@BLaZeR I just mean what if livesplit crashes. It doesn't happen often but I know mine crashed last week. I guess manual timing has to be done there but that would be hard to be precise. That being said, maybe that's just a risk we accept.

After more thought, I feel like we either need to go the script route for not counting loading (thus kinda refreshing the speedrun forums which kinda stinks even though it'll have a "-ns or script" tag) or we simply just ban -ns and consider it a mod to the game like -seed or something like -act5. I'm leaning towards the banning of it because then we just don't have to deal with all of this hassle and management of everything. People just deal with load times because they're a part of the game and everyone is on a level playing ground and is able to stream/enjoy the game audio. I think this is my vote.

What an interesting issue...

I can see ups and downs to both. A script sounds cool and would really help with things like tcp/ip resets, but that also would "invalidate" every current run since they all have load times. So everything we've done would be pointless in a way since they would all be reset. Also there is concern about the script/program crashing during the run. I've have my livesplit crash before and then had to go back and manually time it...with load times that could be awful...

Playing with -ns sounds fine but man...I don't want to play without sound. That is going to ruin my stream for a lot of people and to me is almost worth it to have slower load speeds (and a competitive disadvantage) just to have a better stream experience. Which kinda sucks.

I'm really not sure.

I was wondering if it wouldn't be a bad idea to add missions/campaigns as a goal?

Could be nice to add in a bunch of smaller things to work on + whole campaign.

I know there is a guy who did this on the speedrunning archive site but he does a bunch of patch jumping around, whereas I'm more of a "latest patch" kind of guy.

Just a thought!

haha this happens to me quite often when I stream. I just upload it in multiple parts. It's annoying, but if it's not allowed then you have to scratch out a lot of my PBs and records

So it's probably fine, but people don't tend to usually enjoy watching streams with webcam footage of a game. Just never quite ends up looking good unfortunately

So I just finished running a Hammerdin through Hell (http://www.speedrun.com/run/kz5301ny) and I'm wondering what other characters people believe could run through Hell, what sort of plan for skills they would have, and what time estimates they believe it would take.

I know for the hammerdin one of the biggest challenges I had to consider was Wave 2 in Hell Baal due to magic immunity. In my practice run I tried holy bolt, crushing blow, Merc w/ potions, etc. None of it worked. What I actually ended up having to do was Charge/knockback each unraveller individually until they were pushed far enough outside the throne to spawn the next wave. Annoying, but effective.

Other tricky areas to consider: Maggot Lair/Arcane Sanctuary/other places you need to be able to kill most everything to get by, Flayer Jungle, chaos knights in CS, etc