Since the beginning of the new year, we've taken strides towards getting a working load remover available for use by all runners as a means to combat load discrepancy a other factors that could add on time in an RTA setting. With some help by members of the community, we now have achieved this goal, and will now have it be recommended for use going forward.

So then, what shall we do with the current runs on the boards that were done with a simple RTA timing method? Well, I've gone through the runs that I thought mattered (the top ones that we're sort of close to eachother), and timed out any frames where the word "loading" appeared on screen from the transition from mission briefing to the shop menu/spawn in.

Just to clarify, I'm timing out any frame that looks like this -

Notice the box that usually says "continue" transitions into "loading" after being clicked, I then resumed the timer once the first frame of the shop menu/spawn into game world appeared on screen. For quick loads, I timed out from first "black screen" frame to last "black screen" frame before spawning back into game world. I must stress, these are the ONLY PORTIONS OF RUNS THAT WERE TIMED OUT MANUALLY, mission briefings, ending stats screens, shops and and accidental pauses were left in.

Obviously, doing this by watching the youtube videos one frame at a time can be a little inaccurate, because some recordings were only 30fps, so sometimes the jumps in time were more massive for those than they were for 60fps recordings, giving them more "load time" to remove. Also, there are very very slight loads from shop menu to game world after hitting "play mission" that I could not reasonably count because of no real transition between the two in terms of changing of frames. Both my runs and Noctorious' runs timed out to be 26:29.800~ or so, but due to possible inaccuracies I've just changed both of them to read as "26:29 w/o loads".

Its also worth noting that, at the time of this writing, I don't believe the current load remover times out cutscenes. Some users have an issue (or benefit???) where their cutscenes don't play at all, which could give them an advantage, albeit very minimal, over the course of a run. On the matter at hand, I personally believe they should be counted TO the time, cause the player does have control during them and can end them through their own input, which I believe should be always counted. But with some runners not having them play at all and just instantly going to the Stats Screen, I can see this being an issue for sure. Thoughts on the matter?

It's obvious going forward we ask all runners to use this new Autosplitter/Load Remover if possible, because the times from now on will be sorted by "time w/o loads" in ranking. You do not have to use this function, of course. I will go ahead and add the splitter to the Resources page and try to write up a guide on how to do it soon(ish).

I could also try to time out the Expert runs using the same method I did for the Normal runs, but seeing as they aren't close to each other, I don't think its that important to spend hours on that atm.