"Unlike most 2D Mario games, Super Mario Bros. Special didn't have any warps, and this was faithfully kept in this romhack. This means that every level has to be completed." A quote from the movie page of the newly published TAS of this hack.
But that's not true. In fact, not every level has to be completed, because you can freely choose a starting world in the title screen.
The goal of my TAS is clear: fastest completion. The real any% run of this hack should start at World 8.
This is not cheating, because it's simply allowed by the hack creator (Frantik). He stated it in "Readme.txt": "There are two special features accessible from the main title screen: Press B to select the starting world..."
After saving the princess, you'll get the very same ending text & credits. I see no reason not to use it in an any% TAS.
Other than that, it's just an ordinary SMB hack TAS.
Frankly, it's not my favourite hack, and far from my favourite TAS. But to me, if this hack is allowed to be published on this site, it deserves a real any% run.
HappyLee has been banned from TASVideos for 3 months for repeated disruptive behavior in this submission's thread. Given the author's arguments and accusations, I would like to summarize and explain the situation from a rules and judgement perspective.
First, I must clarify up front that the decision made for this run is mostly independent of HappyLee's temporary ban, in that the ban only affects one possible outcome, and only temporarily. While it is true that the run would have been cancelled or rejected had his ban been indefinite, the defining factor behind this decision is based entirely off of the nature of the TAS itself. On TASVideos, we occasionally receive submissions that require us to re-evaluate our MovieRules. This is in no way a bad thing, this is something that we want as staff. For myself especially as Senior Judge, I want nothing more than to ensure our rules are clear, readable, understandable, and malleable. If the community decides that there needs to be a change, there will be a change. This has been happening quite often lately, and I'm proud of the work we have all done as a community to make things easier and more reasonable, from the TAS authors who make runs that challenge the rules to the community members who discuss them and come to a consensus.
This was, in a way, one of those submissions. It found a weakness in the rules, and that weakness was corrected. However, unlike other submissions that lead to edits of the rules, this one found a weakness of omission and not a weakness of complication. The usage of this form of level selection as a time saving technique has never been allowed on TASVideos, and in my opinion it's unlikely that it ever will be. I don't believe any speedrunning community, RTA included, would ever count skipping 87.5% of a game through a level selection system as a legitimate strategy for an any% speedrun. Keep in mind, however, that this is an opinion and not a firm statement. There is a possibility the overall community's thoughts on this could change in the future, and we will change accordingly to fit the desires of the community.
That being said, there are ways in which this run could have been treated differently, and I'd like to go over three of the more notable ones.
In cases where we accept individual level TASes, we have a clause in the rules that handles how to treat these runs, namely that they will always be obsoleted by full game runs of their respective games, due to what we call "full content overlap". That is, the entirety of an individual level run will be contained in a full game run, so there is no need to have both published alongside each other. Were someone to create and submit a full run of Biker Mice From Mars, it would obsolete the "final round" TAS linked above. For this run, though, the full game run already exists and has been published. so even if we determined this run to be a valid individual level run, we still cannot accept it. Of course, since this is an SMB1 ROM hack, it is following SMB1's presentation of a long series of connected stages, and as such any usage of the title screen level select is explicitly skipping required content. This is confirmed further by the published run's statement that there are no warp zones, meaning all worlds and levels are normally required to be played. In short, we have to rule out this run being acceptable as an individual level.
Another possibility is that the input itself could be salvageable outside of being published. If this is a strict improvement to the published run's World 8, perhaps the two runs could be spliced together as a compromise solution. This presents a (thankfully) much simpler to describe set of problems, namely that this run and the published run cannot be adequately compared. Any improvement that this run contains would need to be recontextualized in the full game run, as conditions between the two could be completely different due to the level select. Notably, the full game run is fully powered up through World 8 while this run remains small Mario, which leads to this run actually being slower overall as it needs to wait for a piranha plant in 8-4 that the full game run can just kill, so there's no real compromise solution here either.
