Hey y'all,

Long time no see.

I've reached out to a few runners of the game via twitter and some mods of other communities about how we can level the playing field for runners on different consoles in the categories that use RTA timing. There seem to be 4 primary lines of thought.

Gonna preface this by saying this shouldn't affect Bowhemoth or ILs, since those already use IGT.

0. Make no changes and keep the leaderboard as it. I think this is just lazy to not try and fix this, but it's still an option to consider

1. Have a moderator (probably me, Moosh), retime all new runs and old runs. The leaderboard would then include both times but be sorted by time without loads. This is the most work intensive fix, but it's just figuring out when and where the load times are, then just manually retime runs without loads.

2. Split each leaderboard between consoles and PC versions. This is the easiest and simplest solution, but this already turns the already sparce leaderboards of any% and SSA any% into even smaller ones. This also doesn't address the issue of Wii U times still being significantly slower than Switch / potentially Xbox times IIRC, but that could be achieved with another leaderboard split, but that just makes the visual aspect of the leaderboard being divided a bit worse.

3. Go the Sonic 2 route and calculate run times as sums of each in-game level's time. This is also a pretty easy fix, but introduces some new questions about excessive waiting on the map or how deaths factor into the final run time (as mentioned earlier), so that would require further discussion.

4. Take the NSMBW approach where high-level runs are subject to different timing conventions (for example, in SSA any%, a time of 15:00 on Wii U being retimed without load times using method 1 or 3, but a 15:00 on PS4 not being retimed for not reaching some other threshold). This doesn't address any actual new timing methodology, but does make it somewhat easier to moderate (though, Runbow isn't exactly getting a lot of traffic on the regular, so overworking the mods isn't that big of a deal right now).

I would love to hear anybody and everybody's thoughts on this matter :)

Well, I think I mentioned us looking into a more fair timing method based on IGT, like summing each level's completion time.

Wii U load times are just ridiculous, but it's what I run. I don't think many run the other versions of the game.

Moosh, I'm up for whatever you feel is best. You're the mod, so whatever works best for you in terms of work load. ;)

Alright it's been about a month, and I think it's time we reached a decision here. Unfortunately, I was not able to get in touch with Nara or Munchakoopas over this time frame (no fault of their own), but after communicating with other runners and other speedrunning communities, it seemed that sum of IGT and splitting the leaderboard between consoles and PC were the clear favorites.

Based on the feedback I heard (and to have consistency with Bowhemoth and ILs timing methods), we're gonna try out sum of IGT. If that doesn't go well or we realize they just don't really like it, we'll go back to RTA with the console/PC/Wii U categories ranked separately.

This change will affect current times on the leaderboard for ANY%, 435 MEDALS%, SSA ANY%, AND SSA 108 MEDALS%, but I'll handle all the retimes, so nobody has to worry about resubmissions or anything. Going forward, you can continue to submit with your RTA time or submit it as your Sum Of IGTs, as I will manually retime each run regardless. I'll start this process this weekend, but it may take a while as the next couple of weeks will be pretty rough for me IRL lol

I know some runners expressed in returning to these categories after a timing change was implemented, so I am looking forward to seeing some new Runbow submissions in the near future!

Alright guys no more excuses we got everything set up and retimed, let's see those console submissions lmao