Hey everyone. In the past month, we've had an unprecedented amount of activity on our leaderboards. A lot of new WRs and PBs, even in categories I frankly thought nobody would want to touch again. So first of all, congrats everyone on successful runs. However, with all this activity we've also had more chances to highlight certain problems with our rulesets.

To address certain things that I personally, and a couple other runners too, consider slightly imperfect in our rules, I would like to propose the following three changes. Everyone is welcome to add their own two bits on which of these should or should not be implemented, and/or suggestions for other improvements.

1. 126 fame extra rules.

Recently a "126 fame" run was completed that doesn't capture the final lost city, because you don't actually need it to get 126 fame, but i think the category would make more sense if it wasn't just defined by getting 126 fame, and instead just require a full completion of the "career track" screen. That wouldn't change anything else besides just not letting people skip capturing the final lost city, as far as we know. I just figured the 126 fame category is basically our version of "100%", but neatly defined by the game itself. However, because of this one little issue, i think there can be made a case to add an additional line to the category ruleset for 126 fame that requires you to fully finish your playthrough. The name of the category will still be 126 fame.

2. Finally, milliseconds!

We've had more and more cases of runs being tied for 1st place. As some of the categories have become incredibly competetive over the last few months, i think it's about time we added milliseconds to the timer, so that everyone can truly compete on a sub-second scale. Every run will be retimed by me to include milliseconds, which should more clearly represent each run, especially in categories that have sub-1 minute WRs.

3. Timer start on gaining control of the ship.

Thirdly, and that's just my personal opinion, nobody else has asked for it, but i think it would be cool if we changed the timer starting rules. IMO it should be redefined from "starting on finishing the character creation" to "starting after gaining control of the ship", so after the initial load black screen. That would serve two purposes - first, it'd eliminate loading speed variance, which is particularly noticeable on HDD vs SSD and especially if it's your first run of the day, as the game loads much longer if it's just been launched. Second, it'd skip the need to frantically click through the bartender cutscene and starting nation choice, which i just don't think is fun or healthy for the players. The result of this change will be that every single run on the leaderboard will become roughly 1 second faster, and you will never have to worry about perfectly clicking through the starting choices.

Changes 2 and 3 are particularly nice to implement at the same time, as both require a re-time of existing runs, so if I have to do it for one of them, might as well also do it for the other. Change 1 is usually something moderators decide within themselves, but our community is small enough that i can consider pretty much everyone who's on the leaderboard to have an equal opinion weight as the mods. Please, post them below by clicking the "Read more" button and adding a comment.