The final possibility is to accept the run as a new branch altogether, putting it in Alternative or Playground. Alternative is clearly ruled out by the community reaction, with the run receiving a wealth of No votes. PG, on the other hand, was quite literally made to support runs like this. There is a major problem with this option, though: The run was submitted as an any% run of the hack. As such, without any changes, it does not qualify for Playground. Placing it there would require us to change the run and treat it as something else. Not only is this going against HappyLee's original intention for the run, but given his temporary ban, he is unable to make any statements regarding how the run is presented. We should not, under any circumstances, make any changes to an author's work without their explicit consent, so as of right now we will continue to treat this run as HappyLee submitted it, which means it cannot currently be placed in Playground. However, it is still an option for the future, once HappyLee returns and is able to publicly consent to it.
I believe that's everything I would like to address. If anyone has any questions about how this submission was handled from a judgement and rules perspective, feel free to ask me directly. If need be, I will continue to update this judgement with further notes and clarifications to ensure that my thoughts and actions are understood and not misinterpreted.
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Thread temporarily locked until the administrators are able to provide a response.
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EZGames69 wrote:
What’s actually happening here is this submission is making judges realize the rules had a loophole due to the way it was phrased.
Because games typically do not give you the option to skip levels without the use of a password or cheat code, and up until this point nobody really TASed any such game that had a level select at the beginning, or at least ever utilized it thinking it didn’t make sense to use.
Just because something isn’t explicitly mentioned in the rules doesn’t mean it’s an automatic endorsement. The movie rules have been adjusted many times over the years as new case situations come up. The rules regarding level select only ever mention passwords for skipping to levels because there hasn’t been many cases where games didn’t require a password or code to access. This game does, so a clarification has to be added to eliminate that loophole.
This is a good summary.
The very top of Movie Rules wrote:
This page describes the requirements that submissions should meet in order to be published. These requirements are always subject to change as the site continues to grow.
It's impossible to have rules set in stone and to expect users to remain happy about them. So because users are higher priority for us, we always try to make our rules make the most sense. And to accomplish this, we rely on the best thing we have available: community consensus.
We discuss things together with our users, we brainstorm, we come up with solutions, and we implement those solutions if there's a balanced agreement about it. Which means it meets expectations of different sides. This is basically what I've been doing here for years.
Recently the site started trying to be even more user focused, and I contributed to that trend as someone who has previously contributed to brutal legism. Hearing out the community, refusing to talk down to users, is what we officially want to be doing.
This means that our policies are meant to keep evolving, because that's the only way to remain relevant as a community based site. As is the wording of those policies. Simply because it's never clear to everyone, and can't cover all the possible scenarios in advance. We've embraced policy tweaking, because if it's done timely, there won't be a crisis from them getting outdated and irrelevant. And yes we don't use logical loopholes when figuring out new policies, or their wording. We only apply a change if it makes sense to themostpeopleinvolved.
Community consensus is quite obvious in this thread. Majority of users consider skipping ahead via non-gameplay features a bad idea. This is objective reality, I'm not judging what it good or bad. It's what people think, even if their opinions are subjective (they are meant to be, we're working with subjectivity as well, we use it to figure out trends).
So, again, changing a policy only happens when there's a common agreement. It never happens on a personal whim. Policy wording also gets changed when there's agreement: the point of those changes is to more clearly communicate the spirit of the rule. For example some practice that that has always been in use, and nobody really had a problem with it, but as EZGames69 mentioned, it may not have been codified as clearly as we may have wanted.
This is not a minor thing and not an excuse. Our original Movie Rules used to be constantly growing, and they were constantly getting more and more complicated, intimidating both users and judges, not making it easier for anyone. And nobody attempted to fix that issue until Samsara volunteered and, you guessed it, fixed it based on discussion and agreement, as always. Not only that, but we now have a dedicated thread for rule change suggestions!
Now I should review the clause in question.
Historically, old Movie Rules used to have 2 clauses that reflect the intentions:
No skipping to the end with a password
The point is to demonstrate how quickly a game could be beaten if the player had superhuman abilities; skipping major sections of it with a password defeats the purpose.
Cheats, debugging codes, and Arcade continues are not allowed
This includes any in-game codes[1], input sequences such as the Konami Code, as well as immediately accessible hidden menus.
