@BokserKabaty I understand where you're coming from. The thing is, you save and quitting for shrines etc. will always be a time loss. You cannot do that over and over regardless of the loads being removed. But what can, on the other hand happen is this: You wanna farm for a shrine, the game save & quits nearly instantly, wonderful. Or you will save & quit and the game will hang for 8 seconds.

If you just look at the leaderboards, there are people with times 1:09:44 and 1:09:45. So whose run is really better? The loads they had in the run may have been for example 1 minute and 30 seconds. Just something I can imagine for a run of this length. So depending on their hardware (and game randomly deciding to get stuck in loads), the difference between these runners can be even tens of seconds. And what if we imagine this scenario: One person decides: "Oh, I'd really like an experience shrine there", they get it on the second try, get a level faster and save 20 seconds over someone who was in the same situation, but didn't choose to try the shrine. But the game decided to get stuck on both of the loads, so what's the issue here? The player, who made the superior decision might get worse time because the game decided to.

You might argue that "it's just RNG", but this is the kind of RNG that shouldn't be a part of the run.

And as for the only appropriate and enjoyable way of speedrunning the game. Sure, you might have your unique view on this, but I might tell you that this is not what all people will agree on with you. There's many games where IGT allows for more creativity and overall more sensible gameplay. Such as Fallout 4 ( - Here's a clip of one player stacking an item on themselves to achieve more speed, this was btw. run on the last GDQ and I'd say it's one of the most loved runs there and I haven't seen a single complaint about them being in a load screen for a relatively long amount of time)

@Bender_ Actually, there are games that require sound to play and it's very reasonable. It makes splicing runs much harder. Especially in a game such as Diablo 2, where splicing is super easy, it wouldn't be so unreasonable to require sound.

@RyuQuezacotl I personally don't like pausing the game for breaks. Surely, if the game is extremely long, then it's reasonable to include some time you can spend afk. But in general, the only reason why games remove the time when the game is closed is because of a crash.

@MrLlamaSC If LiveSplit crashes, I think it should be possible for you to start it again and press your start run key again. It would still remove the times, so you'd only have to append the time it took you to start LiveSplit again. That's how most of the games with IGT LiveSplit solve this problem.

And as you mentioned, it solves TCP/IP loading but it also does solve loading differences between different hardware setups.

And I can absolutely agree, refreshing the leaderboards would suck. Retiming the runs semi-automatically might however be possible.

@327 You might be right, I'm definitely willing to expand on the script's functionality if it's possible of course. The question is, how much time over a run do these things take, because some times might be negligible. But again, I'm willing to do changes if something is considered unfair.

Addition to my last post: Actually did it, my script removes the loading and saving times, but not the menuing required to continue playing. Is there anyone who'd be willing to test this? Just message me on Discord if you can (Wafu#7264)

Edit: Got input from Indrek and blazer-flamewing, seemed to be sufficient enough. So if there's interest, I'll polish it so that it works with commonly used versions and I could push it directly to LiveSplit so that it requires just a one-click setup.

@Teo- Yeah, that's why I was saying the only thing people would need is LiveSplit. I already found a way to remove the loading screen loads, but the issue is that clicking the "Save and exit" is inconsistent between -ns and no -ns, so I'd have to figure that out.

Edit: Another question is: Is the menuing part of the run? I assume you'd count that in, right?

@LaV Yeah sure, but again, most people who speedrun regularly use LiveSplit. And from my experience, if a run had fairness issues due to inconsistent loads, the only option was to remove those loads unless it's a console run. That's just the truth of it.

I understand you might have an idea of speedrunning requiring as little tools as possible and there's nothing wrong about that. But sometimes, you gotta live with the fact that even though D2 is an old game, RTA simply won't be fair for everyone.

Regarding the preparation, I think almost everyone, if not everyone uses LiveSplit. So the preparation needed for switching from RTA to IGT would be like a couple of clicks, I don't think that preparation is much of an argument here.

A similar thing is in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, where the game just overall runs faster with sound disabled. For me personally, I'd like to see it allowed, although yeah, it's weird to have soundless runs (and it makes splicing a bit easier)

But there's one thing I'm gonna ask, why time by RTA if the loads clearly are inconsistent? It's also not a thing that takes long time to implement.

