This is a great idea. So much of important info is spread around several Discord servers. Having one consolidated place to gather everything is great.

If you feel like mods of a game are abusing their power you can take it up with the site moderators and they may look into it.

The 100% notes (found in the guides section) have a few very important sections that involve card rules and are key in removing the bad rules from the Trabia region, which is the region Diamond uses for their rules.

1. Remember that we have to play a card game in the Galbadia Prison to get the Character report
2. Because of 1), we have to restore Balamb rules, which we do after Oilboyles before we play vs CC Jack. This means that you have to decline to play cards until the person doesn't want to mix rules anymore, then they will only play with Balamb rules.
3. The first time we visit Shumi Village (which is in the Trabia region), we are carrying Balamb rules, so we can manipulate the rules. After a hard reset (Save+Quit), try to play cards against anyone in Shumi Village and decline 8 times before accepting the game. Then when you enter the card game screen you can exit and the "Plus" rule should be removed.
4. Before the next time we visit Shumi Village we want to be carrying Centra rules to be able to remove "Random". We get them by asking to play cards vs Edea at her house until she doesn't want to mix rules anymore. At that point we are carrying Balamb rules because we have taken them back from Dr. Kadowaki at the start of Disc 3, I'm not sure this is essential, my memory is hazy on this bit.

Once you're carrying Centra rules you can do the same as above and ask any Shumi to play cards but now instead of declining 8 times you only decline 4 times, and then accept. This is again done after a Save+Quit.

And that's it, with two visits to Shumi Village and some clever abuse of card rule manipulation you can remove the two most annoying rules of the region and now Diamond are left with no rules at all. Sometimes when you go from playing Jack to playing Diamond in the Ragnarok you can spread the "Open" rule, but definitely not always. It doesn't change much though if you have a good and consistent strategy for the card games.

Good luck!

The voting time has concluded and a Any% NoManips category has been made. There were 22 responses total, 14 Yes and 8 No. If we remove the people who I think most would agree don't count, there'd be 3 Yes and 2 No answers removed from the 1st question, resulting in 11 Yes vs 6 No. It's a large enough majority to warrant the creation of the category in either case.

The vote about NoManips category is here: https://forms.gle/yNUjspd39igxyi4E8 The vote will be open for about a week, I'll post the results next weekend, around 11 am on the 28th of January.

All the relevant information should be in there, but if you have questions or comments, you can DM me directly either here on SRC or on Discord or just reply in this thread.

To the mods: You can add a Discord link when you edit the game and put the permanent invite link there (Edit game -> Community Discord server). It creates a small Discord icon below the Follow button that people can click to get the invitation.

Last day to vote is today. I will be closing the vote in about 18h (10am GMT).

We have added a category for it now: https://www.speedrun.com/ff8/thread/0yvnt

We now have an English version of the Lite% Mod thanks to Thomas_89 in addition to the French version by Seifer! We have added a category called Any% Cutscene remover to have a more intuitive name for the category and to be in line with FFX and their version of the same thing. As the name suggests, it removes most of the FMVs and dialogue heavy sections and cuts down the length of the run to about 4 hours. You can find both the English and the French versions on the Resources section.

Here's the survey: https://forms.gle/5kcybUmT5AQYRiwz6 All of the necessary information should be there. We will keep the survey open for 1 week, closing it next Sunday (20th) night.

It is something we are looking into and have thought about. I will say that since it only works on French version it is less likely to be ran by people who already aren't heavily invested into FF8 Speedrunning, so it does hurt its chances of being added as a category. There's only 6 people who have done a run on the 1.0 version (7 if you add Soph from previous versions) despite it being a thing for quite a while now.

Meanwhile you can always add your time to the unofficial leaderboard found on the Lite% website: https://rentry.co/qh7ak

I have created a 100% category for the PC as we now are starting to have a bit more interest in it and had our 2nd completed run. I'm expecting at least 2 or 3 more people to pick it up in the near future.

I have also removed the rule about having to point out the timestamp of a reset in case you reset your game at any point in the run. The rule was decided on a spur of the moment as a side thing in one of the rule discussion streams we had with Ahramanyu and primarily it was made to make the moderators' job easier, but in practice I have noticed it's making it harder and giving mods more work if anything. You can still continue to point out the time stamps in your comments of course, but no one is required to do so anymore.

