I'm going to scattershot reply to a few things that have been said in the thread thus far that I have thoughts on. First, I agree with the general sentiment that a TAS block that consists entirely of new runs made just for GDQ would probably be a poor choice for a number of reasons, the least of which is that we only have 10 days left and the quality of such submissions would probably be low. Having said that, I do want to submit at least one "surprise" run that will be new and tailored just for the GDQ event. I'd prefer that surprise was a playaround of some game where the intent is to cause as much mayhem through glitchiness as possible before completing the game well under existing human times for the target game. This game should probably *not* be SMW because if we submit that again we're going to get some really dirty looks but I'm sure there are some other good choices. We would probably submit this game as a surprise with a private note to the submissions committee to allow the run to be developed over the next couple of months, to be finished by the end of the year.
As far as highlighting runs that have been at GDQ events is concerned, the biggest issue is that many, many things we have done cannot be submitted on the site. Have a look at
the list of past GDQ appearances and compare it to what we have been able to submit (let alone get published) and you'll see what I mean. This is something I have tried and failed to convince the rest of the staff is important and I am no longer willing to fight that fight, it is clear I'm outnumbered and GDQ content is not important enough (or doesn't fit in well enough) to be in a first-class category that is searchable through the Movies page. Having said that, I really do like the idea of a badge / icon that indicates a given run has been shown at a GDQ for the ones that *are* published. Thoughts?
I think perhaps people are going too far with saying no ACE at all - the problem is that things veered way too far into the technical showing-off realm (I blame myself entirely for that getting as out of hand as it did). Having a nice, exciting ACE would still be very welcomed by a large subset of the audience, but that doesn't mean it is a hard requirement that we have one either. What I'm trying to say is what's important is entertaining the audience and I'm not willing to hardline exclude content before we've even had a chance to see it. I, for one, would welcome a fun exploit with a short but interesting payload if it fit in with the rest of the block well. Bonus points if said ACE allows us to do a credits roll to on-screen highlight the efforts of everyone who contributed to the TAS block, that was a good choice during AGDQ 2017. Yet again I end my diatribe with the question - thoughts?
Thanks again to everyone chipping in to work through content. In light of the fact this thread is now firmly discussing AGDQ 2018 I'm going to change the thread title to reflect that.