nymx, I'll continue what I was saying in PM here.
nymx wrote:
I need to clarify one thing, in regards to OtakuTAS's concerns.
I understand that there are some differences being discussed here between the use of FCEUX and Bizhawk.
Not at all.
I think you are confusing my criticism of the BRAND of emulators, when instead I am comparing the VERSION of the same emulator.
You note FCEUX's accuracy, however I am noting specifically the old version of the emulator vs. new rather FCEUX as a whole.
Comparing BizHawk's first version with BizHawk's newest version (2.9.1) would create the same argument on some cores.
NES is probably the most "safe" core for aging well as emulation was pretty good even years ago, whereas something like an N64 core would save a significant amount of time. Nonetheless, if going with FCEUX, it should be ran on the newest version.
I'm less concerned with the brand of emulator and rather not using one years out of date for a non-grandfathered submission
You mention the "accepted" emulators and this is an interesting point as it's a huge gray area and an abusable loophole that should be corrected going forward.
i.e. I could run a Game Boy Color game on BizHawk 1.0 on save a ton of time due to emulation inaccuracies, luckily nobody seems to have tried this strategy to my knowledge but it presents an interesting issue
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
Sent another PM to nymx. We have been discussing emulators and it appears there is no literature describing this.
There is allowed emulators and disallowed emulators but no restriction on emulator versions.
Perhaps this is a good time to set a precedent. I do think there SHOULD be some leeway (i.e. 5 minor revisions, 1 major release, adjustable to whatever the powers that be like) for people that have working on TASes for months and they don't sync on the next version up (or five).
i.e. I have a DS run I've been working on for months on Biz 2.8.0 that no longer syncs on 2.9.1. So that should be fine as I could see that happening every so often (and perhaps be less strict on long TASes that have been worked on for months). Plus regardless of my circumstances or reasoning that's within the ballpark of versions anyways. It's not THAT old. But a few years and versions back starts to present larger problems.
But versions a few years old shouldn't be allowed as it presents an abusable opportunity to gain frames (not saying this is the case here by any means).
It doesn't seem to have happened yet, but there is a huge advantage to running something like a Game Boy game on an ancient version of BizHawk or something.
I'm obviously not saying we should go back and retime every old emulator version (there are many that exist with illegitimate times as a result of emulation inaccuracy and getting anything on this site to sync without editing that's more than 2 years old is basically a death wish), but for new submissions I'm surprised there's no rule setting that you can't use an emulator several years out of date just for the heck of it
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
You note FCEUX's accuracy, however I am noting specifically the old version of the emulator vs. new rather FCEUX as a whole.
you do realize the movie syncs just fine on FCEUX 2.6.4 right?
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't
12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!"
Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet
MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish
[Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person
MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol
Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
You note FCEUX's accuracy, however I am noting specifically the old version of the emulator vs. new rather FCEUX as a whole.
you do realize the movie syncs just fine on FCEUX 2.6.4 right?
That was my next question. LOL
Nymx and I just had an interesting discussion and it was worth bringing up, as the version argument was more important than the FCEUX vs. BizHawk argument nymx brought up.
If it syncs on 2.6.4, then that's great... and then I'd be happy to see either accepted. I'm not getting into worrying about FCEUX vs. BizHawk as that is a much bigger discussion than this run and wasn't what I was talking about at all. I was just concerned the very outdated version of FCEUX was producing the results mentioned by warmCabin, but also as I mentioned I figured NES emulation was pretty good back then, which it was, as you confirmed it syncs on 2.6.4. Good stuff
That's all I was worried about... and only very slightly as noted
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
So you went on a rant about runs using older versions of emulators, citing concerns that they are too inaccurate.
and you didn't even check for yourself to see if this run synced on a more up to date FCEUX?
Why?
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't
12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!"
Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet
MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish
[Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person
MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol
Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
So you went on a rant about runs using older versions of emulators, citing concerns that they are too inaccurate.
and you didn't even check for yourself to see if this run synced on a more up to date FCEUX?
Why?
I'm not as passionate about this discussion as you think, nymx and I were communicating over PMs he initiated, along the lines of curiosity about the version differences and rules (a lot of friendly nerd discussion going on) and then he encouraged both of us to continue the discussion here (see his above post to mentioning my and warmCabin's discussions and encouraging me to continue them here rather than PM as well... which was all handled in this thread anyways). Decided to just put the whole thing here (a fair bit after 8~ PMs) as I think it's an interesting issue, even though it didn't end up affecting this run itself.
Not trying to bury warmCabin's emulator choice, infact the TASer side of me would obviously rather see the faster time accepted, especially if my name ends up added to it. :P (That was a joke)
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
So you went on a rant about runs using older versions of emulators, citing concerns that they are too inaccurate.
and you didn't even check for yourself to see if this run synced on a more up to date FCEUX?
Why?
