Posted: 9/20/2013 1:03 AM
Post subject: Rate of incoming submissions - decreasing?
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Truncated
Editor, Reviewer, Experienced player (980)
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I notice that once again, the queue is empty. It has stayed that way for a few days now. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what the cause is. My suspicion is that it is because we get fewer submissions than we used to. But this is just a suspicion. Could someone with database access get the numbers on submissions per month (or similar) and post it here? Then we could determine if fewer TASes are actually being made. It could also be that it just seems like fewer new submissions, because the judging and encoding is more efficient lately, which would be a good thing. I'll hold off further analysis before I know which it is.
Posted: 9/20/2013 1:05 AM
Post subject: Re: Rate of incoming submissions - decreasing?
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jlun2
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Truncated wrote:
I notice that once again, the queue is empty. It has stayed that way for a few days now. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what the cause is. My suspicion is that it is because we get fewer submissions than we used to. But this is just a suspicion. Could someone with database access get the numbers on submissions per month (or similar) and post it here? Then we could determine if fewer TASes are actually being made. It could also be that it just seems like fewer new submissions, because the judging and encoding is more efficient lately, which would be a good thing. I'll hold off further analysis before I know which it is.
Well, it's September, and some of us have school or other real life events that occur.
LLCoolDave wrote:
This seems to be competing for the "Worst looking TAS of 2011" Award.
Posted: 9/20/2013 1:23 AM
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Patashu
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Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4045
I think it's because the standard of quality in TASing has gone up. I know many TASes that will be extremely good are currently in development to ensure they'll be as good as possible (TTYD, Banjo Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, DK64 some day?, Twilight Princess, etc).
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Posted: 9/20/2013 3:17 AM
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CoolKirby
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I had been thinking we might be quietly trying to set a record for longest empty queue. (Though that might be a little silly.) It is weird to see it empty for quite a few days. We used to have a steady stream of submissions before the mass unrejections for the Vault, and I feel like it's been slowing down gradually since then, but I didn't expect this would happen. Though, I'm curious how long the queue was empty the other two times it happened. Any veterans happen to know how long it stayed empty back then?
Posted: 9/20/2013 4:02 AM
(Edited: 9/20/2013 4:33 PM)
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Ilari
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CoolKirby wrote:
Though, I'm curious how long the queue was empty the other two times it happened. Any veterans happen to know how long it stayed empty back then?
Digging timestamps from the site: First time: 20100210T031512Z ([1459] N64 Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon by zggzdydp in 2:04:49.35) to 20100210T041732Z (#2555: arukAdo's PCECD Kaze Kiri: Ninja Action in 23:22.08) -> 1 hour, 2 minutes, 20 seconds. Second time: 20110123T001708Z ([1726] SNES Mega Man & Bass "100 CDs" by parrot14gree in 39:48.65) to 20110123T053513Z (#2983: IsraeliRD's DOS Hocus Pocus "Episode 2" in 13:48.60) -> 5 hours, 18 minutes, 5 seconds. Third time: 20130913T145145Z ([2458] GBA Metroid: Zero Mission "100%" by Dragonfangs in 1:00:46.28) to 20130920T161143Z (#4070: mtbRc's DS Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow "Julius Mode" in 09:01.49) -> 7 days, 1 hour, 19 minutes and 58 seconds. Edit: Final length of third empty workbench.
Posted: 9/20/2013 7:03 AM
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darkszero
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Interesting how short lived the other two 'empty workbench' were. However, a more relevant datapoint would be the longest/average/variance of the time between two submissions? For example, it's been about 12+ days since the last submission.
Posted: 9/20/2013 7:44 AM
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Ilari
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darkszero wrote:
Interesting how short lived the other two 'empty workbench' were. However, a more relevant datapoint would be the longest/average/variance of the time between two submissions?
I didn't compute that yet, but I looked at what kind of distribution time between submissions has. Looks like one of those ill-behaved ones. For intervals of about 1.5 min to 24 hours, the intervals grow roughly proportional to ~1.6th power of rank. For intervals longer than that, the intervals grow even faster (the slope of log-log plot increases rapidly).
Posted: 9/20/2013 9:12 AM
Post subject: Graph of the submission rate
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amaurea
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Location: UK
The submission rate fluctuates a lot, but overall seems to have been stable after the first 20 months or so.
