There's been interest in removing load times from the run to even the playing field among players with varying machine capabilities over time. I had previously showed indifference towards the idea, but recent developments have put me on board with it.

With an autosplitter, automatic load time removal would be easy to set up. However, past runs would be time-consuming to manually retime. There are 1,222 load screens in existing runs and I'm in college—it's not likely any retimes will happen before May.

Thus, should the community decide to go with this, the process will be as follows:

1. A version of the autosplitter with "RTA minus loads" timing will be developed and tested.
2. Its use, using the "Game Time" timing method, would be requested in all full-game PC runs of LEGO Racers 2 going forward. I'll evaluate whether or not to require it, though I recognize that this doesn't work for the PS2 version (which nobody has run).
3. Runners would not be required to use its automatic start/split/finish functions (most runners don't split at "finish line of every race"), though runs will be retimed at the start and end as if they did.
4. Until the mass retiming, runs will be timed by the current rule—this is that I find the timestamps of the start and end within the video, and the difference between them is the run time. It's worth noting that I've already done so with all the runs presently on the board, including new runs as they come in.
5. Sometime in May, once my classes are done, I'll make a Google sheet to track all the load screen timestamps to manually retime existing videos. This sheet will be publicly viewable during and after the retiming process, including for all runs I need to manually retime well after the rule's implementation. No times will be changed until all runs have been retimed.

Some driving forces behind this change are:

• The installation method of the game affects load times. If you used the LR2 Alternate Installer, for example, load times are twice as long or more.
• The PS2 version of the game would likely experience uncompetitively long load times as well.
• Even before my modship, the change has been requested.

This change would not invalidate existing runs, and a manual retiming would ensure they're not disadvantaged by having been run before the rule change.

If you have any concerns or input, or would like to approve or oppose the proposal, leave your comments below.

One thing you might want to consider: when I looked at my load times I found that their duration was very consistent, it varied by only a couple of frames over ~20 load screens. It might be less painful to compute an average load time over the first five or so load times of each run and only do a full retime of a run if someone else places close and requests it.

Either way, I think removing load times will be beneficial to the community.

Thanks for supporting this change (and for considering doing it all by hand :p)

how much time loss is from load times? 1:00 - 1:30?

It would be about a minute, yeah. Longer in 100% (78 load screens instead of 56 in Any% or 52 in NG+).

I just did a run with the load time remover active. With loads, 1:22:21.18; without, 1:21:13.99.