With TSC submissions being down since March and the site's infrastructure growing more outdated by the second, it's finally time to put some IL leaderboards up here. The change won't happen untill after SGDQ as I simply won't have the time, but I wanted to get this thread up ahead of time to list how I intend to structure the boards, as well as gather some input from the community about several points.

Rules:

• Video is required
• Emulators are banned (This might change in the future, but 1 change at a time)
• Team Blast Glitch is banned
• Segmenting through checkpoint usage is allowed

There will not be a transfer of any existing statistics from TSC or other sites. The sheer workload would be huge as is, even more so if we contact every person to ask if they're ok with having their stats transferred to begin with. A lot of stats on TSC are without video to begin with, so even if we did a stat transfer, it would still result in an incomplete board. The intention is to give these boards a fresh start and let the people decide for themselves whether they want their stats here or not. This will make the boards start out empty of course, but if the community wills it, the boards can evolve into the primary IL boards on the internet.

The boards will be structured by stage, with subcategories for each team. PC and Console will both have their own boards, unlike the shared board on TSC. The Metal Madness IL will be submitted under Team Sonic.

Team Blast Glitch is banned for 2 reasons: 1. To keep the robot wave bossfights interesting, instead of “Spam TBG to insta-kill every wave” and 2. To keep Team Dark interesting, considering their Team Blast effect stops the level timer. Accidental Team Blast Glitches will be judged by whether they had any effect on the outcome or not.

If people want, we can have a variable for checkpoint segmenting. Both options will be shown by default as they are both valid, but it gives people the option to filter if they want to see what the best unsegmented run is. I personally think it's a good idea, but I'd like to hear from you.

If you have any thoughts about any of the above or something I didn't mention, post here. It'll be a while before the change is implemented, so you'll have plenty time to get your thoughts in.

Lastly, keep in mind that verification will take a while during the initial wave. Especially since this is not the only game that will be getting IL boards. Should the workload become too large for the existing mods, I'll be sure to recruit someone from the community to help verify.

Some additional info about the board structure: Extra stages will be included yes. The stages will be added as "Seaside Hill" "Seaside Hill Extra" "Ocean Palace" "Ocean Palace Extra".

You'd theoretically get less blank spots by adding "Team x Extra" as subcategories, but having too many of those will make the "view all" page look extremely cramped and squished together as the site does not support horizontal scroll bars and will instead make the columns more narrow.

I think this plan is good. Giving people a new website to locate their records is good as an extra option. I definitely support a variable filter for checkpoint usage/manipulation for obvious reasons. For boss battles, do you plan to include the TSC rules or any other rules on restart glitching strategies and gaining control of teammates early? This lowers many of the boss fight times but also makes the team boss battles wonky. For team battles at least, having those rules can prevent "potentially silly" 1-3 second times and encourage playing the team bosses in a less broken way. I will post more information here if anything else is thought of. (This post applies to the PC version of Sonic Heroes too).

I'd say it's better for competition to not allow restart glitches for early control on boss fights yeah, good point. Especially since the effects of those differ by platform

I think banning TBG for all teams is not a fair decision for IL leaderboards.

Sure, it makes combat somewhat less interesting, but with team blast setting your speed to 0 and TBG in general taking a few seconds to execute, team blast isn't actually used too much in IL speedruns. Also banning TBG would make stages like team rose's Bingo Highway a lot less interesting where you would simply have to spam the B button to get team blast meter, and that wouldn't be very interesting imo.

The right approach should be banning TBG only for team dark like TSC has been doing, in my opinion.

That's just my opinion though, it might just be me being too used to the old system, but after doing ILs for years I still stand by my opinion.

After a small amount of thought, I think having another leaderboard variable filter for if a time incorporated pausing is a good idea. This topic is significant enough to make a variable for it valuable. It could track any pause during the stage (and this could include pausing to do the death restart glitch to save time in bosses, if people want this purpose for pausing be included in this definition). Such a variable can make it easy to know if a submission used pause abuse or pause strategies at a glance and people could of course filter those records out if they do not like records which utilize pausing. The Sega Mega Drive "classic" Sonic the Hedgehog games on speedrun.com have this variable already. (My idea here also applies to the PC version for this game)

Re: TBG, that's fair Deku. I'd still like to extend the TBG ban to at least Robot Carnival, Robot Storm and Metal Madness/Overlord however, to avoid "spam TBG to win" and since Madness has a Dark section. I can see the value for the other teams. Curious how other people feel about it.

Re: pausing, that's a maybe for now, simply for the sake of not wanting to drown the stats in too many variables, but we're discussing a similar thing for Unleashed so I'm not opposed (it is admittedly a much more heated topic there). Would like more input from others on this.

Personally I could go any way with this, but I'm a bit more biased towards what rules were already in place on TSC (i.e. TBG banned for Dark, but not necessarily ban for Metal Madness Dark section)

Thanks for all the discussion so far. To sum up what I'm planning to do for Heroes when I get a chance to put up the boards, based on the feedback thus far here and in the discord:

• View all page will look something like this. If y'all think the bosses should be mixed in with the stages instead to get it in the order of the challenge mode in-game let me know, but for this game I feel like it would look nicer to have all bosses lumped together.

............................................Team Sonic........Team Dark.....Team Rose.....Team Chaotix Seaside Hill Seaside Hill Extra Ocean Palace Ocean Palace Extra Rest of the stages Egg Hawk Team 1 Robot Carnival Rest of the bosses

• Team Blast Glitch will be banned only for Team Dark, Robot Carnival, Robot Storm & Metal Madness/Overlord

• For the teamfights, if either team is moved before control is naturally gained (i.e. restart glitches), the time is disqualified from the boards.

• Segmenting through checkpoints allowed, with a variable so people can filter for it

• Pausing to gain an advantage allowed, no variable for the time being, but this can be added if enough people want it

Boards are up! https://www.speedrun.com/sonicheroes/individual_levels

"if either team is moved before control is naturally gained the time is disqualified from the boards."

This is the exact same ruling as TSC, so I think you misinterpreted their rules

Yes, but the rules both here and on TSC clearly state that neither team is allowed to move early. The rules are not banning a specific glitch, they're banning any glitch that accomplishes that.