I've opened up this Mega-Thread to discuss all the Categories for the game.
Whether that's adding new listings for a particular type of Speedrun, adjusting the Rules for an existing one, or any other types of concerns, it will be handled here!
Feel free to throw in your input if you plan on running the game or have any ideas for it! =D
Continuing from the previous non-stickied post here's a list of all my current thoughts:
• Game Modes could possibly be condensed into single categories with tabs rather than three for each game mode difficulty as people feel things out and see where things go after that
• Time Attack category should probabbly actually be submitted with IGT and have milliseconds enabled so it shows by default in the category overview rather than saying Time = IGT in the rules cuz' that's a bit confusing at a glance otherwise
• The way Survival is currently formated would result in a broken category since the ''best'' time SRC defaults to is always the fastest time but a good survival run would want to last as long as possible - almost the inverse of a standard speedrun - my suggestion to improve this would be to tab it out with milestone limitations in order for people to have goals to work towards that they can then aim to improve the time of (eg: 25 Wins/50 Wins/100 Wins)
• A character filter and IL board would be appreciated
• Boss Rush seems like a cool category addition for the future
• Potential for a Game Difficulty sub-tab seperate from the standard mode difficulty if people want it since it's selectable in options but testing would need to be done if it actually has any effect on the modes in-game first.
Currently default game difficulty (3/5) together with hard mode doesn't feel like as much of a challenge as I expected so I could see game difficulty 5 filling that nicely but I wouldn't want to bloat the board unessesarily with a 2nd sub tab so that's kindna tough. Maybe there's some sort of appropiate compromise here.
In the options, Game Difficulty is described as ''CPU Strength'' so if that ends up meaning it just unbalances enemy attacks rather than the AI itself becoming extra smarter I'd actually be against adding a tab for this myself but it's good to consider.
@Habble Im pretty sure you can set something to timer ascending for survival mode
At the moment the Separated Categories for everything is because the Game itself considers each Modes as their own Different, Independent, Section rather than most Fighters where it is dictated by the Game Difficulty in the Settings Menu. So you may have an instance where someone could want to do something like "Story Mode - EASY, CPU Difficulty 5" or "Story Mode - HARD, CPU Difficulty 1" which is where things start getting tricky.
That's why we're using the Default Settings for everything for now as a basis & jumping off point so that we can adjust for more Categories & Settings since once more Players have a better understanding of how the Game Modes play by Default, then we could start looking into & talk about Specifics when it comes to Sub-Categories, Various Settings, and Character Specific things outside of Mission Mode (Which is being worked on since each Character's Missions are different).
Right now it's more of finding the core audience for the Game by using the Defaults rather than over bloating the Leaderboard with things that folks might not actually do until they see that the "CORE" Categories are actually being Speedrunned and then they start getting the idea to potentially branch out into other types of play & Speedrunning.
I'm not gonna sugar coat things but in comparison to a Big Name Fighting Game like "Street Fighter" The Melty Blood Series is more of a Niche so there's a chance having TOO MANY Options at the Start might not be ideal & could actually divide things more, which is why I think branching out the Options after we actually have more folks running the core Default Game would be ideal.
You have to walk before you run after all.
That's not to say many of those Features can't & won't show up later though as more folks begin to do Runs for the Game.
Also @DWednesday is correct in that the Survival Mode is currently set to Ascending Time so the Best would be based on actual Survival Length.
Sounds good, I hope my list from earlier becomes useful once more time has passed and things are in a position to be reassesed.
On the Survival topic, wouldn't an ascending timer give rise to just stalling out the fights for timer scamming rather than actually defeating the survival opponents normally? Not sure if that's something to encourage or not so figured I'd just quickly raise it. I did some quick tests and it doesn't seem too hard to do since the CPU doesn't seem too good at chasing you down from fullscreen even on survival-hard so I worry that encouraging gameplay like that might poison the well - tho I realise I may just be overthinking this, who knows.
So an update on my thoughts; I managed to unlock Boss Rush mode and do a run so I'll have it ready for whenever the category gets made. Interestingly once unlocked there's a "Free Battle" boss rush where you can select anyone but also a seperate boss rush-type Story Mode where you play as Miyako with the extra challenge of only having one chance to beat the final boss for the best ending - I feel like both story and free battle are deserving of a category having tried them out.
Some more things; firstly now that I've got a feel for more categories and how their gameplay works, I'd like to suggest that I think only the "Any" category variants should be allowed to change the in-game settings like rounds or game difficulty to be different from the default; it's not only easier to understand this way but also ties up the loose ends about any concern of people wanting to use strange settings if they want to for whatever reason.
Additionally, I still think these boards would benefit from sub-categories regardless on any future rule changes that may happen and I think it would be wiser to set things up sooner rather than later so there's less work down the line to manually move existing runs over to their new home. This is a simple matter since nothing changes about the rules and it would really help new players more easily identify the leaderboard without things looking unnessesarily bloated as they are rn.
A example of what I had in mind based on categories that have been already been talked about would look like the list below which would condense the 10 existing categories into 4 with appropiate sub-tabs for simplicity and the idea is that anything new could easily follow the same format.
Story Any / Easy / Normal / Hard / Boss Rush
Time Attack Any / Easy / Normal / Hard
Score Attack Any / ??? (nothing else there currently)
Survival Any / ??? (nothing else there currently)
Boss Rush (Free Battle) Any / Default
I agree with this ^^^^
Also, Character Variable? Also also, Character ILs?
Alright I condensed a lot of the Category Difficulties into Sub-Categories under a Main Category for many of the Modes, however bare in mind that many folks may need to resubmit some runs since the Category they submitted for may not "technically" exist after everything got condensed since we have Sub-Categories for Difficulties now (I'd also like to remind folks that you do need to show The "System Settings" for Runs and not just the "Game Settings").
