As it stands, the only categories for The Wind Waker are Any% and 100%. This is quite a shame to only inhibit runners of the game to these categories.
I am suggesting two new categories to be on the official ZSR leaderboards;
Low% and
Glitchless. Both of which have been seeing some attention recently, despite the fact there is no proper leaderboard (Heck, theres even an official Low% route on the TWW info page
http://zeldaspeedruns.com/tww/Routes/low).
The common debate about adding new categories would be; "No one runs this. Why would anyone run it now ". In response, I would say that you couldn't know for sure unless you try adding it (you can always remove it if it doesn't receive much attention). Also, the major reason not many people run low% or glitchless% is there is no official leaderboard to compete times with in the first place.
I am in favor in adding new categories to keep competition fresh and reinvigorate excitement to the TWW community. For such a diverse game as TWW, we should provide more options for runners to play and compete for times.
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In addition to the aforementioned, I am also in favor in somehow bringing attention to other shorter goals within TWW.
A few years ago TWW had a "Master Sword" leaderboard. This was wildly popular, with a lot of submitted times. It was popular for a reason, and in my opinion, it might have been a mistake removing it.
Let's face it, The Wind Waker is a volatile, hard, and long game. The amount of hours required to become competitive in any% is quite significant. A few glitches, most notably 'zombie hovering' are major hinderances to many people attempting to learn this beautiful and rewarding game.
The most significant of these concerns of mine is
time. There are countless people I have talked to claiming they wished they could run this game, but they simply don't have the time to compete in even the
shortest category, which is on average
over 6 hours when you first do runs. Heck, I stopped running any% because I simply don't have enough time to run this game while trying to balance college/real life, and speedrunning. It's so frustrating to not be able to play your favorite game because there aren't enough options of play on the ZSR leaderboards.
This is so incredibly disheartening. There is nothing more I could hope for than to see The Wind Waker be a highly competitive game, with hundreds of submitted times.
There is a huge fan base out there ready to pick up the game, all we have to do is provide them with options that are more reasonable than the ones we currently provide.
There are amazing 'alternate' categories for The Wind Waker that don't complete the game, but have the potential to be highly competitive.
- The Master Sword - Obtain the Master Sword by pulling it from the pedestal in Hyrule (already highly popular on speedrunslive)
- The Master Sword (glitchless) - This is the most popular category run in Japan
- The True Master Sword - Obtain the True Master Sword by completing Wind Temple (http://pastebin.com/DxB2bZ2t)
- Earth Temple RTA
- Individual levels - 100% and any% for each dungeon
This list doesn't end here, there are plenty of more awesome way to speedrun this game that have so much potential.
These are short, fun, and easier to pick up categories that have the potential to bring a large competition base to the community.
With more people learning and playing the game, also means more people learning the 'Big Boy' categories: Any%, 100%, and maybe low%/glitchless too?
hint hint 
Now of course these categories should be considered on a lower level than the true categories of the game. Which is why I'm considering is this:
We already have an excellent page that records individual levels (see here:
http://zeldaspeedruns.com/tww/Speedruns/individual-levels). Why not clean this page up so that videos/comments can be linked. In addition, I am in favor of providing a link to this page from the leaderboards tab. So when you pull the tab down to look at the route options from the main TWW leaderboards page, it would look like the following:
This way, the main categories will still be the priority, however, the alternate categories are able to be directly accessed from the main page. This would significantly increase traffic to these categories, and hopefully spark competition to them.
I understand that these categories do not complete the game. But on behalf of myself and many others:
I'm a speedrunner, can I just go fast?Discuss.
