Hello Mario Party DS enthusiasts! You may have noticed a couple of changes with the leaderboard, and that's because there's been a new leaderboard mod added! Me! I am super excited to be a part of the moderation team, and I hope you're all excited for the changes that I've bought.
Change 1: A new category has been added! All Minigames RTA is now a category, which I've wanted for a while. The objective is, of course, to win every minigame in the catalog. If you like the minigames in this game, take a quick look at the rules and do a run! Who knows, you may even get the first subhour 👀
Change 2: New miscellaneous categories have been added. Triangle Twisters has been changed to "Puzzle Games" and now includes all seven puzzle game modes, with the objective of each one (other than TT focus mode, which is the same as before) to get to Level 99 in game. If you have even a remote interest in any of these modes, I encourage you to try one out!
Change 3: I've made some clarifying rules changes for existing categories, just so they're more clear(and for Story Mode some of the now-existing redundancy has been cleared up).
Other than that, there are a couple more potential changes on the way. One of them being Pen Pals, the somewhat forgotten multiplayer mode in this game. I don't think its accessible enough to be its own category on the main board, but I really want it on the category extensions board(which you should check out if you like Mario Party Speedruns!), so I'm going to contact one of those moderators about that.
ANOTHER THING: there has been a large amount of debate in the Mario Party Discord(which you should also join, linked on the side) about whether the difficulty options for the categories that have them should exist(those being Step-it-up, All Boards, and Rocket Rascals). I made a poll yesterday about how they should be handled, where you can vote here. https://forms.gle/h4QK95MszApBMRn68 . I strongly encourage you to join the Discord and read the arguments for yourself, but here's a really quick summary of them:
Argument for removing difficulty options: The leaderboard is particularly bloated right now(most notoriously step-it-up, with 48 total subcategories) and removing the difficulty options will clean up the leaderboard and encourage competition.
Argument for keeping difficulty options: There is already an established leaderboard and removing those difficulty options will be unfair to those who have already done runs and the community is too small to make the leaderboards competitive anyway.
I'm going to keep the poll open for another two days, so if you've run the game before or a part of the community please get your vote in. If you've read all of this, thank you! I hope you're excited for these changes! If you have any suggestions for how to make the leaderboards better, please reply below, or, I plug once again, say it in the Mario Party Discord!
- UmbreSR
UPDATE: Results of the poll! 8 responses total, 50% of the people wanted option 2(remove normal and hard), 25% of the people wanted option 1(remove easy, normal, and hard), and 25% wanted option 3(no changes). Plurality wins here(especially since most people wanted at least some leaderboard changes), so I'm going to remove the normal and hard categories, and then change the easy category to any. That way, you can set your partner CPU to expert on the 2v2 modes. All 6 people who voted for a change wanted the change applied to All Boards, 4 of the people wanted the change applied to Step-it-up, and 3 of them wanted it applied to rocket rascals. For this reason, I am going to leave Rocket Rascals in tact for now, as, counting everyone, the majority of people did not want a change to the Rocket Rascals leaderboard. The win amount options for Step-it-up were voted to be left up.
If you want to see the results for yourself, here they are: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rPriAeBnMwvBHYgu7amL4oK0NXus_yLiDCcpyI6hKp4/edit?usp=sharing . Names were redacted.
I think this is a good compromise between the two arguments(credit to DoubleDubbel for the initial idea), as it cuts the subcategory amount for the respective categories in half while cleaving the least amount of runs from the leaderboard. I will start work on this very soon! Thanks for voting everyone!
ALSO Pen Pals is a category now! You're gonna need two DS's, but get your runs in here: https://www.speedrun.com/mariopartyce#Mario_Party_DS .
Hi, are the leaderboard changes still ongoing, or should they be done by now? I noticed some of my runs aren’t categorized correctly, such as this one that’s missing a difficulty.
I think that run got deleted off the leaderboard because I removed "Normal" and "Hard", and all runs therein. If you want to resubmit that run to the "Easy" category that would be fine!
I thought you were going to change the easy category to any, and move all the normal and hard runs to that?
Easy category is functionally "any", as the rules state the CPUs can be set to any difficulty. Just thought having easy and expert as the two category names made sense. Regarding the moving, there really weren't enough runs in normal and hard to justify doing that, much less world records, and moving runs on SRC is quite tedious and laborious. If anyone cares about their runs in those categories, they may resubmit to the "Easy" subcategory.
