I would like to request the removal of @MDK_ from Super Moderator status for https://www.speedrun.com/eu4. He has not been logged in to this site for a full year and has shown no activity on our discord server either. Furthermore, on every social media platform I can find for him (YouTube, Twitch and Twitter), he has had no activity for several years. The last time one of our mods attempted to contact him to ask him to give up his Super Mod status (via forum post here on Speedrun.com about a year ago) he did respond and appeared to be willing to give it up, but never actually did it. So, I'm asking once again to have him removed in light of his inactivity and inability to contact him.

Could there be an option for ranking runs based on some secondary variable(s) first, and time second? I think this could be useful in some situations. One example could be Low% runs, where you could rank them based on the number of completed objectives first and then the actual time second. That way you could keep one and the same leaderboard for new and old Low% runs, rather than having to create new leaderboards every time a more minimal route is discovered which would make old runs obsolete.

It could also allow for more alternative timing methods, such as for games with an in-game timing method that doesn't follow hours, minutes and seconds necessarily.

I understand your concern there. Although, from that perspective, wouldn't the option of displaying times as years and months be preferable to substituting in-game years and months for hours and minutes, the way we do it now? Because if someone sees one of our IGT runs that has been submitted as say 5 hours, they might be inclined to assume that it's a run that actually takes 5 hours to complete, whereas if it instead were to say 5 years, most people would probably go "wait, does this run really take 5 years, can that really be right?" and might be more inclined check it out more carefully before jumping to conclusions, in which case they would realize that it's not actually literally 5 years.

But a sort of "custom IGT" setting might be even better, though I understand if it might feel a little messy.

Would it be possible to implement a feature for displaying leaderboard times differently than the standard hours, minutes, seconds? For example, as years, months and days? The reason I'm asking is because I run a few games that happen to use years, months and days as their in-game timing method (due to being historical strategy games where you advance through history one day at a time), and it would be neat to be able to display that on the leaderboard rather than having to use a substitute method where Hours = Years, Minutes = Months and Seconds = Days, which is what we use currently. Not sure if that would be complicated to implement but I'm just throwing it out there anyway, since there are currently a decent number of games in which such a feature would be greatly appreciated :)

As far as I know, all leaderboard times must be submitted in the format of Hours, Minutes, Seconds, and possibly Milliseconds. What I'm asking is whether it would be possible to display and rank times using other units of time besides these, maybe as an alternative option you can set for a given leaderboard?

The reason I'm asking is because I run and moderate a couple of grand strategy games by Paradox Interactive. These are historical strategy games where you start at a historical date and then play through history in ticks of one day at a time. Our leaderboards have separate subcategories for RTA (which measures time in hours, minutes and seconds as normal) but also for IGT, which is based on how quickly you complete various challenges measured by the in-game date.

In practice, IGT times are recorded as the number of in-game days, months and years the run takes, but it's not possible to actually display that on the leaderboard. As a workaround we're using a system where Hours = Years, Minutes = Months, and Seconds = Days, which works well enough but doesn't look very good and can frequently be confusing, especially for new runners.

I suppose that all I'm really asking for is a cosmetic change, namely the ability to change the actual text displayed on the leaderboards, without really requiring any change in functionality. I understand that this might not seem like a huge priority, but I thought I'd still ask about it in case it would be relatively easy to implement, and it definitely is something that would be greatly appreciated by the communities for several pages here :)

I just wanted to chime in a bit on the topic of real-time vs in-game time:

I've done lots of speedruns for EU4 and Vic2. On these leaderboards we have separate subcategories for each category, one for in-game time and one for real-time (the HOI4 leaderboards does this too). I think that's a nice compromise as it allows for both IGT and RTA to coexist without interfering with each other, and I think that makes sense since both subcategories can be interesting in their own ways and require very different skillsets (at least once runs become fairly optimized).

The biggest issue with RTA is of course how having a powerful computer gives you an unfair advantage, but that aspect can at least be mitigated by restricting the maximum game speed to 4. Speed 5 is basically just "as fast as your computer can run the game", which is very unfair, but speed 4 actually has a built-in cap so as long as your computer is fast enough to reach that cap, then it doesn't really matter and everyone can have an equal playing field (or at least mostly). The HOI4 leaderboards completely dissallow speed 5, while the EU4 and Vic2 leaderboards have separate subcategories for unrestricted RTA (which mostly exists for legacy reasons) and RTA No Speed 5.

So that might be something to consider, which would allow both those who want to compete with in-game time and those who want to compete with real-time to get what they prefer!

I don't personally see any particular problem with a Bavaria run as such, and it could be nice to have more nation formations centered on Europe since that's the region most players are most familiar with, but personally I would prefer a slightly longer category tbh. While nation formations such as Mughal Empire and Japan might be a bit more difficult, they're still rather short, and the only semi long one we have at the moment (besides Roman Empire) is Golden Horde (but even that one could be pretty short if optimized enough).

But I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of Bavaria either. I'd recommend you join the Discord server and post your suggestion there, since that's where most of the community activity and discussion takes place.

Hey everyone! I already made an announcement about this on the discord, but I guess it might be worth doing it here as well. The leaderboards were recently reworked in a couple of ways:

The categories have been rearranged a bit and a few new ones have been added, but most notably there now exists subcategories for IGT (in game time) as well as RTA NS5 (no speed 5), alongside the old RTA category (now called RTA Unrestricted).

RTA NS5 has been made the new default category since it's probably more fair to people with less powerful computers, given that speed 5 is essentially uncapped and solely dependent on how fast your computer is, while speed 4 at least has an in game cap.

Furthermore, the rules have been rewritten to be more explicit and standardized. This goes both for the game as a whole (found under "Game Rules") and for each individual category. Notably the timing for the RTA categories have been changed, so instead of starting the timer right when you press the "play" button, you now start the timer after taking your first in game action (but you're allowed to adjust the game speed before starting the timer as well). All the old runs (except those in the Any% category) have been retimed in accordance with these new rules.

If you wanna do new runs you're encouraged to read through the new rules in full. That's all, I hope you all have a good day! :)

All the other paradox game leaderboards have their own discord server, which I find is a pretty nice way to build a more active community, since it allows communication without having to resort to making forum posts and stuff, so it might feel bit more "casual". Something to consider I guess :)

I'm not a Total War runner (or even much of a Total War casual player) but I think it would be interesting to have two separate subcategories, one of which disallows auto battles. It would require two quite different skill sets no doubt and a category which disallows auto battles would arguably show off more of what the game is intended to be.

Hello! I just found this page and considered attempting a speedrun of my own. However I must concur with fruitjuiceman that any RTA run should be limited to speed 4, and in fact I don't see any way that RTA runs can be in any way fair as long as speed 5 is allowed. Since speed 5 is as fast as your computer can run, it will always give a ridiculously unfair advantage to those with more powerful computers, to the extent that I suspect that computer power will be the single most deciding factor in runs once they get more optimized.

With speed 4 you at least have a hard cap for how much computer power is going to benefit you. Slower computers might still have a disadvantage in longer runs since the amount of lag tends to increase the longer into a game you play, but at least it won't be quite as extreme as with speed 5.

I would go so far as to say that RTA runs are rather pointless in a competitive setting as long as speed 5 is allowed. IGT runs would of course be unaffected by this so I would definitely support introducing such a category.