Thank you all for voting. The results are as follows:

2.1 Should the Load Extender be allowed for speedruns?

• Yes: 23 to No: 3

2.2 Which categories should it be allowed for?

• In accordance with the majority votes, the LE will be allowed in all categories.

2.3 If the load extender is allowed, should it be used to simulate a slow computer by having the same slow load times for all maps, or should we pick and choose which maps should be fast and which should be slow?

• Pick and Choose won with a single vote over Simulate a slow computer.

2.4 If the load extender is allowed, should there be any restrictions on its use?

• No: 23 to Yes: 3

3. Should repetitive backtracking be allowed to gain IGT at the cost of RTA?

• Yes: 15 to No: 11

To summarize this means there will be no restrictions on the load extender except that runs will get a Yes/No tag to indicate the usage of the load extender more clearly since question 3 wasn't as conclusive as most of the other ones.

Hello lovely HPL community,

We, the moderation team for the Amnesia series (currently Skyreon, Andy, Trigger, Cakeri and myself), would like to inform you about an overdue discussion which has to be held because the current situation involving the load extender and certain categories is not sustainable in terms of fairness.

What is the issue?

In a few categories (Any% No Quitouts, No Major Glitches and Glitchless), loopholes in the wording of the ruleset have allowed for loadless time scumming through flashback skipping.

About IGT

Way back before automatic load removal became a thing runners would mainly push their real time down. The top runs would of course have their loads removed manually but in general loadless time was not considered as important. Optimizing for this type of timing method is heavily frowned upon across many communities and in this case it makes sense since it infringes on the legacy of older runs.

What is the load extender?

The load extender is an external tool that enables runners with newer hardware to run in competition with far worse machines. It achieves this by modifying how the game treats loads, giving runners full access to how the game should treat each and every loading screen with user-defined delays down to the millisecond. This might sound backwards, as with PC speedrunning, tools for timers such as load removers are usually developed to solve issues the other way around; preventing faster machines from gaining advantage over slower machines.

What does this mean?

With the correct load extender settings, runners can easily skip through flashbacks for essentially no timeloss with loads removed to artificially lower IGT while their real time ends up being a lot longer than comparable runs.

Closing words and conclusion

Only one of us (Andy) had the presence of mind to see this coming and I know me and the other moderators at the time owe him an apology at the very least. But we also owe one to the community as this issue could’ve been explored much earlier and in greater detail.

For this I am deeply sorry. Hindsight is a terrible thing but we should choose to learn from such mistakes and correct them if possible. In this case, we would like to have an open discussion with all runners, be it active or inactive, to find a way to move forward and what has to happen to those runs which have abused these rule loopholes in case a majority decides to restrict the use of the load extender for the categories in question.

I am certain that we can work this issue out together as a community, since that was the case with other topics in the past.

Thank you for reading, I hope everyone had a good start into 2023 and look forward to everyone's input on the matter.