Basically an extension to my reply in this forum with reasoning https://www.speedrun.com/smm2/thread/zkdt5 for a subcategory, but this was before CE was a thing on speedrun for this game.
Or what I said was on that reply: "A suggestion if I may, I've seen several people including Raysfire, RedFalcon, etc. stream a new subcategory of 100 level easy (and maybe even normal as well) endless speedruns. In my opinion I think this is much better and should at least be additionally included alongside 16 levels, the problem I have with 16 levels is that the smaller the sample size of levels you have to work with, the more randomization and less skill is involved. (Think of it like this, if there was a 1 level speedrun, you would just have to keep rerolling until something drops you onto the flag basically and then you have the most optimized time). In the opposite direction, having 100 levels you could still complete in a reasonable amount of time (Raysfire did 1:31:41, RedFalcon did 1:29:59, and I myself have a 1:24:18), makes and encourages skipping levels to be actually strategic instead of just only resetting because the run is too short, and you can start the run in the middle of an ongoing run without the need to reset all progress. This would also be more accessible to other players on the in-game leaderboards who aren't forced to make a family account but don't want to restart on their main account. I usually start my timer on the first A button press on the world map and end at the flagpole of the 100th level. If that's still an issue with rolling runs together (having two or more runs at the same time at different levels which is the main issue here) I could also suggest that the start of a run could happen when someone hits the "Continue" button in the difficulty selection menu to prevent that from happening."
Now that several people have done 100 level speedruns and at least 3 people now have done 1,000 level runs (myself with a 14h 58m time, and Raysfire / 360Chrism with sub 16h runs), I think it would be nice to finally have categories that could be run for both but instead of using the 16 level ruleset make it more friendly to those who don't want to make a new account or start their entire easy endless run over.
Hi! Recently, I decided to make two separate but similar trackers for your stream overlays if you guys are interested in using it. It is customizable and I am open to future suggestions for the programs as well. It is cross platform, so you can run this on Windows / Linux / etc. here is the link to it in case you guys are interested in it. https://github.com/dsteves8000/99LivesOverlay and https://github.com/dsteves8000/NumberOfEndlessLevelsOverlay . For the latter, you can customize it to work for any number of endless levels (16 for easy/normal/expert, 6 for super expert, even 100 for easy which is a category I'm still pushing for, or pretty much any number you set it to) At the end of a run (hotkeyed by "") it will also produce a graph that shows your performance on your past run! I hope this at least help you guys out a little bit.