Valkyrie% now uses loadless time
2 years ago
Brazil

Recently, it has been noted that in the Valkyrie% categories, PS4 is at a severe disavantadge compared to PS4 Pro. Under the old rules, both platforms would compete in the same category, if using the same storage type (HDD or SSD). The first (and simpler) proposed solution would be to add more subcategories to better reflect the variability in load times among platforms.

The alternative solution, which has been adopted, is to remove the storage type subcategory, and instead use a loadless time to merge all platforms and storage types in the same ranking. Since this speedrun has a fixed route, and load times are not expected to vary much between the same platform/storage, a good way to do this is to calculate an average load time for each platform/storage, and subtract this fixed time from all runs made on that platform/storage. This way, we don't need to use any load remover tool (which would not be feasible to implement in this game) or individually count the loads for every run made in the future (which would also not be practical for the runner nor to the mods who verify it). The downside of this solution is that load times can vary randomly and are not exactly the same among different runs in the same platform/storage, so the runs can have loads a few seconds greater or smaller than the average time suggests. However, this problem is also present in the old rules and in the first proposed solution.

To determine the average loads, I opened most of the Valkyrie% runs currently in the leaderboard and calculated all 18 loads (restart checkpoints and portals) to a precision of 1 second. For the restart checkpoints, I begin counting the loads the moment the restart command is done, and end the moment the GoW icon begins to fade out. For the portals, the loads start the moment the destination is selected, and end the moment the portal appears in the portal realm.

To determine the total load time for each platform, I simply summed all individuals loads and averaged them over all runs. The values I found are: 414s (PS4), 298s (PS4 Pro), 194s (PS4 Pro SSD), 335s (PS4 SSD, with a sample size of one run), 212s (PS5, with a sample size of one run). The PS5 run I checked lost time in one of the portals due to extra time spent on the menu, so its time is probably around ~205s. I rounded these values down and the final adopted load values are: • Base PS4 or PS4 Slim with HDD: 410s • Base PS4 or PS4 Slim with SSD: 330s • PS4 Pro with HDD: 290s • PS4 Pro with SSD: 190s • PS5 with internal SSD: 200s

I made a video to demonstrate the loads in a typical Valkyrie% run and how they were counted:

Since they were based on one run each, the PS4 SSD and PS5 values are provisory and may be refined in the future. The PS5 value is valid for runs played with the default SSD inside the PS5. For runs made on PS5 with an external SSD or HDD, the loads may be different and we can evaluate them if such runs appears.

All Valkyrie% categories have been updated to reflect these changes. Their rules have also been updated and were slightly rewritten to make them clearer.

Also, the God of War (2018) leaderboard now supports PS4 Pro as a platform. Runs made on PS4 Pro should be entered with this platform, rather than PS4 as before. We updated all Valkyrie% runs with the correct platforms, and plan to update the runs of other categories soon.

Summary: • Valkyrie% runs now use a loadless time, and the previous subcategories of HDD/SSD have been eliminated (for Valkyrie% only). • To get the loadless time, you must subtract a fixed amount of time from the time with loads, depending on your platform/storage. • The leaderboard now supports PS4 Pro as a platform.

peeq and ThiagoGow like this
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