Note that if the feature in question is suggested explicitly by the game itself or mentioned in the manual as a normal means of playing, such as level restart shortcuts in the Legend of Zelda or Metroid, it is usually allowed. If the code is not used but the features it provides are accessed directly using a glitch, it is also allowed.
[1] When we speak about codes that are part of a game that we allow for use in certain scenarios, we are talking about passwords that can be entered in a menu, pressing some buttons on the title screen, passing execution parameters or setting environment variables for DOS games, or anything of a similar nature. This excludes things like Game Genie codes or emulator cheating tools. Codes are considered secret if the game never tells them to the player: neither through official documentation nor during gameplay.
Since then, we've loosened the rules on in-game codes severaltimes. But the general rule about skipping ahead was not changed:
The spirit of those rules is that in-game codes need to add content to be accepted, not remove it. Then they result in unique gameplay, therefore they are worth having a speed record in Standard.
It's true that the way to skip ahead in this hack is explicitly mentioned by the developer as a feature, similar to "level restart shortcuts in the Legend of Zelda or Metroid". But note how we're approaching in-game codes differently now, by allowing them on a different basis than it being explicitly mentioned by the devs.
There's also a point that pressing B is not a password. But is it any different in what it does, compared to level passwords in other games?
Some games preserve your state to some degree, so you can use them to simulate in-game saves. Other games give you level passwords after you've completed those levels, but without saving what your character has collected in the game. Other games may have a level select menu locked behind an input combination. There are also probably games where you can pass a launch argument to start in a certain level. In all those cases, the game simply does not care if you've actually completed anything ever. You enter an in-game code, boom, you get somewhere.
In that sense, there's no functional difference between entering a 6 char password and hitting a single button. Especially when we know that on some markets, pirated games we pre-hacked before they were sold, to add some trivial cheats, for example level select by hitting the Select button, or infinite lives if you hit Up+Start. Those are still in-game codes. Simply because there's no in-game way to do it through gameplay.
The point of the rule is not to only ban passwords that skip ahead, but to ban all kinds of in-game codes that skip ahead. And because it was never pointed out, the wording was not clarified.
Note that whether a code is told to us by the game itself or by its documentation, is not very important. If a game tells us a password that makes it much easier, it doesn't automatically mean we should use it for speed advantages. On the other hand, we don't need game docs to tell us about warps or secret level codes: we just access them like an omniscient creature, because it makes speedrun sense to do so, directly.
There's also a point about similarities between warps and level select right from the title screen.
An obvious difference is you don't use warps to start the game at a certain level. The very meaning of the gaming term "warp" is that it takes you from one in-game location to another in-game location. You need to already be playing the game, dealing with its gameplay directly, to be able to access the warp zone and to use it. And since there's substantial difference between using and avoiding warps, we traditionally publish both categories.
This is not the case with level select, because gameplay is simply missing when you start from a farther level. So since level select doesn't substantially change your routing and the feel of the challenge, but simply removes it instead, it was not traditionally published as a separate category.
HappyLee, I tried to address your points in this post, but if this thread happens to remain locked, you won't be able to reply here. I won't be deciding whether it should remain locked or not, but if you want to discuss my arguments, just send me a forum PM.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Hi so feos said pretty much almost everything I wanted to so I'll be clear here to everyone. Avoid accusations, personal attacks and the like. Deeply consider whether or not you are contributing before posting. If anyone posts anything out of line, they will be directly warned followed by a temporary ban from the site. I'd like to believe we all want to contribute to this site and simply want what's best for it. While I do appreciate people expressing their opinions on whether or not level selects make sense, I don't want things to turn into too much of a pile-on. And happylee, it would be kind to avoid accusing the senior judge of essentially going rogue, that's a bit much.
Thank you, posting can continue.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
This is a serious statement, and also a very important issue to me. I'd admit I haven't played many games before. Can you show me 2 or 3 examples in which a level select system (no password allowed) could obsolete an any% run (providing it's a real any% run that's intended to be the fastest completion of the game)?