Plus I found it extremely odd, obviously it's a red flag but thankfully the NES has been pretty well emulated for some time, reading through my posts I was more "curious" than "sure". I have some runs I did on 2.8 and 2.9 that I ran through 2.9.1 just to be tidy so I could list that as the emulator version on the submission.
I think even if you're positive it's not afflicted by these issues, to run it through the newest version anyways for the sole purpose of verification and a version to put on the submission page that won't raise an eyebrow. Only takes a second, and then as a side effect you also have the new version to keep using downloaded and ready to go for new projects too rather than just verification. Shrug, I'd do it just for the little box on the submission page looking fresher
If it's a valid run you won't even have to touch the inputs anyways and it'll be swift and painless
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
I'm not as passionate about this discussion as you think
Yes I’m aware, considering you didn’t check sync for yourself before writing up paragraphs about it.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't
12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!"
Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet
MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish
[Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person
MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol
Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
I'm not as passionate about this discussion as you think
Yes I’m aware, considering you didn’t check sync for yourself before writing up paragraphs about it.
Just a little near-copy-and-paste over a friendly discussion between two people in PM, referring to all games and systems and not just Meong (didn't think it necessarily warranted a thread since we were already on the topic), posted publicly as requested.
I don't have FCEUX downloaded and have never used it, nor did I think expressing a concern would require me to check this instant. I do think it's a valid concern as for several other systems I wouldn't even have to check (GB, N64 obviously, DS, etc. seem to be desync city lately even for close versions)
but the NES did indeed overcome my expectations on emulation improvements over the years and did indeed sync with the newest version as I wasn't sure (but not completely unsure).
Have a nice night!
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
EZ, though a tad bit too provoking for my liking, has a point here. Honestly, Otaku, if you're going to try and suggest sweeping changes to site policy regarding deprecation of emulators, the best thing you could do is actually give us proper evidence for why it should be done and not literally say things like "Hey guys, I've never used this emulator and I never will, and I don't care enough about it, but y'all should really implement some sort of precedent to remove it from the site entirely" while simultaneously keeping up long PM chains with site staff over it, wasting time that should be dedicated to the 73 runs on the workbench at the time of this post. You can also stop the condescending attitude, the double and triple posting in every single forum conversation you participate in, and the consistenteditspamming if you want to actually help out the site.
This warning should've come a lot earlier, to be honest.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Alright, I'll respond to your post point by point (except the double posting thing, I don't know why I do that), and tone is so difficult on the internet so I assure you I am not writing this in a condescending tone as you feel I'm executing. This one is probably even worse for that, but I'm just trying to be direct. Anyways...
Samsara wrote:
[overall post]
It's not FCEUX!
Not sure how many times I have to say that I haven't even begun the argument of saying FCEUX is inaccurate nor any desire to get rid of it. nymx mistakenly thought I was talking about that subject, when I was not (I was not even aware of the accuracy differences and tests until he linked me the wiki page, I thought they would have been much closer), and I'm assuming that's what was passed along and now we're all confused, including myself.
My point was solely speaking on old emulator versions (X.X.X.), whether it be FCEUX, BizHawk, whatever, which are already proven to be constantly changing and improving to further accuracy, making old versions inaccurate. This has nothing to do with eliminating FCEUX and is not a problem exclusive to FCEUX, and until we hit a point of near-impossible emulation inaccuracy, will probably ALWAYS be a problem, but nonetheless ensuring that runs are done on newest versions sounds like a good idea to (apparently) both nymx and me. If the emulator wasn't NES based (which is quite polished at this point), I'm sure I would've been right without checking... just as I'm sure you'd raise an eyebrow at somebody using an old emulator version on a core more susceptible to changes than the NES, especially something like Nintendo 64. I've lost sync on DS runs just from going from 2.8 to 2.9, and I don't know if I've ever had a Game Boy run sync that was made on a different version. Everybody knows this is an issue and it always has been.
Samsara wrote:
Honestly, Otaku, if you're going to try and suggest sweeping changes to site policy regarding deprecation of emulators, the best thing you could do is actually give us proper evidence for why it should be done
Download any run from several years ago and it will not sync, this is well-known. Again, not emulators, versions. I know you know this as well which is again why I think you are misinterpreting what I am saying as a whole and I attempted to clarify above
Samsara wrote:
while simultaneously keeping up long PM chains with site staff over it, wasting time that should be dedicated to the 73 runs on the workbench at the time of this post.
"Site staff" being one person (nymx), who himself initiated the conversation asking for my thoughts, who I've had a friendly and short conversation with over the past 2 hours in-between doing other things, with large gaps in them, through a measly 10 PMs, discussing 3 different topics. If I thought somebody could change site policy it would not be the brand new judge, and/so that was clearly not what I was after.
