Hi folks! New to Walkabout Mini Golf speedrunning, and submitted my first run yesterday :)

I was wondering, the rules for timing a course say to start from pressing Play Round at the lobby menu. I can understand this being necessary for a full game run, but for a single course, it seems odd to include a variable load time into the run. Would it perhaps be preferable to time from the fade from black once on the course, or perhaps hitting the first ball?

You cannot click and start timing a run when you are swinging for a ball and you can't analyze every single video and calculate frames when loaded in. It is set that way so people can use the oculus timer to make it accessible to more people as well as stay consistent for everyone else.

I have been wondering: what prevents people from cutting out parts of the loading screen and therefore reducing their time? That would be almost unnoticeable and an unfair advantage, because personally for me, the loading time is quite long, especially on DLC courses.

The same thing that stops people from editing videos (or screenshots) for almost all games' speedrun entries: Nothing. If someone feels that motivated to cheat, for something like this, I feel sorry for them.

But I do agree, this start-frame calculation is a problem. I hadn't noticed how much of a problem until I saw one with a 3-second load and another with a 20 second load. That is a MASSIVE difference.

I don't click anything external (like Splits) to start timing my runs -- I always just watch the video back and figure out the time from that.

And these runs aren't competing at the millisecond level yet (and there aren't too terribly many), so we COULD actually go back and re-calculate the "start at fade-from-black" time for all existing runs.