Might be a late to this, but Japanese and GBC versions ofOperation C (and a number of other Konami games on GB around the same time) allow the player to start from a later level by default without any cheat code or password.
It's impossible to have rules set in stone and to expect users to remain happy about them. So because users are higher priority for us, we always try to make our rules make the most sense. And to accomplish this, we rely on the best thing we have available: community consensus.
We discuss things together with our users, we brainstorm, we come up with solutions, and we implement those solutions if there's a balanced agreement about it. Which means it meets expectations of different sides. This is basically what I've been doing here for years.
Well said, but in this case, the rules are changed by the judge Samsara before community consensus was reached. My TAS was targeted by the new rule change, so I'm not satisfied, and then I got threatened and the topic got locked.
That doesn't seem friendly at all to me. I was targeted and my TAS would be rejected for this. A judge changed the MovieRules just to reject my TAS, how should this be allowed?
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I made a fastest completion TAS of this game, using a method that's allowed by the hack creator, and doesn't violate the MovieRules at the time.
Of course that doesn't mean that this should be automatically published. All I want is a fair judgement.
At first, I was accused by LogansGamingRoom, Memory, Samsara, & despoa for "breaking the rule". In Samsara's first comments, it seems that the rule I broke is this: You are not allowed to skip levels with passwords.
Then I explained that my TAS doesn't use passwords. It's only a level select feature added by the hack creator. There was nothing in the previous MovieRules banning level selection features.
Then Memory said: "The rules were shortened..." Samsara said: "The rule can be reworded..."
Then the MovieRules page was edited by judge Samsara, and a new rule appeared: "You are not allowed to skip levels with any form of intended level select feature." Edit reason (by Samsara): fine, it's in the rules now
Then Noxxa repeatedly told me: "No new rule was added."
That's basically how I see what happened in this topic.
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feos wrote:
There's also a point that pressing B is not a password. But is it any different in what it does, compared to level passwords in other games?
What they do are the same: skipping some levels. But so does a Warp Zone. So the discussion needs to go deeper than that.
As stated before, I'm totally in favour of the rule banning passwords or in-game cheat codes (at least for most of the cases), because they are considered cheating. And the previous MovieRules are very clear about this one.
The world selection feature I used is very different from using passwords or in-game cheat codes.
Samsara keeps telling me that whether the hack creator allows this world selection, or whether it's in the game manual (Readme.txt) is "irrelevant". But I think they are what make it different than passwords.
What we really should be discussing is: should we ban non-gameplay level selection, just like banning passwords and in-game cheat codes.
It would be great if people can provide convincing examples, like explaining what damage it could cause if we allowed non-gameplay level selection, but so far I haven't seen any example similar as this case.
Samsara posted two examples, but they only completes a task or a branch of a game. My TAS completes the game and got the true ending. Noxxa and LogansGamingRoom posted an example which includes a faulty ROM (or bad version of a game), but I didn't use a faulty ROM.
I'm not familiar with many games, but I posted an example of the "both quests" RTA category. It uses world selection to start the second quest in World 8 in the title screen, just like in this TAS. I don't see anyone complaining about this usage of this non-gameplay level selection. This RTA category is popular among top speedrunners. For example, Niftski (current SMB RTA WR holder) did it in his 4:54.798 World Record run.
If people can accept using non-gameplay level selection in that case, so why not in this run? The only difference is, in this hack, world selection is allowed before seeing the Princess.
In my opinion, if we're to ban something in MovieRules, we should better do it with solid reasons.
feos wrote:
This is not the case with level select, because gameplay is simply missing when you start from a farther level. So since level select doesn't substantially change your routing and the feel of the challenge, but simply removes it instead, it was not traditionally published as a separate category.
What if the missing gameplay is optional? Since world selection is allowed by the hack creator, Worlds 1-7 are not required for saving the princess and getting the true ending. My TAS aims for the fastest completion, so natually I don't have to play every level if they are optional.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
Might be a late to this, but Japanese and GBC versions ofOperation C (and a number of other Konami games on GB around the same time) allow the player to start from a later level by default without any cheat code or password.
The example includes a in-game cheat code, and even the wiki page calls it a "level select cheat". Our movie rules are clear about in-game cheat codes.
