Updates made to leaderboards: why?
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Updates made to leaderboards: why?
Posted 1 year ago by

First off, a follow-up to the previous post: it turns out that loads are much worse on Pac-Man Museum+ than I initially thought they were. It's unconfirmed what the exact time difference is, but it's estimated to be somewhere around 50 seconds across all 25 levels, This means it would certainly lose time in All Ghosts, All Pac-Dots, and 100%, but what about Any%?

Well, between 2-3 skip, the new skip in 4-4, and full 5-1 skip, that's roughly 1m40s worth of timesave. The loads and lag eliminate almost all of that gain, along with the fact that matching Wii times in 4-5 just doesn't seem realistic. If you discount 4-1 skip on Wii (since it's way easier on Museum+), then that does give Museum+ a bigger advantage, but for now let's assume we're including it.

Now, whenever these issues arise in version differences for the same game, there are usually two options: using in-game time instead of real time, or using real time but subtract loads. Neither of these are currently viable options for the following reasons:

  • Using in-game time would work, except that boss stages don't have IGT displayed during them. The game does keep track of how many frames have elapsed in each stage (including bosses) behind the scenes, but without modding the game to make this visible (which is a sketchy idea in it of itself), there's no way to know for sure without retiming each stage individually. Doing that would require way too much effort to do for every submitted run, and is made even harder when you consider that it's not always immediately obvious when the exact frame the timer stops would be.
  • Subtracting loads isn't really an option either. The only platform that could manually remove load times would be PC; for all other consoles a bot would have to be created. In fact, two bots would have to be made since Wii and Museum+ have different load times, and neither currently exist.

Because neither platform has a major advantage over the other, they play significantly different from each other, and the above alternatives aren't currently feasible, the only other choice is to split the leaderboards for the two versions. This keeps the Wii version from being completely obsolete while also allowing the Museum+ version to become competitive if it ever does.

Note that, again, this mostly applies to Any%. Museum+ has an obvious disadvantage over Wii in the other categories due to the loads and lag, so splitting them actually makes more sense since Museum+ runs could never compare to Wii runs.

One final note: All versions of Pac-Man Museum+ do have online leaderboards for total in-game time. These will NOT be used for the following reasons:

  1. It adds up your BEST IGT in each stage, not your best single-segment.
  2. It does NOT include boss stages.
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Updates made to leaderboards: why?

First off, a follow-up to the previous post: it turns out that loads are much worse on Pac-Man Museum+ than I initially thought they were. It's unconfirmed what the exact time difference is, but it's estimated to be somewhere around 50 seconds across all 25 levels, This means it would certainly lose

1 year ago
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