Hey all,

The topic of the Practice Difficulty sub-category has come up again, as it usually does from time to time. In the past we have declined adding the practice difficulty as a board category for various reasons, mainly due to its short length, relative lack of challenge, and incompletion of the game, which may lead to a situation where everyone essentially ties the best possible time and we end up with what's close to a meme-styled run.

That being said and in the interest of being completely fair I'll pose the question to current and potential new game runners. Would you want to have the Practice difficulty added as a sub-category? YES or NO. Feel free to elaborate on why you feel the way you do. Anyone can chime in, but the opinions of people who have current times on the leaderboard OR people who would submit should a new category open will carry the most weight.

YES: from experience normally every time someone says it isnt possible to go any faster eventually someone proves that to be wrong, heck i did that mistake myself

as a top runner of this game i say NO, id rather people play the full game/Normal not just the demo version/Practice.

i will say YES to this as i can see a lot of new runners pouring in knowing that the times are gonna be millisecond difference. If the category is created i recommend adding milliseconds.

I'll start off by saying I am currently not a runner, but I have practiced some of the run. This may make my comment a little less valuable to this community; but please see this as a perspective of a potential runner's point of view:

I'd say YES since this would give an opportunity to those who are thinking of running the game a "soft" starting point. This could help get them at least familiar with some of the game, the techniques, etc... without needing to dedicate a lot of time to learning the full run. In turn, I imagine most would want to try their hand at the rest of the game and could possibly become serious competitors on the board.

If this does happen to become a reality, I would also say to get the information out there that this category exists and include some good resources along with those posts to help motivate or simply give a solid starting path to new runners.

As someone who's been interested in running this game for a while but hasn't pulled the trigger yet, I'd say it's generally better be more inclusive with categories than exclusive. Even if the run does end up being all the same times, is that really such a bad thing? It's not like the leaderboard is crowded with categories at the moment, and you can still leave Normal as the default category. In the event that counting frames is required, you could even require runners to count the frames in their submissions ahead of time in order to submit, then and just verify their calculations if needed.

It will definitely attract players who just want to do runs of as many different games as possible, but I doubt it would make them more interested in trying any other categories.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with adding practice mode if people want to party with three simple slices of bread rather then a complicated five course meal.

That being said I wouldn't want to be the verifier having to frame check split start/ends to find extra milliseconds to squeeze out of a run.

Follow up point for discussion: this was brought up on the discord server. For emulator runs of practice mode, once the theoretical best possible time is reached by runners, the world record holder will possibly end up being the person using the least accurate emulator which we currently allow. We would likely limit the emulators which could be used for the runs. Is that understandable?

As for verifications, I would suggest we have some cutoff time, where anything faster needs to be frame counted. The onus would be on the runner to do this, possibly even having them submit their start frame and end frame in the comments section as verification that a proper frame count has indeed been performed.