Samsara wrote:
You can also stop the condescending attitude
I don't consider anything I've posted recently to be even nearly unfriendly (tone is always difficult online), although I don't expect my tone to be butterflies and rainbows in response to the tone I was offered by EZ, which seems to resemble a lot of the attitude of some (very well known members) of the community - very unapproachable especially for any person holding any level of senior positions. Perhaps that is my reason for my conversation with nymx, as it sure was refreshingly friendly and casual. Great guy and judge!
Samsara wrote:
Apologies for that, I'm still working out the BBCode differences between the forum posts and the submissions/wiki. I was expecting that to be standardized but it is incredibly different (URL linking for example) and often... most times... confusing. The link to the markup usage guide isn't on the same side of the text box and is a different size, so there's been a good few times I got lost and tried to find the guide, and got lost finding the guide too. Lol. I do often make little edits to complete a whole picture as this is live stuff, but I'll try and consolidate it further.
Samsara wrote:
if you want to actually help out the site.
This warning should've come a lot earlier, to be honest.
At this point, I'm just going to be submitting runs and posting any necessary follow-up to make that happen (I'd rather not ditch the site entirely) and that's it, I'm not interested at making any further suggestions or input because the reception to different ideas is always so hostile and rude, even when I try to make my tone light-hearted. It's whatever. I enjoy doing this to pass the time so I'm not going to quit but I certainly have a desire to scale back my interactions in the community further. I understand it's a small and tight-knit community full of old friends but there are definitely times here where there's an overbearing sense of negativity and being an outsider/newbie. Nonetheless I'm aware my intro to this community was messy to say the least and not during a good time in my life getting out of an abusive relationship, however now that the dust has settled and I'm in a better place, I've tried to reflect my posting to be a bit more light-hearted. I'm disappointed that even suggesting a valid concern about emulator versions must turn into a fairly hostile set of criticism from staff members from both the issue at hand and then other meta concerns.
Hell, half the reason I even write walls of text is because half the time you say something here it feels like you piss somebody off or somebody misunderstands the whole point of what you are trying to say, but apparently that isn't working either. I'm just not going to say anything anymore.
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
I understand it's a small and tight-knit community full of old friends but there are definitely times here where there's an overbearing sense of negativity and being an outsider/newbie.
I can't speak for everything (being mostly an outsider/observer myself) but I can speak on my experience. The community overall very much feels all business for the most part. The people who were around way back when are all good friends and it seems exceptionally hard to go about building any form of relationships with people in the community. People have their people/roles and that's kinda it looking at it from the outside.
That being said I don't really think that there's an overwhelming amount of negativity. Very to the point and sharp responses (attitude-y even)? Sure, but I haven't seen anybody get personally attacked for being a new player or asking questions. In a lot of regards I think the entire website top to bottom has become more accepting and supportive. It's evolved from essentially "This sucks. Rejected" to "here's some ideas to improve, good luck on your next attempt". That isn't to say that there aren't problems/spats between people, tone/statements read incorrectly, or knee jerk reactions before someone's brain catches up, but I think that these incidents are few and far between and not indicative of the whole community in any way. I've personally never encountered a situation where a question I had was just blown off or I was made to feel lesser than for things I said or did.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
OtakuTAS wrote:
You mention the "accepted" emulators and this is an interesting point as it's a huge gray area and an abusable loophole that should be corrected going forward.
i.e. I could run a Game Boy Color game on BizHawk 1.0 on save a ton of time due to emulation inaccuracies, luckily nobody seems to have tried this strategy to my knowledge but it presents an interesting issue
OtakuTAS wrote:
for new submissions I'm surprised there's no rule setting that you can't use an emulator several years out of date just for the heck of it
Any time saved or lost from version differences and/or emulation accuracy is considered unavoidable, and is discounted. Your improvement movie may even be longer than the published run, but it is still considered an improvement if it improves upon gameplay.
You should always use the most accurate emulator available and a good ROM of the game, even if the published movie does not.
Glitches that specifically rely on poor emulation must be avoided, even (and especially) if the published movie uses them.
A new movie may involve emulation accuracy improvements. Emulation accuracy often adds extra lag, resulting in improvements that appear longer than the movie they're trying to obsolete. Always ensure the new movie has gameplay improvements. If the new timesavers can be applied to the old movie, they count as improvements.
Nonetheless, if going with FCEUX, it should be ran on the newest version.
While this is true as we can see from the quotes I provided, the fact that certain emulators (and certain versions of emulators) are not banned, means they are generally okay to use. We just think that people tend to prefer the better ones, and we have protection against actual abuse. Also a judge can rule for a certain game that certain versions of some emulator must be used for future submissions (for example if some feature started working properly).
And in case of fceux specifically, it barely got any notable accuracy improvements over more than a decade, aside from occasional fixes for individual games. Most of the time the difference is just in timings of things.
