Here is a full set of my solutions.

I think I already had those together with the PimoLems ones. Will take another look during the week nevertheless.

Here are my new solutions.

Both of these are acceptable.

For the Rule 1 levels, do we just invert the level, invert and flip (so that way it's like you rotated a picture upside down) or does it not matter at all?

Just invert the level, that way it's exactly upside-down.

We do a mirror here, not a rotation.

Quote from Nepster's pm:

The second one has exactly the same terrain the first one, just upside-down.

I will give 1 little leeway here though:

After the complete invert, you are allowed to invert back single pieces that have the exact physical attributes as the inveted version for fixing lighting issues. This will result in exactly the same terrain as after the complete invert. It's just some of these pieces can look very odd and out of place when the shadow side is on top. So you have a little visual style choice here.

That last group was a close one!

Moving on to group 4 now!

I think you are right.

I thought for quite a long time now that using the old difficulty ranks to describe the difficulty ranks in custom packs is not really fitting.

1.) The difficulty in the oiriginal packs is way too inconsistant!

So what does Mayhem difficulty mean?   

"Steel Works", "Rendevous at the Mountain", the "Fast Food Kitchen".....    These are quite easy levels compared to "No added colors or Lemmings or "Save me" And even some lower ranked levels I would call harder.

What does Tricky difficulty mean?

"This should be a doodle", "A ladder would be handy" or "Postcard from Lemmingland".

I think you see the point here, but I guess most people only reference to the hardest levels in the rank when comparing and simply not count in the rather easy ones.

2.) The difficulty in custom packs is topping "Mayhem"/"Sunsoft" difficulty even in the earlier ranks!

I am an offender here as well when describing Reunion's ranks with original messurements. I descibed rank 2 with "Tricky-Taxing" and I can easily see quite a few levels not fitting that.

I would say most custom packs are "beyond Sunsoft/Mayhem" from rank 2 or 3 on, even with throwing out the easy original levels like "Everybody turn left" in these ranks.

Let's take "No added colors or Lemmings" as an example: It has the "free the blocker with a miner" trick and the trick to get the miner back up again by mining with the last lem. This is called by nearly everyone as at least one of the hardest if not the hardest level.

Now be honest: I think nearly everyone here goes beyond those 2 tricks pretty fast in their own packs.

In conclusion: I think comparing custom pack rank difficulties to original rank difficulties is outdated and doesn't give a good comparison to other players. It rather just confuses them.

Custom pack difficulty exceeds the difficulty of the original games pretty fast and the difficulty of the original stuff is very inconsistant to begin with.

I won't use them to describe United's ranks. I still did this with Reunion, but back then I did it as all the cool kids were doing it. Instead I will simply use my own words to describe what the player will await in the respected rank: X of everything, trick introduction, easy puzzles, hard puzzles, ...... you get the idea.

Don't worry I have it sussed now.

Sorry, I'm only seeing this now. Even you seem to have managed it now here is the method again:

I simply loaded your old format levels with the new format editor and saved them under the new format --- that's it.    

To be honest, I'd suggest just letting all 5 slip through at this point, rather than continually drawing out an early round with tiebreakers.

 "drawing out" doesn't really matter as normal contests still continue in contrast to the older LOTY votings -- so it doesn't hold anything back like in recent years.
Also if we got a very big tie, then one group gets too many survivors, making the survival rate unfair in comparison to the other groups. Here it's just a small shift, but I want to be consistant and handle the groups equally. If we get a full on tie between the remaining tiebreaker candidates I will resort to letting them all through.
I want to keep that survival ratio as fair as possible. I would take a few tiebreaker rounds and a longer voting phase over unfair survival rates.

For next year's LOTY I already plan to further limit the nominations a person gets, due to the exponential increase in nominations we got this year. This should counteract the length for the next year.