Since To the Moon may be released pretty soon, there are questions of whether it should be allowed to fill the slot of SR2 in a srubs/standard challenge. I figured before making a decision on it I should get an idea of what people in the community want the rules to be. Obviously this will depend on certain factors that can only be known after the game is released, such as how difficult the hack is and how long the speedrun categories of it take.

In the second post of this thread I will try to keep an updated list of the possible options of how to handle the existence of To the Moon for the purposes of the scrubs/standard challenge along with a condensed list of reasons why each option may be a good idea.

I understand that this may come down to simply being an opinion, and that I will probably be biased toward favoring requiring Remnant of Doom to be run in the challenges, and that maybe other people could feel differently about that, which is pretty much why I am making this thread in the first place. While I will look at anything anyone says and examine their reasoning, for things that are a matter of preference or opinion, I will weigh more heavily the opinions of those that I have evidence to believe are more likely of actually running an SRC some time in the future. As a result, the more speedruns that someone has on the leaderboards across the star revenge games, the more I will give weight to their preferences.

Alright, so this will be the list of options, which will be edited to include new ideas that I see in this thread.

First option: Completely allow To the Moon in both scrubs and standard. Pros: Will make it easier to new players to run the challenge. Cons: Will take out much of the "challenge" involved in the star revenge challenge.

Second option: Completely ban To the Moon in both scrubs and standard. Pros: Will keep things as they are and won't drastically change the difficulty of the challenge in general. Cons: Depending on what To the Moon is like, this decision might be inconsistent with the general idea of what the scrubs/standard challenges are supposed to be and require an exception in the rules, which will make things needlessly complicated.

Third option: Ban To the Moon for Standard challenge, and allow it in Scrubs, but requiring 100% instead of any% ISC. Pros: If the 100% category of To the Moon is considerably longer than the any% ISC for Remnant of Doom (if an optimal run is about 2 hours, that would probably be perfect), this will give people the option to run To the Moon if they think Remnant of Doom is too hard, but at the cost of losing time compared to if they had a good run of Remnant of Doom. Cons: Would require and even weirder exception to the rules than option 2.

Fourth option: Ban To the Moon in scrubs/standard, but create new, miscellaneous categories that are similar to scrubs/standard but allows To the Moon. Pros: If there is a clear division in the community where one side really wants To the Moon and the other doesn't, this could be a decent compromise to give both sides something that they would want to run. Cons: Having divided categories might reduce competition, and this might lead to way too many categories to keep track of.

Now for the first post to actually have some real discussion in it. I will try to think of the main questions that I want answers to in terms of preference, pretty much.

First (Q1): Do the scrubs/standard challenges need to actually be challenging, or is it fine to leave the real challenge to other categories, such as apprentice/master, and have the scrubs/standard be easy challenges that can get people into the series so they can work their way up to the harder categories?

Second (Q2): If TTM is allowed, then there will pretty much never be a reason to run RoD in a challenge except for the full series ones. Is Remnant of Doom an important part of the challenge that makes it what it is, and will removing it (and replacing it with something trivial) completely ruin the challenge of the scrubs/standard challenges in general?

Third (Q3): How important is the consistency of the rules? Currently we do not allow SR6.9 Luigi Lost in Time because it is way too short, but supposedly To the Moon will have 70 stars in it, which is the same number as SR5, and more than SR3. Do we consider length relative to other games in the specific number, and consider that NoD is very long, and RoD is also somewhat long but not nearly as long as NoD, and TTM is (probably) going to be much shorter than those two and as such could be banned for the same reason SR6.9 is, or consider length in an absolute sense and put the cutoff for hack length at something like 50 stars for a full hack that is legitimate? (most of that wasn't really a question, but I do want this sort of line of reasoning to be explored and discussed).

I can't really think of many other things I want to get input on right now, but I probably will in the future.

Regarding each question in the last post: Q1: I don't think that the difficulty of one hack in these challenges is what is keeping people away from running this. Therefore, I don't think it will matter whether or not TTM is allowed (at least in the popularity of the runs) Q2: I don't think that having remnant of doom makes it a challenge. For instance, there really is no point to running Redone 1.3 when you can run redone 1.5. Therefore, this same question will apply to TTM and RoD. Q3: I think this really depends on the amount of stars needed to any%, as stated in your post. If any% is similar to SR6.5 in that there is none, then I feel that it should be allowed. After all, 6.5 is much shorter than 6 to 100%, but 6 is shorter to any%. If that were the case, RoD 66 could be shorter than TTM 70, making the ban unnecessary. However, if it is similar to SR5 and has an any% point of something like 31 stars, then it should definitely not be counted, as that is frankly too short relative to the other hacks of that number. So therefore, I agree that the length should be relative to the other hacks of that same number.

Alright, now that TTM has come out and I have played it, I think there is no reason to go with option 2 (complete ban) or option 4 (make new categories). The game cannot be considered in the same category as SR6.9 Luigi Lost in Time, and so should be in the scrubs challenge in some way. Currently doing 100% is significantly longer than RoD 66 (at least for me, even a completely awful RoD 66 run will be better than any run of TTM 85, no matter how good it is), which would make option 3 somewhat interesting for people who don't want to run RoD. On the other hand, I think it might be too much of a time difference (RoD 66 is a LOT shorter), and it may be best to just stick with option 1 (allowing it normally in both scrubs and standard).

I am somewhat leaning toward just allowing it normally, but if people really like the idea of option 3, I have no problem with making that the rule. I kind of want to take a vote on what option people like best, and since it would be somewhat clunky for everyone to post what their vote is, what I will do is make two posts, and I will just count the number of likes on each post and count them as votes for that particular option.

Alright, so here is the first post for voting. If you want option 1 (allowing TTM normally in both scrubs and standard), then vote for that option by liking this post right here.

And here is the second post for voting. If you want option 3 (allow TTM as an option only in the scrubs challenge, but require a 100% run instead of any% ISC for TTM, and also maybe allow NoD 90 star in the standard challenge to make up for it), then vote for that option by liking this post right here.