Florida, USAWhile I do understand the desire to take breaks in longer runs like these, I personally am not in agreement with allowing breaks in an RTA run. Including breaks with paused timer would basically mean that the runs submitted with breaks would leave the conventional rules of RTA and become segmented runs, due to the timer being stopped and started again. Allowing breaks that don't count against your time also sort of sets the current times on the leaderboard at a disadvantage, since they were all set without that rule to benefit their runs.
You can always take breaks during a run of course, but I personally feel it should count against your time.. After all, it only makes your run arbitrarily faster for pauses during breaks, since the same amount of time passes irl regardless.
I feel that preparation and time management are another important part and skill demonstrated during these longer RTA runs, and I feel that that skill will also not be able to be properly represented without being disadvantaged if breaks were made not to count against your final time. I also believe there's plenty of places to take decent stretch/quick bathroom breaks. There's a 49 second break in Brownboo after Matataki, a 55 second break from entering the submarine for the first time in queens, and a 3 minute break after Sun and Moon temple where cutscenes play with no prompts to mash text. Basically after each dungeon there's a decent opportunity for a quick breather.
Saving time and in turn ultimately having less time needed for breaks in dark cloud is just highly dependent on weapon RNG in the first two dungeons/the route you chose to run with, if you reset to get the bandit slingshot within those two dungeons it shaves hours off of the run and can make a run on average an hour or more shorter in most cases.
BCPS3 was voted to be banned by the community for runs, and ISOs loaded via ps3 are not allowed.
Its kind of a pain to try to run JP games on American PS2s, i recommend if you want to play J to just invest in either of the actually native Japanese consoles. If you can't or don't want to, you'll either have to install a modchip like ModBo or Matrix that removes region locking, or you'll have to use FreeMcBoot to run a Swapmagic ELF and utilize that to play the Japanese version.
We don't add categories unless someone has runs completed for them. Many times as a moderator I've had people say "We should have this or that category" but they never end up running them and the category sits around cluttering the leaderboard page.
That being said, if you'd like there to be a category, along with any other ideas you may have, do a run for us and link it to us so we can review it and consider the new category. Thank you.
Yes, you would have to disable this mod. For consistency's sake, the mods have agreed to ban all mods for the PC version, including visual mods.
This is mostly because allowing any mods at all as we had previously discussed opens the doors to more tomfoolery, even if they dont affect the game on the surface level beyond visuals. I do understand that it is a bit easier to react to prompts when the PC version matches the controllers, but it will become better with time and muscle memory.
Apologies for the inconvenience, and I hope you understand!
Globku has brought to our attention that many runners on the leaderboard have submitted runs using the 60FPS mod for PC. This is a mod that functions separately and differently from the most recent patch on console that supports 60FPS.
**The 60FPS mod, along with all other mods in general, are now officially banned on the main leaderboards after discussion between the main moderators. **
We initially were not aware of the usage of the 60FPS mod in these runs, so the runs were verified without our knowledge of this issue. Due to this, and the fact that beforehand it was not explicitly specified that mods were banned on PC, no runners who submitted runs using the mods will be penalized. Any runner who submitted a run using this mod will still be allowed to submit further runs.
To those runners, we just ask to uninstall the mod along with any other mods downloaded, and we will be more closely monitoring submissions from here on out. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reply to me in a comment here, or join the discord and ping me or any mods with an @.
Thank you!
Post has been updated
We suggest to mute the in-game BGM Audio slider before recording and submitting runs over all else. If you've already done your run and it's become unavailable, you can just mute as the alternative but we prefer BGM muted only at this point in time.
Emulator has been added as a separate category variable and is now allowed as a submission option for Kingdom Hearts 1-E and 1-J! After discussing the request, the moderators have decided to instill a "trial period" for emulator being on the leaderboards. This period will last 9 months from going live. If it gains a remote amount of traction, it will stay. PCSX2 will be the only emulator allowed for the time being.
Detailed Emulator Submission rules can be found in the "Game Rules" Section of the leaderboard.
Thank you to all who requested this and completed runs to show interest. We hope this makes the game more accessible to those interested and hope to see more runs in the future!
