I can't tell why those got accepted to begin with, but the community has made its choice clear: 1cc should not be required to speedrun this game. If people want a 1cc category/subcategory, I will gladly add it alongside the existing ones.

curious question, some of these runs dont show difficulty, is this an honor system or is there an easy way of telling its on hardest just from viewing the gameplay?

You do make a good point. I'll even call guilty for the 3p run that was done on a marathon. We entirely forgot to go back to the dip switch menu to show the difficulty.

Now at this rate, it would be a call as to whether, like with the 1cc requirement in the past, hardest difficulty actually brings any value in our context as that sort of standard varies from one community to another. I mean, there were non-1cc runs when the 1cc rules were into play, and that was before I became a moderator.

I personally hate taking down runs because of situations like these because it can come across as a slap in the face of runners who put in the work. I'll have to run it on 4 stars AND 8 stars (I've only played on 8 personally) and take notes as to whether it is merely an "A.I. quality level", or if damage on both the player and enemies is impacted. If I notice visible differences, it'll allow for more thorough analysis of the current runs. If not, then it'll be a matter of determining if we require 4-star and higher (stock) difficulty instead of 8-star, if we add boards for different levels (which could end up being redundant), or if we just knock runs off the board (with mine which wouldn't show the difficulty level being no exception) and end up with an aggravated playerbase. Or maybe even leaving it to the player's choice, as, for instance, the Capcom vs SNK 2 community did for a while. Not sure how much of an impact that would have on this community, though.

But yeah, thanks for the insight, and feel free to comment.

@T3tsuya, your thoughts?

In my honest opinion I don't think difficulty should matter for any%. Or maybe even at all due to the difficulty in verifying it. As it is right now you have to give a good guess to the difficulty from the run itself if they didn't show the dip switch menu.

The difficulty requirement and the 1CC rules are/were definitely holdovers from the way runs were done in the beginning. I would say separate categories would be the best course of action, but the game is small enough as it is. I don't see redundant categories doing much for the health of the board. I also don't see an issue with the rules being changed if the community agreed on it.

That's my .02. Would like to hear what runners think.

I went ahead and added them as sub categories anyway. This way, those who forgot to display the dip switch settings are not penalized, while those who went out of their way to show them have their own niche, and people can come and challenge them for that.

By default, runs are now in "Any difficulty", with players being free to edit their submission to reflect the difficulty IF said difficulty is shown via the service menu.

Was the best compromise that wouldn't hurt anyone that I could find.