I'm currently running a game, and found a glitch I'm not sure is generally allowed.
About 8 mins into the game there's an obstruction you have to move, which requires you to have collected a particular object earlier on, however once the obstruction is moved, if you then fail the game and start again (either by losing all your lives, or straight up aborting the game), its position is never reset, meaning that in all future runs you can skip the detour to collect this object, saving about 30s at a guess.
Is that a legit running technique? to spend 8 minutes doing prep work just to move this thing, triggering the bug, resetting and then starting timing?
Please take this question to a game-specific forum or discord, or even contact the game's speedrun moderators directly, as outlined in the pinned post. It's really up to the community/moderators of each game. The general forums here are not an appropriate place to ask this.
Having said that: Whether this is allowed likely depends on how easy it is to reset progress in this game. Unless this game is one where all progress is stored online or something, there is surely a way to delete previous progress between runs. "Losing all your lives, or straight up aborting the game" is probably not the only way or best way to reset progress, delve a little deeper before asking this kind of question.
However there are cases where this is not the case; I moderate a series of games (new Hitman trilogy) where all progress is stored online and it's virtually impossible to reset progress outside of making a new platform account (PS, Xbox, Epic account etc) each time. Hence, the main speedrun category for these games is NG+ and a lot of pre-run setup is allowed and not counted in the speedrun timing.
I'm more after the general feel of the community regarding this type of glitch in games, whether exploiting bugs that are triggered by previous playthroughs is an acceptable method or whether the previous playthrough counts towards the total time.
The game is an 8bit platformer from 1987 and sufficiently obscure that I've ended up making the page for it here, so I can't really ask a mod. This isn't a situation where you can't delete progress - you just reboot the computer and reload the game - it's a straight up bug where upon game end of any kind it doesn't reset the flag in memory for this obstacle properly.
There are games with similar behaviours like that or a certain RNG manip works through setting something up before starting the actual run (for example Final Fantasy 6 does a manipulation to get certain RNG seeds for encounters and such, FF 3 NES has something similar). This here is not really RNG manip but feels pretty similar in the result to me.
So there are definitely games that allow this stuff (and I'm sure other games ban it), so it is pretty much up to the community of the game if they want to allow it. Since apparently you are the community, it is your decision ;-)
And if it is allowed there can arguments be made for making it a seperate category, depending on the impact and also how tedious/slow it is to even set up. But since it seems to stay for the whole session and you don't have to set it up again before every run, it's probably not too annoying to do.
Thank you, this is exactly what I was after...
I agree that a separate category is best, is there a defined naming scheme for these? Currently I have any% and "no major skips" (for runs that complete all the objectives on the official route) so thinking of something like "any% with reset glitches"
One of my runs does something like this. The game's supposed to end with a boss rush, but by clearing it on one savefile (you get three), the game thinks it's cleared on all of them. So you clear it on Savefile 1, then do runs on Savefile 2, and when you get to the end, there's no boss rush. To tell the truth, I don't really care for this kind of "skip" but it was always in the run since I joined the game so I've gone along with it.
NG+ is an intereting shout, but I feel like that's for games that intentionally let you start with all your stuff on a new run, where this is clearly a bug. That said since the game doesn't have any intended NG+ mechanic, why not I guess?