There was a long chain of events that led to the current situation.
In
Thread #14601: Movies labeled "glitched" that shouldn't be a few users agreed to go back and change all branch labels, including obsoleted movies, according to some new system they came up with, without getting a proper community consensus. That resulted in
https://i.imgur.com/J0WfHmC.png
https://i.imgur.com/fizlbWn.png
and other funny branches that made the staff team interfere and have a proper discussion:
Thread #15203: "glitched" label vs. "no x glitch" label.
Staff agreement was to stop using blank branch as an indication of any%. But community still halved on how to handle branch labels, so
I suggested a solution that didn't blindly follow either side, and didn't force the other side to accept what they hated. I suggested to rely on statistics, and to replace the "glitched" label with something more descriptive.
Major skip glitch (it's when we invented the term too) is not present in most games, and it's not a regular in-game option, so it's a rare thing in general and it needs to be labeled.
But there are games where most movies use such a technique, for example
SM64. So we just highlight which branch has unique goals:
[2062] N64 Super Mario 64 "70 stars, no Backwards Long Jump" by Jesus, Kyman, MICKEY_Vis11189, MoltovM, Nahoc, snark, sonicpacker, ToT, CeeSammerZ, coin2884, Eru, Goronem, Mokkori, Nekuran, Nothing693 & pasta in 42:58.52
stands out from all other SM64 branches by avoiding BLJ.
Similar cases:
[1937] Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog "no zips" by Aglar in 17:36.58
[2950] GBA Sonic Advance "Tails, no Ultraspindash" by GoddessMaria in 13:33.54
[4057] NES Mega Man 2 "zipless" by warmCabin in 27:16.17
Some people were still unhappy, but the final thing we could do to reduce annoyance was creating a flag to unambiguously signify what the site counts as any% under our
tier class rules:
http://tasvideos.org/FastestCompletion.html
So we actually don't use blank label for anything special. It's only left blank if there's no unique goal in a movie compared to other branches. Which is why
I suggested to call it a trunk. It makes sense because there can't be 2 current publications with blank branches for the same game: to be able to distinguish them from one another we need to label one of them, or both of them, depending on rarity of their goals.
But when
we applied the new system,
we did not update labels for obsoleted movies initially. Not that leaving them wrong was the goal, we just didn't get around to doing that until some years later.
So what's happening with Aria of Sorrow is obsoleted movies not being relabeled to match the new (as of 2014) system. Movies with major skip glitches should be labeled to tell the nature of the glitch they use (not the glitch name, just its main effect on gameplay). Probably it's just "warp glitch".
To me it's common sense to assign explicit labels to things that are unique, and to things that choose common options (like player count). Of course that will result in branchless movies not having goals in common across different games, because different games allow different goals, and the result may look inconsistent.
Now "inbounds" became a label because it was a unique feature of the branches that have it. Even if there are several such branches for some game, it's still only featured in minority of branches. In the case of AoS, most branches use zips, so we don't highlight that. One branch uses death warp glitch, and we highlight that by its gameplay effect. And 2 branches ban zipping entirely, so we also highlight that.
I hope this explains some wonders. If there are ways to improve the current system considering those past problems we used to have, I'm interested! And it's absolutely true that the system that was introduced
after this thread was created is absolute nightmare:
http://tasvideos.org/PublisherGuidelines.html#Structure
Just (IMO) not in terms of labeling glitches. That part I at least understand and can easily explain how to apply.
