You could create a category only for emulator, separate from that of ps2 because the emulator has advantage over ps2
What types of advantages have been found? Just load times or anything else?
The emulator has an advantage because the load's much faster than normal PS2. An example of this is the first fight against Kakashi, on normal PS2 it starts at 38 seconds, but on the emulator it starts at 34. These 4 seconds of disadvantage are applied to virtually every fight that ends up taking considerable time. This ends up frustrating those who play on their own console. No need to create a category just for emulator, because it would be boring, just add 106 seconds which is the total time earned on all runs submitted using emulator. If the calculated time is incorrect, please correct me.
I did some testing from this, and Felipe's right, there's nearly two minutes of difference of loads between my console run and Meka's WR on emulator. Meka's run: 38:17 with 8:09 of load time--30:08 game time My run: 39:14 with 9:57 of load time--29:17 game Load time difference: 1:48, comparable the 1:46 Felipe mentioned. (My timing might not be super accurate either, but it sounds like a 1:45-1:50 difference)
I don't want to demand anything crazy (since we've already had a bit of a fiasco with the leaderboards and I don't want to sound bitter about my WR being beaten, I'm really not too worried how this ends up), but I want to suggest, maybe a console vs emulator sub-tab, like what the SM64 boards do with N64, VC and Emulator runs. We could also try a run time and game time split on the boards, but that might be a lot of work to go through every run on the boards and time loadscreens. Up to the mods to decide.
(2.3*2) times #of missions equals +/-difference. sucks that emu's faster, because i was sure that it's other way around.
can uh, we just try to count the runs by the time you spent fighting maybe? solves loadtime problem, but screws up the mashing in between the segments though. making leaderboard a mess would suck, but meh
We could pause the time in the load and let time count only in dialogues and phase selection, thus taking any advantage. This is how the guys that run Cuphead do.
I've done some stopwatch testing on this and I found out that the in-game timer doesn't include loading screens. This will make an easy solution to the equality problem. Have people save their games after a speedrun and use in-game time as the reference for the leaderboard. I think that's much better than either banning emulators or giving them a huge advantage. For the NG+ categories, we can just take the final time and subtract the time the file had when you loaded it.
Ok, I agree now with the increase amount of players that are beginning to run this game on emulator and the obvious time save that comes with it according to users in this thread, I think it is time to address this issue. I am interested in l555444333222's solution. Can you reply with detailed instructions on how to reproduce your proposed timing rules and if it is possible to replicate on emulator. If we decide to go with this I think we also need to discuss what to do with the current runs.
The start and stop time of all runs will need to be slightly changed to work with the new rules. All runs will be timed by in-game time, which starts when you select New Game (or Load Game, for NG+ categories) and immediately after finishing a run, players must save the game as soon as possible, and the time shown on the save file doesn't include loads, so it will be fair for everyone to make that their official time for the leaderboards. All runs for NG+ will need to have footage of them selecting Load Game, so we can see what the in-game timer was when they loaded it, and subtract that from the in-game timer on the final save after completing a run, to get the in-game time of the run without loads. As for runs that are already on the leaderboard, I suggest one of two things: 1. We re-time them manually by watching the run with a stopwatch handy, pausing every time the game loads. 2. Don't bother changing or deleting them because IGT will always be lower than RTA anyway, so the runners could easily beat their old times.
Thank you l555444333222, for the help. I will be testing your proposed solution and thinking about how to move forward. I will get back to everyone in a couple days when decided.
Here's an example of what a run with the new timing method would look like. It's easy and fair for everybody. This run would be 35:07 on the leaderboard.
This example l555444333222 was very interesting. If it were up to me we would run like that
SoullessMW, have you thought about what to do with the suggested rule change? I'll help re-time some runs if you want to go through with the change.
Ok, so I think the proposed solution of switching to IGT and retiming runs is a probably the best option right now. I'm going to look at re wording the rules now and then begin retiming from wr down. If a run has no video then I will leave the time as is.
Actually whats everyones opinion on just not retiming runs? I don't want to give an unfair advantage to runs because they where improperly retimed. Also I don't really want to sit through all the runs pausing and unpausing a timer. I don't really have time that I'm willing to give to that.
I believe that the IGT has a concrete time difference from the RTA. I could record a run and see the difference in time between the two, then just take the RTA and subtract with the IGT, obtaining a time difference between the two. Then we would take the result of the subtraction and subtract with the time of all executions, so we would get more or less the IGT of each run. The only problem is that we don't know how long the players were in the game menu.
I agree with Felipe_Retrogamer's solution. For the cases in which there wasn't footage of menus, we could give the runners the benefit of the doubt and subtract the same amount of time from their runs because they had no idea that a rule change would happen in the future. If they did, they would have gone through the opening menus as quickly as possible. As for my runs, it's fine if you don't re-time them. I can beat them in one try with a new route I made.
