TL;DR Powertools and the Tornado spawnrate mod are not allowed in runs.
Submitting SR2 runs that make use of mods has been, and is not allowed. That also includes Powertools (mod that allows to change the game speed, in case your CPU is too fast), and the Tornado helicopter spawnrate mod.
To cut it short, these are not allowed because of two reasons:
- If some mods were allowed, the dilemna of "where do we draw the line" would arise, and it would only furthermore complicate the issue.
- Identifying those mods (to prevent bamboozles) would be hard for the moderation team, and also it would be hard for the runners to prove that they haven't gone too far with "fixing" the game without any cumbersome modifications.
For the Tornado situation, a mindful resolution for the runner would be to either keep grinding the Tornado (it's in the first 10 minutes - YGO guys throw runs even earlier and they hardly complain), or modify your route to not include that specific Tornado spawn, which would fix the issue completely.
About the game speed, if the game's running faster, in practice you're obviously at an advantage, and besides the game being a tad harder to navigate you're not losing much. Besides, if you were to use Powertools, how would you prove that you have not put yourself at an advantage by speeding the game up a bit more?
Due to recent discussion in the moderation team the Powertools and Tornado spawn rate mod are now allowed. More info here
I want to call into question the choice of having the Tornado spawn rate mod being allowed for PC runners. As a person who has been running the game for a month and a half at this point I'm starting to realize how bad the spawn rate is but at the same time it's also showing me how much of an advantage PC players have over me, and any other future console runners, because of this mod.
I've been running any% for about a month and a half and across all the runs I've tried with the Tornado route, which in total is about 190 times according to my attempt counter, I've only seen it spawn 2 times making the spawn rate, for me at least, 0.01%. Maybe when I do several hundreds more attempts I'll see that number rise or fall but to put that in perspective you are 10 times more likely to die in a house fire in the USA than to get a tornado spawn. However if we somehow knew the exact spawn rate for the tornado then potentially we could cap how much we raise that by in PC runs but that all depends on the actual spawn rate; maybe I'm just getting bad RNG or maybe the mod is giving too much of an advantage I don't know.
Personally I'd like to see the tornado spawn mod to be banned so everyone is on a level playing field across all platforms but that's for the mods to decide.
