I think I understand your point, but I'm not positive I agree. I would argue that if someone completes the game by <some in-game date>, even if they have to pause or run the game slowly, they still will have demonstrated the skill to complete the final milestone by that <in-game date>, a demonstration of pure skill and not how much they paid for a CPU.

I just want to make sure I'm making the risk with how we're doing timing now as clear as I can here:

Cities Skylines is as much a CPU benchmark as it is a game. We're essentially saying "anyone not running with the latest Intel i9 or Ryzen 9 series processor will most likely be unable to compete in PC runs" purely because a day of in-game time is going to process faster on a faster CPU.

An actual example: I had an almost 40% speed increase from my laptop with an i5 processor, when I moved to my friend's computer with a modern Ryzen 9 processor.

It is extremely unlikely anyone will be able to compete that isn't using a top-shelf computer. Further, folks that had a lot of skill that set a record a few years ago may lose their spot simply because new runners will have new computers that are better and could run the game faster, not because of their skill.

In a real way this is risking being pay-to-win, and not much less focused on skill-based capability.

I just want to make sure that if we're insisting that we do timing based only on wall-times, that we're doing so understanding the implications around the CPU.

Asking because I ran into this during practice and my actual run. I completed my shortest wall-clock run on a friend's gaming computer (in 1h 45m), which ended on May 20th 2028 in game. However, my shortest practice run which I did on my budget gaming laptop this weekend was a 2h 45m run, but ended on Dec. 25th 2027 in-game. I feel like I need to ask for myself and the people that shouldn't have to, or can't play on a $2000+ machine to be competitive.

I was curious about timing: much of the mid- and late-game is going to be heavily slowed if you do not have a top-tier CPU. Have we ever thought about changing run timing from wall time to in-game time? Cities Skylines is as much a benchmark for your CPU as it is a game. This would allow folks with anything but top-tier computers to still compete, and wouldn't require folks that want to be/remain competitive to get the latest hardware every year. I checked the forums but didn't see if this had been discussed.