I know that this has been brought up in a previous thread, but it was definitely brushed off too quickly. After doing some digging, I've noticed a significant difference in load times between runners, and it simply isn't fair for somebody to have such a distinct advantage just because they could afford to build a faster PC.
For example, according to the leaderboard the WR is 28:49 and my time is 31:56. However, when I retimed these videos myself to discount load screens, it turned out that Armork's run had 152 seconds of total load time throughout the run, averaging about 10 seconds per load screen, and my run had 308 seconds of total load time, averaging more than 20 seconds per load screen. That's a huge difference that has absolutely nothing to do with gameplay. It still puts him ahead, but only by 31 seconds as opposed to several minutes.
In the sake of fairness, I'm happy to take it upon myself to retime every run on the leaderboard. Timing stops when the white load markers appear on screen and continues when the player regains control of the character. It's objective, and it's fair.
Going forward, there are ways to make it so that runs submitted would need to be timed according to this standard. The Crash Bandicoot NST community, for example, has a program built into LiveSplit that stops the timer automatically whenever a loading screen is detected. This tech exists.
Hi, I'm new here but I think this would be a great idea! It would make it fair across all of the platforms and remove any issues like what you are seeing between PC and consoles. Would there be a way to potentially make an autosplitter out of it? Like when the loading starts, it splits on that frame? That would give us more consistent splits (splitting by hand isn't that bad in this game but it would be nice for keeping everything precise). Just an idea if you are going to go ahead and make the loadless timer in LiveSplit.
Hey, I have already tried to make an autosplitter. However, since I have no experience in developing autosplitters, I wasn't able to find the base adress of the game and therefore I couldn't get the autosplitter to work. I can take a look at it again and try to make it work.
I've resumed my retiming and it turns out third place should actually be first place. The fact that load times are literally world record determining only further supports my case.
Back at it, I go!
I finished the loadtime remover. You can download it under the Resources tab. I haven't testet it on the full game but it should work fine. I might add features like Autosplit in the future.
I have finished retiming all 12 current runs on the leaderboard. I'm going to double check the top three to be absolutely fair and certain, especially since the WR is a potential tie, if not only a couple seconds off. When I'm completely sure of my work, I'll post a separate thread with the new times.
Thank you all for your effort. I will update the leaderboard to include game time, which will be the main timing method over real time.
I will update rules to reflect this.
New loadless times have been submitted and you should see them soon; congrats to everyone who moved up as a result!
Hi, I am very sorry for resurrecting this topic but I noticed a comment that a load splitter was available in the resources tab and I can not find it. Is this still somewhere available?
Hi, Its a part of Livesplit now. You should be able to enable it through the Edit Splits window when you set the game name to AER.
