That's maybe a decent compromise, submitting as the lowest difficulty used.

That may still be unfair if a point comes up where a player needs to change costume/difficulty followed by a damage boost (that wouldn't be possible on Hard). But I guess there needs to come a point where you simply can't please everyone.

I honestly thought we were done with this, but you asked a very good question, also in the server we suddenly realized that the costume/difficulty warping technique is actually super broken.

(I've just said this in the server, but for clarity sake) Basically, the problem with the trick is that you can exploit all checkpoints by shooting them from far away, and just warp yourself to them, saving some walking time. You could also force different, better cycles out of rooms. On top of that, it completely refills your health, at the cost of nothing. You can even cheat death, because if you lose all your HP, but not touch the ground or a death-plane, pausing is still allowed ! And the timer is put on hold all the way through.

Since that's like way too overpowered, and completely changes the way the game is played, it seems pretty clear that it will at the very least require its own area in the leaderboard. And while we're at it, we should enable that area or category complete pausing permission. That way, people who want to fully abide by the game's limits now really can ! This way of play could go under the name of low IGT. The other categories, while still under the IGT metric, are intended to play out like continuous, real time speedruns with few IGT timer pauses. And lastly, perhaps a bit controversial but I will suggest it regardless : a complete permission for that category to be able to change the difficulty as you go, 24/24h. All that in the hopes of lowering the IGT even more, and also so everyone have access to the category and techniques in some shape or form. Because of this last point, it would mean that the focus point of low IGT is not on clearing something the fastest way under a given difficulty, but simply beating it the fastest way, that the game allows for, period. Honestly, I'm hooked. (Bosses ILs won't have access to the warping trick because the fight will reset if you do so, even Nahatomb. But you can still pause and set up tricks)

About whether or not the trick will be allowed in the other, already existing, more straightforward categories like any% standard/support : Since changing difficulty or switching costumes cause the warping, it will probably be disallowed for them. So in these categories, playing exclusively under one given difficulty will be mandatory. And pausing is still planned to be regulated, though only for top profile runs that await us in the future.

(This may all sound a bit confusing, because I'm partially responding and going over things that has been said on the server)

This seems like hell to redesign the leaderboard around though.

Board redesigned anyways. I added a 4th difficulty setting, it will be the one concerned with low IGT. Unfortunately, no matter how small the names are, if you have 4 different values for a variable, and you create categories out of them, they will be displayed through a button that you have to click to make them unfold. Ugly, but a site limitation.

For ILs, I merged any% Standard and Support to just any% (and added 100% cause why not). Within the IL sections, you can choose if you've used Support mode or not.

Note that we still can't accept ILs because the rules are not written for all these things yet. I'm not sure if I will be able to get to them in 30 minutes, but I will try. Be on the lookout. [EDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT : Nope. Tomorrow at best.]

Another note, I have disabled the parameter that makes it so empty time column will still show regardless. This is because :

• For full game runs, we may still accompany IGT timing with RTA timing as a supplementary metric (but overall less important, and not meant to be perfectly accurate)
• For timed ILs such as the extras and bosses, we will fill in only the IGT column
• For non-in-game timer stages such as the main game stages, we will fill only the RTA column.

Question since reading this thread doesn't give me a clear picture: What's the benefit of timing with IGT in the first place? I feel like you need a reason to time with IGT because while RTA can be unfair (load times etc) it can never be wrong, whereas the IGT in these remakes seem to not count all sorts of things which on initial blush strikes me as suspect to go with it as a default timing method.

like i'm not seeing what the advantage of IGT is supposed to be in the first place, particularly because it makes costume swap tricks cumbersome in an IGT setting but they integrate pretty simply into RTA runs because it's either faster or its not. I don't see why you'd restrict the range of tricks available to use by way of attempting to use a flawed timer.

Well, at the moment it does seem like RTA isn't going to be easy to do in a way that's even reasonably fair. Loading times don't even seem consistent from one playthrough to the next (I've already seen a variation of more than a second for a single load screen on the same machine). The line between "unfair" and "wrong" still seems pretty blurry in this case, since right now there's no reason to think there's a way to majorly abuse the IGT by e.g. freezing it for an entire stage or something. And using RTA as the primary method would certainly eliminate any possibility of easily having comparisons between runs on different platforms, which I know isn't really a big deal for a lot of people, but not having to split by platform seems like something to strive for if it can be done without sacrificing the integrity of the run.

