Hey everyone, we have a big announcement today.

As a result of continued feedback, the CMs have decided to revisit our ruling on turbo restrictions. Effective immediately and on all leaderboards, turbo will be allowed up to 21hz. The restriction on missile weaivng with turbo is also being lifted.

Unlike previous rulings, we did not have an officially sanctioned public discussion before coming to our decision. This issue has already been discussed at length in various feedback threads made by community members, and it was clear that doing so again would only further strain the community. Everybody has already made their thoughts known, so we instead discussed the state of the issue internally and came to a consensus.

We understand many people will be upset with this decision. When it comes to turbo, there's never been a perfect answer. Every ruling has always come at the cost of some part of the community, and as with every decision in the past, we've attempted to balance this to minimize the damage caused. After the many lengthy discussions and an internal revisit, we feel that the positives of loosening the restrictions far outweigh the negatives. We're certainly not happy about upsetting people with this, but it was also clear that not making this decision would upset even more.

Because of how nuanced this issue is and how many factors there are, we've compiled a document with a full explanation for the reasoning behind this decision. If you take issue with this decision or are otherwise concerned/curious, we ask that you please read this document. You can find it here.

That said, we will at least summarize the reasoning and have a short FAQ here:

• Why was this decision made?

After considering many factors including (but not limited to) community activity, competitive integrity, controller availability, and runner health, we felt that the pros outweigh the cons. We feel that we stand to gain a net positive or at least not a net negative on any of these factors. The strongest factor was competitive balance, which turbo has been lagging behind in significantly.

• Why not 17hz?

The main reason is controller availability. The doc goes into depth about this, but many 13hz controllers would see no speed increase under 17hz. Along with still lagging behind the best human mash, this would somewhat defeat the purpose. We felt that if we made the cap 17hz, we would have to eventually raise it to 21hz anyways.

• Why not split the board?

Our goal with the boards is to provide an option for every way to view it. It's already possible to view a split board by using filters. While this isn't a perfect solution, it would be worse for those who want to see a combined board to be unable to do so than it would be for those who want to see a split board to need a few extra clicks each time they use the boards. Our reasoning is that it's clunky, but at least usable, unlike the alternative.

• Will this decision be revisited?

We don't plan to revisit this decision. While this has also been the case with past rulings, our principles never changed. We just didn't predict the circumstances changing so dramatically as the gap between turbo and mashing got further. That gap will probably not get that wide again, and even if it does, we're limited by the controller market as controllers over this speed aren't widely available. This shows no sign of changing as controllers closer to 30hz are difficult to make. As of now, we see it as very unlikely this decision is revisited any time in the near future.

Thanks for reading.

Hey there, it's been too long since we had one of these!

We're pleased to be able to partner again with SpeedGaming and our good friend kekumanshoyu to hold another tournament showcasing Metroid Dread, this time in the Any% Glitchless Category!

SpeedGaming Live 2024 Metroid Dread Any% Glitchless Tournament

Here are a few things you should know:

This is an online tournament. Signups are open to all with no entry fee, but please make sure you are able to follow the scheduling requirements detailed in the tournament rulebook. You must be flexible enough to potentially schedule matches with international players within 5 days of the matches being made available by the tournament organizers.

• Qualifiers begin: July 20, 2024
• Tournament begins: August 5, 2024
• Tournament ends: End of September 2024

Signups will close on July 27th @ 11:59PM EDT. The earlier you sign up, the more qualifiers you can join!

Qualifier Heats

Before the tournament begins, there will be eight qualifier matches that determine the bracket positioning.

Qualifier heat schedule (all times are in US Eastern)

• Two heats on Saturday July 20th, 2024: 10:00AM and 6:00PM
• Two heats on Sunday, July 21st, 2024: 2:00PM and 10:00PM
• Two heats on Saturday July 27th, 2024: 12:00PM and 8:00PM
• Two heats on Sunday, July 28th, 2024: 4:00PM and 12:00AM (technically Monday morning)

YOU MUST PARTICIPATE IN AT LEAST TWO HEATS. You can participate in more than two if you would like. In fact, we encourage it because your best time from the qualifiers will determine your bracket positioning.

