Hey there, I know that most of you are probably surprised to see any kind of activity here. I've become the new moderator for Alpha Protocol since the old mod, thevk, has been inactive for over a year and no longer speedruns anything. With that said, there's been a lot of problems that have bothered me about how these runs are done, wording, and general weirdness with the leaderboards that I want to address, so let's get started:

First thing is to modify the categories.

Any% NG, Any% NG+, and 100% all work as category names but felt a bit off to me. NG+ was really just Veteran, which while it is a kind of NG+ mode isn't really a NG+ by itself. I've renamed the categories to fit more what I think makes sense, which is simply Any% and Veteran. 100% is remaining the same, but the rules for it have been changed. This shouldn't matter since nobody has ever done a 100% run.

The old rules for 100% stated that you must finish the game with 100%/100% in both dossiers. I made a forum thread about this some years back (now deleted) about how the 100% category simply isn't possible - there's a point about halfway through the game where you can only pick one dossier entry from an email, making it impossible to get the other two. Add onto this that 100% just didn't sound like a very interesting category, I've replaced the "100% dossier" rule with "all missions" instead.

This, to me, makes 100% a more interesting category to run since you don't have to take dossier routing into consideration, but it still adds a noticeable amount to the run that you do have to route for that you otherwise would never have to play in a normal run. I still don't expect this category to get any runs, but it's at least more appealing now than before.

Next up, I've added variables to runs. These are for two things - difficulty, and class. Previously there was no easy way to differentiate between runs of different classes/difficulties, and while this isn't a factor now, I think it'll be important for the longevity of the game to encourage people to try different things. With the current categories you were basically forced into Tech/Easy to get a good run. Now you can run whatever you want.

Now, onto the big question mark. Should Veteran be merged back into Any% again? It bothered me all those years ago when the categories were split since, in my opinion, the time difference between Veteran and Tech is minimal if a run is executed properly. I've even proven this to some extent with my 1:39 any% run, being just 3 minutes behind Veteran - this isn't because Veteran is 3 minutes faster, but it's because I died multiple times in my any% run. Veteran does make survivability slightly easier, sure, but outside of that it changes very little throughout the run.

I'm very against dividing the leaderboards the way they currently are, and with the new class categories it's entirely realistic to combine the leaderboards again, in my opinion anyway. If you don't want to see Veteran times, just filter them out - simple as that. Before I make this change I want to ask for the opinion of people who actually have the slightest investment in this game however (even though I know this will be a grand total of maybe one person, if that).

The other substantial change I made was to the timing. The run no longer starts when you gain control/UI appears, but instead when you pick up the PDA. This is simply to give more control to the runner over when timing starts, since anything before the PDA doesn't really impact the run at all anyway. Timing still ends when the final dialogue timer expires, as before. All current runs on the leaderboards have already had their time adjusted to match these new rules, so nobody needs to update their timings.

And with all that said, thank you for reading! I want to try and keep up with AP speedruns in future and encourage more of them to be done. I'll be trying to get back into runs myself as well.

--Ema