So first off. Thanks for adding what you guys have already have. But i feel like that we are still missing something.... Noticed that we dont even have Steel Cage Matches on here.. Would like to submit some runs under cage matches... Thanks

This is five years late, but maybe it's time to revisit this idea.

I don't want anyone to worry, I'm not going to be making any changes without the enthusiastic support of a bunch of people here, I just wanted to reopen this for discussion.

Seeing as this concerns the most popular category of this game, we should probably give it some thought and decide as a community.

The NES One on One board WR strategy seems pretty locked down right now, so in theory nobody will ever run an NES Cage match again if they're going for record. I agree with OP that that seems sad, so I think NES runners could benefit from a split board.

The SMS One on One WR seems more hotly contested at the moment between Regular match strats and Cage match strats. The results are pretty close, and I don't necessarily want to get in the way if people are still trying to theorycraft the fastest way to play this version of the game.

What does everyone think?

Some options include:

1. "Combined board" - Leave the One on One category alone, and continue to allow both Regular and Cage matches.
2. "Combined board, and Cage match board" - Leave the One on One category alone (same as #1)... but also add Cage matches as their own category. So if you run a Cage match, you could theoretically submit the same run to both boards. This is like what they did for the NES Golf speedrun with the "1W and PT only" board. Again, this seems healthy for NES runners, but only because we know the Cage match is slower. If it turns out to be faster on SMS, I don't know if this makes sense anymore.
3. "Regular match board, and Cage match board" - SPLIT the One on One category into 2 boards: One on One (Regular), and One on One (Cage). This seems fair I guess, but do we really want to recategorize old runs, make our existing leaderboards smaller, etc? Again, thinking of the SMS boards where there's less than 2 seconds difference between Regular vs Cage match times at the moment, and it feels like a real exciting contest between those runners.

Open discussion, voice your thoughts if anyone cares!

From my perspective, I think the regular match will be faster than the cage match in the SMS version. AlphaNerd may have optimized the cage match as best possible but I feel the regular match has a few seconds to shave off.