Your video will be blocked and unviewable in most countries, including the US, on Youtube 100% of the time if it includes the copyrighted music in the game. We suspect this audio is in Chapter 8, but have not fully confirmed which part of the OST causes videos to be blocked in most countries.
For runs to be verified, they must be completely viewable, so this poses a problem for submissions. Your submission will be denied if it's not viewable and blocked in countries, but due to this issue, submissions without audio or with music will be accepted.
Here are the recommended solutions:
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Mute the music audio in the game settings.
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If you do not mute the music, please stream the run on Twitch and Highlight the VOD of your PB. It will automatically mute copyrighted audio segments and allow the video to be viewable 100%. If you choose this method, you must have the option to save past broadcasts enabled on your twitch channel. (Tutorial: https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/video-on-demand?language=en_US#:~:text=You%20can%20navigate%20to%20this,to%20enable%20or%20disable%20archiving.) .
From there you must turn the past broadcast into a highlight, so that it does not expire. Past broadcasts alone expire for non-prime users within 14 days, 90 days for prime users. Your submission will then be acceptable.
We've done extensive testing by removing and comparing loads on Nintendont vs every other platform, and Nintendont is leagues faster in load times than any official hardware there is. It creates unfair competition because it basically forces all runners to run on it if they want to compete for WR.
Because of this and the fact that it is not official hardware, Nintendont counts as Emulation in regards to runs on the leaderboard and is not accepted on the main leaderboards with runs done on official hardware.
We initially banned Nintendont entirely from the boards. It has created issues in the past of people submitting runs under Nintendont but not telling anyone, and it ended up in us having to completely restructure the leaderboards and rules. We decided that if there was demand for it, we could accept the runs under the Emulator cateogry, but the issue with that is that it cant really compete with PC emulation, and is emulating a different version of the game (PS2 version vs Gamecube version)
Here's the link to the discord that hosts Inuyasha speedruns/info https://discord.gg/YtMMvcB5Su
The following changes have been made to the leaderboard:
Nintendont runs are being rejected on the grounds of being emulation and unofficial hardware. Nintendont runs faster than any official hardware noted to date, including the Backwards Compatible PS3, which is the fastest official hardware by a landslide. It creates unfair competition and leaderboard organization issues.
If there is a major pushback to this decision, the mods and I are open to considering moving Nintendont runs to the "Emulator" section of the leadearboards with the rest of the unofficial hardware. However, Nintendont will likely not be able to compete with PC emulators.
The Category tabs have been changed.
The new main category tabs will be Original - Original release on PS2/Gamecube HD - HD Release on Xbox 360/PS3
Each category will have runs separated by console for both the Original and HD versions to maintain fair competition, due to console load times varying wildly between platforms.
Backwards compatible consoles are allowed, but will be separated by console as well due to having major advantages from faster loading times. The exception to this rule will be the Wii due to its better accessibility and smaller advantage from load times over GCN.
Misc. Categories will remain merged and largely unchanged for HD, due to the fact that loads are competitive and nearly identical between the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions for these categories.
Currently, I am not making a BCPS3 category for Misc. until there is more interest. BCPS3 runs will not be accepted under "PS2" in misc.
Feel free to post or reach out to us moderators if you have any questions/concerns. Thank you!
How exactly are loads being removed, and what was the incentive behind merging actual hardware with emulator? Usually with old gen non PC games, removing loads isn't as simple as removing the "Now loading" screens, as there are other things in these old games that "load" as well. I don't want to assume about MK:D before i've looked into it any, I've just done a lot of load removal comparisons for multiple games on multiple platforms and have seen it in all of them, so I worry about it with this game as well. I was interested in running this game's Konquest on PS2 when everything was separated by console, but I'm kind of being turned away by emulator runs being mixed with hardware because in almost every case, emulator has an inherent advantage over hardware, sometimes beyond just loads (more consistent FPS in certain places, etc).
Requesting leaderboard mod for Dark Cloud 2. I asked acefrog, the only moderator, to update the speedrun page with the link to the DC community's new discord server, and to be a moderator for the boards since they seem to be inactive very frequently, but haven't received a response in 2 weeks and they have been offline for 3 weeks.
A DC2 player has also mentioned in the discord that they have been waiting about 2 weeks to get their run verified, so i'd like to see if i can get super mod to kind of structure the moderation and content of the LB better to invite more players.
