My Thoughts On Potential New Category Split

So I've had more time to think about the category split and get my thoughts written down in an organized fashion. After reading through yesterday's IRC logs and perusing through twitter, it's very obvious to me that the community is very split on the potential new Category Any% No PW. I think the best solution, that will in the long run help the community is specifying Any% NO PW in the notes under Any%, and not an official MAIN category, and here's why.

1. Creation of a new category is a short term fix that hurts more in the long run

One of my biggest issues with decisions that are made within in the Paper Mario Community, revolves around the mindset that everyone that doesn't run the game shouldn't have any input in "our" game. I  think this is a terrible way to approach a decision, because when you're making decisions for a game, down the road, it's very hard to go back and change them easily. When I talk to people within the community and read opinions online about Paper Mario, a game which I put a lot of time into and want the game to continue to do well, even if I'm not as active in it as I use to be, I see a lot of people who view us as a joke of a community. While some Paper Mario runners don't really care about public perception, I find that it's super detrimental to the growth of the game. Bad views of the community inhibit more people from joining the community and keep it from adding new names. Right now the big argument is that Any% in it's current state is a boring run and relies too much on RNG. The truth of the matter is, that Paper Mario is a RPG, and like most RPG's, has a significant amount of RPG. Using the argument that the end boss can send your run back to the beginning because of bad luck is a bad argument. At some point, the proposed Any% NO PW category will get optimized to the point where bad luck on caps on Huff, and other small RNG elements will cause the same resets that the VERY unoptimized Any% has right now. Will the argument be made that we need to create another new category at that point? How bored will the current runners get with the proposed new Any% category and move on with other games? You have to assume that everyone running the game will at some point move on to other games and will not run the category. Once those runners have moved on, will creating another arbitrary category really help us in the long run? My opinion is no.

2. Specifying the different any% route in the notes still keeps the competition, while not affecting the hierarchy of the current categories

When I was involved in the Super Mario Galaxy 2 community, we had a similar system in place for the any% category. There was a system called bank toad, that allowed you to store star bits between files and you could transfer them on a new file. A lot of the Japanese runners who had run the game in the past opted to not use Bank Toad, which caused their times to be slower than those who opted to use it. Instead of making a new category on our leader boards, we instead opted to mention "No Bank Toad" and "Fastest No Bank Toad." I propose that we use the same system for Paper Mario. You're still able to compete amongst people who want to use the old route, and show who is the fastest using that system, but it doesn't take away from the current any%. After talking to Sabby, the general consesus is that some of the runners want to compete for a "best time" and could care less about the WR. If that's the case, this solution should be fair, as you're still able to compare these times among yourselves, without making things even more arbitrary.

One of the things we need to think about is the arrival of Leaderboards. From what I've seen they are thinking about having a Ranking system of the categories. Meaning there will be A Rank categories, which are the main categories, B rank which are not as respected but still fun, and C rank which are more race categories. The A Ranks will be shown on top, while everything else will be toggled. If we were to go ahead and make Any% No PW, where does it fall. Currently, I'd rank it behind Any% and All Cards, as it's a slight change to the any% category, and way more arbitrary than All Cards.

3. We are too small of a community to create another category

At the end of the day, we already have a very small community in comparison to games such as Lttp, Oot, and SM, games that have multiple categories with a lot of competition. One of the reasons why OoT NO RBA, NO WW exists in OOT, and most recently with LTTP  All Dungeons NO OOB, NO SnQ, NO YBA actually can warrant these changes is that the amount of people running those games is really really big. I really seeing this category dying out within a few months when the current runners get bored of the game, and move on naturally to other games. Where does that leave us? We have 3 categories with little to no competition, and a very unoptimized any%. If I'm a new person joining the community. Instead of choosing between 2 competitive communities, I have to choose between 3 not as competitve categories. People are arguing that if we don't make a new category, the game will die. While the game is becoming less and less run, I don't think this solves anything. I stopped running the game because I ran it for 2 years, and had nothing to do with the new things that came about. I've still yet to finish a run in All Cards w/ the new stuff, which I think are really cool. But if I was still passionate about the game, the new tricks in any% would make me more likely to run the category, as i felt the original any% was super boring.

At the end of the day, Im not going to make a big fuss about what the community decides, as I've mostly moved on, but still play the game from time to time. But for a game that I put a lot of time into, I'd hate for decisions to be rushed about something as important as a category, that generally is hard to change years down the road.