Nobody breaks basic rules. It's just you who doesn't understand the rules and accuses other of breaking them.

As Teo said, some people can't play the game without glide wrapper - that is an external tool and it's not even worthy questioning whether it's allowed or not. This macro that Indrek uses is: 1. Not a modification of the game, 2. Isn't even used during the speedrun. It's so obvious that this should be allowed that there's no point in making a rule about it. And if you want to pointlessly nitpick about equal conditions, there's couple of hints: Operating system is an external tool that controls the game, we don't all have the same version of the OS, we don't all have the same CPU, GPU, HDD/SSD, Memory etc. Yet it's never discussed or even mentioned - because it doesn't matter for the run.

I think you might not be quite getting the speedrun.com rules, but it doesn't matter. It would be nice to have an official statement so that people know what they can actually use or not. I agree that with D2, it's not very clear. But it needs more global description than "x version of tool y is allowed", then this wouldn't even be an issue.

@Bender - Yeah, I'm only saying that what's in the rules doesn't have to list everything that's allowed. I agree with the point that it should've been discussed on the forums or on Discord with the community.

You literally quoted that "exceptions can be made on a community basis". Rules don't have to say what is allowed, the rules have to say what is NOT allowed.

@sceuriolu: You can run whatever you want, you don't need a leaderboard for that. If it proves to be a wanted category, then it's something worth considering. This seems maybe like a nice challenge, but I doubt many people want to run it. We have 2 misc categories: pacifist which some people run and PreLoD (which one person runs, but it's quite obvious why it exists)

As far as my experience goes, most challenge runs don't have a leaderboard.

I don't run the game anymore, so it doesn't affect me. Some games do allow this (e.g. TES: Morrowind), but there, you have 2 instances of the game and just switch mid run. Downloading patch from battle.net could depend too much on your internet speed and would be really unfair. We already use RTA to time the runs, so I'd advise against adding more hardware-dependent stuff.

For all active runners (Drakan15, BigTechs - edit your run times according to this), please start the timer when you first see that the game is loading. The time it takes for the first loading to appear is hardware dependent and can take anywhere from 0.5 seconds to having the game stuck for even a minute. RTA should still be timed from pressing "New Game" or "Yes", but in IGT, don't include the time before the first load.

Other than that: This thread is dedicated to any questions related to the load remover. Just post them here or ask me on Discord.

Nice, thanks for caring!

"time without loads" versus "time with loads" for me.

The topic you are linking is about ILs. I'm extending that to failing to follow moderation rules, which is kinda a big deal and I didn't want to mix the thread too much, not everything was said. And surely, it might be a complicated issue (although implying that I'm seeing it too simply is a bit strange to me, you could as well explain it properly instead of just throwing "too complicated, not worth to put my time in it" etc.).

It took 4 months to even post your conclusion, and then you still say that you might do something about it or you might just ignore it, even though you admit that it completely killed Doom on speedrun.com.

You must know that it's not a community decision - and your community are not only the runners. You couldn't have asked everyone, so removing over 300 IL runs definitely doesn't sound like a decision people would agree on. And apparently, they don't.

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not accusing you of being a bad moderator or anything, I don't want you to be kicked out of the moderation or anything like that! I'm just trying to inform you that this to me doesn't seem to comply with the rules.

Hey. I'm not a Doom runner, but still, I feel like there's something wrong going on in this game and I wonder how it's even possible that this is happening on speedrun.com.

Ultimate Doom has been one of the games that I would like to run at some point, and as likely most speedrun.com users, I'd like to track my times here. That is no longer possible, because it has essentially been removed from speedrun.com. The reasoning behind the removal of IL (from Tezur0's post) was this and it feels mostly flawed:

--- Reasoning ---

1. The speedrun.com boards are incomplete

• Example picked at random: E1M4 Max has 2 entries on speedrun.com, but 36 on dsda

You can complete the leaderboards (unless the players explicitly ask you not to). Users who don't wish to use speedrun.com shouldn't be affecting the existence of the leaderborards on speedrun.com. There are reasons why people choose to use this website and there are reasons why people choose not to use this website. Still, I believe speedrun.com expect to be able to submit runs of a game they wanna run, if they find a game and run it, but find out they can't submit runs, what's the point of it being on speedrun.com?

