First of all, a huge thanks to Marioaxelsan for all the coding he has done and to Mordaak for having betaed it. The autosplitter is now mandatory for all runs in the 3 main categories (Any%, Glitchless and Arcade). For Arcade, just activate it in Livesplit and you are good to go. For Any% and Glitchless, you MUST go to "Settings" and toggle "Exclude festival games" and "Exclude shield training".

As it has not been tested in multiplayer, RTA is still needed there.

1. What is this thread for?

The latest developments of the Any% category have shown that, because of hardware limitations, keyboard players were at an advantage over controller players. Indeed, the bling trick is only doable on a keyboard, effectively making Any% a “keyboard only” category for now. Since Any% NMG has been designed so that every player can be on an equal footing regardless of the hardware used, some adjustments must be made. The first one will be an autosplitter/load remover (coming soon) to acknowledge the fact that we don’t all have gaming PCs. The second one is to end the abuse of animation cancelling.

2. What is animation cancelling?

To keep things simple, it is the fact of cancelling an action with another faster one to gain time. One easy to see application is attack-cancelling: using the buckler in the middle of an attack will stop the swinging animation, allowing you to attack immediately after. Other uses include blink-cancelling: a blink-attack-blink combo allowing to move way faster than intended.

3. Why is it a problem?

Because it removes the fun from the category. Its objective is to reward good routing, execution and skill, not button mashing. Animation cancelling makes ASPD irrelevant when it should be the cornerstone of every build. Furthermore, controller players are at a massive disadvantage here since it will almost always be faster to do this trick on a keyboard than on a controller.

4. What are the consequences for the other categories?

I am going to be honest here: this is going to be a pain to enforce. It means that the mods will have to watch the entire run. Furthermore, to complicate things, there are moments where it’s mandatory to cancel an attack animation (ie: for last second shielding in order to optimise DPS). Hence the rule will only apply to glitchless for now and ONLY covers INTENTIONAL attack and blink cancelling (so don't worry about shielding that axe attack from Luke). It may be extended to Arcade with the next release though, let me know what you think about this below.