Hi everyone !

I started speedrunning it (with Xunkar) 3-4 years ago and stopped after having reached what we believed to be close-to-perfect times with the routes we used at the time. I'm really glad that people have started speedrunning this game again... Unfortunately there are a few problems with the current rules and categories.

First of all, there is absolutely no reason to use the IG timer as the game allows the players to use items that slow time which means that runs can have an incredibly slower IG time while being 2 to 3 times longer in Real Time and we can all agree that speedrunning is about going fast, not making the game THINK that you're going fast. IG time is only used with games in which it is reliable and cannot be altered (and it's only used because it eliminates differences in loading times, which is pretty much irrelevant here).

Plus, and this has been known for a while in the Alien Swarm speedrunning community, on top of making for a slower and irrelevant time, "Adrenaline Abuse" can actually gllitch the IG time to make it excessively lower than what you would get doing the EXACT same route without using the adrenaline. This thing is completely broken and this is why we should only care about Real Time.

Second of all (this is far less important but needed to be mentionned anyway), there are two obvious flaw in the way the categories are made : the first one is that it does not differentate between 2, 3 or 4 players in coop which seems pretty illogical considering the number of players changes your options and routing. More importantly : two players (or three) who do not have the option to play with more people shouldn't see their times ignored just because of that.

The other flaw, minor this one, is that it is limited to only Easy and Brutal. I see where this is coming from but in this game each difficulty setting could make the route different and interesting. In my opinin we should either add every difficulty setting or just remove them altogether and just focus on getting the quickest time (what should be our ultimate priority, not discriminate by a number of criteria that have no real basis).

Anyway that's all I had to say about all this, I hope you take it under consideration and will then love to come here again to share our runs (and a few guides we've written along the way).