So I’ve seen categories saying: Speed Restricted speed No speed
What are they?
"Speed" category rules: "You are allowed to start the level with speed gained by previous levels with no restrictions."
"Restricted speed" category rules: "Speed from previous level must be garnered in a [glitchless or 100%] context. Resetting in a previous level refreshes this state."
"No speed" category rules: "You must start the level from a reset."
To make it even more obvious:
The Red ball 4 volumes has made a big difference compared to the former 3 main series games in the terms of gameplay. Instead of entering a level with no speed after collecting the previous flag, the game instantly puts you into the next level when you reach the end of the previous one, and you are able to keep the speed you had from that previous level. Because of this, the IL leaderboards have been separated into multiple categories, depending on how you start the level.
For the Speed category, the way you enter the level does not matter at all. You can complete the previous level any way that you'd like, even if it takes you 2 minutes to do a specific setup, all that really matters is that you complete the level. This means that you are also allowed to submit a run that restarts at the start of the level, you don't necessarily have to keep any speed into the level for the run to be counted as legitimate for this category.
The Restricted speed category is almost the same as the Speed category, but you have to beat the previous level in the context of it being in a full run. This might sound confusing, but I'll try my best to explain what this means. The best level to look at to see the big difference is level 7, or more specifically, the end of level 6. In full-game runs, top runners will do a specific double jump on the cart to keep a lot of speed into level 7 to clear the big gap at the start of the level. In the context of a glitchless run, you aren't able to do that double jump, and have to enter the level in a much slower way. In the context of a 100% run, there are some stars you have to collect first, and an enemy you have to defeat, which means that the speed you might've built up has to be slowed down again to achieve these requirements.
Finally, for the No speed category, you have to reset at the start of the level to make sure you start of fresh with no speed. One level that changes a lot is level 10. When you look at full-game runs, you will see that all top runners skip the huge gap at the start of the level with the help of speed from level 9. For this category, you don't get to keep any speed, and you have to reset at the very start of the level. A much harder way of clearing that gap had to be found to still complete level 10 in a fast manner.
There, I spent some of my evening voluntarily explaining the simple rules of the IL categories of a flash game to someone that probably hasn't seen that there is a "Rules" button on all leaderboards. I hope this explanation satisfied you.
Edit: Goddammit, I spent so long writing that that I didn't even get to see that Lombre responded before me.
