[F-Man]

I might not have said anything back in the day, but now I will. There's a weird insistence that people seem to have with just tricking the timer and whatever lowest value you get is acceptable even if it's not really the fastest. People figured out that the timer in Chaos 0 starts later in adventure mode, allowing you to get a better time (that doesn't get saved to your Trial charts no less) even though you're not using the real fastest strategy. What's the point? Why limit the strategy by not having the light speed dash and do it an actually slower way? This is when you should have a rule for such instances. Keep it about being fun. About finding and using the fastest strategy, not about figuring out that adventure mode calculates time differently.

Now there's a new strat in Casinopolis to completely freeze time by talking to a hint monitor. So it's no longer about finishing the stage as fast and possible, but just how fast you talk to this monitor that's right next to you. Sure, there's some skill involved in that too, but I find the whole concept of limiting the scope of a challenge this way inane.

When I discovered how to get to a new capsule right at the start of Final Egg, I was disappointed that the stage got so much shorter, but I accepted it because it was still about completing the stage as fast as possible. It wasn't about playing with the timer. When it was discovered how to skip the snowboard in Ice Cap, which let's you finish the stage with the timer frozen, it felt weird, but I accepted it because the frozen timer was a direct result of using a huge shortcut that really does make you finish the stage in record time. Like topic title says, the fun of time attack is all about finishing fastest. If you trick the timer in the process, then so be it, but when doing so means it's no longer about finishing a stage in record time, but only about an on-screen timer, then that's when it's time to consider establishing a rule.

[DarkPolarNight]

To me, everything you've said in your post F-Man, I couldn't agree with more.

Having done Adv.Mode bosses on adv.mode, it is rather tedious not being able to instant restart. Resetting+arriving to the same spot - especially as Big was annoying as hell. Big is slow and requires the monorail to reach C6, and C6 is mostly an RNG boss which sees most of your attempts over within seconds, so a 2-3min wait per attempts makes this very boring to do. Should this have been trial mode only, this wouldn't be so bad.

As for Casinopolis and Twinkle Park's Monitor DC glitch.....its a cool trick. It really is. But in terms of competition, it absolutely ruins the stage. That is not speedrunning. Once that monitor stops that timer, your merely beating the level, not actually speedrunning it.

It may be too late to enforce a "trial mode" rule. I can see that messing with the charts. But I definetly think a rule should be in place for the DC-monitor glitch, at the very least - as that can't even be called a speedrun. Its destroyed the real top time for 2 of the sonic levels, and this one isn't too late to change. I would be cool with it still running, but under "freestyle".

[F-Man]

Yeah, it's now come to my attention that all (or most?) bosses suffer from this, which is ridiculous that people were even okay with it in the first place. I assume that the only reason it's come to pass with so many people doing it is that it seemed that like an easy way to get records or good times, and people loved that. There's a bunch of stats in bosses with comments saying how happy they are because of how easy it was or that they got such a good time with only one try. But all that fun can't last forever and eventually it becomes harder and harder to get good times doing this, requiring to start a whole segment of a game over and over again, which is even worse if you've got no way to play with save files. And all this for what? The bosses play the same, it's just the timer that begins at a different time. It doesn't add more challenge to the boss itself. It's plain ridiculous.

Back when I stopped competing, no one was doing this, except for a very few who started catching on with Chaos 0. It might not be so hard to find and nuke all those stats.

[DarkPolarNight]

There are 5 bosses in which have a clear advantage in adv.mode: (Chaos 0, Chaos 2, and all three Chaos 6's). Time difference I believe or just over 4 seconds. (4.2? 4.3?) Thankfully, the rest of the bosses (excluding Perfect Chaos) can still be done on trial mode.

I believe we may already be reached the point you mentioned, where competition in those respective bosses have become past the point of fun....and become hard enough to get a good time. I'm going to take Chaos 2, as an example. This boss has now become to the point where losing frames from the frame perfect time (set by multiple people), very quickly drops you places. To reach "red" on that boss, you have to four-hit him now. I can tell you that my experience of that boss was not fun. My curret PB is 0.07 from the WR, costing me a lot of points and after setting that I took an hour trying to tie the record, or hit the time one frame off it, but ultimately failed. Admittedly, I dislike C2 anyway, but having to do that through adv.mode made this extremely unenjoyable. I wouldn't be surprised if other players found the same.

I think Trial-mode only should have been enforced from the beginning, to have eliminated that issue, but I think it'll be too hard to differentiate those that used it, to those that haven't - at present.  Some players that have used adv.mode haven't necessarily beaten the top trial times, so there isn't a clear differentiation of who has used it and who hasn't (like there is for the monitor glitch).