Rules

Please read the rulebook below in order to familiarize yourself with the rules:

Any% Glitchless Tournament Rulebook

Rules are subject to change up until the day of the first qualifier.

Other Notes

• Participants are required to join the SpeedGaming Live Discord in order to participate: https://discord.gg/eH4qa3Fnew
• We encourage all runners to show up 10 minutes early for the qualifiers and for the rest of the tournament. This helps the staff and admins out greatly.
• During the qualifiers, four people will be chosen at random to be showcased on one of the SpeedGaming channels on Twitch.
• There's a prize pool for this tournament! As of this forum post, the prize pool amount is $85.00 USD. If you want to contribute further to the pool, visit this link and follow the instructions: https://matcherino.com/t/sglive24?contribute=true

Take care, and See You Next Mission.

Effective immediately, the only acceptable image host for IGT proof is "Proof", our community-managed image host.

Effective immediately, the only acceptable image host for IGT proof is "Proof", our community-managed image host. We made this decision mainly because of the ephemeral nature of image hosting: we can't be sure, in six months, a year, five years, that the proof you submitted of your completed run will still be publicly available. Policy changes dictated from the top down by for-profit enterprises have hit this part of our community hard over the past year. See these examples:

• May 2023: Imgur is Deleting All Old Content Not Tied to an Account
• July 2023: Twitter now requires users to sign in to view tweets
• November 2023: Discord will switch to temporary file links to block malware delivery

As the examples above illustrate, relying on services we don't control for our image hosting is a fool's errand. Bandwidth is an extremely expensive part of serving content, and for-profit companies are looking to cut costs wherever they can and avoiding link rot is rarely on their priority list. To be honest, we're kind of tired of having to do this dance every time a decision like this gets made. So we're moving this part of our speedgame to a place we can control with the goal of better preserving the body of runs and the history of the Metroid Dread speedgame. We are also taking similar actions to preserve the body of video proof as well; we'll go into more detail on that when we have something actionable.

Going forward, use of any external image host (including Discord, public social media, or cloud-based storage services that allow hotlinking from external sites, such as OneDrive or Google Drive) will result in your run being rejected. Use only the service below to host your proof.

https://proof.hijumpboots.com

If you have any issues with the above service for any reason, you can:

• make a post in the forums
• make a post in the "community-suggestions" forum in the Metroid Dread Speedrunning Discord server.
• send an email to hijumpboots [AT] gmail [DOT] com

and we'll take a look as soon as we can. Thanks, and take care.

jay

Hey there. Moderately exciting news for you.

As a result of the change to Imgur's Terms of Service, I started developing an image host for people to use if their runs don't require video proof.

Please welcome Proof into the community infrastructure.

https://proof.hijumpboots.com

This is an image host specifically for In-Game Time screenshot proof. It is fast, simple, and it can be used on mobile devices. I encourage you to use it whenever possible over other image hosts, since this one is community-managed.

Alternatively, there are other image hosts you can use:

Alternative Image Hosts

• Discord, Twitter, or other similar social media that does not require the viewer to log in
• Imgbox
• ImageChest
• PostImages

For proof cards that were lost in the Imgur purge, we will be working on getting them backed up to Proof. We backed up all IGT proof cards hosted by Imgur in late April, so we didn't lose any of them. Take care.

Hey there, we just wanted to let you know about the upcoming All Bosses No Major Glitches tournament. We're pleased to be able to partner with SpeedGaming to hold another tournament showcasing Metroid Dread.

Here are a few things you should know:

Qualifier Heats

Before the tournament begins, there will be eight qualifier matches.

Qualifier heat schedule (all times are in US Eastern)

Two heats on Saturday August 5th, 2023: 3:00pm / 8:00PM Two heats on Sunday, August 6th, 2023: 3:00pm / 8:00PM

Two heats on Saturday August 12th, 2023: 3:00pm / 8:00PM Two heats on Sunday, August 13th, 2023: 3:00pm / 8:00PM

Rules

Quals:

• You must join racetime.gg and you must stream your run live on Twitch.
• You must participate in at least two heats. You can participate in more than two if you would like. In fact, we encourage it because your best time from the qualifiers will determine what bracket you will be placed in, so the more runs you post results in, the better chances to seed higher. Based on your performance, you will be placed into one of two brackets, Mawkin (upper bracket) or Thoha (lower bracket).

