It has come to my attention that Route 101 and Route 280 share the same "rings respawn after 1 minute" mechanic with the kart races.? This has drastic ramifications on those levels' ring charts, obviously.
Relevant facts:
-TSC rules generally dislike any allowance for collecting respawned anything under the virtue of not wanting to have obviously maxed (999) stats, or stats that completely obliterate anything that was possible without abusing the respawning
-The only levels affected by this are intrinsically reined in by time limits (3:40 R101 and 4:00 R280) which allows for at most one respawn cycle
-SA2's save file doesn't even keep track of best rings in kart stages, nor is the total shown in the blue box on level complete (it's only shown, de-emphasized, in the HUD at the corner), and there's no out-of total or all-ring A (well, there is an all-ring A on mission 6, but that's another story)
-It's worth noting that Hill Top in Sonic 2 has a respawning rock mechanic that's deliberately passed over by the rules on the grounds that the 10:00 time limit isn't enough time for scalping rocks to be anywhere close to the amount of points obtainable by "traditional" means
-Unlike Hill Top, use of respawning rings here will by definition be better than what's available without those rings, but there's still competition to be had, and clearly no hope at 999 or other easily maxed counts
-This would provide an extra element of strategy to the level, making its idealized form "What is the best point for me to turn around and drive backwards for 30 seconds, so I can pick up the newly-respawned rings and continue on for the rest of the level?" Note that such decisions have to be made on top of running the level in what would be a 2:40 clip, and without dropping excessive rings to boot
-Because GameCube has a sense of randomness (balloons on Dreamcast are worth a fixed 10 or a fixed 20; on GC they're whatever the DC value is plus an additional 5, 10, or 20 chosen at random), if this technique is to be allowed, the level will most probably become unmaxable on GameCube, as the odds of getting all random 20s are currently 1-in-243; with this route they'd drop most likely to 1-in-2187, and you still you to be able to run the longest section of backtrack possible that provides just barely enough time to reach the finish before time over, and do all that without missing a single ring
-Additionally, if this is allowed then it's worth considering whether kart stage mission 5 rings should be split off.? The decreased time limits (2:50 R101 and 3:25 R280) prevent even one iteration of respawning rings from being able to materialize, leading to a more "pure" ring chart that plays like the levels always have in the past.
With this is mind, what should we do?? Allow respawning rings on the ring charts (with or without spinning off m5 charts), institute a rule to nip this in the bud, or just drop the charts entirely because rings were never emphasized on those levels except as boost food, and this brings it closer to some undefined and arbitrary "dumbness threshold"?
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RULING: This tactic is allowed. However, it hasn't been applied on the charts yet because apparently it's pretty tricky.