Our movie rules are clear about this: "Cheat codes and passwords are only allowed to access harder difficulties and/or bonus content, including cosmetic improvements."
I didn't use any in-game cheat code in this TAS, and what I did shouldn't be considered as cheating.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
The example includes a in-game cheat code, and even the wiki page calls it a "level select cheat". Our movie rules are clear about in-game cheat codes.
They don't, actually. They appear by default on some versions of the game.
It appears normally in both Japanese versions, and the European Konami GB Collection; many very early Konami Game Boy games (such as this game, Nemesis, and TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan) featured a level select by default with some sort of punishment for playing the game to completion by starting on a later level, possibly owing to low battery life.
Do you consider the first three levels of Operation C to be optional in this case?
Do you consider the first three levels of Operation C to be optional in this case?
It depends. I haven't played this game. If skipping the first 3 levels won't affect the ending, then they are optional, so why not skip them?
Also there's a game version issue. We'd prefer using a better game version here on TASVideos instead of strange or faulty versions. I'm guessing the game version used by adelikat & Alyosha doesn't have such level select features?
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
Joined: 7/3/2022
Posts: 463
Location: Berkshire, UK
HappyLee wrote:
Our movie rules are clear about this: "Cheat codes and passwords are only allowed to access harder difficulties and/or bonus content, including cosmetic improvements."
the final world is not, i repeat, IS NOT, a harder difficulty, bonus content or a cosmetic improvement.
a harder difficulty would be 2nd quest.
bonus content would be world 9 or worlds A-D like smb2-j.
a cosmetic improvement would be a different colour palette and/or updated graphics.
so please, will you stop wasting your time here and focus on a different tas project?
Our movie rules are clear about this: "Cheat codes and passwords are only allowed to access harder difficulties and/or bonus content, including cosmetic improvements."
the final world is not, i repeat, IS NOT, a harder difficulty, bonus content or a cosmetic improvement.
Yes, and my TAS does not, i repeat, DOES NOT, use cheat codes or passwords.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
Yes, and my TAS does not, i repeat, DOES NOT, use cheat codes or passwords.
you do know pressing B to select a world is technically a cheat, right?
No. It's not a cheat. You're the first person in this topic saying that.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
Joined: 5/22/2020
Posts: 197
Location: Chennai, India
Just thought of another example. In DOS Prince of Persia, the first 3 levels can be skipped with Shift+L. And it's not a cheat, it's intended to be kind of a demo of the later levels as you get only 15 minutes to complete the game instead of the 60 that you normally get. Unsurprisingly 15 minutes is more than enough for a speedrun to beat the game from level 4 onwards. But the published TAS does not skip the first 3 levels. There was an older TAS that took advantage of the level skip but was not even submitted. But if hypothetically an improved level skip TAS was submitted, I don't it think it should or will be accepted even as a separate branch, let alone obsolete the current publication.
Just thought of another example. In DOS Prince of Persia, the first 3 levels can be skipped with Shift+L. And it's not a cheat, it's intended to be kind of a demo of the later levels as you get only 15 minutes to complete the game instead of the 60 that you normally get. Unsurprisingly 15 minutes is more than enough for a speedrun to beat the game from level 4 onwards. But the published TAS does not skip the first 3 levels. There was an older TAS that took advantage of the level skip but was not even submitted.
Thanks. That's a good example, and finally one that's similar to this case.
It can be seen as a "demo" or a "practice mode", that allows the player to skip about 21% of the game.
There's only one publication about this game on TASVideos, and in the submission text the Game objectives clearly wrote: This category requires that all levels are completed (without skipping the first three levels using the SHIFT+L cheat code).
I checked speedrun.com, and there's Any%, Any% Level Skip, 100% categories.
GMP wrote:
But if hypothetically an improved level skip TAS was submitted, I don't it think it should or will be accepted even as a separate branch, let alone obsolete the current publication.
Maybe so. But a skipped TAS won't be accepted here mostly because it would be too much like the published TAS (with only about 21% difference), not because the level skip itself is banned by the movie rules.
