Mega Man X6

Over the past week the Mega Man X6 leaderboard on Speedrun.com has underwent an extreme change for the worse. The leaderboard went from having 3 categories, to having 17, and top times for each category were removed. This is due to extremely poor communication and poor moderation. I was a moderator for this game for about a year, and was unmodded without any notice or reason and replaced with people who are responsible for destroying a community, whether or not it was intentional. What followed this incident is exactly what happened when Joka's MMRTA leaderboard was destroyed. People quit using the website and just abandoned hope for any sort of leaderboard. Changes are not for the better when you have people deleting their accounts on a website, and disassociating themselves with speed running as a whole. Whether or not the changes were necessary, they were not handled properly, and because of this an entire community was completely shattered and nearly destroyed.

Back when I started running this game, there was no community. It was just me and Luiz doing races every now and then, and then eventually he stopped playing and it was just me for about a year. Over that year I completely re-routed the game, found minutes worth of new strategies, and created several tutorials to get people into the game, which worked. Now there are people running this game almost daily and that makes me happier than you could possibly know. However, these people all like to play on different versions of the game. (Japanese PS1, American PS1, PS1 game on PS2, X Collection PS2, X Collection GC, X Collection Emulator, etc) and these versions are not at all directly comparable in a real time scenario. This became more and more prevalent as time went on. A Change needed to happen, but the solution was not and is not 17 categories. Completely banning and removing times that are and have been established world records is a completely vile act, especially since the emulator "advantage" is literally just loading, which can be timed out or removed from comparisons with the simple click of a button. To claim that all my speed runs are not legitimate because I have faster loading times is both extremely disrespectful, and whole-heartedly disingenuous.  The usage of the in-game timer might not be the best and most accurate comparison, but it certainly beats having 6 categories for the same exact speed run. It lets everyone's runs be on the most equal possible playing field, and it lets everyone have a fair chance at getting a top time regardless of their preferred version.

The main stance against the usage of the in-game timer is that it can be "manipulated". That is not true. You can do certain things that would save more time in game, than in RTA, yes, but there is no manipulation or inaccuracy involved in this comparison method. The only difference would be (if someone ACTUALLY wanted to do this, that is) pause cancelling in Ground Scaravich and Blaze Heatnix, that would ultimately save something like 2 or 3 seconds (in game time, losing about 5 or 6 RTA). This can be easily deterred by having a clear statement that states something like this: "In-game time specific strategies are discouraged as they make comparisons less fair".
Is this arbitrary? Sure, but it is a helluva lot less arbitrary than the current system. It would allow all 17 categories to be merged back into 3, and it would also allow all versions to be treated equally.

The point of this board's destruction was based on equal playing fields, yet ironically it crushed that notion into dust, and created a major rift in the community. A rift that may not be fixable, but I want to try. I have no hard feelings toward Izrail, Zewing, or even Orsa, all they did was try to fix a problem, and I hope we can all agree on the fact that the problem was not fixed, it was only made worse. I'm happy that people are interested in the game, now more than ever, and I feel like the past week's events should be errated in favor of an all-inclusive system, rather than an extremely-exclusive one.