And when it comes to the mod, no, it's not allowed. Any and all mods are banned by default, no matter how tiny they might be. Some mods may be explicitly allowed in some games or categories for some specific reasons, like stability or overall enjoyability of the run.

As for the speedup booster run, I think it's a great idea. Years ago, when FF8 didn't have a booster category yet, a couple people ran with only the speedup booster (Called it F1 Any% or Hi-Speed Any%), but a category was never made and then later on the Booster% category became much more popular, and a category for that was made. After that, no one has touched the Hi-Speed only run as far as I know, which is a shame, since I think it's a much more interesting run. Of course, mostly it's going to be Any% strats, but it definitely has room for alternative strats in some cases. And as ceaselessly said, it's just mostly a case about no one running the game in that specific way for why that category hasn't been made.

We have no separated the Windows 7 and non-Windows 7 PC categories from each other and instead crated new tabs for PC and PC (Windows 7).

This allows us to create new categories, such as Booster% and 100% for non-Windows 7 runs without cluttering the PC tab with duplicate categories (one for Windows 7 and one for Non-Windows 7). You will surely see those categories made in the future as people start running them, now that there is space for them. Creation of these categories will still require interest in them and are not going to be created automatically, so go out and run them if you want to see them created!

The naming has also changed. We used to have PC Any% (No Windows 7), which was the odd one out banning Windows 7. As that category is (and likely will be) much more active than the Windows 7 ones, we have decided to name the non-Windows 7 category as PC and the categories which have been done using Windows 7 are now PC (Windows 7). We feel like this is best going forward as we expect the Windows 7 runs to be very few and far between in the future and thus leaving the awkward naming convention behind.

We have had a little bit of interest shown in a Dollet Escape category for HD Console version and before creating a category that ends up dead after a week, we have decided to make this thread where people interested in that category can submit their VODs. If there is enough interest shown here we will be making the category as normal. You can put all the required information (Time, Platform, Language) in this thread already so once the category is created, these runs are easily added to it by the moderators.

We have added a new category for the Dollet Escape where Windows 7 is banned. The rules are the same as the PC Any% (No Windows 7), so it requires you to have an FPS meter on screen (Steam or better) and Windows 7 is banned. There are no language restrictions. Note that this category only accepts runs from the 2013 version and not from the HD Remaster as the remaster has the option to select Japanese language which also skips all the tutorials and thus is quite different.

We have also changed the "Cards" selection to be "Route" and have added the option to select "ECM" as an option. ECM stands for Early Card Mod, which is starting to take off as a route. The route still uses Q+Z cards, but refines them earlier to get the powerful items from these cards earlier. The "Cards" option has always been a quick and easy way to see which route the run was done with (Q only or Q+Z), but since now ECM is another route that uses the same cards but is significantly different, this change was done to easily differentiate between these runs.

I would also like to thank everyone who has ran the Any% (No Windows 7) category and also congratulate everyone on their new PBs. The creation of the category has been a major success and in these few short months has already seen 15 people submitting runs and many more starting to learn the game. With this in mind, we might be creating a separate tab for non-Windows 7 runs in the near future so the categories aren't forever staying mixed together and unnecessarily jumble up the PC section.

I think your best bet is gonna ask Luzbel or Cordellium directly as they're the only two people to have ran with that stepcount.

We have decided (based on a quick Discord poll) to filter the votes on the basis that people who have completed a run of any FF8 category were eligible to vote. Based on this filtering the votes were 14 for No language restriction, 10 for English required and 10 for Two categories (English and non-English). Based on this result we have decided to create a category with the following extra rules: Windows 7 is banned. Steam FPS overlay (or better) required.

We will be working on creating a quick guide to get the Steam FPS overlay working and visible ASAP, but it is easy.

We have also added a new rule to every category except PSX JP Any%, where If you reset at any point, you have to point out the time stamp of the reset in the comments of the run. This is to make it easier for the moderators to verify the run. We have also added a rule that requires the entire game window must be visible on the video. This is to make it impossible to use the boosters and not have the text of the booster being active not visible.

Thank you everyone who voted. We are very happy to have moved forward in making a new category where people can compete with up-to-date software and hardware.

I have closed the poll. We will be analyzing the results and discussing it tomorrow (Sunday 14th). Thank you everyone for voting, we got quite a high number of votes, 49!

Reminder that this poll will be closed next Saturday (EU time). If you haven't voted yet, go do it. If you aren't sure whether your vote counts, vote anyway. We will handle the filtering in the end.