This game has very small load time differences in between matches which we cant do much about but there is a HUGE discrepancy in the initial load time after selecting your arcade mode settings. The start frame should be when you skip the cutscene into the first fight so everyone has a fair and accurate start timing.

Also, especially for categories that are extremely short (<5mins) like any%, milliseconds should be shown on final time or the category becomes almost 100% RNG without minor execution and optimization mattering much if at all

Mm I agree and this has been on our minds but as far as specifics go there's alot more at play there to consider than it might seem as we'd want a solution that helps all game modes - for instance the degree of influence load times could affect World Tour.

For Arcade modes at least, it's not just the first initial loading after character select that is affected by this so we would need a more all-encompassing solution for that as well. With past leaderboards such as SFV we did this through the introduction of IGT into the verification process to deal with the load time discrepencies but since that process heavily increases the workload on our moderators, I'd like to have some more data and viewable runs from various consoles to draw conclusions from before we commit to a drastic implementation like that.

If it helps in regard to your last point though, milliseconds are already taken into consideration behind the scenes when verifying runs, we simply don't show them unless it's a tiebreaker so we can keep the board UI clean and easy to read.

The only other potential solution to wipe this out would ofc be a category split but that introduces it's own problems for overall joint competativeness by effectivly dividing the community and it's not the kind of solution I've heard support for from our runners or others on our mod team so far either. As things currently stand, it's not uncommon for alot of speedgames to have varying degrees of loadtimes depending on the operating system they're running on so unless we can also find a solution for these concerns in regards to World Tour as well, we'd like to continue monitoring the problem for the time being unless we find things gets too out of hand with too many glaring cases.