Regarding how loadless timing works
3 years ago
United States
Void_Delphox
Any/All, He/Him, She/Her, They/Them
3 years ago

https://www.speedrun.com/sr3/run/y8d4j6nz

About a week ago I noticed someone finally beat my primitive attempt at an act 1 DLC speedrun for this game. Just today I check my profile and somehow I noticed I had WR again because the run got rejected because loadless timing didn't work.

Why didn't the mods just manually retime the run? Like, I get you guys might not have much time to do so, but in my honest opinion the point of loadless time is to make it possible for every console or computer to be able to fairly run the game and have an equal chance at WR. If you guys don't want to retime a run to make sure the loadless timer is correct or retime console runs to put everyone at a level playing field, what's the point? And especially with how few runs are done on consoles anyways, I don't really understand why those runs weren't retimed either. Like, my runs were retimed, but load times weren't removed. You guys looked at my run, evidently.

I know my name doesn't mean much here since I've only submitted a couple runs and don't do anything for this community, but I still feel like it's a bad precedent to set by retiming pc runs and using a loadless timer for those but not for other consoles.

Pomorskie, Poland

Manually re-timed loadless timing will never be as accurate (or equivalent) to the loadless timer used in PC runs. The PC runs were retimed by just remove an average time from existing runs done with the loadless timer, they weren't retimed manually.

United States
Void_Delphox
Any/All, He/Him, She/Her, They/Them
3 years ago

I'd argue they'd be more accurate since you can start cutting loading times the exact frame they start, where with a loadless timer we don't always know what's being cut there. But even if that isn't necessarily possible, there's no excuse for not at least trying to retime the console runs here. If it was a time thing, they're too busy to do it, you could just argue they could do it when they find a little bit of free time. But that change came like a year or so ago, before I did a single run for the game. And it still begs the question, why use loadless for only pc and not do it for consoles where there's an even bigger disadvantage with load times and framerate among other things?

United States
Void_Delphox
Any/All, He/Him, She/Her, They/Them
3 years ago

I also don't see why his run had to be rejected for being incompatible with a loadless timer when console runs have the same issue and are not rejected unless there's something fishy with them. From what I could tell, there was nothing wrong with this runner's footage. His run just didn't work with a timer?

Poland

You put out a lot of points, so let me just answer them 1 by 1.

The run was rejected cause the loadless timer didn't work correctly - if you use an unsupported resolution for the load remover, it pauses the timer on the "mission completed" screens, which is not supposed to happen, thus making the run faster than it was in reality.

On the topic of manual load removal - it's not gonna happen. I don't think you understand how much time would it take to count every single load in a 1h or a 3+h run. We, as moderators, only volunteer to run the leaderboards, we don't get paid for it. We have our own lives, jobs, studies and it's sometimes hard to find enough time to just verify a run, let alone retime it. And on top of that, most of us moderate other games as well, so it's not like we're only sacrificing our free time for SR3.

I retimed your runs while verifying them cause you've started/stopped the timer incorrectly, I haven't removed any loading times from them.

As you've said yourself, console runs will never be competitive and properly comparable against PC ones cause of other factors aside from load removal. That's why we've decided to just let them be measured in real time, like most other leaderboards do, since making separate categories for them when there's barely any runs doesn't exactly make sense.

United States
Void_Delphox
Any/All, He/Him, She/Her, They/Them
3 years ago

In that case, in the event where a load remover doesn't work on a pc run, why not verify the run using RTA and state in the rules "If the loadless timer is not used or is found incompatible the run will be timed RTA"? In my opinion that's better than rejecting a run that was still performed legitimately.

Poland

Rules say that "PC runs use the Loadless timing convention" - it should be in the runner's best interest to make sure that the load remover works correctly before going for an attempt.

Once we start making exceptions in that regard, it may spin out of control and cause comments like "You've accepted X's run RTA, why wouldn't you accept mine? I didn't bother with setting up load remover cause it seemed too hard for me".

In my opinion you're kinda blowing the whistle, considering that the runner himself doesn't seem to be bothered by the rejection as much as you do.

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