You're not at all wrong that the costume swap might be a more interesting/fun trick if it's restricted (implicitly) to scenarios where it saves real time, so that is an interesting consideration. To me the question is just whether there are enough benefits to using RTA to make it worth finding a way to deal with the potential unfairness with loading times, platform differences, hardware etc.

I'd be curious to hear your personal experiences with games where RTA ended up being a better choice even when IGT initially seemed like a reasonable choice for making things fair. I haven't seen it happen so maybe that just makes it seem less real to me.

How possible could it be to do to Klonoa what is done to Silent Hill for example? I'm not really sure how it works, but it's a module or mod that makes it so that the RTA on livesplit for example stops during unskipabble stuff, like load times, transitions between doors or opening doors, and stuff like that. I know it's going way over the place with it, but it could help with the inconsistent load times. But the only issue is that this could only be applied to the PC version, so anybody on console would not benefit from that. But it could be a way to at least unify all PC runs. I don't know if it is even a good idea to try something like that, because someone would have to do it and it would only be more complicated making that than just sticking to the time that you get

IGT allows runs from every platforms to be comparable (at least time-wise, as some version/platforms might suffer from slight fps inconsistencies which may affect the game a little bit), and it's built in from the get go, meaning that people don't have to worry about timing their run or anything, they can just play and get a time by the end of it. it's super comvenient The only known problem with IGT is player pausing, and that can be mitigated fairly easily. Can you list us the things you've found that the IGT timer seems to not count towards the time of the run, or be flawed about ?

I'm not sure what you mean by the costume swappig technique being cumbersome in IGT ? You mean that doing it all the time is tiresome ? I mean, that's why low IGT exist. You don't have to be fast all the time, you can take breaks everytime you want. Hence why it's more like a logistical challenge than a speedrun.

Anyways, even if we switched to RTA everywhere, we would still have to deal with these pausing techniques in the IGT ILs. And right now, the solution we've come up with seems infinitely more elegant than this.

About still making an exception to costume/difficulty warping techniques in standard full-game speedruns, I think I will first leave it to the players to find as many uses as they can for it, uses that would provide a real advantage, even if we were running RTA (so it's not just measly IGT time-saves low IGT would be fond of).

[5 min edit : To be honest I'm still not fond of allowing these tricks in standard speedruns. Even if it were to be used only two times, you still get to reset the stage and enemies cycles if there are, regain your health like it's nothing, and if players don't have costumes, they'd have to change difficulty which is also supposed to be prohibited (and definitely bannable if you switch from easy to something else). So basically there would still be people who do not have access to the trick like probably me.]

What I wrote for the IL rules in my small spare time this lunch :

" Beat the boss or stage as fast as possible. Currently, only timed ILs are available. For them, you must input the final time of your run in the IGT column. Have the last digit be a zero.

Input if you have used the Support move or not.

Input the difficulty level you have played on. In ILs, the act of pausing, and the costume/difficulty warping technique (and incidentally, switching difficulties) are banned for the three main difficulties, but a special difficulty called low IGT allows them back. "

Assuming people think this is fine when I come back this evening, the Il section will be opened and runs should finally be verified. Make sure to update the information of your various IL submissions to fit these rules, in case they were to remain.

From what I've seen, the IGT does not count: -When opening doors with keys -Entering those doors -Load screens -When hitting a switch, the little cutscene of what the switch did (e.g. 4-2 hitting a switch to destroy a rock blocking the door, the whole scene of the camera moving to the rock and the rock being destroyed) -Normal cutscenes (this count from the moment that the cutscene starts, so skipping a cutscene or not does not affect IGT) -World Map -When you die, the transition between the death and the previous checkpoint is also not counted. I haven't seen any other additional examples where the IGT pauses for something unskippable, but those would be the most relevant moments in general

A 69% category where only getting 69 dreamstones in each level, could be pretty cool. Just throwing my random idea out there :)

Bruh. Let that one also be that you can only rescue 69 of all the Phantomileans.

