Yeah. Basically in order to level the playing field on plate color AND remove the possibility of harassment/stream sniping/whatever from the community (or speedrunners toward the community, or perceived acts of any toward either party), the following would happen:

The run begins from the moment of character creation and ends from the moment you turn in the quest: "Before the Dawn." At any point the Duty Finder is used for the FIRST RUN of a MANDATORY MSQ instance of any kind (dungeon or trial), the timer is stopped and the character must remain where the timer stopped from the moment the "join" button is pressed on the dungeon. During the course of the dungeon, the player must continue to follow the rules of the category. You can use food buffs or whatever on EXP while you're in there since leveling isn't really the main focus, though routing in level lock avoidance is still a major part of the category, it'd be tantamount to basically like, using RNG manip in other games to get good results on random spawns and such.

The timer is resumed when the final boss is killed and the player essentially has solo control back of their character, no longer beholden to the group in question. Now: I would like to point out that being kicked from the dungeon at any time during the run would invalidate the run, but I think the rare occasions that happens (if you're not a harassing player and such it wouldn't be very often at all), but that again is basically like getting really bad RNG in other games and other categories. Basically, you'd be able to get more EXP with the timer off by getting kicked out and/or would have to restart the dungeon.

Now, an important part of this is that any time you use the DF for NON-MANDATORY uses (running dungeons multiple times, using your once-per-run allotment of roulettes, doing guildhests for some ungodly reason, whatever the case may be) you have to run the timer the whole time.

This will lead to more competitive, fairer, shorter times in runs that would make the focus less on whether Duty Finder is kind and would future proof the category in a big way. The focus would be more on routing and adequate EXP management and such.

Edit to add content: Though IMHO a recording of all non-timed Duty Finder instances should be required as though the timer were running to ensure that the run isn't being invalidated in some way during that point.

Regarding MSQ completion. Can we add a "solo-only" category which discounts time accrued during mandatory multiplayer instances? I think this would encourage more people to run it and would open up a lot more routing/variety in runs, since right now it's basically "war/pld or bust".

Edit: A recording would still be needed to ensure accurate timing and obviously this would be RTA only, but with clock stops at the correct times: When the queue is entered and before moving again once the instance has been left.

The issue is that you can't not do the challenge log once you pick it up. The moment you do three dungeon roulettes of any kind or five dungeons or X number of FATEs or X number of Leves, you'd get a bonus. In a marathon setting, you wouldn't get that but maybe once, but in a segmented one you could just only play on Tuesdays after reset for a week, which would add maybe 2-3 hours to your run but give you access to your roulettes/challenge log.

Also, I wanted to pitch the notion of having a DPS% on each of the runs too since queue times are being measured. I feel like those are going to end up really needing a category of their own.

Oh and then the thing with segmented runs would also be accrual of rest which wouldn't happen much if at all during a marathon run, so you'd have to make sure to end your segments outside of a sanctuary in which your character would accrue rest.

Agh and another problem with ARR% running all the way to patch 2.55 is the increased level cap from having HW installed unless we're going to say that the only way to compete in ARR% is not to have HW installed and the only way to compete in HW% is not to have Stormblood installed, etc. etc. I'm not sure to what degree we'd care about that though because as far as I'm aware, unless you have access to expack locked gear (which you don't since you can't trade or use marketboard or moogle mail at all), it won't affect combat ability all that much, plus you don't actually GET abilities from future expacks unless you've completed the MSQ that unlocks it (and in the case of everything but the aforementioned likely disallowed DLC classes, the respective class quests).

So maybe my second point is sort of a nonissue in hindsight.

I kinda feel like ARR%, HW%, and SB% are good categories for whole game, and make each DLC self-contained. So, if you're doing Stormblood% (when it's finished, anyway), you can use RDM and SAM whenever you get them to help routing the ARR patch 100, but otherwise nah. That's...honestly like the only time I can think of DLC content being available before accessing the expack itself.

I think that the Road to 60 buff should remain its own separate category, as imho should segmented and marathon runs. The reason I say that is that doing the run segmented opens the door for IRL time abuse like making sure to segment it in such a way that each segment gets access to daily roulettes and weekly challenge log for ease of leveling while marathon you wouldn't get that. Or we could just disallow picking up the challenge log (since you can't willingly only do it once per week segmented, it sorta happens whether you want it to or not) and only allow roulettes to be done every 24 hours of clocked game time, though that would involve using real time and not in-game time.

In order to allow for online content only like dungeons and trials, we could also implement timer stops from the time someone queues until the time they kill the final boss of the instance which would open the door I feel like for DPS classes to step in (since right now it really seems like the speedrun is green plate or blue plate exclusive atm), though idk if people want to micromanage speedrunning that badly.

Just some thoughts.

Cool, I was wondering. I got a few friends into the concept of doing ARR% MSQ runs and we're routing and planning and having a good time, that was just something that I was considering.

At first they'll probably be segmented runs because of the nature of the run, but I'm planning a marathon eventually!

I actually had another question on this: How do we want to view, say, stormblood classes being used to complete the ARR MSQ run? I was scheming over the routing and figured that due to gear and such you'd almost want to drop whatever class you were running and pick up either Red Mage or Samurai to push the actual quests while you get gear for whatever your main class was (probably one of the tanks or Conjurer, because queue times are being clocked too). Samurai if you chose conjurer and red mage if you chose one of the tanks so that you could nab accessories for the Stormblood DPS class without robbing gear from the arguably faster queue-times wise class you started with.

It would mean though that in a weird way the A Realm Reborn MSQ run would require the DLCs to complete.