While I can't really confirm this but I do not believe these matter, they seem to only affect the rank you start out as and doesn't appear to alter wind conditions.

If I am wrong about this, I will add these as subcategories

Difficulty has an impact and does matter. I am certain it affects how many greens have grain. I'm not as certain about the impacts on wind. While I can't say whether or not it effects the average wind, I do think it has an effect on some kind of RNG seed. (this could matter greatly if a certain hole usually has specific wind on a set difficulty)

I think it would be foolish to treat all times/scores the same, regardless of difficulty.

From what I've seen it does impact the grain, and it impacts the CPU's difficulty in the tournament scores. As well, it impacts pin position, from what I've seen when i was experimenting a few days ago. Everyone runs on level 4 anyways, and the game isn't wildly popular as of now, so I'll add different modes when the time comes. (Also I'm the new admin of this game, since he left a few days ago due to a lack of interest in the game, so you can send any concerns to me.)

@Vectorman0 Even though your post is 20 something days old, reading your post comes as semi passive-agressive and contributes nothing about the difficulty modes itself as it isn't providing feedback but rather just an opinion, as I did not think the difficulty mode honestly even mattered and I'll explain why even though RNG already said it.

It seems going by this thread the only impact was the grain, this is slightly arguable. However, the majority of all runs do not care about the difficulty modes as all runs (or at the time) were being done by what was the fastest. Now pin position is interesting because I have never noticed it being moved around (but again most of the time I was only sticking with Normal/Easy so maybe the impact was much more noticeable on the harder settings).

The scoring does not matter and I have had this argument on the discord at one point; your objective is to play the game as fast as possible while winning the tournament in the first place (look at any other golf game on this website) and while this isn't required at this time, any optimal player is going to win the tournament no matter what so this should never be an argument honestly.

Even though I have long since retired from this game and I believe RNG will take special care with this game, if my opinion is still relevant it should just entirely be up to the community, it is very tiny as far as I know and perhaps it warrants looking to adding these modes later in the future.

The only reason I did not add these is due to my lack of knowledge of the modes and not noticing the differences easily, but because of their nature hardly any runners are going to fill those categories with runs and it will create more clutter in my opinion. Like I did say though, if the community becomes a lot larger I think it may be fair game to reconsider adding them to the leaderboard.

@RnG I have also removed the "low score" category, speedrun.com doesn't approve of score-based games/categories on the site. High skill play will aim for the lowest score possible in the regular main game or ILs due to optimal and fast play based around time itself. Anyone who merely wants to track scores should be doing so on a google spreadsheet or another service.

That's true, I just wanted to make scores more official, and tbh I never really thought of a spreadsheet, thanks for the suggestion.

(Also pin position is very noticeable on level 8, it's almost always placed on a slope which really screws with your putting.)

I apologize if I came off as passive aggressive, I was trying to advocate for what I think would be best for long term integrity of the leaderboards here. I will try to better explain what I should have stated more clearly in the first place.

While this community may be small now, it could be bigger later. I think it makes sense to set strict rules that might seem unecessarily burdensome now. If the game rose in popularity, it would be awkward to have grandfathered scores.

I'm not going to debate the magnitude of the impact of the grain, but having it more often makes the game objectively harder. Even when playing for time, your stroke count matters. My belief is that difficulty needs to be taken into account when first vs second can be a matter of milliseconds. Compounding this known difference in difficulty with the fact that difficulty level may yield other changes we don't yet fully understand, I think it is prudent to set a strict standard.

I'm not advocating for diluting the leaderboards with many categories, but setting a standard that can be used for fairly ranking scores and making it easy to compete across platforms. I know that, personally, I would look down upon a place that treated objectively different difficulty levels as the same. If it were up to me, I would set MVS Level 4 as the standard as that was what was balanced for arcades. If you are only interested in pure speed, Level 1 makes more sense, but that could lead to less challenging, lower variance, and more boring gameplay. Either way, I don't think it is wise to leave it unregulated when there are known differences.

@Vectorman0 I personally do not expect this game to grow, it is too obscure compared to many other golf games but this isn't up for debate as the technicality of this is much larger than the scope of discussion and the reasoning behind this is larger than just from a speedrunning point of view.

As with any leaderboard; Do not force empty categories that people do not provide any runs for. Just because a category exists does not mean anyone will run it at all. If people start posting runs in this forum or the discord showing that the interest is there then by all means add the categories. If it means this much to you, then start providing runs to RnG and see if others participate as well it is not very hard to add these categories/variables but again just adding them for the sake of it is not healthy for the leaderboard itself. Actions speak louder than words, and while that may bother you some but considering you haven't run the game nor submitted any runs to the game I do not personally believe your opinion should be held very high and runners of the game should be the ones expressing their views and opinions as it makes no sense to cater to people that don't...well run the game at all. Don't take this to heart but look at it in another angle. We understand your views, but you do not speak the community itself.

One example of this is when I decided to accept IL courses because many people were providing runs for them and thus I decided to create it. I'm quite sure RnG feels the same way, as far as I understand currently is that; what there is of the community are only interested in tracking their "score" as opposed to IL/Full-game RTA runs.

Again, speedrun.com does not accept nor track "scores" on the site and that includes "golf scores" which is exactly why I suggested RnG to track that data somewhere else because the options and features on speedrun.com does not cater to this arbitrary goal. I'm aware there are games across the site that try to add it in some form to bend the rules on the site, but that's another discussion.

I'm not saying not to add these modes to the game, but keep in mind that if the above is met the rules will also need to be redefined as well to cater to the new additions. Which I would be expecting players to finish in I believe the top three on the ranking board (i.e not losing the tournament)