As of the time writing this, the as-of-now new WR for the Glitchless (No Preserve) category has led me to have some concerns. These concerns have led me to conclude that the only way to maintain a competitive and fair leaderboard is to require stricter verification.

Thus, as of July 22nd, 2024, any WR run in any category will now require showing the "stat.playOneMinute" value, immediately after the run. Please ensure that it is clear which world the file is coming from.

Additionally, for the Glitchless (With Preserve) category, as of July 22nd, 2024, all runs faster than 3:55 (3 minutes, 55 seconds), will also require showing "stat.playOneMinute".

Additionally, for the Glitchless (No Preserve) category, as of July 22nd, 2024, all runs faster than 18:50 (18 minutes, 50 seconds), will also require showing "stat.playOneMinute".

For more information on how to find this stat, please refer to the December 3rd, 2022 Timing Policy Update, found here: https://www.speedrun.com/mcm_diversity/forums/yok89

It should be noted that if you load the world and don't immediately start your run (to let the world render in, as timing starts on first input, officially), you should immediately pause and show "stat.playOneMinute". This will allow moderators to subtract the frames from which you loaded in before starting the run off of your final time. Not doing this may result in losing some frames.

As stated in the previous timing update, the rule changes may apply to other categories if the top level times because close enough to warrant it. At the time, this was mainly in reference to the Any% category, which currently employs a benchmark threshold requiring all runs to show "stat.playOneMinute". I believe it would be valuable at this time to apply this same benchmark protocol to the Glitchless (With Preseve) and Glitchless (No Preserve) categories. Following the precedent in the previous update, all new runs faster than that categories benchmark that does not show "stat.playOneMinute", will have their time set to the benchmark. All runs currently on the leaderboard that do not show "stat.playOneMinute" will be grandfathered in by having their milliseconds set to 999, or according to the in-game time if an in-game timer is shown in the video.

The reason for this change is that in the aforementioned WR run, a major source of time save over the previous WR run was load times between branches. Although I didn't track exactly now much time was saved from load times alone, it's clear that it's certainly possible for a potential future run to be submitted where the only reason it might be WR is because of faster load times.

I should emphasize, this is NOT to say that the current new WR run is invalid or undeserving of it's placement. On the contrary, it was clear that it did perform better than the previous run in several places. Rather, that there exists the potential for load times to be the deciding factor in future WR runs. Thus, these rules changes are designed to try and eliminate that.