Hello everyone!

As some of you know, ElRuinel recently got an incredibly good time of 7:22:05 in Any% NMS (No Major Skips) HD PC reaching new heights for the WR in the category. Upon review of this run, it appears that they encountered the "speed glitch" which has a possibility of occurring when the game has been running for longer than 8 hours. Normally, this isn't an issue for most runs as the glitch is not only rare (and seemingly random), but also means that a runner must not have force quit during a bad encounter in Desert Palace or bad boss fight the entire 8+ hours of play time. With this speed glitch, they were able to speed through the entirety of Memoria and Crystal World, with faster movement speed, and assumedly also able to have less encounter checks for the rest of the run.

Now, this brings us to a conundrum, as this glitch is not mentioned in the Category Rules of Any% NMS, but has been previously known about by some other runners of the category and HD PC in general. For instance, the Category Rules for All Bosses HD PC does have this stated clearly in the rule set:

"Mandatory game reboot: Due to FPS instability after 8+ hours, the game must be fully rebooted from Steam at least once every 8 hours to avoid unintentional speedup of the player character. You can reboot the game for this express purpose, but there are many opportunities to close out the game with Alt+F4 at convenient times such as unwanted encounters and frog catching segments. Please include a timestamp for this in your submission notes."

Some other runners in the Any% NMS HD PC category have viewed this speed glitch as unintended for the run, long before this appeared in ElRuinel's recent PB. However, since it has not been displayed in the rule set for the category rules anywhere, how is a newer runner supposed to know about this glitch? For the current listed ruleset on SRC, nothing has been broken. While they have not done so yet, if ElRuinel were to submit their current PB, it would be accepted given the current Category Ruleset, since they abided by all of the given Rules in the category.

Originally, my initial first instinct was to agree that the speed glitch should not be used, and that runners must perform a hard reset at the beginning of their run to showcase that there is likely to be no intent of performing this speed glitch for the remainder of the run. However, that brings up several red flags, and not something so easy to enforce in the current leaderboard. After reviewing all 71 runs under any% NMS HD PC, only 18 of the 71 runs have a visible hard reset in their VOD, before beginning their run. All other 53 runs either start from the title screen, start New Game from a Game Over, or their VOD has been deleted and cannot confirm. Now I have not been able to scrub through each of these VODs and verify if there was a hard reset in the middle of the run OR speed glitch usage, as that will take far more time to comb through every single VOD up there.

Something else that would bother me about this, is that if someone were to encounter the speed glitch by simply playing longer than 8+ hours but still abiding by all of the rules of the category including the theoretical preliminary hard reset, are they just not able to submit? For instance, what if the runner takes 11 hours to complete their run, and reach Crystal World when suddenly Zidane boosts across the screen? Does that mean they aren't allowed to submit? Should there be a grace period of "Oh, Zidane is moving faster than normal, I must close the game and Continue and take the time loss before moving on"? This would mean that the runner now has an unknown "hard timer" to complete the run before the scary "speed glitch" catches up to them and ends their run, which to me would be frustrating as a new runner wanting to learn the game.

Overall though, the Category Rules for Any% NMS and other HD PC categories likely need to have more clarity and overhauled, especially regarding the aforementioned "speed glitch". Should it be allowed in Any% NMS? Should it be placed into a separate category like "Zoomies%"? Should it be allowed in Any% with skips, considering that is already abusing menu buffers and other fun tech outside of Boosters? What about Segmented HDPC, should it be allowed there (sorry Niebl, you'd have to start all over)? And if the speed glitch isn't allowed in the end, what will happen to ElRuinel's run? Do we just say "tough luck bud try again", despite having a great run up until the speed glitch anyway?

(cont part 2)