Dan the Man has been famously terrible to speedrun at top level, in part because loading times are inconsistent across devices (better devices will load faster and give a free advantage), and because if you really want to be at the top you have no choice but to get premium (either by buying it which is unfair on the users, or getting a cracked game which is unfair on the devs). We're going to change that.

As of now, all categories that require real time (Full Story, individual chapters and Prologue (new game)) will now be sorted by real time without loads (LRT) as opposed to the standard real time (RTA) that we had previously been using. (Don't worry, you won't need to try to time this yourselves. You can just submit a guess for the time with loads and leave the LRT field empty, we'll do the rest.) You will of course still be able to see the RTA time on the leaderboards and on individual runs.

There is of course the question of "What counts as a load?" Our rationale is that anything that every runner will have to experience during their runs that will always take the same amount of time will count as a load. This means that the time taken to enter a shop or watching your character's death animation should not be deducted from the overall run time, but the time spent in a cutscene or time spent waiting for the cassette cutscene at a checkpoint should since that depends on your device specs or not having premium respectively. The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of what will and will not be counted as a load.

Counts toward final run time:

• Time spent with the controls or HUD visible (ie you are playing the game) except after the cutscene in 8-4-2 (you are not playing the game in this particular instance)
• Time spent entering, browsing and exiting an in-level shop
• Time spent during the revival potion animation and death animation (up until the first frame of fade-out)
• Time spent on the pause menu (and settings submenu in the pause menu)
• Time spent navigating the map (counted from the first frame that the map is fully visible to the frame after a button is pressed to leave the map, such as a chest on the map, the character selection button, back button, adventure button, survival button, shop button, or play button on a level)

Does not count toward final run time:

• Time spent watching a cutscene
• Time spent on a loading screen / black screen / fade-in or fade-out
• Time spent on menus other than the map, pause screen or in-level shop (this includes the character selection menu, costume selection menu, main menu, and all others)
• Time spent on the "No internet connection detected" screen (unless you are still able to move while this screen is up)
• Time spent waiting for an ad to load, watching an ad, or watching the cassette cutscene at a checkpoint
• Time spent on the "Revive?" screen (from first frame of player showing the damage animation to first frame after the vendor disappears from the bottom left corner)
• Time spent on the level end screen and level intro screen
• On runs that were done on low end devices on v1.6.20 and below only, time spent frozen before a checkpoint/other freeze times if it is particularly noticeable (in 1.7.0+, the game will do multiple frames' worth of calculations if it detects that it's missed frames, meaning there are technically no pauses in gameplay)
• Time spent on the hospital continue screen (normally only visible in v1.4.44 and below after dying, but sometimes appears after dying in 8-4-2;1)

Happy running everyone!