I decided to post my own opinions in a different post, such that the OP would be kept as unbiased as possible.

Personally I believe that option 2 would be the better of the two as a runner of the game.

Pros

• It allows for more interesting strategies to evolve. There is not much timesave left from the current any% category (no major glitches) and therefore I believe it would have more interest if it were to allow for these glitches.
• It would allow for 100 Prosperity to become a FAR more interesting category. With either being able to buy an X-Bandage or set the trigger such that you would not have to digivolve into Monzaemon, it skips the dull "2nd generation" phase of the speedrun.
• It makes (what is currently any%) more consistent in being able to remove Garurumon from the route, meaning less runs dying there and no second visit to Freezeland allowing for further RNG manipulation.
• It would be unfortunate for this glitch to go unused in categories other than any% in my opinion, especially with the nature of any% being a category that may not appeal for runners to do more than a couple runs of. Personally, I don't even see myself running the category at all if the route is as static as it seems.

Cons

• Further developments of the glitch could in turn allow for the categories to become trivial and uninteresting, either meaning that further restrictions would be put in place, further categories may be created or worst case scenario, runs being invalidated if an existing glitch were to be utilised in a way that would be banned on the current ruleset.
• It is a very arbitrary line being drawn to allow certain aspects of the glitch and not allow others.
• Emulator would likely be outright banned generally or at least outright banned from utilising the glitch due to how it's properties differ on emu vs console (crashes etc.)

Some of these points are opinionated based on my experience as a runner so do take them with a grain of salt but this is what I believe.

In the past week, a glitch was discovered by Geta92, involving stacking two textboxes on top of each other, allowing for interesting effects. These effects that are useful for speedrunning include wrong warps from Birdramon (warping to beneficial places such as Lava Cave and the basement of Grey Lords Mansion), buying glitch items both to "glitch" recruitments into the city that have not been done by regular means as well as setting certain triggers, such as accessing Mt. Infinity before reaching 50 prosperity points, as well as glitching the shops to buy generic items that are coded in the game.

This thread aims to discuss what to do with this glitch with regards to the categories. As mods, we want to hear your opinions, as well as stating our own such that the discussion is completely transparent between everybody. There are going to be three categories on the leaderboards, which are any% (anything goes within the ruleset currently put in place, i.e. no hardware manip/debug), a second category and 100 Prosperity, both of which are to be discussed.

Essentially, the category discussion has boiled down to two different scenarios with this second category and 100 Prosperity.

1. Completely ban the use of the glitch, labelling the categories as "No Major Glitches". This naming convention would avoid confusion as to what is defined as a glitch in the current runs and what isn't, as well as not falling into the trap of calling it "glitchless" and having to ban if another beneficial glitch with slightly less game-breaking properties were to be discovered.

2. Ban certain aspects of the glitch, primarily the setting of the trigger of being able to enter Mt. Infinity and the "fake recruitments", i.e. all 50pp would have to be recruited before entering Mt. Infinity in the second category and all 100 pp would have to be recruited from its source in the 100 Prosperity category.

Please feel free to discuss your opinions on either of these two options, as well as sharing if you have any other ideas on how to approach this that may not fall under either of these two options.

Thanks. Despite this being a discussion on categories (which seems to be notoriously hostile in a lot of speedrunning communities), I hope this can still be kept as civilised as possible!

Okay so a question that frequently comes up is "why is emulator not allowed to save and quit mid-run, whereas console can?". By default, emulator saves and quits far faster than console does and was the primary reason why it was prohibited. However, the use of the "-slowboot" option for ePSXe ends up showing the PS1 boot screen, which reduces the time discrepancy down to roughly 5 seconds, meaning that they are more comparable. So why is it that emu is still not able to save and quit, despite this time difference being rather minor now? This post aims to highlight why.

So currently in the fastest any% route there is only one mid-run reset, and the route before that had 2. So why not just add the time on, that should fix things, right? At least in my personal preference, adding an imaginary amount of time onto a run shouldn't really be a thing, but for the sake of a fair argument I'll ignore that point for less bias. The issue lies with ePSXe itself.

