With the popularity of glitches rising, from chain-grabs to wall clips, and the leader boards heavily changing with it, I feel like glitchless should be a category (or secondary category). Here are the rules:
Clips (grab clips, corner clips, that one laser clip in 27, floor clips, full wall clips) are banned.
Grab-boosts* and chains are banned.
Box boosts and box jumps are banned.
Full jumps while carrying an object or character (U, J, U, U inputs) is ALLOWED.
Juggling is ALLOWED.
Any other glitch (I think I listed all of them) is banned.
If a glitch is performed by accident (like corner clips or box boosts for example), reset the level or your run is unverifiable. (That's up for the mods to choose.)
*If the intent is to throw a character, and have them grab the other without jumping again (like the end of level 40 or the start of level 35), that should be allowed. (Also up for mods to choose.)
I'm currently working on a TAS for this on coppersalts' HTML5b TAS hack, (my first TAS I've worked on), and have only done like 5 levels. But some levels are already fully finalised and glitchless so I didn't touch them (except for level 3 because a triple frame save hasn't been added to the site yet), so it's almost a quarter of the full game done.
Anyways, does this sound good, for a category/secondary category/subcategory? (also ce board maybe? 47: everybody up, intended-any% (skipless), maybe glitchless?)
Glitchless is so often problematic because you are forced to make a ruling on every mechanic and their particularities even if they are not discovered yet. With so many glitchless categories, it ends up in a state where a lot of tough decisions on every piece of tech and every new strategy have to be evaluated, and the ruleset must evolve with it, so it's a real bother to actually moderate such a category. Like your special case for grab boosting, I would posit is a nightmare to moderate to see if a grab jump was done "with an intent".
Such a ruleset would have to be very simple to be realistically enforceable. Possibly something like:
- Stay inbounds
- Jumping off of a falling box is banned (except for that one intended on 009)
- It is not allowed to grab another character while the active character is in the air
Something like that may work for such a category and I think is relatively enforceable, I don't still quite know if I broke any levels with this substitution
This timing is actually really funny. We have literally just been talking in the Discord server about what an intended% run (only using intended strats, so no glitches, skips or unintended movements) would look like. I guess there is potential to add it to a leaderboard someday? It could make for a very interesting speedrun, although I do understand the fears that Fewtoo is bringing up as well, so it will probably be more of a "mock" category when all is said and done.
I made this spreadsheet a long time ago with restrictions for an intended% speedrun if you're interested: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gPZ6IJNl0GVQEmE6rb5BOdeEsmu8sqazZGNDuIoHTy4/edit
Oh and I should also mention: while it might seem as such, both grab-boosting and box jumps technically aren't glitches at all! As far as I'm aware, wall clips are the only true glitches we've found in this game so far. In here lies the trouble of a glitchless run. Replacing this with an intended% run fixes all of this though.
I still think that grab boosts should be banned, but box jumps shouldn't. Grab boosts is more of an exploit than a glitch.
