The pages are a mess with all of the runs being on different patches. I was hoping that someone could move the runs on different patches into the same page. I can explain further:

It is not possible to acquire a old patch of the game on Xbox at all, and for PlayStation it is a difficult process. If specific runs require older patches of the game that are difficult or impossible to get on the consoles, I feel like it would be walling off potential people from entering the community.

There are also so few runs on Atlas and Artemis that it would make more sense to consolidate them to respective pages for game mode, without having to be patch specific.

Also, as a newer person here, I find the amount of options very overwhelming. It would be much nicer if the only real subcategory was difficulty setting. I am aware that LeftSideWorldwide made a post similar to this, requesting category cleanup, but that was not patch related and it was a while ago.

I know that duplication glitches and other things are important for runs, but if access is restricted to pretty much PC only because of patches of the game, you are turning away people that may want to try out the game from a speedrunning perspective. I know that Xbox game pass brought in a lot of people to the game as a whole, so you guys shouldn't make it hard for us.

Even if the point is made about older patches being relevant, I'm not saying that they would need to be obsoleted. If you look at date of submission for patches for Beyond and Next, they're all very outdated runs, 5-7 months ago for most of them.

Here is what I propose: Removing the subcategory of what patch is played on, unless it makes an absolutely drastic difference to the run (glitches and the sort). You guys can make it a requirement to submit the patch played on in the submission description to have it be validated, or you can add a column to the board that will show what patch the run was played on. Here is a good example: https://www.speedrun.com/cc As you can see, it shows what character the runner plays (next to what platform it was played on). You can just do this for game patches so that they are all on one board, but it is easy to see what the patch is.

If anything comes to my mind, I will add it later, but this is the gist of what I think would help organize the board and make it less intimidating for new runners like me, and expand the speedrunning community to Xbox and PlayStation.

I'm not 100% opposed to the idea. The idea behind using major patches as categories was to allow for players to run on any patch they want, but in practice pretty much everyone runs on the most current patch anyway. We'll probably talk about it on the discord.

I mean the patch makes a pretty enormous difference though in the time you can achieve. Collapsing it might be ok because generally its become possible to go faster and faster, but, suppose the next patch makes a category slower? Then to be competitive you have to play on an old patch (yuck). I don't feel crazy strongly about it but those are my thoughts.

Ok, thanks for the input! I'll look into joining the discord, but right now I'll just leave this as it is. I just think that as things are right now, you can generally achieve faster times on newer patches. It would still be a good idea to mention the patch played on.