secondadvent

Honestly, if you did exactly what you did with BNW to vanilla, I'd expect similar responses to what you got here. Doing a blind challenge run as your first playthrough while expecting a different game/to know everything you need already, causing you to break your challenge rules and complain every time something popped up that didn't match what you thought would happen, and then getting mad at everybody that points out your mistakes is kind of an easy way to get people on your bad side. Especially when people have to repeat themselves because you obviously missed the point the first five times it was said, or twisted it to mean something else. I mean, I found this whole ordeal pretty hilarious at first, but now it's getting pretty sad that you keep trying to argue everything/make us look bad. If my first visit to NG+ found your NRB post, I still would have laughed at how much of a fool you were making of yourself, even if I never played BNW. Vanilla is a square hole and BNW is a circular hole, but yet you keep doing this and bitching that it's not fitting:

Really, the primary issues people have here (other than how highly you seem to think of yourself) is that you effectively cheated/broke the rules in your own challenge (while still making a big deal out of having done the challenge), complained about things you didn't test/look into beforehand and then made "corrections" for, and completely missed the point of pretty much everything that's been said. I don't care what the challenge you're doing is, how hard it is or how long it takes to do, if you break any of the challenge rules then the challenge is forfeit. Emulator frameskip/turbo/whatever is generally accepted for challenge runs (outside of things like speedruns, where it goes against and would only hurt the challenge anyway), and I can also see adding QoL mods/codes that don't directly affect the challenge itself, but anything that breaks the rules or gives you a direct advantage is a big nope. You've already admitted to cheating, with your excuses for doing so primarily consisting of "I should have free levels here because I got them in vanilla." instead of actually learning how to do the challenge properly inside of BNW's environment. As far as the whole "not having done a normal run first" issue, I can see doing a challenge run as your first playthrough if you actually test out each segment and mechanic separately and then reloading the challenge save after to actually do it. In basically every challenge run I've ever done I needed to go through certain battles/areas multiple times as well as test out several combinations of gear/mechanics to make it through certain parts, and some challenges basically require knowing the game inside and out to properly plan out and successfully run. For example, the SP cap you keep bitching about is something you could have very easily found if you spent time testing it rather than expecting it to work in whatever way you had in your mind. If you can't be bothered to take time to do this, then you really can't complain when something unexpected happens. Even if you never did a normal BNW run, you could see how much experience you get from specific things by spending short bursts outside of the challenge (using the same save, just reloading later after testing) and plan things out rather than getting mad that you aren't getting the same levels you did in vanilla. BNW is not vanilla, and there is no reason to expect or require the same things that the vanilla version of the challenge should have. If I do a LLG of vanilla, I shouldn't expect the same levels doing one in BNW, especially since there's an option to turn experience off (not counting the level (re-)averaging and enemy experience differences). Basically, all I'm seeing from your entire initial post and continued arguments is that you expected the challenge to go exactly like vanilla with the primary planning/leveling and didn't know what to do when things were completely different. So, you improvised by trying to make it match vanilla and then complained every time something new and unexpected appeared, as well as finding any little thing we say to make an argument about just to continue bitching. Since a NRB run of BNW is obviously not for you, how about playing it normally instead, or even doing an LLG? At least then you wouldn't need to worry about levels or EL.

Honestly, the fact that you've been using cheats/changing things in the game for your challenge almost specifically because you haven't learned the game (BNW, not vanilla) and are hitting points with "unexpected" changes kind of breaks the spirit of the challenge. I can see adding purely QoL changes that don't directly affect the challenge, like adding auto-run or faster dialogue skipping would for a speedrun, but if you're going to do a challenge then people tend to expect that the challenge is done within the limitations of the game. I can't speak for everybody that does challenge runs, but any time I go to start one I make sure I have all of the information needed to actually make it happen - if a game doesn't have the info I need available anywhere, then it's a matter of finding it myself through normal runs before starting the challenge as otherwise I'd likely end up in a point where the run ends early because I missed/overlooked something that would be needed to reasonably proceed. You can start some challenge runs with no knowledge of the game, but if you don't know when important items and such come up or even little mechanic tricks then you're going to hit roadblocks much more frequently that cause either grinding (not allowed in this challenge) or a new run to correct. If doing a challenge run of a mod then you can basically throw any vanilla knowledge out the window because there's no guarantee it will still be present. In your case you're basically running the challenge as if you were playing vanilla (or at most a stat-hack that keeps the rest of the game the same), and every time something comes up that breaks your expectations/knowledge you either edit something in or completely break the challenge by going to fight things to "correct" the issue. The goal of your challenge is to not fight any random battles, and in such a challenge you need to know specifically when to get things as you have no options for grinding to fix mistakes, meaning you need more knowledge about BNW than you currently have to legitimately finish the challenge, especially seeing how often you run into something unexpected. Also... ...wat. Have you never played an RPG before? Even games with stupid amounts of in-game information tend to not tell you all of the formulas involved in-game as it's basically useless information to the average player. I can't count the number of times I needed to go through game code to figure out how something works in other games because the information wasn't available in-game or online. Not only this, but older games have much tighter space limitations which would be wasted for something like this, and it really doesn't help the average player who honestly doesn't care about formulas. That kind of information is only really important for challenges, and few challenges even need the specific formulas. You're basically complaining because they didn't design the game around your challenge.