2 days and 23 hours was not enough time for the community to come to a decision on how to handle the most important issue that the MGS3 boards will ever face. The vote ran from Tuesday morning to Friday morning (US time) and didn't even break 3 days before the thread was locked. The vote was conducted in the middle of a work week, and if you didn't see it while you were in the middle of your work week then you simply don't get a say on the matter. When this issue was brought to Haus' attention, he replied saying that he has "been contemplating this decision since launch of mgs mc". I have been thinking about this issue since Master Collection came out, and I have been listening to other runners' opinions on the matter, and I still couldn't come to a conclusion before the thread was closed.

Additionally, there are numerous people who didn't even know that the vote was happening before it was closed; Beez only found out about it when he happened to overhear Speedy and I complaining that the vote was closed after less than three days. Likewise, Shard only learned about it just a few minutes ago when he overheard us complaining about the same thing. How many more people didn't even know the vote was happening?

Moreover, this was not a community decision. The decision on what to do with the boards was already made independently, and people were simply asked whether or not they agreed with the changes. Although people were offered the opportunity to suggest other options for how the board should be changed, none of the possible changes that were suggested were talked about in the SRDC Mods channel here in LC, and the board was changed exactly as Haus described the next day. Due to this, there is no reason to believe that any of the suggestions posted were seriously considered.

It is imperative for the health of the board that the boards are reverted to their previous state, runners are given the opportunity to discuss how the board should be changed going forward, and given a generous amount of time to vote on the issues.

What, exactly, I think should be done:

Revert the board exactly to its previous state. This includes removing the new boards.

Create a forum post dedicated to allowing runners to discuss potential board change possibilities. This thread should be open for 1 week before proceeding, and should be left open at least for the duration of the voting stage.

Hold a vote to determine how the board will be changed, with clear and concise multiple choice questions (when applicable) for each issue at hand. This vote should be open for 3 weeks.

Once the vote is concluded, total votes for each given option should be tallied and publicly posted by a moderator, at which point the winning options will be decided by a simple majority, or whichever option has the most votes, whichever is higher.

Execute the changes decided by the community.

As it stands, the poll that decided the ultimate fate of the board was not conducted in a way that gave runners the choice, consideration, information, or time to come to an informed conclusion about what should be done, and I think these changes would resolve that.

Additionally, shortly after writing this, I learned that existing runs on the original MGS3 board, now the HD Edition board, were rejected rather than just deleting the category. This is unacceptable.

This thread exists primarily to serve as a courtesy call to those not in the MGSR Discord server to bring to their attention a vote currently being held in the server on whether or not New Game and New Game+ should be merged into one sub-category.

Should New Game and New Game+ be merged into one sub-category? If it is decided that NG & NG+ should be merged, a variable will be added to denote which was used in that run.

A vote in favor is for showing New Game and New Game+ runs in one sub-category. A vote against is for not merging New Game and New Game+, keeping the board as it is now.

Runners can, of course, vote here in the forums if they prefer. A simple majority will determine the outcome and voting will close in 47 hours (midnight UTC).

I feel like I need to raise the question of whether or not runners should be allowed to submit a ripped from disc, unpatched US version run of MGS3 HD to the boards. The specific setup is this: an unpatched on-disc copy of the MGS HD Collection or MGS Legacy Collection is ripped to an SSD, and is then played from SSD. Because the HD Collection disc is version 1.0 (unpatched), the runner just chooses to never install the update. Version 1.0 loads faster than any patched version of the game. This setup requires some sort of custom firmware loaded on your PS3. If we compare this setup to the digital version of MGS3 HD available on the PlayStation Store, the PSN US digital version always comes patched, so it loads slower. The Japanese digital version of MGS3 HD available on the Japanese PlayStation Store always comes unpatched, so you get the faster loads, however the Japanese dialogue loses 9 seconds in Ocelot's call due to the dialogue simply being longer. The dialogue during torture and The Boss' unskippable cutscene are all identical in length, and therefore have no time save or loss on any version. All said and done, playing a US copy of the game that is unpatched and ripped to SSD loads as fast as JP digital SSD, but doesn't lose time in Ocelot's call.

Should runs done under these conditions be allowed on the board? Considering this 9 second time save is only available to people who are running custom firmware on their console, opposition to allowing these runs is understandable. Not allowing these runs would affect me and at least one other runner. If these conditions are determined to be not allowed, I'd rather it be determined now and only remove one run from the board, as opposed to this being decided later and having to remove more runs from the board.

I make the argument that this should be allowed because a 9 second time save does not have any substantial effect on runners' ability to compete with one another. Additionally, considering the fact that playing on version 1.0 saves far more than 9 seconds (about 40 seconds on LT, and about 1:40 on non-LT), allowing runs like this makes competitive runs more accessible to people who cannot or do not want to obtain a JP digital copy, such as myself. If these runs were to be disallowed, the only way to be competitive on the high end would be to play on JP digital, which may be totally inaccessible to some players.

Input from runners is appreciated.