There's been a few rule changes over the last few months. Most of these have been announced on
the TSC Twitter, but if you've missed those then here's a quick list of what's been updated.
General: The original game and all its contents must be preserved and unmodified.
Sonic Generations: Modifications of any kind, including cosmetic mods, are disallowed.This rule should have been a no-brainer, but cosmetic Sonic Generations mods were generally overlooked, as they didn't have an effect on gameplay. However, it was recently found that a few "cosmetic" mods
did have a small impact on gameplay that gave an advantage to players running mods. To that end, on top of the general rule, mods are explicitly banned again under the Sonic Generations rules, as that's where most of the issues were.
Even though this was mostly an issue with Generations, the rule applies to all games. Play the vanilla version.
As a side note - if you guys see any stats on the Sonic Generations charts that are in violation of this rule, let us know and we'll take care of it.
General: Any game running on a PC or emulator must perform at full speed while playing the game you're submitting for (60 FPS in most cases). The exception is if lag is caused by the game, rather than by bad hardware or emulation.This is to prevent players from being able to slow down the game akin to using the slowdown function on an emulator and gain an advantage over players running the game at full speed. The rule is largely intended to combat bad hardware or bad emulation, though, so it only applies to PC games, and there's an exception for lag caused by in-game bugs.
Sonic Heroes: Use of the Team Blast Glitch -- switching characters while simultaneously using Thunder Shoot to rapidly fill the Team Blast gauge -- is forbidden for all Team Dark charts except Rings.The Team Blast Glitch was previously banned for all charts except Chaotix Rings. This rule was somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent with our other rules, so it was removed. TBG is still banned for Team Dark charts, though, as it breaks every level excessively to the point of reducing them to TBGing over and over.
Sonic Generations: In Speed Highway, resetting a bell to make it dispense more rings than it should is not allowed.This is a ring scalping bug that allowed you to collect infinite rings in Speed Highway that was largely forgotten about until recently; it's banned now.
That should sum it all up - now go submit some stats :P