Brackets:

• All runners are required to join the SpeedGaming Discord server and state they're participating by posting in the #dread channel.
• The ruleset for the category will be the same as the ones found here on speedrun.com. (https://www.speedrun.com/mdread?h=All_Bosses-No_Major_Glitches-Rookie&x=ndx3qjod-dlorordl.810d8m2l-6nj5x4el.jqzzn7gq)
• All runners are required to run on Rookie Mode
• Runners may make an ad hoc agreement ("gentleman") to increase the difficulty level or run All Bosses Glitchless. Dread Mode is not allowed, and making a gentleman's agreement to All Bosses Unrestricted, while extremely cool and rad, is also not allowed.
• When the tournament begins, all matches will be 1v1. Scheduling will be decided by the players, but a date must be selected before a given timeframe. For those who lose their match, you will fall to the loser's bracket, where you will have one more chance to win. If you lose in the loser's bracket, you are eliminated from the tournament. Better luck next time!

Other Notes

• We encourage all runners to show up 10 minutes early for the qualifiers and for the rest of the tournament. This helps the staff and admins out greatly.
• During the qualifiers, four people will be chosen at random to be showcased on one of the SpeedGaming channels on Twitch.
• There's a prize pool for this tournament! As of this forum post, we're at a prize pool of $111.43; if you want to contribute further to the pool, click this link: https://sglive.speedgaming.org/

Take care, and See You Next Mission.

Hey there, we have some news from the Discord. We want to hold more events where we focus on specific categories, and so we're starting something we're calling a Season. Since the All Bosses No Major Glitches tournament is coming up, our first Season is going to be focused around that category.

METROID DREAD SPEEDRUNNING ALL BOSSES NMG SEASON 2023 (JULY-SEPTEMBER)

This Season is divided into two parts: free play and tournament play. During free play, we'll be holding events, such as clinics and races, to bring new runners into the fold. We'd be flattered if you would join us in the Discord during this time. We'd particularly like to draw your attention to the two clinics we're holding on Saturday July 15 and Saturday July 29. During these clinics, you'll learn the ins and outs of the category and be better equipped to compete (and with a little luck, win) races and tournaments.

FREE PLAY SCHEDULE

(all times are in US Eastern)

Week 1 Friday, July 14, 2023 9:00 PM: Race 1 Saturday, July 15, 2023 3:00 PM: Clinic 1 Sunday, July 16, 2023 12:00 PM: Race 2

Week 2 Friday, July 21, 2023 9:00 PM: Race 3 Saturday, July 22, 2023 3:00 PM: Race 4

Week 3 Friday, July 28, 2023 9:00 PM: Race 5 Saturday, July 29, 2023 3:00 PM: Clinic 2 Sunday, July 30, 2023 12:00 PM: Race 6

Week 4 Friday, August 4, 2023 9:00 PM: Race 7 Saturday, August 5, 2023 3:00 PM: Race 8

ALL BOSSES NMG TOURNAMENT

Starting August 2023, we're going to be partnering with Speedgaming to hold a tournament for All Bosses No Major Glitches!

Here's what we know so far:

• Tournament Format: double elimination, with each match being a Best of One. Grand Finals will be a Best of Three.
• Tournament Rules: https://www.speedrun.com/mdread?h=All_Bosses-No_Major_Glitches-Rookie&rules=category&x=ndx3qjod-dlorordl.810d8m2l-6nj5x4el.jqzzn7gq
• There's a prize pool on Speedgaming's website. If you would like to contribute, we would be very grateful.
• Qualifiers are planned for August.

We'll let you know when we have more information.

Please join us as we celebrate our speedgame; we would love to have you.

The Community Management team (that's us - admins, mods, and verifiers) have been hard at work on several different "hole-patching" rulings addressing various different community concerns. Each of these initiatives were proposed by a member of the CM team based on their unique perspective and insight into the speedgame. Then, they were heavily discussed. Finally, we held an internal vote among all staff members to decide whether to allow these proposals to be put into place.

