The downloading content screen happens when you play online, so for runs you just play offline (just hit cancel when it tries to connect to servers) and that screen wont show up. There isn't an auto splitter for this category so you'll have to split manually, not a big issue, timing doesn't have to be too accurate. Good luck!
Do a run anyways, if a few people do the run, most likely it will be added as a category to the leaderboards. I was planning to do a full game run myself, and I still plan to. I assume if the mods see a few people have actually run this then they would add it, and should.
Glitchless is the arbitrary category, it should be Any% and Glitchless, as any% entails glitches.
Yes, lots of current runs use glitches. The big bank is played on a previous patch so you can get out of bounds, so i'm sure glitches are fine.
This game does have a auto start and stop function for spliting.
This is my ideal category, but the problem arises of new heists being added into the game. Not dlc heists, but actual heists available to everyone in new updates. If someone could come up with a solution for this i don't see this as a reality, although i would LOVE to run this type of category :). The only solution i could think of is to invalidate all runs after an update like this, and make everyone redo it, but some people would probably have mixed feelings about this.
Today a thought popped into my mind about racing this game. I'm sure you are all familiar with the website speedrunslive.com, but if you are not, it is a website that provides speedrunners with a racing platform. Most races are normal categories like any%, 100%, glitchless, ect. But one thing that some games have is a bingo race. A bingo race is when a 5x5 bingo card is randomly generated, and there are 25 random objectives listed. The goal is to complete 5 in a row, weather it be horizontally, vertically or diagonally, and each race participant can choose whatever combination of objectives to complete. I think it would be very fun for a similar racing style to be created for payday 2. The bingo cards could consist of levels to complete, certain items to collect, weapons to be modded, and missions to be completed with restrictions such as no assets, stealth, no civilians killed, ect. I think this would be a very good way of racing this game, and it would keep this game entertaining to speedrun. I want to hear from the community and see if we can create something like this, and if others would be willing to do these races.
I guess you could limit this to the 2-4 players the heist started with.
The rules currently in place state that players are not allowed to quit out and rejoin a lobby. However, there are a lot of useful exploits in multiplayer heists that do involve doing so. For example, replenishing ammo, changing weapons, teleportation to the host, ect. I can think of both positives and negatives of this rule. I want to hear the opinions from the moderators and the rest of the community on this.
you might want to check out this:
This is the forum that the Mirror's Edge community uses. Ask all your questions there, because nobody uses this forum.
One thing that came to mind, is a few certain heists that are very short and will also be very difficult to save seconds off the time (Ukrainian Job, Jewelry store). For these heists, and i'm sure many more, will come down to saving half a second, or a quarter of a second. My suggestion is an in game timer, that is more accurate of the time, showing milliseconds as well as seconds. I don't have a clue how to mod this game, but i'm sure someone would be willing to create a mod like this, to make our current timing methods more accurate, and the leader boards more accurate and fair.
I see that there isn't chapter speed runs implemented into this leaderboards, as well as Any% 3rd person and 69%, and i think that they should all be added to this website.
Preach it.