I think for individual courses where we time without loads, we should enforce hole preview be off. It doesn't matter on courses with no movement, but for those that move, there's a second or two difference in start time.

I think timing would need to start on each hole when the preview starts rather than when the buttons appear.

I don't particularly like the idea of figuring out of you get more advantage by having the preview on or off per course, so I vote they be off. And if the runner has them on, timing will start when the hole preview starts moving.

We don't include the hole preview in timing because the timings vary based on device. Check out this thread in the Flappy Golf 2 forum: https://www.speedrun.com/fg2/thread/zuh8p

Hmm, what do you think the best way to do without loads timing is then? I wouldn't want to disqualify runs that have hole preview on. But I also would prefer to not have to turn them on intentionally to gain a few second advantage on some courses

Time with loads doesn't really matter. To truly compare runs, you have to time both without loads

That's where the problem is though. When you time from when the buttons appear, players with hole preview on get the advantage or disadvantage, depending on the course, of having the level movement start before timing

Sorry, I should've been more thorough in my explanation. Because this game is a mobile game, you're gonna have to rethink the concept of advantage/disadvantage.

For most games, all runners are using the same hardware, i.e. same game console. For this reason, you can use the elapsed time to compare runs fairly, i.e. put them on the same leaderboard. If a game was released on multiple consoles, there is often a separate leaderboard for each console.

Because this game is a mobile game, every runner will be running on different hardware, which will impact loading times. Even if all runners disabled the hole preview, this does not change the fact that a new 2nd gen iPad will load holes faster than a Samsung Galaxy S6 or a refurbished iPod Touch that may have previously been dropped in the toilet. We can't set up a different leaderboard for each type of device. For this reason, the only way to fairly compare runs is to subtract out load times from each run. If you look at, for example, the Golf Land Any% board you'll see that your 1:18.036 is faster than my 1:11.373. This is because your gameplay was faster, even despite your running on slower hardware

Thanks for the thorough explanation. It was very helpful.

I'll keep timing things the same way. If the game gets optimized really far, the WR may come down to hole previews, but we have a long long way to go before that happens

I forgot to mention that when we time without loads, we don’t include the hole preview at all, so it will have no impact on the loadless time no matter what

As I'm timing these runs, I realize that without loads times, hole previews on will most certainly be better on most courses.

It's much easier to time when to start pressing the power meter. Plus the moving parts of the level start before the timer does. I think that will be useful on quite a few courses.

Edit: after checking a few courses, I think it's probably best to leave the option to have them on or not, and timing should remain the way we have it now. There's some strategies that just can't be done with or without hole previews (without waiting for the next cycle of movement). So I think this adds another interesting aspect of routing for some courses