JHobz's thoughts on "Glitchless"

So Vula asked a question earlier that I think is worth answering from my perspective.
```earlier I said the original motivation for glitchless was basically "I wanted to play all skills, sans the constant menuing bullshit for cutscene skips via SA, and all the annoying route-specific tricks, but instead boil it down more to movement and skills"
given that, what are your own goals for this category (glitchless) or for a category similar to this category? what would you like to get out of your speedrun of such a category?
basically, what's the experience of ori that you think is worth creating?```
For me, I saw glitchless as a way to start speedrunning the game without concerning myself with a lot of specific tricks and glitches. I specifically needed to learn the game quickly, so all I did was learn the very basics of a map and experience route and then just tried to go from point A to point B to point C as quickly as I could. My first runs of glitchless didn't even include sorrow bash; I went and did all of Misty & Forlorn for a few runs. As I continued on and learned the "proper" route, I enjoyed learning the tricks (SB included), but I definitely felt the pace of the run was sacrificed, to a degree. With all 3 dungeons, the game has a pretty nice pacing; quickly move from point A to dungeon entrance, slow down a bit to complete the more puzzly dungeon (ginso being the least egregious case), conclude with a fast-paced escape to really show off the movement again, and then repeat, moving quickly to the next dungeon entrance. After learning SB, I felt the run became "keep moving fast for most of the game, then come to a slooow bogged down conclusion with mount horu." It wasn't until learning All Skills that I was really able to realize that that was the frustration I had with the category. Many people mentioned worries of it becoming too similar to All Skills, but from a pacing and map traversal perspective, I feel it's already basically that way until the end of the run, except with the pacing just tuned a bit slower. 0 XP entices as a more intended route through the game, but the extra challenges added didn't really interest me. So I guess with that background, my thoughts can be summarized below:

- I've never found the Kuro cutscene skip to be a problem because I always liked to apply the question "would a casual player notice and identify this behavior as glitchy if they stumbled across it during their play?" to these kinds of discussions. For example, double bashing is pretty clearly a weird play experience that casuals run into and can be easily identified as a glitch, same with cdashing through an instant-kill laser. With Kuro CS, a casual player would have no idea they did anything weird; unless they knew to expect a cutscene, it would simply appear as if they just bashed normally. *That being said,* if the goal is to simply strip glitchless down to its "purest" form, which appears to be the intention from the current proposed changes (most notably the banning of stomping breakable walls), then I'd agree it should be removed. (Side note: I'd be very curious to see if the stomping of breakable walls is intentionally in the code akin to cdash stomp refunds, or if it's a by-product of some Damage event/action/type that is reused by all AoE effects.)
- Through the same logic, I don't find it reasonable to allow luring/bashing enemies onto dangerous ground w/o them taking damage. Not because of any specific sequence break that this enables, but because I find that to be a very weird line to draw. If no enemies took damage from nearby hazards, that'd be one thing, but many enemies very obviously die to spikes that others don't.

With all of the changes made to Glitchless, the discussion of NMG vs. Glitchless vs. Intended, and my own coincidentally recent thoughts on other category ideas, I'd like to propose an alternative to Glitchless Any%: "All Skills, All Dungeons, No Major Glitches." This category would hopefully follow some of the same spirit of 0 XP without the challenge restrictions. It would certainly be moving the goalposts a bit, but I don't consider that to be a bad thing. It also manages to circumvent the "well, what's 'intended'?" problem that a category defined as "Intended" would run into. The list of glitches I would consider major (and thus be banned) are as follows:
- Save Anywhere
- Having any object travel out of bounds, including both Ori and other objects/enemies.
- Any form of warp/teleportation from anywhere other than a Spirit Well. This would include things like TA and FT, but also Fast Stompless, save drops, door warps, and warps during cutscene placements (e.g. warping back to Horu entrance during a lava cutscene or Ginso core explosion). Some of these are already covered by banning SA & OoB, but it more explicitly bans what is "major" about them in particular should alternative methods be discovered in the future. I'm iffy on the Ginso core explosion one, but I think it follows the same logic as the others so I can't think of a reasonable exception.
- Using rekindle during a cutscene (or, more precisely, saving and reloading after rekindling during a cutscene).
- Circumventing the game's speed cap. This includes rocket jumps, grenade jumps, and hyperspeed, but specifically does *not* include bash gliding, dash gliding, air dash gliding, and bash->air dash gliding. This is probably the rule with the shakiest definition and could probably be iterated on a bit to be more explicit.
- Using bash, dash, or charge dash to pass through an instant-kill plane (lasers, lava, etc.).
- Double bashes. While I don't consider them major in their own right, their ability to potentially carry an object with no health bar to virtually any location in the game I think warrants the justification.
- Keystone duplication. Similar to double bashes, while this glitch is not especially "major" in isolation, the ability to effectively circumvent the requirement of every single keystone door in the game is a pretty major edge case.
- Perfect bashes (this is mainly here just in case of a future TAS).

Glitches that would be allowed:
- Ghost doors
- Using bash, dash, or charge dash to pass through a cutscene trigger (Kuro cutscene skip).
- Bashing through the crack in Sorrow.
- Luring/manipulating enemies onto dangerous ground that does not harm them.
- Stomping the right sides of breakable walls in order to circumvent Charge Flame/Light Grenade.
- Bashing any object/enemy during a cutscene.

Another reasonable category idea could be "All Skills, All Dungeons, Glitchless" in which case you would simply merge the second list into the first, banning all of it. I'm not sure which would be more interesting, but I listed NMG first since I wanted to give my thoughts on the distinctions between minor and major glitches. Either way, I would propose for this category to ***replace*** the existing "Glitchless Any%," archiving the old category in some way.

I'm sure I forgot some stuff, so let me know and I'll edit this pastebin as needed.