Posted: 9/20/2013 9:14 AM
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Spikestuff
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Posted: 9/20/2013 9:25 AM
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Truncated
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Thanks for that graph amaurea! I could use some help in interpreting it, though. I am guessing the vertical axis is number of submissions, and that the horizontal axis is time. But what is the unit? And is most recent to the left (weeks ago) or the right (weeks since since workbench start)? What is the interval for each red measuring point?
Posted: 9/20/2013 9:29 AM
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Warp
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Maybe this is the beginning of the end? Maybe all hope is lost? Maybe we will just end up as a footnote in the annals of history... for a time. Until everybody forgets we even existed.
Posted: 9/20/2013 10:06 AM
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amaurea
Former player
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Posts: 424
Location: UK
Truncated: The x-axis is months since the beginning. The y-axis is submissions per month. Time increases from left (july 2004) to right (september 2013), with one data point per month. The data set, courtesy of Ilari, is here.
Posted: 9/20/2013 10:23 AM
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Truncated
Editor, Reviewer, Experienced player (980)
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I thank you again, amaurea! In other words, it is just this month which so far has unusually few submissions (3), and there is no reason to think there is a downward trend, yet. Warp: feeling gloomy? I am pretty sure this site will not make a dent in history but that doesn't mean we can't try to make the best of it at the moment.
Posted: 9/20/2013 11:27 PM
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Zurreco
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Location: Seattle, WA
It's a fairly simple answer, albeit a little broad and melodramatic. The pool of potential runners is over saturated in comparison with the early 2000s, which dilutes the quality of input. With the explosion of twitch, there's been a shift towards dedicated runners, which has in turn shifted a lot of people towards "contributor" roles, rather than taking the time to compete as their own entity. I would hate to say that the success of others is prohibitive for others who haven't met with the same accolades, but so be it. At the same time, a lot of quality, competent content creators are getting burnt out from people treating this hobby as something more (JXQ, Walker Boh, etc.). Also, the pool of fresh, interesting games is moving laterally. That's probably due to the nostalgia factor, but... eh. It seems like a lot of people don't compete over current records so much as bring in new games for running. You'll see the same phenomena in the speedrunning community as well, though not as much, since this a highly specialized group within the overall community. It'll all bounce back in time.
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Posted: 9/21/2013 1:23 AM
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MrGrunz
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For me this is a phenomenon that I expected to occur at some point for quite a while already. Most TAS-worthy old games have been TASed to a very high level now. Improving them has become very hard so it takes either very long to create a new and better run of a game that is published on this website or it is even almost impossible to improve it even further to the game getting close to its limits and no new tricks being discovered (take SM64 for example). When TASing really started to get "big" there was a huge pool of game, that hadn't been worked on yet simply because games have been produced since the 80s and TASing started at least 20 years after that. This pool has become way smaller yet. Of course there are still many many new games created every year, but there are 2 main problems preventing new runs being made for them: 1) The necessary emulalators are not available or have been not good enough until today (TASing-wise) 2) Most games published on newer consoles are very long and pretty complex to TAS. This makes creating a decent run of them very hard and time consuming. I can't see a TAS of Wind Waker, that would have a length of 4 hours and includes much complicated stuff, being done by anyone. It would take a group of at least 3-4 dedicated players to pull this off and even then you would probably need more than a year to finish the project.
Posted: 9/21/2013 6:42 PM
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amaurea
Former player
Joined: 2/19/2007
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Location: UK
Those are some interesting and sensible sounding explanations for why the submission rate should go down. But as I showed just a few posts ago, there is no evidence that the submission actually is falling - it appears to have been quite stable for the last 7 years or so.
Posted: 9/23/2013 7:12 AM
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Patashu
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I like how a few days after this topic was made, we have a spurt of 5 submissions over the course of 24-48 hours. I guess it's just the clumpiness of random distributions at work.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 9/23/2013 1:03 PM
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Nach
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It could also indicate that a lot of players were busy leading up to this time, but then suddenly weren't. Going back to school, then having vacation could lead to that. And while a ton of fantastic games were expertly TAS'd, which will mean overall less submissions for them as time goes on, there's still a lot of excellent games that don't even have a single TAS yet.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Posted: 12/3/2013 1:58 AM
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Mitjitsu
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None of this has surprised me, but I think new people will come along and do these modern game, and could lead them to unexpectedly improving runs of older games. People in general, are better are TASing, which leads to them taking longer to complete movies. This is further compelled by the fact that newer games tend to be longer and more complex. Hence fewer submissions overall.