First off, expect any major discussions to happen on discord (https://discord.gg/6bjVmbvQGC) although this forum will be monitored.

Secondly, the leaderboards will not be open until 2 weeks after launch (November 14) to give people adequate time to play through the game and route. However, we'll be likely also spending some time (in discord) figuring out what we want the initial category rules and such to look like earlier than that, so feel free to come and participate in those discussions as they happen.

Finally, I will be trying to compile any major initial glitch discoveries into the guides section for ease of access--discord is definitely a bad place for things like that.

Hi Yahmez,

Binding dialogue skip to mouse wheel is acceptable for no-mod runs. You should be able to figure out how to edit the coalesced files yourself without too much difficulty (stuff is pretty well documented online). I'm not 100% sure this works exactly the same for LE (cannot check right now), but I made a post explaining how to manually edit these files for the original version of Mass Effect 2 here: https://www.speedrun.com/me2/guides/tyqn2 . It should at least tell you the correct names for the things you need to change to get text skipping to work.

It seems like it's a little different process to actually edit coalesced files for LE, but this reddit post I think should explain it properly. https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/185m4so/couldnt_find_coalescedini_on_steam_did_they_remove/

I think it's probably just something specific to the physics in that location. For example, you can see if you use push on enemies outside that ship while you're waiting at the door that they'll go off flying like crazy, which is supposed to represent the super strong gravity on the planet the ship is flying above. It stands to reason if you end up in the air somehow when you're there that the physics engine will send you flying too.

For people who aren't in the discord:

We've decided to add separate mod categories for all 3 games that allow the use of the Expanded Speedrun Mod made by KR33PYK1NG. These mods mostly just reduce downtime during the runs significantly by allowing all dialogue/cutscenes to be skippable. This saves 35 minutes in Mass Effect 1, 10-15 minutes in Mass Effect 2, and ~1 hour in Mass Effect 3. The default displayed categories on the leaderboard will remain the "no mod" categories.

No unofficial patches should be used. The only mod of any kind that should be used (other than texture mods which are kind of a grey area) is the speedrun mod for LE2 that can be found on the resources page.

Hey, sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

We can get your "real time" just from looking at the video length, but yeah, without being on PC, there is no way to make use of the load remover.

Hi guys, just an FYI (since I think some of you are not in the discord):

Since the load remover is now available (go into livesplit splits editor and hit activate; should work for all 3 games), I'm going to set all runs that didn't use it to have their time with loads = time without loads. Because, otherwise, runs with time without loads blank will get sorted to the bottom:

EX: run has 2:05:00 with loads and no time listed without loads run 2 has 2:05:37 without loads and 2:15:00 with loads. Run 2 would actually show up higher placing on the leaderboards.

I may go back and try to manually actually count loads at some point for runs that didn't have the load remover available, but I'd just encourage you to beat your times using the load remover so you have a more accurate placing on the leaderboards.

Nope, Max Quests just requires doing quests in the main game (without DLC). List here: https://pastebin.com/G9BjNpi1

Hi there,

Can Mass Effect Infiltrator (https://www.speedrun.com/mass_effect_infiltrator) be tagged as part of the Mass Effect series (https://www.speedrun.com/masseffect)

Hey there, sorry I didn't see this (not sure why this forum doesn't give me notifications?) but I can't add existing games to the series as far as I can tell. You'd have to talk to speedrun.com staff to get it added, I think?

For future reference: to get the load remover to show up in livesplit, you need to set your game name to "Dragon Age 2" not "Dragon Age II'

I mean, there's no difficulty requirements, so do whatever you want. In practice, that means easy though as easy is the fastest way to do the story.

IIRC for whatever reason windows 10 updates keep breaking the load removers for the kotor games. This one doesnt get as much action, so probably no one has fixed it since the last time it broke

messaged you on twitch

It's definitely not having enough LSP/DSP to trigger the cutscene that leads to her attacking you. The game softlocks after dantooine because the game expects you to have visas at that point (similar to reason you need to go through Onderon to get Mandalore).

messaged you on twitch with invite link

What specifically are your DLC related issues? Do you not have access to golden nug? If you are missing some DLC but still have it, it won't be hard to work out a route that works entirely on current patch. But if you don't, it makes finding a viable combat strategy on current patch pretty difficult, not sure what I would recommend other than "buy the GOTY edition for $20 so you have all the dlc".

because we previously agreed we didn't want a glitchless category, because we couldn't easily agree on what should and shouldn't be allowed. Like OOB is an obvious ban, but I would argue that all the tricks we do with the mako aren't glitches, where some others might argue they are.

Nope, we can always just literally check the timestamp when your run starts and when it ends to get a time; we actually already have a Xbox One run like this on the leaderboards.

Singularity isn't sufficient to "knock down" most of the harder enemies (they resist the lifting effect i guess?), which is really important for the saren fight because if he gets up on the wall he resists all damage. It also matters in a lot of other areas-> lift and throw will deal with asari that try to knock you down on benezia and thorian, but singularity won't.

Also, the soldier class doesn't actually deal more damage than the vanguard. The one point we normally spend in the class talent for vanguard gives 5% weapon damage; spending the equivalent point in soldier class talent doesn't affect weapon damage at all. Since we really only get enough points to fill out one weapon tree and pistols are both the best weapon type and available to both, there's no difference there. Vanguard also has warp which lowers damage protection on enemies (damage protection basically is just a flat decrease to damage; if an enemy has 40% damage protection, they take 40% less damage than they would with 0% damage protection. If we cut that in half using warp, they only take 20% less damage rather than 40% less damage, which is a significant dps increase).

The main advantage they have is that they are much better at tanking damage, but that doesn't really matter. Now for NG+ it's probably a lot closer, and it's possible soldier may be faster as being able to make use of assault rifles in certain situations is helpful.

Also, it's been a while since AGDQ so I'm not 100% sure on this, but I'm pretty sure I had an awful gun for most of the game, which is really the biggest determinant of damage by a longshot. I'd recommend checking out my record run for a better idea of how quick most of the fights usually go.

Also, in case this came off as really aggressive, I didn't intend it to be that way, just wanted to explain the reasoning behind the decision of playing vanguard as best I could.