Hello! So I have some explanations for some mechanics and with it our reasoning for the timing methods used. When we retime runs for IGT we download the video of the run and edit out every cutscene and guide trigger and account for slowdowns from Major Kills which is a 2s time difference and Base Captures which is a 2.5s time difference. With all this done we can time each stage this way and sum them all to get a final time.

Now a common question would be "Why do you even do all of that instead of just using RTA?" and that is a good question. The simple answer is there is too much RNG to time loss outside of the stages themselves. Leveling certain allies will add menu prompts that randomly trigger between stages and picking up items can create a bunch of micro time loss. Also loads aren't consistent overall and console degradation and HDD vs DDS create a lot of hurdles for timing in that way while being fair. Also Last Stand is random and would arbitrarily kill runs. Now an alternative would be to just time stages and that's a relatively fair compromise as well. The main issues with that are the black fade to cutscenes aren't consistent even on the same console and also guides and the speed you skip cutscenes can drop input detection because some of those scenes lag less or more depending on what you did leading into the cutscene. So it makes sense to remove these as well. Finally slowdowns are accounted for already on EMU with the frame timing script so its only fair to cut those out of the time as well.

This adds a fair share of verification time slowdown, but overall I think it makes the game the most fair and competitive for speedrunners and I hope it clears up questions you might have of how we time for IGT. There are slight advantages currently to Console over EMU in regards to how we edit the videos for retime, but its also very possible EMU saves a bit of that time back in regards to lag and visual clearness with the Black Screen wipe transitions being faster and thus less time is spend playing blind.

Thanks everyone for reading and if you have any additional questions feel free to make a thread and ask or DM me on Discord under the same name!