this thread: https://www.speedrun.com/dq9/thread/dk3fl

It got me thinking about some categories, specifically categories that start after corvus - maybe an "all dungeons" category for killing all 12 dungeon bosses + all legacy bosses. What do people think about this, is it reasonable?

same problem, i've got runs to submit for hotline 1&2, i've had a community moderator try to submit them on my behalf but it isn't working. also other people have submitted runs