Pre-Skew

Any% Unrestricted (UR) runs that use Pre-Skew have been separated out into their own leaderboard, called "Any% UR Multi-File". After reviewing the runs that have been submitted since March, we felt it was best to split those runs out. All other routes and rulesets have fallen back to the "single-file" rules, with the exception of Minimum Items UR, where the use of Pre-Skew is required to meet the category conditions, and Boss Rush UR, where Pre-Skew is the only meaningful difference between the UR and No Major Glitches (NMG) rulesets.

Changes to Video Proof Thresholds

We have added time-based thresholds for video proof, in addition to the current rank-based thresholds, in order to ease verifier load. The thresholds below apply to all difficulties.

Runs that require video:

• Any%: top 30 AND faster than 1h 30m
• 100%: top 15 AND faster than 2h 00m
• All Bosses: top 15 AND faster than 1h 45m
• Minimalist: video is always required
• Maximalist: video is always required
• Category Extensions: video is always required
• Boss Rush: faster than 8 minutes In-Game Time (IGT)

Changes to Allowed Turbo Actions

The act of missile weaving using turbo (by turboing the "fire" button and tapping the "missiles" button rhythmically) will be banned on all merged leaderboards that do not have a separate "turbo-only" leaderboard. Missile weaving without using turbo will still be allowed. Accidental turbo missile weaving will be dealt with at the discretion of the verifier team, on a case-by-case basis.

This ruling will take effect Friday, June 16 at midnight Eastern Daylight Time.

You should know that this was not an easy decision, and that we spent months considering the pros and cons of further restricting the turbo function, versus splitting the boards turbo / no turbo. The conversations were passionate but civil, and the votes were close. In the end, the staff narrowly voted to further restrict the turbo function to make merged board play a little more fair to non-turbo, while still keeping the entire speedgame accessible for runners who need to use turbo to play.

We welcome your questions, comments, and concerns in the comments below. If you'd like to speak with us more directly, please join our Discord and use the #feedback channel.

Thanks for reading, and take care.

DO NOT USE IMGUR TO HOST YOUR IGT PROOF

Due to Imgur's new terms of service, IGT proof cards hosted on their services are being deleted at an alarming rate. Uploading IGT proof to Imgur is heavily discouraged. There's no guarantee that your card will be around for the verifiers to look at.

Alternative Image Hosts

• Discord, Twitter, or other similar social media that does not require the viewer to log in
• Imgbox
• ImageChest
• PostImages

We backed up all IGT proof cards hosted by Imgur in late April, so we didn't lose any of them. We'll work on restoring these cards on an individual basis. We're also working on an image host specifically for Metroid Dread IGT proof cards. We'll keep you posted.

Thanks for reading.

VOTE HERE: https://forms.gle/Lxktt7PkRcsAn17J7

Hey there. The staff has decided to introduce a new proposal for community vote regarding splitting difficulties on the leaderboards and abolishing the "Standard" label for runs.

What is the proposal? Proposal 23-5 (proposal #5 of 2023) is a proposal to decide whether or not to split out the leaderboard difficulties. Each difficulty split was considered as a separate question in the proposal.

Why is it being proposed? This proposal was opened due to feedback from members of the community regarding concrete differences between the difficulties. Also, the verifier team's output has recently been audited, and the audit shows that the team can be reasonably expected to be able to take on the workload of verifying separate difficulties without a significant delay, even with the current rank-based threshold system.

Who on the staff was eligible to vote? Admins, moderators, and leaderboard verifiers. The total pool of eligible voters was 17.

How did the staff decide? 23-5α, split out Hard from Normal: YES (9 to 1 with 2 abstentions) 23-5β, split out Rookie from Normal: YES (6 to 3 with 3 abstentions) 23-5γ, put all difficulty split questions indicated in proposal 23-5 to community vote: YES, by unanimous consent (11 to 0)

These questions now go to the community for a general vote. Please fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/Lxktt7PkRcsAn17J7. In order to be eligible to vote, you must have at least one run on the leaderboards.

Voting will close Monday, April 10, 2023 at 9PM Eastern Daylight Time (Tuesday, April 11, 2023 at 1AM UTC).

Thank you, and take care.