OtakuTAS wrote:
Samsara wrote:
Honestly, Otaku, if you're going to try and suggest sweeping changes to site policy regarding deprecation of emulators, the best thing you could do is actually give us proper evidence for why it should be done
Download any run from several years ago and it will not sync, this is well-known. Again, not emulators, versions. I know you know this as well which is again why I think you are misinterpreting what I am saying as a whole and I attempted to clarify above
Technically, accuracy is not an objective category. It does not necessarily keep increasing with every code tweak that devs do, and sometimes some changes even have to be reverted from release to release. Because the way to check if something became more accurate requires deep technical research and a lot of tools that very few people have in the emulation hobby. For this reason we don't obsolete old movies by their resyncs on new emu versions without gameplay improvements.
To get banned, an emulator (or its version) has to be considered bad by the community, both objectively (apparent issues with emulation or usage) and subjectively (effectively abandoned).
OtakuTAS wrote:
Apologies for that, I'm still working out the BBCode differences between the forum posts and the submissions/wiki. I was expecting that to be standardized but it is incredibly different (URL linking for example) and often... most times... confusing. The link to the markup usage guide isn't on the same side of the text box and is a different size, so there's been a good few times I got lost and tried to find the guide, and got lost finding the guide too. Lol. I do often make little edits to complete a whole picture as this is live stuff, but I'll try and consolidate it further.
Just mark your edits as minor in the dedicated checkbox when sending them.
OtakuTAS wrote:
Hell, half the reason I even write walls of text is because half the time you say something here it feels like you piss somebody off or somebody misunderstands the whole point of what you are trying to say, but apparently that isn't working either. I'm just not going to say anything anymore.
This is definitely a thing, but it can be helped by leaving more room for corrections in the way one posts. For example you can see how many posts have been made based on the assumption that we don't care about different emu versions at all, and it was also a misinterpretation.
Just like in TASing, the only mistakes we make are those we don't go back and fix. If we've fixed them, nobody has the right to blame us for trying, because that's how people live.
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.
Joined: 11/14/2014
Posts: 932
Location: South Pole, True Land Down Under
There has been a lot of conversation going on, that I believe overshadowed my request. I'll just start over...
warmCabin's submission has been improved by Otaku. Because we have this existing submission, and a WIP that improves it, I need clarification on how both of you wish to proceed.
From what I have observed, Otaku wishes to be added to this submission. Of course, we would like to get confirmation from warmCabin on this request.
If co-authorship is accepted, then I will be taking the following WIP, https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638278907131826344, and replacing it as the primary movie file. I have ran this on newer version of FCEUX and it does sync.
So...just say the word and I'll finalize this submission.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence.
----
SOYZA: Are you playing a game?
NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing.
SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real?
----
Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes?
Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :)
----
BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
Joined: 8/13/2018
Posts: 109
Location: United States of America
OtakuTAS wrote:
I'm not interested at making any further suggestions or input because the reception to different ideas is always so hostile and rude, even when I try to make my tone light-hearted.
Sorry to further distract from the submission but I genuinely can't believe this is still such a prevalent issue on this site. Yes, Otaku was misinformed on several counts, but throughout this conversation they have acted cordially and professionally. The same cannot be said of some other people I quite respect in this thread who, instead of attempting to correct this misinformation (rules on emulator versions, edit spam), repeatedly misunderstood Otaku's points, refused to assume good faith, and captured screenshots to complain about an easily resolvable offtopic issue (if any screenshot was to be taken, it should've been of the Minor Edit button). To be blunt, this is immature, unprofessional, and not the behavior I expect of the modern day tasvideos.
Thank you feos for taking the time to clear up the misinformation (/genuine).
Postmortem edit since the thread is locked: why keep around a known abuser/harasser on the website? I'm hoping this is just an oversight and that there aren't more known abusers in the community that haven't been banned because they haven't posted weird shit in a bizarre attempt to prove a point yet. I think my conclusion above largely still applies though for very different reasons 🤷♀️
I'm not interested at making any further suggestions or input because the reception to different ideas is always so hostile and rude, even when I try to make my tone light-hearted.
Sorry to further distract from the submission but I genuinely can't believe this is still such a prevalent issue on this site. Yes, Otaku was misinformed on several counts, but throughout this conversation they have acted cordially and professionally. The same cannot be said of some other people I quite respect in this thread who, instead of attempting to correct this misinformation (rules on emulator versions, edit spam), repeatedly misunderstood Otaku's points, refused to assume good faith, and captured screenshots to complain about an easily resolvable offtopic issue (if any screenshot was to be taken, it should've been of the Minor Edit button). To be blunt, this is immature, unprofessional, and not the behavior I expect of the modern day tasvideos.
Thank you feos for taking the time to clear up the misinformation (/genuine).
This is a cool TAS, I quite like ones that make good use of scripting tools to achieve near perfection. Meh for entertainment though ;P. Hope the confusion over publication can get sorted out.
Refreshing take. Thank you.
Not trying to be a dick but this is the most hostile and cold community I've ever been a part of. Probably doesn't help that it's so small and everybody knows everybody, but that's even more reason to be kind of one another. It's always like walking on eggshells here and even then usually that doesn't work. My many years in the speedrunning community showed me how toxic that community it is, but it's generally friendly.
