Is there a guide to do so? because with nerfs to some guns and builds I imagine there could be significant time savings in earlier builds especially on the apoc runs where health bars get chonky.

Glad to see some updates to this game.

I wanted to discuss a few of my thoughts regarding these points.

Sensibility is a great topic to cover. It's definitely been hard to decipher what certain categories really entail in other games.

That being said, Consistency and Accessibility are naturally going to be the enemies of gachas.

Specifically regarding consistency, even without glitches, a unit like Mlynar drastically changed the landscape for speedruns, especially in categories like IS (where he obliterated no relics as well).

I'm surprised that these ideas came from Warframe as the game, at least back when I was more hardcore in it, had constant buffs and nerfs to various aspects and abilities. If I complete a Void T3 Capture in 60 seconds under movement 1.0, then movement 2.0 comes out and nerfs coptering making 60s clears impossible, what do you do with the category?

My recommendation in this sense is maybe instead of limiting what can be done, especially if that's what the community wants to play, but rather archive the current leaderboard and reset the category if major changes do occur.

On the topic of accessibility, again, I'm surprised to hear this come out of Warframe. What's considered a new player? In Warframe with primed frames and guns getting vaulted constantly, and primed mods taking months of work to level up a single one, naturally some types of clears will be gatekept by what the player actually owns. Likewise for arknights, potentials, levels, mods, masteries, will all impact how much damage units will do. This obviously won't be applicable to New Account speedruns, but that comes with its own challenge as load times between devices can heavily impact a run unless some sort of auto splitter can be made, in which case mobile phone users would have to manually calculate time in game vs loading. When looking at it in IS2/3, load times could easily add up to half a minute or more of difference between emulators, and this is for shorter categories than many of the new account categories. So the point of this text block is more to say, what's your vision for accessibility in Arknights?

Edit: Saw that there was a calculator spreadsheet posted. Will this be used for new account speedruns as well?

This brings me to my last point: Popularity. I'd have to guess, without looking at the leaderboards, that the most popular categories are those with in-game timers that tell the player how long the run took, those being Annihilation and IS. And naturally the longer the run, the less popular it is. There are many many different divisions of New Account categories. Were these popular in communities in China? I only see 1-2 entries max for each of these. Given the recent IS3 speedrun event, I wonder if Yostar would allow a specific channel dedicated to the discussion of speedrunning in arknights on the main discord as that could definitely help visibility (indirectly popularity) and accessibility.

The main reason I bring this up is maybe to clarify the rules. In general, external programs outside of what is built into the game / device tend to be disallowed in speedruns unless generally agreed upon by the community. So I figure AHK would not be allowed under standard rules of play for a speedrun. That being said, some people might think it's harmless to make keybinds in AHK to be more comfortable in GPG without seeing the issue as the result is the same as a keybind in another emu, while the process is more complicated than the emu. So I would just add to the rules that keybinds must be native to the emulator and not another program.

Alternatively, as what other games have done, is have approved scripts, but I'm not sure that's what's right for what is really a mobile game.

I was hoping to have the following clarified. For those that saw my previous comparisons and posts for IS2 load times, I've completely switched to Google Play Emulator. I find it has many benefits of load times, fewer crashes, and just being less sketchy software. That being said, the main downsides are that virtualization required for google play emulator doesn't play well with other traditional emulators, and the key, there are no keybinds.

Personally, I switched fully to mouse-only gameplay. Every single action is purely LMB.

That being said, as I've seen more people interested in speedrunning and wanting to try with Google play emu, as well as seen discussions about people using scripts and macros.

I wanted to hopefully clarify the following rule:

No macros.

Keybinds are OK, but any keybind that is mapped to 2 or more buttons is forbidden.

So as I mentioned, google play emulator has no keybinds built in. Would auto hotkey be a fair alternative?

Here's a sample script I wrote: x:: MouseGetPos, xpos, ypos MouseClick , Left, 2319, 174,,0 MouseMove , %xpos%, %ypos%,0

So, pressing X on your keyboard will:

1. Record current mouse position on the screen
2. Move the mouse to the pause button and click it
3. Return the mouse to the original recorded position

Is this seen as a script/macro? Or as a keybind? The end result gameplay wise is that you paused the game. But the underlying required multiple steps to perform.

Figured I'd ask before runs start getting rejected for some people.

Has anyone done more of a deep dive into load times in IS2? Possibly by platform / emu as well? The first thing I noticed is that it seems like the load times are reduced if I face the same maps in a previous run without resetting the emu. I'm guessing this has something to do with maps staying loaded in memory. The other thing is how the emu / hardware pairing can give reduced load times. Looking over my 29M BSL run, it took ~12s from starting the BSL stage to the DP bar beginning to move. I was using LDplayer and a 9900k at the time. In spiefie's recent upload, this took about 7.5s (presumably he had attempted BSL previously in the same emu session). In my most recent run I had a 6s load time for the same period, and I had done a warmup run before so I imagine the maps were loaded into memory already. Using 7950x and Google Emu now.

So TLDR, has anyone noticed faster load times of the same map across different runs? Which emus feel the fastest for AK?