2. Their existence leads to confusion. There is an expectation that they are the source of truth when it comes to doom speedrunning. As mentioned above, this is not true.

speedrun.com has never claimed to be the ultimate source of truth. People can explicitly ask to get their runs removed (and moderators must do so), even if they held a world record. Just that rule alone proves that speedrun.com can lack data. That doesn't mean it's wrong. DSDA is not the ultimate source of truth either, it is not complete and never will be complete, that's impossible to achieve.

3. Authenticity - doom speedrunning has various important requirements to prove the authenticity of runs. Among them, using compatible source ports and recording demos. These are fundamental in the community and the speedrun.com boards aren't really set up to serve this purpose.

I think moderators should be able to deal with this stuff. If your requirements on verifying runs are so high that you can't provide the proof in a speedrun.com submission, those requirements should either be changed or you shouldn't act like you own the leaderboard. AFAIK, everything you can provide on DSDA can be done on speedrun.com.

4. It's a poor investment to expend lots of effort maintaining a board that is actually a mirror of another board, but simultaneously only a tiny subset.

It's kind of a red flag for a moderator to say this. You should expect having to invest into moderation of a game here, otherwise what's the point of moderating it? (and I don't want to sound rude, I don't expect every moderator to spend every day here, but you shouldn't be avoiding moderation via these methods) It might be a tiny subset, but it might be a subset of people who WANT to have their runs tracked on speedrun.com, but you remove all of their runs. Some of these runners might be proud of having their runs here, be it world records or just personal records, but those were not just a few runs, and you shouldn't be punishing these people just because some other people don't use speedrun.com.

5. The speedrun.com boards are missing lots of relevant categories (as a necessary result of 4)

I might be misunderstanding this, but I don't see how this can't be fixed. Anyway not really getting what you mean here.

--- Summary ---

1. The speedrun.com page is nice for casual players or as a landing page for people coming in from google or elsewhere on the site, but not really the place for serious competition.

Well first of all, you can make it a place for serious competition, there's no reason why this wouldn't be possible. But even if you couldn't, just as you are implying, it's nice for casual players. So casual players should be denied of personal tracking? Obviously they shouldn't, and they shouldn't be expected to submit to an external website.

2. Runners interested in working on ILs would be best served by joining the doom speedrunning community proper, either in the discord or on the doomworld forums.

That's very subjective. Again, some people just want to do their stuff on speedrun.com and that's it. They don't want to feel obligated to join a Discord server or some external forums. They can just play their game, have fun and eventually submit something when they're happy with their time.

My final thoughts and issues with this:

The website:

Expecting people to use an external website submit runs is crazy, let alone thinking they want to use email to submit runs. Quality and design of the website follows very old standards, you can't possibly think people want to use it, there's just no other option.

Evading / breaking rules:

Referring to a different leaderboard is a way to easily evade many rules and I don't think that's okay. Moderation rules say that you don't own the leaderboard, this kind of workaround makes you own the leaderboard, you can do whatever you want with it.

"The users moderating a game should represent the consensus of the players of the game" - This is clearly not happening. Many players probably don't even know, but they can't possibly be happy that their runs suddenly disappeared from speedrun.com, neither can they be happy that they now have to use an external website that's so uncomfortable to use / view.

"Do not list a player's runs on a leaderboard if they explicitly do not want it listed." and other rules that give players the option to not be listed are easily evaded. Because you have a website where anyone can submit your runs and you can't possibly protect yourself. I don't think it's okay to force people to use such leaderboards that have too different rules from speedrun.com's rules.

People who just want to watch:

You no longer can! If you wanted to see a specific level, you could easily open it in ILs and you'd see the video, if it was there. Not everyone has to use speedrun.com to submit runs, they can just search runs and watch them. And surely, not all games have to require a video, but most players will still submit with a video, just in general. Now you have to literally buy the game to be able to watch someone's run.

I feel like this decision was very detached from the community, at least when it comes to speedrun.com users and I don't think you are choosing the right solution.

Well.. that's the thing I never figured out. Reinstalling the game sometimes helped for me, sometimes it made no difference. Didn't figure out a consistent way of having the cutscenes. Maybe someone else knows.