At this point I'm just here to do what I do but besides that I have no desire to interact. Reading old threads before my time here it's clearly been here a while, and I've heard stories before I even joined. Clearly not very receptive to new ideas and pointing out issues. I've already pointed out that having the staff team consist of a group of friends with seemingly similar ideals probably isn't the best way to NOT create an echo chamber in situations like these (especially when said group also seems to make up the majority of the site's repeat content, and when the community itself seems to be rather quiet on making suggestions and input), or any. I've re-read my replies in this thread and come to the conclusion the overall response was extremely weird and off-base, but that's just me.
I appreciate you sticking up for me, as it doesn't seem like many of the active talkative users that aren't staff (25%?) voice opinions. (I wonder why. /s)
The whole thing is weird. Explaining emulator version differences and suddenly we're worried about my edits! Not the first time I've been lashed on by an assortment of people here sticking up for friends.
And yes, thanks feos.
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
So you went on a rant about runs using older versions of emulators, citing concerns that they are too inaccurate.
Just one more thing, I was reading through an old submission and you almost made several authors quit for asking questions about their emulator choice, in a much more severe way that I have brought up here, even including an edit of the submission details.
Why make such a big stink about me asking the same questions you asked a few years ago, let alone much more intently?
EZGames69 wrote:
This is why I originally asked why gens was used
EZGames69 wrote:
Also not exactly related to the movie itself, but is there any reason you used Gens rather than BizHawk?
EZGames69 wrote:
I disagree with their choice of emulator
Also in that thread, there's a great point from Memory that addresses not only that author, but the eeriely-exact problem here, i.e. "nostalgia of emulators"
Memory wrote:
If you simply prefer Gens due to nostalgic reasons, you will at some point be disappointed because we must rule out emulators that have eventually become outdated. Various other emulators have become deprecated for similar reasons.
And just like here, feos was the voice of reason.
feos wrote:
Evil_3D wrote:
Third, it's a shame to see how the work of Archanfel is smearing only for use gens. These nonsense situations make me think on still in this community and simply quit or work off the site.
Archanfel wrote:
So TASVideos is just a good place to share my works with people who also have interest in superhuman playing. If they are no more welcome here, i can simply stop submit them.
We absolutely cannot let TASers quit the site over a note in a movie description. Reaching this point means that we all have had a lot of misconceptions about things, and likely about one another.
Evil_3D and Archanfel, please do not quit the site over this argument, it will be resolved in a proper way, I've done it before, I'll do it now. I will edit this post with more insights ASAP, this was just the most important announcement I needed to make.
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
OtakuTAS wrote:
Not trying to be a dick but this is the most hostile and cold community I've ever been a part of.
Cool, thanks, much appreciated. Given you dug into a staff member's post history to call them out, I'll just go off of the assumption that your idea of not being hostile and cold is to do the same thing to you. Remember that time we published a run and you got pissy because you had an improvement on the workbench? Certainly that's not hostile or cold either. Follow-up question, do you remember when you tried to impersonate Spikestuff and harass your ex-girlfriend while claiming to be them? Remember when you didn't know how staff operated so you applied to be a Judge in the middle of harassing your ex so you could presumably "prove yourself" by posting staff chat to her?
This is all above board to talk about, right? Digging into old drama isn't "hostile or cold", right? I'm sure if you actually had access to private information you'd be using it on the same level I am, right? Because it's all kosher?
Cool, again. I knew you'd understand. Anyway, feel free to grift your way into another community while I spend the next day explaining to "the most hostile and cold community" why you are now permanently banned. I'm sure that'll warm us up considerably.
I'd give you my usual "goodnight, sweet prince" but for all I know you're just impersonating one.
Yes, I'm actually going to explain this in full, given the suddenness and severity of it. Give me some time, this all happened in staff channels and a lot of context needs to be explained.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Alright, here's my attempt to explain the situation in a way that minimizes private information as much as possible. I put this here just so anyone reading can immediately see the context for my previous post. Discussion of this situation is not prohibited, though ideally this explanation should answer any questions anyone had about why this all happened. If not, I'll be happy to answer remaining questions as long as it doesn't derail any submission/publication thread, i.e just ask me on Discord or in a PM. I'm not as scary as my last post made me sound, I promise ._.
Advance warning that this is complicated, mostly because all of it happened in staff DMs so context needs to be actively provided. Hell, the impersonation part wasn't even staff knowledge until the ban went into effect.
Quick context: Back in March, OtakuTAS reached out to the admins, warning us that his ex-girlfriend was trying to stalk him on-site. We looked up the account in question and went ahead with banning her, as it was a serious allegation and we saw behavior from the account in line with what Otaku was saying. While the situation was quickly dealt with, all of the site staff were involved in the discussion and knew of the situation.