If the movie difference is greater than 50%, then I'd support setting a different category here as well, similar to speedrun.com.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
It's impossible to have rules set in stone and to expect users to remain happy about them. So because users are higher priority for us, we always try to make our rules make the most sense. And to accomplish this, we rely on the best thing we have available: community consensus.
We discuss things together with our users, we brainstorm, we come up with solutions, and we implement those solutions if there's a balanced agreement about it. Which means it meets expectations of different sides. This is basically what I've been doing here for years.
Well said, but in this case, the rules are changed by the judge Samsara before community consensus was reached. My TAS was targeted by the new rule change, so I'm not satisfied, and then I got threatened and the topic got locked.
That doesn't seem friendly at all to me. I was targeted and my TAS would be rejected for this. A judge changed the MovieRules just to reject my TAS, how should this be allowed?
Movies which use level-select codes or passwords are more the exception than the norm when it comes to TASes on this site. In other words, there needs to be a good reason why the level-select/password should be allowed to be used, as opposed to it being OK by default. This applies to all movies which use passwords (which are few and far between to begin with, since it doesn't make sense to use passwords for TASes of most games).
Also, consensus on not allowing passwords is probably pretty uniform across the board here. I would be opposed to using a level-select code here, for example, and I imagine that if a poll was made on this topic, about ~90% of people on the site would probably agree with me.
...In any event, focusing on the movie at hand...
Some parts of the TAS (like the out-of-bounds clips) were cool, but I didn't find the movie to be very entertaining as a whole. How short the movie was and the fact that so much of the original hack was cut off likely contributed to this movie being less entertaining than other SMB/SMB Hack TASes.
Therefore, voting no.
Joined: 5/22/2020
Posts: 197
Location: Chennai, India
HappyLee wrote:
Maybe so. But a skipped TAS won't be accepted here mostly because it would be too much like the published TAS (with only about 21% difference), not because the level skip itself is banned by the movie rules.
If the movie difference is greater than 50%, then I'd support setting a different category here as well, similar to speedrun.com.
There is no arbitrary cutoff point to this. Standard "any%" means having meaningful progression. The reason there is a RTA category for level skip is that it is a good challenge with the 15 min time limit for new human runners, and a good way for more experienced players to sharpen their later level skills. But it's meaningless for a TAS.
Also, consensus on not allowing passwords is probably pretty uniform across the board here. I would be opposed to using a level-select code here, for example, and I imagine that if a poll was made on this topic, about ~90% of people on the site would probably agree with me.
I'm against using passwords (generally) myself. This TAS doesn't use passwords. I think it doesn't use "level-select code" either, because most people would think level-select code like "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, B, A, Start" cheat code, which is usually hidden. All I did was pressing B to select a world. The hack creator called it a "special feature".
GMP wrote:
There is no arbitrary cutoff point to this. Standard "any%" means having meaningful progression. The reason there is a RTA category for level skip is that it is a good challenge with the 15 min time limit for new human runners, and a good way for more experienced players to sharpen their later level skills. But it's meaningless for a TAS.
"Meaningful progression" could be somewhat subjective. What's meaningful to someone might be meaningless to someone else. Could the real reason there is a RTA category for level skip be, that it's simply a way to beat this game? It's not meaningless for a TAS because it's faster, but if most players think banning Shift+L is a better rule for an any% run, then I have nothing against it.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
If this submission and argument of allowing the use of in-game (non-password, non-cheat-code) level skipping were from a newcomer/rookie to TASing/speedrunning (or even a troll), I'd at least understand the potentially innocent nature of the question.
But HappyLee has *checks notes* 17 active publications here on TASVideos at the time of posting, primarily of the original Super Mario Bros. games and its sequels/variants/hacks.
Heck, one of them was published less then 24 hours ago!
If this isn't an out-of-season April Fool's joke, it is a very bizarre hill to die on for someone as knowledgable of TASing as HappyLee.
Joined: 10/20/2022
Posts: 61
Location: Rajasthan, India
sameasusual wrote:
If this submission and argument of allowing the use of in-game (non-password, non-cheat-code) level skipping were from a newcomer/rookie to TASing/speedrunning (or even a troll), I'd at least understand the potentially innocent nature of the question.
