Yeah, it's just up to interpretation though that can change depending on the person. Like a difference between completionist for Pokemon games can be the difference of completing all of the story, side-quests and extra challenges compared to someone else that considers it collecting all of the pokemon which can make the significant gap in the times. They do allow the descriptions at least on what you consider to be the main, main + extras and completionists but realistically I don't think there ever will be a genuine amount of time that's right just based on everyone's skill level or if they have to retry a lot like dying in a souls-like game. Just have to do our best and use the times as a guideline rather than the rule.

Pretty sure it's impossible to unlock all achievements mainly on PC that now no longer have their servers available for online play and online play related achievements so just gives more of a reason to wing it and record the times that feels right to you about what is honest.

That's very true about online achievements becoming impossible to get under some circumstances. That's one of the only cases where I'd personally consider the use of third-party tools to trigger the achievement unlocks justifiable. It must be extremely frustrating to have spent hundreds of hours earning the vast majority of a game's achievements, only to be unable to finish the job because the dev/publisher killed online play. At that point, the player deserves the award that comes from 100% completion.

I think that's all fair enough. I just wanted some clarification, thanks for letting me know. Part of me wishes the system more overtly catered to the different interpretations. For example, some kind of checkbox with "Did you miss any achievements and/or acquire some using tools?" or something else that allows the visitor to filter the submissions to their liking. But I realise you probably wouldn't want to overcomplicate the formula and I get that. I know there are notes but the submitters can avoid adding those entirely. The reason why I didn't see the notes at the time is that I viewed the HLTB times through other means, for instance on the Steam Deck using mods or using Augmented Steam. I guess I should check the website more often in future.

I'm really not sure what the procedure is here, but there's definitely a problem with the times provided for the game... *clears throat*... YEAH! YOU WANT "THOSE GAMES," RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM! (Store link)
(Yes, that is the game title.)

The issue is that it's impossible to do a completionist run in 8.5 hours. While it's probably possible to get three stars on every stage within that time, it's not completionist because there's a missing task that the time doesn't account for. There's an achievement called "VIP Millionaire". This torturous and gruelling achievement requires the player to gain a million coins. This simply isn't possible through any normal playthrough as the amount won't come close to a million. Somewhere in the region of 100k-200k, sure, but not a million. This achievement requires the player to keep playing the monotonous games for many hours. Even if the player sets up a macro to automatically complete a simpler stage on repeat, it'll still take almost an entire day for the macro to reach that million. As much as I'd prefer this joke of an achievement not to exist, fact remains that you can't truly and absolutely "complete" a game without getting all achievements and finishing any other content. Many people will want to have such Steam games amongst their "perfect games" - i.e. all achievements unlocked - which a completionist time would appear to account for.

Obviously I understand how this site works and how it creates an average of people's submissions. So if I gave you a considerably longer completionist time that includes the time taken for the achievement, it wouldn't make much of a dent on the average completionist time that's shown by default. So in cases like this what's the procedure? Even if the submitted times don't meet the criteria, are they just allowed to stay? That's understandable if so (after all it's hard to verify these things), but there is the fact that HLTB visitors will be provided times that simply are not accurate.