As some may have desired and as reason demands, the competition for time trials on this site will be open to everyone. With me added as mod with special regard to the time trial section the "WR only" clause will no longer last.

I guess i often expressed why i held a grudge against such a prevention of open competition and self-improvement, so let's move forward to some questions concerning the "how to" that i wanna discuss. I will point out how i plan to handle stuff and ask for your thoughts and opinions on things.

• Some historical background to why we should care about time trial (Skip this small section if you just wanna learn about what will happen to the time trial section)

Around 2003-2005 Stefan Mahrla me and Patrick Zalesky were the first to take DKR serious aiming to find out and push the potential of the game. Why that long story from a past long forgotten time? Well i often see people disregard the time trial based history of the game. Yes, today we have a great speedrunning activity in this game and only little activity in time trial (i dont expect it to explode with opening the leaderboads on here) There was a leaderboard in the starting days hosted by MK64 people but there wasn't a DKR community-like driven will to keep track of records. That strat hiding issue that people often feel might not have been a strategy used by runners to keep their records rather than that it was even difficult to keep the pure knowledge of the record times from extincting. In other words it might as well just been a result of how the community treated time trials. Now just think about where the game would be now if all that effort was never done considering Mahrla was also the same guy that started speedrunning DKR. My point (and why i tell that story) is that the game wouldn't be where it is today without all the effort and great achievement of the time trial community. That's the reason we should take care of this part of the game, pay respect to it (even if only in a historical sense) and at least make competition possible (and such in way that everyone independent of skill level can participate). I honestly understand and respect that the majority of the people in this community today share interest in speedrunning the game exclusively.

• Records:

I'd find it inconsistent if opening the leaderboard would mean we are starting from zero with basically free WRs on each track to grab. Attempting to reconstruct every single ever documented time seems like a pointless and very hard to do job as well. So i suggest to aim for a certain balance between those two. The time trial leaderboards should at least be a correct representation of the World Records, but id say let's expand it to at least the Top 3 (giving you motivation to fight for a golden, silver or bronze medal next to your time, if you wanted to) In fact i would like to add the times of certain trusted players, that have been around in the community or still are, amongst them past certified world records even if they do not have a video (anymore). The reason for that being that most had a video in the past that just got lost partly to the "WR only " mentality that always seemed to try to undermine the leaderboard-ability of DKR Time Trials (--> there will be a section below that discusses if we even want video proof requirement for future submissions). All in all i think open competition as necessary component to pay respect to players that wanna keep track, improve their times at any player level combined with still having a few times to start with, paying respect to the great achievements of the past and the history of the game is the way to go. What do you think?

• Video proof

As mentioned above, legit and certified records of the past that are necessary to correctly represent the actual world records should go through even if there isn't a video (anymore) A point open to discuss would be whether there should be video proof requirement for time trials at all. Of course having a video is always a great thing: It would be optimal to have a records recorded, so people can learn from watching it. I see that open sharing concept much more distinctive than the pure proof idea for me to wish for videos. However if you want to submit a time, where you don't have a video because the leaderboard wasn't open to everyone contact me, i would accept them anyway (maybe with a picture of the certain time on your cartridge). Of course it's nice if we can avoid rule differences between time trial and balloon races as much as possible to have a uniform appearance. What is your thoughts on whether there should be video proof or not? And especially considering the apparent logical inconsistency in treating past and future times differently, do you understand the reasoning behind that or do you disagree? What are your thoughts on that?

• Shortcut vs non-shortcut

On the few time trial that actually were on here in the past Shortcut times (such as OOBs) and Non-Shortcut were all messed and mixed up. The options are to separate SC and non-SC or to always go for the fastest. The thing is i wouldnt even have the technical option and knowledge to split Shortcut and Non-Shortcut. Neither would it fit consistently with how we handle Balloon Races. On top of that we are talking about a time trial leaderboard hosted on a (mainly) speedrun dedicated site. From our self-understanding and common sense as speedrunners we would always go for an oob if available, in general terms: we would always go for a "faster" if available. I think all that sums up smoothly to why always going for fastest time is the easiest and most consistent way to handle it. What are your thoughts?

• Can i just get a better time on emu, later?

It's quite an easy topic, emulator was never a topic in need to discuss in time trials. Balloon Races handled it like this from the very start as well which i guess is nice as it cannot lead to long discussions later if it should turn out there is a huge advantage. There will be a topic on how we want to handle emulator for speedruns in the future soon so stay tuned for that! Turbo controllers blabla and stuff ... you know the deal :)

• Did i forget something important?

Let me know :P

Otherwise thanks for the attention as well as the trust in letting me take care of time trials and forgive me for my philosophical style here and there, i guess its hard to dispatch of your daily routine :(

hehe i guess it's meant that way, rather a bit too precise, so that you can just skip straight to the parts you care about.

My opinion on the questions brought up by Paddy:

Video proof and emulator This should be just like balloon races, require video and ban emu. Although I do think it's acceptable to put old records without video on the leaderboard, just mention it in a comment to not confuse people.

Shortcut The problem here is that we can only add a variable for the entire leaderboard. But no one is ever going to run RTA categories separately without shortcuts and the leaderboard would look terrible. So unless the site is updated to support adding variables only for a specific section of a leaderboard, it would be best to either ban or allow shortcuts for all time trial times.