The real story begins a couple days after the ex's site account was banned. She reached out to us herself with screenshots of an email conversation between her and someone who claimed to know who she was and what she was banned for, offering to "help her":
https://i.imgur.com/go9jJ4y.jpg
I've elected to redact the names/avatars of both the ex and the anon account to minimize the chances of either being contacted. For consistency, the anon is redacted in black and the ex is redacted in white. I've also cropped larger screenshots like the above down to only the relevant information and chose not to embed them for readability purposes: Uncropped versions can be provided for proof that no relevant information was left out. Also, sorry, I censored a few swears in light blue. I have to start making up for my previous lack of professionalism somehow.
At first, this was only known to feos, adelikat, and Memory (i.e, the two Admins at the time and the Site Owner), but it spread to the Senior staff as well and turned into a full group DM. We were treating this completely seriously at first because, one, we had no real reason to believe it was fake from the outset, and two, the fact that it was an email conversation referencing staff-only knowledge meant that we needed to investigate internally and come up with a course of action in case it actually was a high-level staff member going rogue.
The anon kept information extremely vague at first, not outright mentioning anything about being staff but mentioning at one point early on that there was a "private discord where people discuss this sorta stuff", which we had figured was either a server set up for discussing TASVideos drama or a vague way of mentioning our internal staff chat:
https://i.imgur.com/Vc1Y2Zv.jpg
We proceeded to spend a couple hours discussing this. I won't be sharing much of the staff conversation since nearly all of it is private, internal information, but I can give a couple general things:
In regards to a full list of every account who can view user emails:
Note the usages of "a lot" and not "all": With the knowledge we had at this time, we couldn't completely rule everyone out.
The anon became active again while we were discussing things. This time, OtakuTAS himself sent a screenshot coming from a text conversation he was having with the ex:
https://i.imgur.com/jLiWUso.jpg
This prompted the question of why Otaku was openly communicating with someone that he had warned us was stalking him. That question never got answered and never will.
The increasingly strange and creepy nature of the anon's comments here, combined with the ex's reaction, had us fairly convinced that the anon wasn't a staff member at all, though the possibility still remained. It could still have been someone outside the site with contact to a staff member who had email access, for example. Around this time, we started discussing the possibility that this could be faked:
I wasn't completely convinced that it could be faked since this is a lot of work to go through for reasons that I thought had been swiftly and neatly dealt with, but my mind started changing less than 10 minutes later:
This was the first real moment where we thought that there was an ulterior motive at play from Otaku. Given what happens later, the most plausible theory is that he took a shot in the dark to join staff and gather information to make his impersonation attempt look way more legitimate. Still, we ended up treating this as an incredible coincidence:
We got another discord screenshot from the ex:
https://i.imgur.com/NrnO4pp.jpg
This removed all suspicion from staff completely, because none of us would have had anything remotely close to a "long story" regarding a member who had joined the site in January. Still, it could have been an outside actor who knew a staff member, but even that seemed far more unlikely.
OtakuTAS was DMing adelikat throughout all of this:
Take note of adelikat saying "spike doesn't have access": The fact that it started at emails, which lower-level staff don't have access to, had already eliminated Spike as a suspect. Even on top of that, though, we had a lot of other reasons to not suspect Spike. On top of THAT, the rest of what Otaku was saying didn't exactly go over well with us:
Mentioned this in the ban announcement post, but to reiterate: There was quite a lot of beef between Otaku and Spike over this submission and the publication of the submission that it was meant to improve, among a few other things. Given that the beef was over ShesChardcore's run being published, the random inclusion of her as a suspect (and the later mention of the incident itself) made it feel so much more like Otaku was masterminding this whole thing as a way of punishing a couple people he felt wronged him.
As I said in the screenshots, I was actually surprised I wasn't mentioned given I was the one who actually made the decision to publish Chardcore's run in the first place, but I guess he was okay with me then since I'd tried helping him with a previous submission of his, or something. Pure speculation on my part.
All speculation aside, we finally got the evidence we needed in the next screenshot we were sent:
https://i.imgur.com/RaIdxM1.jpg
Now, I've been careful not to reveal how exactly how staff operates so there's less of a chance of someone successfully impersonating staff in the future, but for context I have to say one thing: "Screen share checks" are something we have never done and will never do. There's a followup screenshot that goes into detail about it, but it's such a bizarre concept that I didn't feel it necessary to include. Either way, bringing up something we don't do by itself would have been completely concrete proof that a staff member was not involved in this situation at all, but the most damning evidence is that the anon claimed to be Spike. I already mentioned that Spike was literally one of the first people we ruled out, so that reveal was the real smoking gun. Even if we hadn't ruled Spike out at that point, the anon's behavior and motivations didn't match Spike in any way, shape or form. Even if the acting was better, Spike was asleep the entire time the anon was active. Even if Spike was awake, they were openly in support of preventing the ex from contacting Otaku by opening up that Github issue. Even if that were a deflection, Spike had no way of accessing the ex's email address. Even if they tried asking someone with email access, that someone would have reported it to the seniors and we would have taken action long before any of this got out of hand.
