SpainI think that's underrating how long it can take for 1:36 to happen (and how difficult it is). Currently the best 120 players (like Liam or Cheese) are struggling to improve their PB in the first place. They are clearly capable of getting better times, but 120 can take a lot of time to get a new PB despite being very capable of it, and 1:36 would require a really good run overall that's pretty unlikely to happen in less than 10 months from now.
I also think $1,000 is very low for how big of an accomplishment 1:36 is and the crazy amount of skill and dedication it takes, but I won't get more into that.
There's plenty of TAS-only tricks and TAS-only movement in that TAS, lol. Also, there will always be some timeloss in RTA runs due to RNG since getting really good RNG on everything is super unlikely.
Liam's sum of best now is 1:35:02, better than that community segmented run. Which means community segmented best time should be a 1:34 now, and also I remember watching a "human TAS" of all the best single stars combined (not just best segments) and it was a 1:33, which should be the theoretical best possible human time right now.
(Actually it was 1:32)
4:54 is so difficult that is currently not humanly viable, no matter if you're a top runner or if you're a player with a lot of time to try to get to the top level. There's a framerule that no one has ever saved even in practice, for example.
@Mars02 I wasn't referring to you, but mainly the first post ("what would that bounty have to be for you personally (yes, you, the reader) to be willing to grind for this 4:54 and be the first to get it?"), that to me just seems to assume that anyone could grind and get a 4:54, just because it's "theoretically possible".
You seem to be really underestimating the difficulty of 4:54 if you think anyone could just grind it to try to be the first one to get it.
I can assure you that at least no one of the top times are cheated. SSRy, coolbrosamuel and I all have SM3DL videos of runs close to many of these times, but since having a 3DS capture card is hard, it's hard to play the best you can while recording with a camera or phone, at least for me, so these WR times usually don't have video but the proof of the time that the game saves.
Also, honestly I prefer that than many IL leaderboards here that require video where there are generally very few submissions and the "WR" is fairly unoptimized, and not the true WR in many cases.
Seeing the important differences the versions have, and the advantage 2p has in switch, I think they should be splitted here too.
There are pretty good challenge leaderboards with very optimized times and scores here: https://www.cyberscore.me.uk/game/1172 14.82 is a massive tied WR on The Boo Ballet.
