Good point about allowing people to choose difficulty, never thought about it like that. I guess the reason I suggested separating difficulty before is because people would complain that their Hard difficulty run wasn’t comparable to someone else’s faster run that was done on Easy, but in the case that you’re given a choice we could say that it’s the player’s responsibility if they deliberately decided to make it slower for themselves.
Though I’d imagine this would still be a problem in WON, where 41 people have performed their runs on Hard simply because the category only allowed that difficulty before, so if someone was to submit a run on Easy that beats the world record (or for that matter, any run that used Hard difficulty) then there would probably be complaints by many.
EDIT: Moving related stuff from difficulty changing thread here.
This is something I’m struggling to make my mind up about. Hard is mainly a tradition (even the first OP4RTA and BSSS runs were done on Hard but because nobody else did runs I decided to do what I thought made the most sense) in that people just copied what the old schoolers did and didn’t know any better. Now we have 41 submitted runs on Hard difficulty and this category is the standard right now despite Easy being the fastest (not to mention this version is also not the fastest, though I understand the appeal for uncapped bunnyhop).
When I look at it from a technical standpoint, it probably makes more sense just to establish WON/Easy as the default WON category. We could consider the WON/Hard category from now on as a sort of “Legacy” category (sort of like in Portal when save glitch came into play) and just make Easy the default for everything else (assuming that changing skill mid run isn’t allowed).
I’ve noticed alot of people suggesting fairness is the reason for the 100fps limit, but this is more of a convenient bonus rather than the actual reason for it. The reason the 100fps limit rule is in place is because the original WON engine was capped to 100fps, so in order to make using the DLLs in a different client actually legitimate we basically “pretend” that the limit is still there.
Then of course it is possible to have unlimited FPS in the actual Steam version, which is unfair but as discussed in this thread there isn’t really a way to set a limit without arbitrarily putting the version at a disadvantage against WON, so it’s just something that we have to deal with.
As for what I’ll call “modded” categories (i.e removing the bhop cap from Steam or uncapping the FPS in WON etc), I wouldn’t support adding these to the main leaderboards because they’re not possible without modifying the game, though I wouldn’t be against adding them to the mods section where Big Lolly is if there was actually a demand for them.