The investigation was over at this point. We knew just from that last screenshot alone that it had to be either Otaku or the ex herself faking this. It wasn't anyone on staff, it wasn't anyone who was friendly with staff, it strictly had to be one or the other. Otaku, seemingly, attempted to deflect suspicion from himself in his conversation with adelikat, or at least that's how I choose to read it in hindsight. No screenshot for this one, only a partial text log, though I believe a screenshot can be provided if this isn't solid enough proof by itself:
OtakuTAS — Today at 8:11 PM
idk if im buying it
adelikat — Today at 8:11 PM
buying what?
OtakuTAS — Today at 8:12 PM
if that is who she is talking to
seems very obvious and he was quick to say so
adelikat — Today at 8:12 PM
so you don't think it was spike?
OtakuTAS — Today at 8:12 PM
i have no idea at this point
im running out of questions to feed them with
Conversation immediately following the above:
It didn't matter, though. We sorta stopped caring at this point after 3+ hours of worrying about staff conduct only to find out that the whole thing was 100% faked. Memory sent Otaku a PM essentially saying "Hey, we know this is fake. We don't know if it's you or your ex faking it, but we know for a fact it's fake. Do something like this again and you're gone." Otaku's response to this PM was to leave the site. Screenshot of a text log this time, it includes the last DMs Otaku had sent to adelikat prior to him claiming to leave so I've boxed the relevant section:
We decided not to do anything from here because we figured the situation was too insane for him to ever come back from. We weren't ever going to trust him again, so it would've been smart for him to never show his face around here. Unfortunately, that lack of trust should have applied to him leaving as well because he came back a few months later like nothing happened and immediately started pulling some more stupid crap with edit and post spamming, publicly campaigning for a site award, forcing his way into a ton of submissions, and finally all of the drama in this thread culminating in him pulling out years old posts from staff as an attempt to defame them to try and win an argument that he repeatedly claimed he didn't care about at all. That, combined with calling the community "hostile and cold" despite being the one actively starting drama with people, led me to believe that a permaban was necessary here, and it had to happen sooner rather than later.
Two final notes: One, "pulling out years old posts from staff" is his favorite move, apparently. You can see in this thread that he did it with EZGames, he recently tried it with me and feos on a now-deleted Github issue after the ban, and it is extremely likely he did it with Spikestuff as well prior to the impersonation effort, due to Spikestuff having apologized for using alt accounts in the past. As far as I'm concerned, this is the fifth or sixth final nail in the coffin. There's no plausible deniability here, everything he did at the time and everything he continues to do just incriminates him further.
Two, I personally believe the ex-girlfriend is a real person. There's no evidence suggesting otherwise, not even anything circumstantial. Whether or not she's actually a crazy stalker who was harassed and manipulated by Otaku into pulling off his defamation scheme or if her backstory was a lie and she was a willing accomplice from the start is up for debate, though I could see either option being true.
So, I have some final thoughts, and they're the most important part of this post.
I won't say I acted professionally in how I handled it, because I very clearly didn't. I apologize for my poor behavior. A lot of the problem there was in moderation and potential escalation: The knowledge of the impersonation was senior staff only for a while, and we only told the mods after the fact without even going too deep into it. General staff wasn't even aware of this until the ban took place (although they knew about Otaku's ex), and obviously none of this was public information until now. I made an admittedly rash and biased decision to ban first and explain later, given how much stress Otaku had put me and the rest of the senior staff under throughout this whole ordeal and feeling that the argument in that submission would have only gotten worse and worse with the way he was attacking both the staff and the community. That, combined with the fact that I was specifically approached to moderate the situation, made it feel far more like it was something that needed to be handled ASAP, especially given it wasn't the first time I had stepped in to moderate Otaku in that thread, let alone the several other times Otaku's behavior warranted moderation in the past.
I'll fully admit that I acted hostile and cold, here, without a single shred of snark or irony attached, but at the same time I'm absolutely not going to tolerate anyone saying that the rest of the community is the same way. I absolutely have my poor moments, that's something I've been working on for a while now and I'm not close to where I want to be yet, but I've seen nothing but warmth and respect from the rest of the community in all other cases. Someone like Otaku who comes in, wastes staff time and energy, starts drama, and then plays victim after all of that isn't allowed here. If that sounds too harsh... Well, there's a reason I don't usually like to moderate, and it's because I'm scary as hell when I feel like I need to.
Moderation's tricky sometimes, especially on TASVideos where we've had an extremely long history of lax moderation that only ended a couple years back, and clearly we're still not where we'd like ourselves to be. I believe Memory already stated this on Discord, but I highly recommend that people immediately contact the moderation team any time they see something that could escalate into a fight, especially if it's on the forums as those tend to flare up pretty harsh. I would also recommend not contacting the admins about moderation aspects in general, as that gives off the implication that something drastic is necessary. Of course, definitely contact the admins if something drastic IS in fact necessary. If you'd like to report something privately, you can group PM moderators and/or admins on site. We're discussing and will soon be implementing a way of doing that on Discord as well.
