The debrief screen after each mission says what the difficulty is, so there's no need to do anything else to verify difficulty.

Thanks for adding level leaderboards! I think it would be nice if IL videos included the mech lab in addition to the debrief screen, which I've done for the few runs I submitted so far. I'm not sure whether it should be a rule, though.

Yeah, IL categories by IGT would be nice. IMO we should change the rules from "Difficulty: MEDIUM" to "Difficulty: MEDIUM or HARD" since I see no reason to exclude existing hard-difficulty runs.

I'll just make a new thread for that…

Edit: I made a guide instead.

Awesome. I'm glad to hear someone else is interested in running this.

I'm not exactly sure what's different between the difficulty modes, but I'd guess that the different modes just fiddle with damage multipliers—and they visibly act as multipliers for Honor at debriefing, with Medium being a ×1.0 multiplier. Disabling heat tracking means that you can fire as many lasers (etc.) as you want without generating any heat (and you earn no Honor for the mission).

And yeah, I just went with the default settings. Different speedgames have different conventions; some assume that you will use a certain difficulty (there's no Easy category for Metroid: Zero Mission), some have difficulty as a submission field (Half-Life does this), and some have different categories for different difficulty settings (Super Smash Bros. does this where applicable). Somewhat unusually, the other two MechWarrior series runs so far (one for 4: Mercenaries and one for 2: GBL) use the easiest difficulty setting and do not mention difficulty in the rules.

So! I personally like the default settings and would prefer a level playing field, but if you want to run the game on Easy then don't let that stop you. And if you do, then maybe we can work with Mewyabby to at least have difficulty as a submission field.

I now submitted a run to Any% since it was the only category, but it should really be in a Jade Falcon category.

So GBL got a run a few months ago, but 31CC is still empty (what?!). I'd like to have some defined rules and categories for this game, since I've done some runs for it and would like to be able to formalize one. Here is what I propose:

Categories: Jade Falcon, Wolf

Rules (for both):

Using a new pilot, complete all missions in the clan's campaign.

Timing starts at "Accept" on the register screen. Timing ends at fade to black at the end of the final trial.

Use medium difficulty, heat tracking on, and altered reality settings off. Do not use cheat codes.

I'm guessing a co-op record doesn't count? : )