I also made a whole separate Category for Boss Rush which includes both the Normal Boss Rush and the Free Battle Variants.
As for Individual Character Variables & ILs as mentioned before it might be possible further down the line, but as said earlier we don't want to fragment an already Niche Game so the Main Focus is to get the Main Leaderboards running first. If a lot of the Runners after running one or a few of the Main Leaderboards first expresses interests into running Character specific stuff then it will be considered to be added in sooner than later.
Happy with however things evolve and looking forward to seeing everyone's new runs for the new categories; thanks for adding those! I thought I might quickly add my 2 cents about some of the new layouts and categories that have yet to be deep dived into if it helps as there are some parts that are a bit confusing to me.
• Does "regular" boss rush mean the "story" mode? Not sure if some of these category titles are still a WIP but figured I'd mention it anyway.
• Survial end time in rules should be on dying rather than on defeating the last opponent since the mode appears to be endless - also now that I've done some runs I feel like the ascending timer works well and I'm very happy with it but I'd like to possibly see a custom "Wins" filter for Survial runs as I think that would be a perfect compliment to it since it's a trackable statistic that appears naturally on the game over screen in game for Survival runs.
• Score Attack, Time Attack and Survival all appear to force lock their game rounds to a particular setting regardless of if you try to select something different - this also happens with some other system settings found in the main menu so I'm not sure if any of those toggles actually do make a difference or not for those modes. If so, the "Any" variant for those categories may be pointless - needs testing to decide at a later date maybe.
• Score Attack rules might need some attention - I'm guessing the intent is to order them by Score since it's Score Attack but there's no custom Score filter for that yet and I'm not even sure if there's a way to prioritise a custom filter over completion time with the current site tools; would be interested to hear other's ideas for this since I'm a bit stumpted on suggestions for it myself.
• Finally regarding Character Variables, I think you may be misinterpreting what we mean by that actually? They're just a filter detailing what character is used in the run, not a seperate part of something new that would fragment the leaderboard in any way - if it helps clarify we're not asking for character sub-tabs as that's something entirely different and that actually would be harmful to the overall community unlike a basic filter which I think is what you may have thought we meant? Apologies for any confusion there.
In that same way, ILs are not listed as a mainboard run so that wouldn't have a negative impact on the mainboard either; they're typically just an evolution of mainboard runs where you can also submit to character-specific ILs at the same time when you PB regually if desired - anything special like the idea you mentioned last week about possibly adding Missions for example would likely also be best utilised on an IL board rather than the mainboard in order to keep low on bloat and maintain a level playing field because just as you said; each character's missions are different after all and the only alternative would be having an actual mainboard category for Missions with every character as a subtab which is a bit ridiculous imo.
That's all I got for now! Hope my additional thoughts helps in some way, sorry if I rambled on a bit. I'm really passionaite about seeing how this community grows because I feel like with all the options this game is giving us there's truly alot of potential here and I'm excited to see how things go. Thanks again for all the time you've taken to listen, it's much appreciated! <3
So, having double sub'd a run for both Time Attack Easy, and Time Attack Any, it makes me think, is there really any need for both cats when the only difference is AI 1 or AI 3?
Also, if i want to run a cat on hard, with AI 5, what happens?
I dont agree with the current idea of how survival should work, for me..the best player should defeat more opponents in less time. The category should be played on hard just like the current rank system of the game requests to save your record on the list of runs. My current best run is 48 wins in 25 minutes, way better than the current 1th place with just 28 wins
I went with the earlier suggestion of having a specific Survival Mode Category with specific amounts of Opponents KOed being Milestone Limitations as Sub-Categories for those who can defeat the set amount Opponents the fastest.
Since Survival Mode by it's very nature is about "SURVIVING" as long as possible the Original Rule Set is remaining as it's own Category as well maintaining the Ascending Order.
The Default Settings for Both Categories are remaining as Any for now since this is already dividing up an Obscure Category for the Game into Multiple Variants and whether they actually end up being runned by Multiple Runners who would be legit interest in running any further Modifications to the Survival Mode Categories would have to be seen over time after these current adjustments.
For anyone wondering, I'm pretty sure if you want an ascending timer on a category it has to be it's own individual thing so it makes sense that's why Jak seems to have implemented it this way. I think this works well since people can choose how they want to run Survival now. It's technically alot easier to pb in "actual survival" by stalling out every single fight but who am I to judge if that's the kind of content people enjoy running - personally I plan on just submitting the longest attempts of my Survival Speed to Actual Survival category - so there's a solution for every kind of runner here which is great.
After trying multiple different difficulties on Survival Speed runs it feels like the difficulty selected might not even be a reference to the AI intelligence at all, it's really weird since no matter what difficulty you select you end up get matches with ramping difficuclty curves that plataeu to max after about 20-ish from my experience. I think leaving it as Any difficulty with this in mind is fine but I'll prob still run on Hard anyway in the future so I have a chance to submit to the in-game online rankings as well - that should tell you how little of a difference I felt when comparing the two on different run attempts.
In case anyone has noticed the sudden changes to the Game and wondering what's going on we're currently overhauling a lot of things for the Leaderboards of MELTY BLOOD: TYPE LUMINA as well as adjusting the Moderation Team by adding another Member @Habble who has been one of our Reoccurring Runners of the Game.
Over the next few days you may see multiple changes to Current Categories or Additional Categories added.
Also we just updated the Individual Character Leaderboards to Include Mario Gallo Bestino & Powered Ciel who are the latest FREE DLC Characters added with the most recent update :D
