On the furnace bit you can actually prevent enemies from spawning by flipping the switch and getting to the ladder quick enough. Found out on my blind playthrough.

Thought it useful as you can get to the top of the catwalk without being attacked but once you get on the crane enemies will spawn from the upper catwalk doors.

Makes it easier if you flip the switch and then back away from it, turning round on the corner to go up the ladder.

I'll address the points (in order of appearance in gameplay) before giving any insight onto what Matt and I are actively looking into.

I know that the start playing can be hidden and we've been allowing runs that have this as people may want to use this option during normal non-speedrun gameplay and as we want the speedrun to be accessible to as many people as possible, even me who had never played a FM game prior to speedrunning it.

A lot has been found since Matt thought of creating the category including save skipping which was one of the biggest time wasters for the run or that the MacOS version allows the use of the space bar to save while PC isn't consistent with it.

As for the end run splash screen, we've not seen other runs that don't appear with this. Even when doing the 100+ runs to work out a TAS every run had the splash screen. We're only a tiny community on speedrun.com so there will be anomalies and errors in runs that are down to the software itself.

FM is a yearly release so I don't think we'll ever get 100% accuracy on a game or how we can optimise it's progression and we're talking about how we can take FM category as a whole further whether that be moving on to the newer games as FM23 is being added to GamePass PC from day 1, whether we add seperate categories for Touch, Mobile, XBox, and Switch versions.

For now we'll stick to the rules we've set and what we have allowed so far but will spend some time looking into the issues posted just please bear in mind both Matt and I have commitments outside of speedrunning and gaming that need to take priority so I can't give a timeframe as to when we expect any result.

GGs man, really clean run 69. Sub 28 is definately possible. Hopefully it doesn't take you to run 420.