Hi. Maybe this is a dumb question but while trying to play through this game on the hardest difficulty sometimes I would look in the gameplay options menu and see that it was mysteriously set to a lower difficulty.

Looking online it seems the game will auto lower the difficulty on death.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/220240/discussions/0/648816743083885300/

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632849-far-cry-3/64897100

But there are plenty of times I looked in the menu after a death and it was still on master, so it isn't consistent. It's mysterious to me how this works.

So my dumb question is, how do you know the game didn't do this on the current, or any future, master difficulty speedruns? Did y'all know about this and exactly how to avoid it triggering? Should master difficulty speedruns be forced to check the difficulty in the options menu after every death?

In my humble opinion it defeats the point of the category if the rules allow this to happen. Depending on how this thing works, the hypothetical optimal master difficulty run could become just figure out the fastest/earliest way to get the game to auto lower the difficulty and play the rest of the game on the easiest difficulty.

Except no wrong warp and force quit because those would be redundant with any% glitchless

I see there is a thread from a year ago debating on if it was worth adding the glitchless any%. But now it is a popular category with 48 runs. (Maybe it is too popular for the Misc. section now.)

And I see there are 2 other threads here asking for a SL1 glitchless category.

And I have found 2 glitchless all boss speedruns on youtube. So I'm sure some people would like a leaderboard for that also.

I suggest skipping all future debates on glitchless categories by just giving every category a glitchless subcategory now. So that would mean any%, all bosses, SL1, and all achievements would all have glitched and glitchless subcategories. Any future categories added would also get glitched and glitchless subcategories.

Applying the same glitchless ruleset to every category where it can be done, is consistent and not arbitrary. Maybe some will become more popular categories after they get a leaderboard like any% glitchless. And any gitchless subcategories that don't become popular won't be cluttering up the main category list, so it shouldn't hurt to have them there.