I think the site would greatly benefit from having an overall IL performance leaderboard.
Much of my experience comes from the Celeste CLASSIC (celestep8) community, but I frequently see negative mentalities toward ILs that I can only imagine exist on a much more widespread scale. People neglect to put time into ILs, even if they would otherwise enjoy the activity, for various reasons, such as:
- Not considering their time to be worth submitting. Maybe it's easy to tie for first place in the first few levels of a game, it'd be pretty reasonable to conclude that nobody is going to gleen any useful information about your skill level seeing your name on the leaderboard, if they even see your name at all.
- A lack of reason to play an IL to begin with. Some games have a large number of IL boards, and they're usually not what people come to look at anyway to begin with. What incentive do you have to grind level 54?
- Seeing ILs as more of a perfectionist game; wanting to tie or bop first place or not play at all. ILs, at least for smaller games, have generally smaller leaderboards than full runs so it's easy to fall into a mindset that your third place doesn't actually matter in the grand scheme of things, especially when the "view all" IL page only shows records.
- Not wanting to be that one guy that actually submitted a "bad" time to an IL.
An Overall IL Performance leaderboard would aim to solve a large quantity of these issues. The philosophy is that by giving each IL value towards some greater leaderboard we can encourage submitting all times, provide a placement with more visibility, giving worth to "worthless" times, and ultimately break down as many barriers of participation as we can. Of course, people will always grind ILs for the personal reasons they do now, or enjoy the way current leaderboards work, but providing additional and unique on-site motivation can help get more people involved in an admittedly often dismissed aspect of speedrunning.
So how would it work? Obviously, the specifics can be tinkered however people see fit, but the way I personally envision it is quite simple and, in my opinon, intuitive. First and foremost add a new option under the Level Leaderboard submenu labelled "Overall":
This would lead to a familiar looking leaderboard, it would be formatted more or less identically to every other leaderboard on the site, but with a couple key differences. First, and foremost, people are ranked by their "Overall Rank", which you can think of as the sum of all of their IL placements minus the total number of ILs, effectively measuring how far they are from a perfect sweep. Should a time be unsubmitted, consider them tied for worse than last place. Secondly, instead of a date of submission you'd simply list the time of their last improvement. Here's an example board, note that this data is not actually intended to be accurate.
Finally, if you were to click on anybody's placement on the overall leaderboard, instead of taking you to a video page like you would normally do, since this wouldn't make much sense, you'd link to a summary page of their IL placements. This would simply be a table formatted like the one you already find on individual level pages of user profiles. Maybe replace the game logo with something else, though.
But of course, proving the worth of the feature isn't the only thing we need to cover to convince you to put any amount of dev time into something like this, we also need to briefly touch on why this is important for speedrun.com itself to implement. I won't spend too much time on this, but to summarize, this is a statistic that is frankly quite cumbersome to keep track of on a community level. The large amount of ILs on many boards, the magnitude of interaction improvement or submitting for the first time has on everybody else, and the rapid nature submitting to short ILs can have makes it a lot of work to document. Additionally, this is an ideal way to summarize IL player's performances relative to eachother. I would argue the information this presents, in tangent with the "view all" option, makes it much easier for the casual onlooker to parse IL information all at once.
And yeah, that's all I got. I don't really see any cons to a feature like this, but I see many potential benefits. At absolute worst it will make ILs appealing to a larger group of people, and that's all we really want to achieve with such a feature. Thanks for reading my proposal.