Do anyone know if any of the skips/tricks does not work in this version?

For klonoa 2 specifically*

Looking forward to your 69 dreamstones speedruns and routing then.

For questions or subjects unrelated to this thread, please at least make a separate thread for them.

Bernaeon : Most of these IGT timer pauses are alright because there's really nothing you can do during these specific moments. Most are pretty harmless too.

But there are some interesting exceptions.

Opening doors. Normally there's nothing you can do during them, but if you use the Support move in L'sV, you will gain control of Klonoa much earlier and save a bit of time. The one million dollar question is, how does the IGT behave around this in DtP² and L'sV² ? Someone should really record how it plays out.

There is also this one with cannons that stop the timer. Which is weird, because you can still "move" Klonoa by doing taunts. But, most importantly, you can glitch them like this (https://youtu.be/6uWlIGY6z_Q?t=1645>) And someone should also really record what happens to the IGT. It's mostly exclusive to one place, but you never know if it may just freeze the timer for the rest of the stage...

This aside, there will be world map staying duration limits, similarly to pausing limits (again, both for top play only).

I guess the leaderboards are functional, but some more new stuff have come up again. Maybe we should stop making promises.

Geez... don't have a lot of time, and the server is so active and everyday there's a new supervillain causing havoc in the leaderboard...

Though tomorrow it will get better a bit, and we might finally get progress with full time runs and other smaller errands

Two things :

I don't know if ILs are actually ready given all the once again new findings. For instance, it turns out that you cannot activate Support Mode until you are in a stage. While the act of having Support move enabled won't be enough to move your Standard run to the Support mode categories (only when the player use the move at least once), if you are actually going for Support runs of anything, you should set it up before you start your run. Setting it up during the IL attempt will have the run be deemed unacceptable because pausing is banned. It's definitely less problematic for full-game runs, especially if you do it in the very first seconds of the first stage... but I don't think it will threaten the integrity of speedruns unless we're talking about top level ones, in which it would be expected be regulated to at the very most the beginning of the first played stage. (Anyways, I don't see why you wouldn't want to have it be activated as soon as possible)

• It should probably be mandatory that in the rules you are required to have the timer enabled. Cause if you don't... well gg we can't time your run Obviously that doesn't concern timed ILs since they don't have one. Just use the timer they provide

Day #2 of me ranting about NamcoBandai over updating timer so that it allows milliseconds

Sorry if this isn't very clear

Can we also determine what's the timing for start/end of the runs? For example starting on "yes" when you confirm difficulty, and either on the framedrops after the last hit vs The King of Sorrow (the flash of light is much less noticeable), or when the screen goes white after "vision clear" shows up (or when the boss disappears and "vision clear" appears) in the case of Klonoa 2. Mainly wondering about the final split just in case.

@AxelSanGo In my opinion safest bet would be to do the equivalent of what Kumohachi does in his Klonoa 2 WR here: https://www.speedrun.com/klonoa2/run/z5v70w5m It's all in Japanese so I don't know what the menus are saying here but the Timer start right before the first Splashscreen and ends roughly on KoS final hit.

That discussion will officially happen soon. Just know that as long as you have the game recorded, and the in-game timer on, there will most likely be no problems with anyone's runs.

NOT the post you are expecting. Just clarifying that I verified a couple IL runs to test with the custom trophies and see how the submissions would look like. I didn't verify any of the PC ILs... because some discovery about higher fps counts than 60 affecting gameplay will make them (as well as full game-runs) have to be delayed. Sorry in advance, but it might not be a good time for PC submissions right now.

For PC runs, I'm inclined to say for now we should accept runs played with the FPS capped to 60 and with the steam FPS overlay (or a similar 3rd party overlay) shown onscreen for the whole run. Based on my own testing and what people on the discord mentioned about other games, the counter occasionally displaying values a slightly over 60 (e.g. 61, 62) shouldn't be considered a problem. We'd potentially want to ban values that go dramatically and persistently below 60 during normal gameplay just to be safe as well (of course it's expected that the framerate will occasionally drop below 60, especially during loading screens).

If it turns out that the frame rate issues are more minor than feared, the rules could always be relaxed, but for now this seems like a safe rule based on what we know.