I've added Normal and Pro difficulty categories and removed Easy, Hard and Super difficulties from the list of choices. Checking all runs including obsolete runs I found no runs submitted using those difficulties.
I've added the categories in the interest of expanding the game a little further from the previous Standard/Hyper system.
Gonna be honest, not my call, but personally I preferred when it was just standard vs hyper, made way more sense to me for a few reasons.
SRC leaderboards rarely care about difficulties as far as I know. Hyper is different cause it allows you to go faster. Otherwise difficulty shouldn't matter in my opinion. The other OutRun leaderboards also don't have different categories for difficulty either. Furthermore, too many categories also diminishes the importance of each trophy significantly.
And if you're adding normal and pro, why remove easy, hard and super? The few random runs on normal and pro shouldn't be used to make a decision on this in my opinion. None of it really makes sense to me.
And are you also going to do the same for OutRun 2019 and OutRunners? I would really not be in favour of it.
But it's just my 2 cents. I'm not a fan of this change but this is your leaderboard now, you're the boss. Maybe I'm looking at this wrong too and everyone else will love it.
I think normal mode should be removed for sure. Pro mode is interesting but over all keeping it the way it is offers way way too many golds for one game in my opinion. I'd love to see gear gotcha removed. It's a garbage next to know has ran it and it's a glitch anyhow. But that's me. Normal mode is definitely unnecessary. Again pro mode is kinda cool tho. I feel like this thinned the leaderbored when I wanna see it grow. Sometimes less is more.
The primary purpose of the new categories is to give the most recently active runners the opportunity to continue to set PBs and new records in this game since they (we) seem to have maxed out the existing categories and aren't running it anymore. I think to create a Pro category you have to then create a category for every difficulty that has runs on the board in this case Super Easy and Normal. It's not fair to the Normal runs to compete with Super Easy if Pro becomes its own category. Since no one in the community has ever posted an Easy, Hard, or Super run it doesn't make sense to create those empty categories at this time.
I don't know of any specific rules about how many categories a game can have just that the categories should each have a few runs in them. If everyone in this thread ran Normal and Pro I think that would justify their existence. But if no one here wants anymore opportunities to set top times in this game I will change it back to Standard/ Hyper.
I appreciate your responses. Thanks!
So, I know you were craving to add Pro mode and that's awesome that you can now do it. You've been running that for months while there wasn't even anywhere to post those runs 😅. And while I'm not completely against Pro mode (like @AlphaNerd said, it can be interesting, I somewhat agree), I don't like Normal and the other potential categories (let's say I run Easy and Hard tomorrow to get easy WRs). But I guess you can't remove Normal because where would the Normal runs go since they're not Super Easy. That's also why Standard/Hyper made way more sense in my opinion. And I'd hate to see more OutRun games get scattered like this. This is why I like that OutRun 3-D, not being very popular, is super cool with just one single Any% run on my opinion. I think consolidation, especially for small leaderboards, is good. And like Alpha said too, the board was growing and starting to look relevant on SRC, you probably noticed I've been using tons of SRC boosters on it and him and I were in discussion to make it a community challenge on YouTube with rewards for those participating to getting even more Goal A's on the board. But now that it's thinned out like this, no offence, but I'm not interested in doing that anymore. With only 17 runs on Goal B showing up when you click on that page, it looks like almost no one is running it and not the most popular goal anymore. It's overall a big step back for the game the way I see it.
--- Or maybe have 3 categories: Standard - Pro - Hyper !
And all of Super Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard would go under the Standard umbrella.
I still would personally prefer to keep just Standard vs Hyper, but at least that'd make way more sense to me if you guys think Pro mode deserves to be on there (never played it myself so I can't really say).
After giving it more thought I def do not think there should be a normal mode. Adding pro makes 3 super easy aka standard sure pro I guess and hyper. 4 is way to many. I'd say get rid of normal mode. What's the point really. It's not much different then super easy. Yes it's harder sure. But speed running is ment to be about doing things as fast as possible. And that's why we have super easy and hyper. For a challenge sure pro mode is ok . But normal has got to go. I def do not like seeing the leaderbored being thinned out like it is.
Yeah I have no idea what Pro-mode entails. If it has more traffic than Hyper then I guess it makes some sort of sense to have it, I can see that. But yeah Normal and Super Easy should just be under the same banner (Standard), the way I see it.
Super easy pro and hyper. I'm cool with that. The ppl who sumbited runs on normal are not around and didn't care that they were under super easy If rhey cared they who run super easy and improve their times but they didn't. Pro is kool it's a whole new challenge. Normal is pointless. And makes wayyyy a many available medals imo. 3 game modes in super easy pro and hyper is more then enough. Super easy will always be the most popular and I hope more ppl join the ranks this year.
I'd still have "Standard" instead of "Super Easy" to regroup everyone non-pro and non-hyper, that way, no run would disappear. There's people like Takojaki that are still around that ran on Normal.
Thanks again. I've changed it back to the way it was. It was a very easy change to make so I figured just do it and people can see what it looks like and decide. Goals B and C have 6 and A, D and E have 2 runs in Standard that are on a higher difficulty than Super Easy. I was interested in competing with those runs at those difficulties but I don't want to do that if none of the other top runners are interested.
I think the difficulty levels in this game are more significant than others like 2019 or OutRunners where the other cars aren't as random. OutRun 3D also has very different difficulty levels. If you created categories for all of them I'd definitely play them but that's just me. I understand your perspectives of keeping it simple and limiting WR opportunities.
I just noticed that you can use the filter to filter for difficulty level. For example if I filter Goal D for Normal then my obsolete Normal run from a year ago pops up. So you can post slower runs of other difficulties and they would be hidden as obsolete but show up when filtered for that difficulty. That's kinda neat.
Yes indeed @JFred99, and also if you don't select "Platforms obsolete each other" and "Regions obsolete each other" in the "Edit Game" settings, you can have multiple runs of yours on the very same leaderboard. You could for instance, keep your Super Easy run with the US version, and get a Pro run with the Japanese or European version and they'd both show up on the same board, pretty neat also. Similar as to what you can see here from myself with both a PS4 and a MAME run (I didn't do it on purpose but you'll see what I mean): https://www.speedrun.com/outrunarcade?h=Goal_A-No_Gear_Gacha&x=9d8xx5l2-ylpm7zjl.5q80dj31 But if you ever want to change to Standard/Pro/Hyper, both @AlphaNerd and myself are more than okay with it. Your call. AlphaNerd might run Pro with you I believe. Myself, I'm not sure if I would run it in the near future. I'm already very busy at the moment.
I'm still cool with pro being added. Just normal seems pointless. That's all.
Having multiple runs of different difficulty on the same leaderboard would work here but I think it would be too confusing for most people. I've posted my Pro runs as obsolete so they only show when filtering for Pro or Obsolete. Eventually I'll probably post runs of other difficulties as well.