But HappyLee has *checks notes* 17 active publications here on TASVideos at the time of posting, primarily of the original Super Mario Bros. games and its sequels/variants/hacks.
Heck, one of them was published less then 24 hours ago!
If this isn't an out-of-season April Fool's joke, it is a very bizarre hill to die on for someone as knowledgable of TASing as HappyLee.
So strange that you commented after 9 years and at the same time HappyLee's movie is getting intentional no votes(feels like voting pole abuse has started with multiple accounts which is against the site rules)
It's impossible to have rules set in stone and to expect users to remain happy about them. So because users are higher priority for us, we always try to make our rules make the most sense. And to accomplish this, we rely on the best thing we have available: community consensus.
We discuss things together with our users, we brainstorm, we come up with solutions, and we implement those solutions if there's a balanced agreement about it. Which means it meets expectations of different sides. This is basically what I've been doing here for years.
Well said, but in this case, the rules are changed by the judge Samsara before community consensus was reached. My TAS was targeted by the new rule change, so I'm not satisfied, and then I got threatened and the topic got locked.
That doesn't seem friendly at all to me. I was targeted and my TAS would be rejected for this. A judge changed the MovieRules just to reject my TAS, how should this be allowed?
Enough. There was a misunderstanding over what the rules contained. Samsara recently rewrote the rules in their entirety. We realized that something was missing from the rewrite, so we corrected it. She is not "a judge" she is the senior judge, the judge expicitly in charge of the rules. Your submission isn't important enough to spite.
If you continue to send these baseless accusations of direct attack, you will be banned from the site for 3 months.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
If this submission and argument of allowing the use of in-game (non-password, non-cheat-code) level skipping were from a newcomer/rookie to TASing/speedrunning (or even a troll), I'd at least understand the potentially innocent nature of the question.
But HappyLee has *checks notes* 17 active publications here on TASVideos at the time of posting, primarily of the original Super Mario Bros. games and its sequels/variants/hacks.
Heck, one of them was published less then 24 hours ago!
If this isn't an out-of-season April Fool's joke, it is a very bizarre hill to die on for someone as knowledgable of TASing as HappyLee.
So strange that you commented after 9 years and at the same time HappyLee's movie is getting intentional no votes(feels like voting pole abuse has started with multiple accounts which is against the site rules)
There was absolutely 0 sockpuppet abuse here.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
If you continue to send these baseless accusations of direct attack, you will be banned from the site for 3 months.
You see, that wasn't friendly at all.
It's not "baseless accusations" if what I said was what truly happened here, and I haven't "attacked" anyone.
I'm the one who's being threatened and criticised here.
Like feos said, "users are higher priority for us". In my opinion, every movie submitter deserves a fair judgement.
I've joined TASVideos since 2007. I never felt it could be so hostile than it is now. I first felt it when I was badly treated in 2018, in a TAS that shouldn't have any controversy.
I was even attacked on YouTube comments by a user here with fake accounts, and that user is still active and commenting on my movies.
It's OK if some people don't like this TAS, or if this TAS doesn't get accepted. I'm going to keep making high quality TASes in the future.
If I'm banned for this, then I'd think TASVideos is not good place for me anymore, and I'd suggest other TASers to leave as well.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
...I genuinely don't think you would've gotten a TAS like this that starts at world 8 accepted on the site at any point in its history, whether it was 2007 or now.
If anything I think the site has become more welcoming to users overtime; plenty of TASes that would've been outright rejected on this site for reasons as weak as not being of real games have become acceptable over the past couple years, and judge responses are far more geared towards kindness now than they used to be.
A judge changed the MovieRules just to reject my TAS, how should this be allowed?
It is.
If we couldn't change rules, we'd be stuck in 2006 rules. If rules couldn't be changed to reject exactly one movie that it applies to, then I would leave.
If you don't trust TASVideos staff with Movie Rules, you should try to become staff yourself, or leave.
Warning: Might glitch to creditsI will finish this ACE soon as possible
(or will I?)
