You may have noticed recently that the previous moderators have handed off responsibility of the leaderboards to a new team! Charmander and I actually already have some history together as I also took over responsibility for the SFV leaderboards from him several months ago.

In order to help revitalize the community and help foster a level playing field for all runners, we've decided to make a few changes to these leaderboards. They are as follows:

• General Game rules have been clarified, detailing acceptable standards for video, emulator, gameplay and general runner conduct requirements

• Official collaboration with the Street Fighter Speedruns community discord is now in effect; a link to which has been added to the leaderboard sidebar

• Moderators are no longer permitted to automatically verify their own submitted times

• Runs are now verified in IGT to level the playing field between various PC and console loading times; no longer will arbitrarily improving your load times with mods or more powerful hardware yield an unfair advantage!

You are free to still submit with RTA as a reference if you wish but the official rankings will be ordered by the fastest in game time after it has been confirmed during verification

• The previous 8 difficulty sub categories have been merged into three different minimum difficulty thresholds rather than having a category for every single option individually. We feel this more accurately represents a more distinctive change in AI behaviour for each avalible category to choose from

• Any% category runs will continue allowing runners to skip Bonus Stages without any kind of penalty. For any of the other Arcade categories, skipping Bonus Stages is still allowed but will incur a 1m 44s penalty which is the maximum possible time of 60s for Car Crusher and 44s for Barrel Buster. (existing runs have been retimed)

• The previous 1 Round and 5 Round sub-categories have been merged into Any% which allows any setting. 3 Round is now the universal standard setting for all other Arcade categories

The new Arcade category format is as follows: Any% allows the use of any round or difficulty setting while also allowing Bonus Stages to be skipped without a penalty Very Easy allows difficulty settings between Very Easy (2) - Easy (3) Medium allows difficulty settings between Medium (4) - Very Hard (7) Hardest only allows the Hardest (8) difficulty setting

• Arcade Mode, Trials and the Car Crusher Bonus Stage are all now avalible as an IL Leaderboard, allowing everyone the opportunity for competition over character-specific WRs

• All characters previously missing from the submission form have now been added in

• Four new "Hardest+" variants of Arcade Mode has been added as new categories to the misc. tab which require you to fufill special requirements during your speedrun to defeat a particular secret boss and defeat them ontop of also defeating Seth on the Hardest difficulty; we hope you enjoy these special challenges! Please note that the 3DS only has two secret bosses as it's based on the original SSFIV release, not SSFIV: AE

Thank you for your time and good luck with the runs!