TLK categories

Hi. Welcome to The Lion King Leaderboards! :)
I'm a moderator for TLK speedrun leaderboard and I saw your question about the XXXXX category.

First of all, please keep in mind this leaderboard exists since +4 years so pretty much all ideas about categories have already been considered. This includes "all bugs%", "upside down%", "invincible", "frameskip", "blindfolded", "MS-DOS version" and other silly ideas that I'd rather not mention. This includes all 3 difficulty settings and individual levels of the game.

Now, when non-runners (or new runners) visit the TLK leaderboard, I want it to be as simple as possible to understand what is going on, because the LB is not only made for the dedicated runners of the game. Adding more categories is not always good. Even when TLK is a game with a small community of runners compared to other games with +100 runners in the main category, and it should be considered a "just for fun" speedrun, I like to keep it relatively serious when it comes to categories. I've been around since the SDA days, before this website was even created, and I've seen a ton of ridiculous stuff regarding categories in the leaderboards of various games.

Sadly, there are some people that want to create more categories just to have an easy WR. Even I have done this in the past haha. And this happens in all types of games in speedrun.com. In the case of TLK, honestly, "Easy" and "Difficult" is all I think we need. Everything else should go to misc categories unless someday a new trick breaks the game so much that a "no major glitches" category truly becomes a necessity... or something like that. But I don't see this happening in the near future.

Easy is the "fast" category, as it's faster to kill the hyenas. Difficult is the "swag" category and it's also the preferred choice when playing in marathons/races due to the added tension and risk to dying in the early levels and getting a Game Over. This seems to be more entertaining for the casual viewer (and that is very important!). Normal on the other hand is not faster and not risky, so it's kind of pointless.

This doesn't mean you "cannot" do a speedrun of any category that you want. You can record your run and upload it on your personal channel (or even post it on the forum!) so you can claim to be the first to do it. Maybe you can get a lot of people interested in your category and it could be added to the leaderboard!

Frankly, I'd rather have people competing and getting better in the main categories of this game that creating a new one just to have 1-2 people posting a run and never coming back to it again. So please, pretty please, let's just keep the leaderboard simple :)