New (Old) Category Idea: No Major Skips

It's something that a few people have been discussing, and I said I'd help get a more discussion going on this. So here we go.

A short history: Long ago the #zelda community was on SpeedDemosArchive.com, and originally we had a category called No Major Skips. Around the time when ZSR was first formed back in '09, Cosmo and others pushed for the No Major Skips category to be renamed as MST for Medals, Stones, and Trials, as these were the most obvious core goals to the route back then. In doing so, the No Major Skips mentality was lost in favor of this new mentality that the only things that mattered were the three things in the category name. Since then, we have discovered a number of tricks that would probably not be allowed had we kept the old NMS name.

The question now is, what would a No Major Skips category be?

My only concern atm is that a No Major Skips category will end up being too much like MST or Glitchless.

Lastly, MM could probably use a No Major Skips more than OoT.

You're right, it would be too much like MST or glitchless. Many people thought no im/ww should've been called NMS (which I still to this day think would be a good idea, but I digress)

However, if it were a thing, no dot skip, rba/gim/ww. Where it goes from there I have no idea.

Already posted this in the SDA thread but I'll copy and paste it here for convenience's sake:

I don't have much investment in it since I don't really run Ocarina of Time (I'm more of a Majora's Mask/Twilight Princess guy myself) but I do know stuff about the game and I figured I'd weigh in on some of the stuff I think should count as "large-skip glitches":

1. Out of bounds glitches. Historically, the whole reason why the Ganon trials are part of NMS is because the original trials skip method was a clip through a wall into an unloaded room (a borderline violation of the old Radix rule about no out of bounds) to skip the entire lower area of the castle and go directly to the tower. By this same logic, all the boss key skips should be banned in NMS as well - they use clips through walls to skip the main dungeon and go directly to the boss. This is most egregious in the Water Temple, where you can enter the temple and go directly to the boss without doing *anything* except hoversliding to the boss door and clipping through it. Why is trials skip banned but not boss key skips? I don't know if "no out of bounds" is the best way to go about doing this, but I think *something* should be in place to get rid of the boss key skips, even if only for the sake of consistency. Additionally, going out of bounds allows you to bypass the Door of Time and go directly to the master sword, potentially skipping the entire child section of the game. Although you do have to do the child dungeons anyway as part of the definition of the category, Door of Time skip is probably the #1 thing that is allowed in No Major Skips that people say should be considered a major skip.

2. Wrong Warp. The reasoning behind banning RBA in NMS was that RBA has the potential to completely break the game open and skip every single dungeon. By this logic, Wrong Warp should be banned too - it lets you warp directly from the Deku Tree to Ganon's Castle and skip the entire game, and indeed the current MST route does in fact warp to Ganon's Castle near the very beginning of the run (although it doesn't actually fight Ganon until much later). If warping to the final dungeon within the first 15 minutes of the run isn't a "large-skip glitch", then I don't know what is.

3. Get Item Manipulation. This is an absurd glitch that lets you get the Light Arrows from the Deku Tree as a child, making getting all of the medallions completely arbitrary. This is probably even more broken than RBA, especially because of how bizarre it is (and the fact that it ONLY works on the GameCube and Virtual Console versions of the game - on all other versions it crashes).

Those are the ones that come to mind right now; others may be able to think of others.

One idea that I had was MST No IM/WW/OoB, but the thing is how would we define OoB? What should count and what shouldn't? Also, skipping the nocturne of shadow would allow you to skip the first three adult dungeons, so would the shadow temple seamwalk be forbidden as well?

Another idea: instead of banning tricks alltogether, we could require certain objectives that, if skipped, would allow you to skip dungeons. For example: not only require beating the dungeons and trials, but also require opening the door of time, learning the nocturne of shadow, physically collecting the light arrows, etc.

I'm definitely on Apasher's boat when it comes to the definition at least. From an objective perspective, the way that glitch development has progressed at least over the last couple years, the definitions for categories have gotten somewhat unstable, so we've ended up just making new categories to fit the routes we liked. If we're going to craft a new category definition, it should be based on a positively framed goal list that would stand even if new glitches were found to circumvent them. For NMS, my thought is that it would include:

- Collect the Ocarina of Time from Zelda
- Collect the major item, boss key, and medallion/stone from every dungeon
- Complete the trials
- Defeat both Ganondorf and Ganon

What gets tricky is when it may be faster to both SKIP the goals and NOT skip them later on. This is true for MST now, where we technically break the original category definition ("you can not skip the trials") within the first 15 minutes of the run, then go back to 'not skip it' later on. I'm not sure if this would come into play with my above definition, but it's something to think about. Whether you define a category positively or negatively though, you'll always run into that in some capacity; for me, the benefits of a positive definition weigh out its detractions.

This sounds like a good idea. With more and more tech being discovered, it would be nice to have a category that forgoes any major glitches or skips. Don't get me wrong, the glitches are the main reason I find this game interesting, but OoT has a lot of other cool stuff to offer that is often skipped in most categories.

I also like the idea of including no OoB, but I'm not quite sure which definition we would use. Is OoB defined as clipping through an object/geometry, or escaping the volume contained by the level's geometry?

Also, should hovering be allowed? It could be seen as a way of cheating the level's design, ascending to places in an unintended manner. Would this count as a skip? An immediate example that pops in to my head would be the Spirit Temple hover to get the mirror shield early.

Overall, I think is good stuff, but I think we need to think about precisely what defines a "Major Skip", and which of the game's tricks and glitches could be categorised as such.

My proposed ruleset: http://pastebin.com/wQGj4maK

Thoughts?

Sounds good to me so far, but I still feel like certain things are missing. For example, the Water Temple is still only around a minute long. You enter 2 rooms and then immediately skip to the boss. Shouldn't that be counted as a major skip? I feel like boss key skips and trials skip both fall under this idea of "de facto dungeon skips".

So more like "Natural dungeon order"?

New (much simpler) proposed rule set: http://pastebin.com/4n5YCR1A

I remember a stream zfg did back in 2014 when he watched yautjaelder's 100% run in 6:35, in the middle of it he talked about a 'any% no tricks after 2010' potential category. This seemed kind of like this 'no major skips' category, and i dont know if some of the tricks from that run could be helpful to this run.
Also i would like to ask whether skipping major portions of a dungeon would count as a 'major skip', like the bk skip in forest temple skips everything including the bow. Also like ing said WT bk skip is pretty dumb, because all we need to do is hoverslide (or something else since getting hoverboots before WT could be a major skip) to get to the boss door and then skip it with a hover.

I should add 'any% no tricks after 2010' to my meme category ideas list  :D

I sent a poll out on Twitter and #zelda, and the majority vote resulted into this ruleset. http://pastebin.com/nCp8Et2T

The general idea of this ruleset was to ban skips, instead of glitches as a whole. It was a new idea I recently thought of, and I thought that a restriction-oriented definition like this would work better for OoT's nature in terms of stability. Of course, it wouldn't be as stable as a goal-oriented category, but I feel like it'll be more stable than No IM/WW, which gets broken almost every time a new trick gets found.