From testing how the console route works on emulator, SydMontague found a quirk which lead to the Kunemon fight (the second fight in the game in that route) to be different, despite having the exact same RNG value. Now ePSXe is not an accurate emulator in any way, but is used as the standard due to the loads being comparable to that of a PS2 console with the fast disk speed option enabled. But enabling save and quit leads into a hypothetical situation where emulator could result in faster RNG manipulations due to this difference in how ePSXe emulates the RNG, meaning that it would be the fastest way to play the game. This is not a situation that should ever occur.

Another issue with emulator is that most emulators are not able to emulate lag correctly for the game, which can speed up certain fights by indeterminate amounts of time depending on what techniques are used, notably the Ogremon 3 fight with WaruSeadramon using Aurora Freeze, a move which generates a lot of slowdown if there are other particle effects happening on screen at the same time. This is a smaller issue but one that should be highlighted regardless.

So why ePSXe? Why not just use another emulator? Well, the issue lies in that the more accurate emulators are only aiming to emulate the PS1 to the highest amount of accuracy, meaning that the loading times are the same as that of a PS1 (very slow compared to PS2 w/ FDS). This is something that might be looked into with some discussion, allowing these sorts of emulators (Mednafen, XEBRA etc.) to save and quit, though the likely scenario is that a route that doesn't save and quit performed on ePSXe may still end up being faster. psxfin is another emulator which is actually completely prohibited, as although it is accurate enough to emulate console RNG, it runs the game faster than console does natively.

The separation of leaderboards has also been brought up, however as mods we do not feel this is an adequate solution. The separation only brings about a split in competition and the idea of an "emulator WR", which would be completely pointless, due to it essentially being a similar run to console only with slightly faster resets, less lag and potentially more favourable RNG manipulations, nothing to do with the players' skill level or, let's be real here: luck. Secondly, Digimon World is not Super Mario 64, it does not have many people submitting to the leaderboards and splitting up competition further seems counter-intuitive when you consider that if you don't care about competition, you can just speedrun with save and quit and not submit to the leaderboards. The third thing is also what emulators to ban and allow, as the best time would require the player to buy a PSP and emulate it that way, as that has the fastest loading times. And if you're having to buy hardware to compete, you could simply buy a PS2 and game? (an NTSC PS2 and copy of Digimon World is not too difficult to obtain if you look around, take this from somebody living in a PAL region who's bought both NTSC-U and J)

If there does happen to be an emulator which can accurate emulate console RNG and does not run the game too fast, then this can be discussed about how to implement the usage of it on the leaderboards while still maintaining fair competition.

Thanks for reading, hope this clears things up.

Xbox > GC > PS2 Wii is likely to be faster than playing off of an actual Gamecube but that's just from what I know of other games (iirc the difference isn't that big so for a game this short it doesn't matter).

If you're talking about splits, download a tool called Livesplit. There's probably tutorials online to configure it how you want.

epic

I believe that there shouldn't be separate categories for runs using RNG manipulation and runs that do not. I feel as though defining a category stating "No RNG manipulation is to be used" is simply not feasible. Although you can avoid most of it by implementing a ban of resetting the console mid-run, that would not stop somebody from still being able to manipulate the starting deck.

I know from the discussions held in the Discord group that the argument has been put forward that it is possible to tell whether somebody has intentionally performed RNG manipulation to get a good starting deck. However, I believe that if somebody were to submit a locally recorded run, that would not show how many attempts it took for them to get a good starting deck, and that the starting deck that they did get differed from the ones used in the current RNG manipulation runs, moderators would not be able to tell the difference. So why should a new category be created if it's essentially impossible to police runs that go on it?

Another point that has been made is that RNG manipulation takes the fun and strategy out of the game, and that it is uninteresting for both runners and viewers. This is a non issue as far as I'm concerned. Races will stay the same as they've ever been, and it's at the runners discretion whether they want to use RNG manipulation or not.

tl;dr no new category imo, run how you want but don't expect results doing slower strats.

Sorry for the late response, I've only just seen this now. Yeah, I've written in the rules that the time must be set at 120 seconds. In terms of difficulty, I've created sub-categories so that "Any%" now has tabs for Easy, Normal and Hard (Normal being the default one that shows up when opening the page.)

Feel free to let me or any of the other mods know if there's a problem!

(P.S. I saw on your run submission that you have a DBS 2 time to submit. There is a leaderboard for it now with the same rules so feel free to submit anytime.)