Hey! I'm thinking about one of the first points of the detailed preliminary rules. As it is preliminary I decided to open this thread and start a discussion. Why exactly is the use of metronomes not allowed?

Additional questions:

1. How is it verified that the metronome wasn't used during the run? Should runners submit not only recordings of the game but also recordings of themselves and their surroundings?
2. Is listening to specially constructed playlists compiled only from electronic house-like songs with e.g. 166 BPM and using them as help considered cheating? If it is, should listening to all kinds of music during the run be banned?
3. Are runs performed in a room with an old grandma clock giving a distinctive tick every second considered cheating? A runner could use this as a metronome.

I imagine a lot of potential for abuse and not really seeing the benefits of this rule.

I think it would be optimal to bind a digital metronome sound (or other sound file) to the same key as the strafe key, which you use to start the catapult glitch, and use that as a sound cue for it. That's already kind of what's being done with listening to the sound of the hero's steps, though that depends on the surface and background noise too (and there is no step sound OOB). Then the same thing again could be done but bound to the ESC key to time the duration of pausing.

To me that just seemed too much external assistance, but I recognize that that is very subjective.

Sadly there are many ways to cheat (like using macros), that are hard / impossible to detect. That alone would not be an excluding factor to a rule for me.

Since metronomes are allowed in many other games, it's reasonable to ask, why they are banned in Gothic. If they would be allowed and some people would start using them, it would put others in a disadvantage, if they would want to have the clean Gothic speedrunning experience without help of external software. That's my personal reason, why I slightly lean towards keeping them banned.

Thank you for your answers. Putting runners not using the metronome at a disadvantage is a strong argument. Nevertheless, the alternative idea would to be differentiate runs with the metronome used and those in which it wasn't.

To give an example, in the Minecraft Random Seed speedruns most of the runners use the F3 console to assess very important information. It is not banned, but the information on whether F3 was used is displayed each time on speedrun.com. Achieving a great time without using F3 is seen as very impressive. Maybe something similar could be adapted in the case of metronomes.

On the other hand, the problem with defining the metronome still persists. To hit a frame responsible for the catapult glitch you need to wait ~720ms between the strafe key-down and ESC key-down. This is around 83 BPM for a single tick and 166 BPM for a double tick delay. There are plenty of songs with both tempos. Are those metronomes?