Ocarina of Time leaderboards are switching to In-Game Time

Note: in case it wasn't already obvious, this news piece was an April Fools' Day joke. The OoT leaderboards will continue to use real-time, as they always have.

Controversy has been surrounding the Virtual Console and other versions of Ocarina of Time for years. Many community members question the fairness of using Virtual Console to save time in speedruns when it is purely due to less lag and faster load times.

This has gone on for too long. To finally lay this issue to rest, we have decided that all OoT speedruns will be timed using in-game time. This means:

• All platforms will be equal, barring platform specific glitches such as bombchu void hovers and Get Item Manipulation.

• ANY version can be played on ANY emulator: 1.0 and 1.1 are now allowed on VC, Project64, or any other N64 emulator.

• Fewer arguments about version differences or ESS adapter legality as VC is on a much more even footing with N64. This will strengthen the community in the long run.

• As everyone is aware, ZSR has had issues with loading pages slowly, or not at all. We have found that navigating the site is significantly faster when timed by in-game time rather than real time.

Unfortunately, the game does not have a start-to-finish total in-game timer. Therefore, runs must be timed manually. We would like to ask all of you to go through all of your submissions to the Ocarina of Time leaderboards on ZSR and please retime your runs using in-game time. All runs that have not been retimed within the next 24 hours will be removed.

To help everyone out, we have included a list of things that do not count towards in-game time:

• Loading times. All fully black or white transition screens will not count towards timing. However, fadeout/fadein frames will still count.

• Savewarps. Time spent resetting the console, in the title screen, and on the file select screen will not be counted.

• Cutscenes. For simplicity, a cutscene is defined as any time during which a) the HUD does not appear, and b) the player does not have control of Link.

• Pause menus. Time spent in the pause menu does not count towards in-game time. However, to discourage people from pausing excessively, we are instating a penalty of two seconds for each pause.

• Lag frames. These are repeated frames during gameplay when the game is running slowly. Accounting for these can be tricky. We recommend identifying these by using video editing software such as Windows Movie Maker or Audacity to view your entire run frame-by-frame. If you are unsure if a frame in your run constitutes a lag frame, please message a moderator and they will help you out.

Please ensure when timing lag frames that you do not miscount and subtract too many frames from your final time. If your time on the leaderboards is found to be incorrect, your run will be removed and you will be banned from further submissions. Please note that depression is NOT a valid excuse for misrepresenting your final time in this fashion.

It will take some time to adjust, but we feel that in the long run this will have a very worthwhile and positive impact on the Ocarina of Time community. We considered adopting this ruleset for Majora's Mask as well, but in the end we decided that the game did not have a high enough IGN rating to merit this change. Ocarina of Time is truly a masterpiece, and we are committed to doing whatever it takes to ensure fair and healthy competition.

Happy speed running!