VOTE HERE: https://forms.gle/Lxktt7PkRcsAn17J7

Hey everyone!

After a very long period of discussion and voting, we can finally announce the updated turbo regulations. The results are in, and starting Monday, the turbo cap will be 12hz with no additional restrictions. Runs that are already verified or submitted before Monday will remain allowed on the boards, but after that, you will need a 12hz controller to submit with turbo. Hopefully this will give everyone enough time to adjust.

For more specifics, we will be allowing the average turbo speed of a controller to go as high as 13hz, to allow for manufacturer variance. This also means that the 8bitdo Pro 2 (the most popular turbo controller) can downpatch to an earlier firmware to fall within the threshold. If you need help doing so, please feel free to ask any questions in the Discord. We also have a controller sheet available in the guides tab (as well as the resources channel in the Discord) that lists controllers that are allowed under this ruleset.

We think this could truly be a good compromise for the community, so we're happy about the result, and hope you all can be too. This took a lot of cooperation from all sides, so the staff team is extremely grateful to all of those who discussed, did data collection, and voted.

Thank you, and happy running!

Hey everyone!

It's been ongoing for about a month now, and we feel it's an appropriate time to try to wrap up the turbo revisit. To do so, we're going to be putting up a vote so every runner can have their voice heard.

We're handling this with ranked choice voting this time. In case you don't know about it, essentially you'll rate each of the options from favorite to least favorite. In the event your first choice is the least popular, your vote will be counted for your second favorite.

In addition, this vote will be limited to only those with runs verified on the leaderboards for Dread.

We also want to make sure everyone can make an informed decision, regardless of how much they've been keeping up with the discussion. To ensure this, the first page of the vote will be a summary of the issue so you can get quickly caught up to speed. For more details, you can still check out the pins in the #turbo-rules-discussion channel in the Discord.

This vote will remain open until Friday night. You can find it here: https://forms.gle/1oNsoHMR36RzfMzg8

As always, thank you all for your cooperation. Happy running!

Two things to announce today:

First up, we're putting up a poll about the turbo rules. The discussion has been going on for a while, so we feel it's an appropriate time to collect the community's thoughts. Keep in mind, this poll is not a raw vote. We're going to use the results of it to decide how to move forward next. The poll will run until next Friday.

Please fill out this poll honestly! We want to reach a compromise between everybody here, so we encourage you to really think about your answers before you submit your response. If you need more information about the issue, please join the Discord server and read #turbo-hz-discussion, as it has been discussed extensively there. You can find the poll here: https://forms.gle/Zrv3GsgZ2AMDPzHi8

Next, we're looking for some more verifiers to add. We're opening positions for both the main boards and the category extensions, and you can apply to either one. If you are accepted, we'll be expecting at least 2 runs verified a week, so please make sure you can meet that before applying. As with the other form, it will run until next Friday. You can apply here: https://forms.gle/4GSvC7MuPAE89vKTA

Thanks for reading!

We have re-opened the discussion surrounding the regulations of turbo controllers. To be clear, this will only be on the details of how they are allowed, not their legality as a whole. Turbo controllers are going to remain allowed in some form or another regardless.

To start, we're focusing on the Hz cap. You can find a more detailed post about this discussion in the announcement channel in the discord server. If you're interested in participating in this discussion, please head over there and get yourself acquainted with the discussion rules, then feel free to jump into the #turbo-discussion channel.

We are holding an interest poll on revisiting the rules surrounding turbo. This is NOT a poll that will lead to any kind of decision directly, instead we are using it to better decide how and what to discuss.

This poll will be close on Saturday, 06/20/22, at midnight EST. You can fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/Ke8Bc8U4K2zkmCMQ7

After this, we'll open a discussion thread in the discord server. We encourage everyone to join there, as this is where rule discussions will be taking place and more frequent updates will be posted.

We've finally added Category X-Tensions Extensions! All your favorite meme categories are now official Metroid Dread categories! This includes:

• Mercury Steam%, both Glitchless and Unrestricted
• Belly%
• Hypothermia%

You can find more info about these and submit runs by either clicking 'Leaderboards' on the main Metroid Dread page, or by opening this link: https://www.speedrun.com/mdreadce Happy running!