NOTE: THIS IS A COPY OF ANOTHER POST AND THESE CONTENTS WILL STILL BE REVIEWED AND CLARIFIED IF NEEDED. JUST NEEDED A URL TO LINK TO.

[section=Intro]The rule listed for the categories are a listing of what applies for those categories. In this post I try to explain why some of the rules are in place and give more detail on them. If something is not clear, please post in the thread about changing these rules. In case something is not black and white, it's up to the moderators to judge whether a run should be disqualified (for a certain category).

Due to the limited number of runs present for this game, existing runs will not be disqualified if one of the more specific rules is violated. They may have to be moved to different categories.

[section=Rules] [big]General[/big] 1. Team AI may be enabled. 2. The total time of a run is the sum of all timings on the mission end screens for the host. 3. Runs recorded by clients must have some indication what the hosts time is. 4. Mods that give you (significant) advantages are not allowed. See the next section.

[big]Categories[/big] 1. The exploitation of major and time saving glitches is only allowed in the Any% and Shuffle categories. See below on what's considered a major glitch. 2. In co-op runs, it is not allowed to leave a game to speed it up unless posted under the Shuffle category. 3. It is not allowed to restart a co-op game in a category other than in the Shuffle category. It is allowed in single player mode and for individual levels. [small][1][/small]

[small][1] Restarting or ending a game will not show the time played. Unless an in-game timer is shown, the time between the intro fade-out and the opening of the menu will be used. Unless all timings are accurate to tenths of a second, they will be rounded up to the nearest second. Endgame timings are used as is (and rounded to what the vanilla game timer would've shown).[/small]

[section=Mods: What is allowed and what not.]This is a controversial topic because not everyone has the same opinion about what's cheating and what isn't. However, disallowing all mods means you can never play with any mod or "accidental" speedruns would not be allowed when you regularly play with some mods enabled. Instead, we'll be a bit more liberal on this and allow anything that's not a cheat. That is, any information that will help your run and is not provided by the game and cannot be determined manually is not allowed.

Since only the actual gameplay is recorded, intros are allowed to be skipped with mods as long as the transitions are maintained. While this may indirectly affect the state of the game in some cases, there is no advantage in starting a game a few seconds earlier. When a certain timing is of concern, the same effect can be achieved in other ways that do not involve mods. While restarting a game is allowed to restart individual levels, you are not allowed to do this to speed up multiplayer runs as you may gain a few seconds compared to when you are forced end the game by the whole team getting downed.

Examples of what's not allowed includes anything that changes the gameplay, seeing assault times in a way not possible with a stopwatch, enemy numbers (as they can tell you when the assault starts or ends), information about enemy hitpoints, etc.

If you really want to do a run on a modified game (e.g. a custom difficulty), you can use the other difficulty. Even slight alterations to the gameplay are not allowed for the regular difficulties even if they make the game more difficult. The only exception to this is the bugfixes to the Undercover map by DorHUD/DAHM to fix the boss loop as they do not impact speedruns (they're too short for the bug to have any effect).

[section=Glitches]The game has tons of bugs and some of them can be abused to make your runs faster or much easier. In the any% category all glitches can be used, but for the glitchless category they have to be defined since many small glitches are used by most of the community in regular gameplay. In general for the glitchless category the rule is simple: if it gives you a time advantage or a significant risk advantage, then it should be disallowed.

Avoiding damage or manipulating assaults by entities being in so called "god spots" or "jesus spots" are not allowed. These are areas where you are hidden from enemies (by taking advantage of their pathing limitations) and take little or no damage. Assault manipulations in general is a way to play this game, so there's nothing wrong with that as long as units can (easily) hit you in the places you go. Examples of these spots are closed off rooms in Panic Room, sitting behind doors, hiding in open containers and hiding in bags to avoid damage. This does not only apply to players but also to sentry guns as they too attract the attention of the cops just like a player would.

Interacting through objects in general does not save you any time nor is it significantly safer to do so unless you purposely put yourself at risk by being in risky places. For time advantages there's really only a few things I can think of and these are:

• Duplicating and using mission critical equipment, most notably gas cans and thermite unless explicitly attempted to be picked up again or multiple players starting the interaction at the same time.
• Interacting through the wall on panic room to set up or repair the saw. This avoids two people having to go in the panic room.
• Interacting with the gas on slaughterhouse through the container wall. This only saves a second, but every second matters.
• Destroying the glass on the cases on Diamond Heist with the GL40 from the floor above even though will only save you a second on a solo run.

For some less obvious ones it may be debatable and may have to be determined when the question arises. These include not killing the bulldozer guarding the transformer box on Counterfeit. However, for this example you're not saving any time (if your team is good enough) and in fact you already lost time at this point as the power has been turned off. To be clear: that specific case would be allowed in a glitchless run. [section=Tracking time]For runs by individuals the time simply starts from the moment you gain control of your character until you see the endgame screen. This is tracked automatically and the result is rounded to the nearest second (the time you see on Steam is rounded down to the nearest integer number so it can be a second lower). For multiplayer runs desync plays a factor, so if the host has the ability to record, then he or she should do so to prevent any questions about the validity of the time (i.e. caused by high ping and/or having delayed objectives or spawns). This can be done by communicating the time or taking screenshots. These screenshots then have to show either the endgame screen or the Steam statistics [small][1][/small] (if this was the fastest time). For full game runs the screenshots have to be of the endgame screens as the small differences can add up. In general the time shown at the mission end screen should be identical for both host and client. If there's any discrepancy, the time shown for the host will apply. Existing runs recorded by clients have to be taken as is in order not to invalidate everything.

[small][1] The time indicated by the Steam statistics has to be at most the value shown on the endgame screen. Lower values -- by one or two seconds -- are acceptable, higher values are not. Because of how the rounding is done, this may still lead to a minor discrepancy if the times are equal. A lower value on Steam is no proof the run was faster than shown in the video/screenshot.[/small]

[section=Crashes, (re)joining and other client stuff]The game isn't the most stable and it can crash or bug out and the networking code isn't the best. I do not wish to disqualify multi-heist runs when this would happen. But if the video isn't recorded by the host, it's really difficult to determine an accurate time for the run. So unless screenshots are provided in this case, the time will be based on the video and in every case of doubt the result will be rounded up. If any gaps in the video are present, there's no other option than to disqualify the whole run. For individual levels, such effort will not be taken and the run will be disqualified immediately when a player (re)joins the game.

Using mods to get yourself out of situations where you became stuck or falling through the map is tolerated, but this should not be abused. Any sign of intent or gain of advantage will disqualify the run.