I'll post my thoughts on the rating system here once more. I also posted them one page ago, but whatever... I have a few additional points (I hope).
Current rating system
You are able to give integers (0, 1, 2, ..., 10) to both
"the entertainment value of this movie" and
"The technical quality of this movie (how close it is to perfection)". The entertainment value counts for 2/3 to your final score, and the technical value for 1/3.
My suggestion
You are able to give a single decimal number (0.0, 0.1, ..., 7.6, 7.7, ..., 10.0). It's just a single rating for the TAS where you consider whatever you think is important to whatever extent.
This is a better rating system because
- Even though right after the technical rating it says
"(how close it is to perfection)", no one really agrees on what it actually means, and gives it an own meaning. This might not be a problem to many, but it can be used to argue against people who say they are interested to see what technical rating people are giving.
- Assuming that most people do view the technical rating as a measure how close the movie to perfection is, is this a good thing for this to influence the final score? It seems like 'easy' games are just getting a rating boost by this. A game like Donkey Kong, SMB or Circus Charlie takes a lot less effort to make more perfect than a long game with lots of lag and randomness. It might be a technically much better achievement to create the hard TAS, even though it's obviously not as close to perfection due to randomness and such. Still the 'easy' game choice seems to get an instant advantage. (Note that the argument "But the harder game will be more entertaining." is a really bad argument, since there is no guarantee for this.)
- Assuming that most people do view the technical rating as a measure how close the movie to perfection is, how does one know how close a particular movie comes to perfection? The truth is, you have no idea of determining that until you actually TAS the game yourself, and notice howmany, frames you can save. Neither the tricks used, the amount of rerecords used, the author, whatever else you could possibly know of this movie by watching it. Of course, if you spot obvious errors you might get an idea, but most of the TASes obviously don't show these, as they wouldn't be published. On this very page, Adelikat mentioned
"mm1-near perfect except the energy refills which are extraordinarily difficult to do frame perfect." The currently published movie improved upon this however in nearly every room. (And 3 of the only 5 movies he mentioned to have given a 10 as technical rating, were obsoleted. This is btw not in any way meant to downtalk Adelikats judgement, he has a very good judgement, it's just that technical rating in this sense cannot be known, which was my point.) One can also see a very strong correspondence in some cases to people being entertained by a TAS, and the technical rating they give, even if this strictly shouldn't be the case.
- People might disagree on the fact that entertainment counts for 2/3 and technical rating for 1/3. Some people might find entertainment more important than that, or less important. People might also consider other things besides these two things. Would it not be better for each person to consider whatever he finds important, weigh it as high as he thinks and compiles it into a single rating?
- People might want to rate higher than a 8, but wouldn't quite give it a 9 (or want to be between some other numbers). Some people consider a 10 to be a perfect score, and are reluctant to hand it out, but it's the only option if something is worth more than a 9. Being able to give ratings like a 8.2 or a 9.3 would solve this problem.
- Being able to rate a 8.2 or 9.3 (or whatever) will also enable you to list the TASes you've rated better by rating. This way, you will truly get a list of TASes you like best to TASes you 'like' worst. The current system doesn't produce this kind of list for two reasons: 1) You can only rate integers, and many movies will get the same rating, even if you like one movie a little better than the other. 2) The technical rating will give boosts to some TASes, even though you don't like them as much... this will especially be the case for the 'easy' games I mentioned earlier.
- The labels the current integers have
"slightly above average" and so on are very confusing, and might not represent what people think. It doesn't matter if one person gives his movies an average rating of a 5, while some other gives them an average rating of an 8, as long as their own list is consistent. I don't think these labels are needed.
Edit:
Maybe a bit unrelevant to my suggestion above, but it's also about the ratings. I find it somewhat hard to get to the rating list of other users.
http://tasvideos.org/rating.exe/my/ This page shows a list of the top 15 raters, it would be nice if their names linked to their rating lists.
