A few months ago, it was discussed among a few of us interested in running the game what sort of rules were to be considered "fair" for actually doing a run of the game with as much of a solo playthrough in mind. With the recent influx of people interested in running this game, I thought I would bring this up again so that we can figure out what is really fair for everyone.

1.Timing starts after you confirm player information after selecting your nation. Interruptions do not pause the timer. Timing ends upon seeing the defeat message of the target boss in the chat log. -This seemed to make the most sense in terms of timing. For things like "Rank 10" or specific missions it would potentially end upon completion of said goal in the chat box.

2.Do not interact with other players or mules. (including things such as the Auction House, Bazaars, trades, partying, etc.). Do not open the Delivery box. Use /blockaid before you leave town. Accidental player interference or griefing is excusable as part of the game. -Since the goal of this is to speedrun the game with a single player mindset, it wouldn't make any sense not to prohibit outside player interaction where applicable. If Co-Op runs become a thing, then obviously this would change, but for all of the 'solo' related runs this seemed to be the general consensus. The only exception to this is in places where it just can't be helped. For example, anything involving Adoulin story missions is going to eventually have to deal with Reives. There are certain areas that you just can't get past without doing the Reive and at some point it's extremely possible that some other person not involved in the speedrun might also need to pass through that Reive and they are going to be attacking the same giant tree root you are.

3. Limited-availability items such as items gained from login campaign, Alter Ego campaigns, etc. are banned. -Some of the login campaign items are incredibly useful and also only available at completely random times. Some of the trusts are incredibly overpowered. Since these sort of things are really only available at random times of the year, it felt most fair to just ban the use of them in order to keep from dissuading someone from running the game just because they don't have access to Kupofried or something.

4. DLC items such as the Destrier Beret, Mog Satchel, etc are banned. If you have a Mog Satchel just don't use it (since you can't remove it). -Not everyone really has access to these things, and not everyone can just buy a new copy of the game every time they want to do a run. So in order to keep things fair, everyone felt like just banning all DLC type items was the best option.

5. Windower Plugins and similar 3rd party programs are banned. You are more than welcome to use the base Windower program if you are unable to utilize the windowed mode available in the base game, but plugins are banned from use. -You can write scripts to automate a lot of things that a player can't really keep up with. Anything from buying items to spaming through cutscenes at a turbo rate. In order to prevent a situation from coming up later on where someone wrote a plugin that automated too much, everyone felt like it was just best to ban all plugins. It's also against Playonline TOS and some players are a bit paranoid about this.

If I forgot anything, or you'd just like to give some further input towards why you disagree with some of these, feel free to chime in.

There's a few things that are also up for discussion and I'd like some input about.

For now I made EXP campaign a variable. Obviously it's going to be faster to do runs during a campaign, but I also don't want to dissuade people from doing runs when the campaign is active. I also don't want to end up with like 500 categories for this game, so at this point it seems best to just make it a variable so that people understand it's just a part of the game.

I personally don't feel like EXP rings should be allowed to be charged during a run, but I understand that it's a mechanic of the game. For the Shadow Lord category it doesn't actually matter (you can get from 15-60 on a single ring and still have some left over), but some of the longer categories it could play out to be a benefit. I do understand both sides of the argument but I don't actually agree with the idea of recharging it. For now It's being allowed, but if the community feels like it provides too much of a bonus that it limits when people can actually do runs then it may end up being banned in the future.

I think EXP rings should be chargeable. A significant leveling benefit comes from timing the start of your run to take advantage of RoE limited-time challenges (Gain EXP, Phys. Damage Kills, Kill Vermin, etc). In the same way, if you decide to run right before Conquest Tally, that's a timing decision that anyone can make once a week.

I understand your reasoning regarding plugins. In my runs I only use plugins that give no tangible benefit other than information, though someone playing without Timers is going to have a much harder time optimizing DPS. It is against TOS, but, if I may be glib, every player knows the GMs only enforce grievous violations.

Rules have been expanded and made more explicit. Please feel free to ask any clarifying questions here, or discuss or recommend changes.