Somewhat of a no-brainer obviously, but best to codify stuff like this sooner rather than later.
I feel like banning accessibility options is a bad look. If you want to not use them, it'd be better to simplify keep it a separate category/ruleset
My apologies, should have elaborated on the settings. All of the settings under "control" and "comfort" can be well kept, as they are mostly up to user preference.
"Water of Life", however, is an instant healing potion which never depletes, meaning that you can never die.
"Enemy Lock on" gives you an indicator where enemies are coming from, and auto aims your gun towards an enemy. Increasing "weak point stickiness" makes it so that you get aim assist on hearts basically. Someone running these settings has an insane advantage over players who do not use them.
My idea would be that this is relegated to "fun" categories, which are more humorous, whilst for any% you should be required to show your accessibility settings before or after a run so players don't abuse the "weak point stickiness" setting, which would be otherwise hard to detect.
I think it would be best for everyone who wants to run the game with and without accessibiility to do sub-categories for any% and futurs other categories (like other game use sub-categories for ng+ (ex: dragon's dogma 2)).
So everyone is happy and can run the game ^^
PLEASE do not ban the accessibility features; I would vastly prefer to do the run WITH them than WITHOUT them. While the water of life does mean that you have infinite heals, using it takes time and does not even guarantee survival (as its a smaller heal than then ones you'd pickup throughout the run). If the goal of any% is to reach the end as fast as possible it doesn't quite make sense to me for this to be banned.
I would also argue that folks who need to use a controller to run the game would also be strongly negatively impacted by the decision to ban the combat accessibility features.
As opening the inventory pauses the game, having inifinite heals eliminates any sort of difficulty whatsoever for a large chunk of sequences: a you can just face tank any attack, you will only need to shoot enemies in sequences where the game explicitly requires you to do so - in turn also eliminating routing for ammunition and resource preservation since you will always have ample ammunition and heals.
I think it would be interesting to have it as a seperate category, just to see what kind of crazy tech you can use with it, but it shouldn't be the default category.
As for "weak point stickiness," agree I jumped the gun there, the feature only applies for controller, and from what I've seen current controller aim is really poor, so there shouldn't be any undue advantage from it.
I've been looking at this game, along with many friends, and I know I speak for them when I say that, should lock-on and water of life accessibility features be entirely banned, we would no longer be interested in running SWC or promoting the speedrun. If these features are to be banned from Any% (a bad look on the community no matter what), there should at least be another category leaderboard which allows them.
The way I look at the "difficulty" argument being presented is not in the speedrun spirit. We should be using all tools available to us to run the game as fast as possible. If infinite heals makes the run faster, then that's a GOOD thing. The fact that the game does not have difficulty options means that "difficulty" should not be a factor for the run or for splitting categories. If you want to do a challenge run, then do a challenge run.
I agree with soulmass, the banning of these elements leaves me in a position where I would be significantly less interested in picking up or promoting the run. It feels incredibly silly to allow "any glitch" but ban a built in tool that provides free time save on an any% run. Not only does this decision feel like its out of alignment with the spirit of speedrunning, it feels contrary to the spirit of the game and intentions of the developers.
There will be a new category added later today that allows the combat features.
Things are still super early and likely to change more as the run progresses.
Join the discord for easier discussions!
An autosplitter/load remover was made for the game.
It is available on Livesplit.
Time without loads will become the default timing method, using the load remover will be required if you do not want load times counted in your final time.