A few days ago, I submitted my 6:01.86 spike gauntlet speedrun. The run was pretty flawless: all levels were deathless, the menus were decently fast, and I even pulled off the Victim skip, which the world record didn't do. However, I ended up being 3 whole seconds behind the world record. The reason for this? Load times.

My laptop is on the very low end of the spectrum, which results in 3 second load times for levels at minimum. This might not seem like a big difference next to the 1.5 second load times of the world record, but when doing a full gauntlet, it adds up quickly. I cant help feeling a little cheated from a world record solely because of my hardware. (And yes, I did try going to low graphics, lowering my resolution, and closing all other tabs. Nothing worked.)

This is why I'm proposing a change in how runs are timed. I think it would be a whole lot more fair for everyone if load times were excluded. I think the timer should pause when you hit the play button, or the sound plays, and it should resume when the cube first appears in the level. This would make it so users with low end computers can actually compete with users with high end computers.

This isn't new for speedrunning. In cuphead, for example, all runs are already timed loadless, in order make running the game more inclusive to people with various tiers of hardware. Other games are already doing this, so why not GD?

Yes, retiming runs will be a HUGE pain for moderators, but if this change is implemented, it would make speedrunning GD many times more fair and inclusive for everyone, and it'll probably expand the speedrunning community of GD. And people could always code autosplitters so that runners won't need to manually pause and resume timers.

I really hope you take this change into consideration, because I truly believe that it'll improve speedrunning GD by a ton.

like leshenka said, nothing exists that can accurately take out load times from the run, so you are unfortunately out of luck.

I know a little bit of coding, I could probably make an autosplitters that could take out loads. Shouldn't be THAT hard, since its just pause when the play button sound plays and resume when the cube appears or the level music starts.

I know the thread is 2 years old, but cant you just manually retime the run without loads lol

That takes a lot of work for hundreds of runs.

you could just retime the top X runs of each category

guys there is an autosplitter for GD now