All that being said, I hope this didn't affect peoples' opinions of me too negatively. Let's just say that only someone like Otaku, some relative newcomer who spends most of his time making my life harder and refuses to take any accountability for it, can get that level of sudden, unprofessional reaction out of me these days. I'm open to talking things over with people and hashing things out. I'm a site admin, now, so the last thing I want is for people to be scared of me. I have valid reasons behind my behavior, but I'm not gonna use them to make excuses. I still need to try harder.
Hopefully this explains the situation and my logic behind the ban. For the record, staff are in full support of the ban itself, and it will not be reversed. We've also banned him on other platforms we have control over as he's already started retaliation efforts, and we're on the lookout for alt accounts given that he is clearly not above using them.
PM me on the site or ping me on Discord if you have any further questions. Aside from that, let's just try and move past this as soon as possible.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
In regards to a full list of every account who can view user emails:
Note the usages of "a lot" and not "all": With the knowledge we had at this time, we couldn't completely rule everyone out.
The anon became active again while we were discussing things. This time, OtakuTAS himself sent a screenshot coming from a text conversation he was having with the ex:
https://i.imgur.com/jLiWUso.jpg
This prompted the question of why Otaku was openly communicating with someone that he had warned us was stalking him. That question never got answered and never will.
The increasingly strange and creepy nature of the anon's comments here, combined with the ex's reaction, had us fairly convinced that the anon wasn't a staff member at all, though the possibility still remained. It could still have been someone outside the site with contact to a staff member who had email access, for example. Around this time, we started discussing the possibility that this could be faked:
I wasn't completely convinced that it could be faked since this is a lot of work to go through for reasons that I thought had been swiftly and neatly dealt with, but my mind started changing less than 10 minutes later:
This was the first real moment where we thought that there was an ulterior motive at play from Otaku. Given what happens later, the most plausible theory is that he took a shot in the dark to join staff and gather information to make his impersonation attempt look way more legitimate. Still, we ended up treating this as an incredible coincidence:
We got another discord screenshot from the ex:
https://i.imgur.com/NrnO4pp.jpg
This removed all suspicion from staff completely, because none of us would have had anything remotely close to a "long story" regarding a member who had joined the site in January. Still, it could have been an outside actor who knew a staff member, but even that seemed far more unlikely.
OtakuTAS was DMing adelikat throughout all of this:
Take note of adelikat saying "spike doesn't have access": The fact that it started at emails, which lower-level staff don't have access to, had already eliminated Spike as a suspect. Even on top of that, though, we had a lot of other reasons to not suspect Spike. On top of THAT, the rest of what Otaku was saying didn't exactly go over well with us:
Mentioned this in the ban announcement post, but to reiterate: There was quite a lot of beef between Otaku and Spike over this submission and the publication of the submission that it was meant to improve, among a few other things. Given that the beef was over ShesChardcore's run being published, the random inclusion of her as a suspect (and the later mention of the incident itself) made it feel so much more like Otaku was masterminding this whole thing as a way of punishing a couple people he felt wronged him.
As I said in the screenshots, I was actually surprised I wasn't mentioned given I was the one who actually made the decision to publish Chardcore's run in the first place, but I guess he was okay with me then since I'd tried helping him with a previous submission of his, or something. Pure speculation on my part.
All speculation aside, we finally got the evidence we needed in the next screenshot we were sent:
https://i.imgur.com/RaIdxM1.jpg
Now, I've been careful not to reveal how exactly how staff operates so there's less of a chance of someone successfully impersonating staff in the future, but for context I have to say one thing: "Screen share checks" are something we have never done and will never do. There's a followup screenshot that goes into detail about it, but it's such a bizarre concept that I didn't feel it necessary to include. Either way, bringing up something we don't do by itself would have been completely concrete proof that a staff member was not involved in this situation at all, but the most damning evidence is that the anon claimed to be Spike. I already mentioned that Spike was literally one of the first people we ruled out, so that reveal was the real smoking gun. Even if we hadn't ruled Spike out at that point, the anon's behavior and motivations didn't match Spike in any way, shape or form. Even if the acting was better, Spike was asleep the entire time the anon was active. Even if Spike was awake, they were openly in support of preventing the ex from contacting Otaku by opening up that Github issue. Even if that were a deflection, Spike had no way of accessing the ex's email address. Even if they tried asking someone with email access, that someone would have reported it to the seniors and we would have taken action long before any of this got out of hand.
The investigation was over at this point. We knew just from that last screenshot alone that it had to be either Otaku or the ex herself faking this. It wasn't anyone on staff, it wasn't anyone who was friendly with staff, it strictly had to be one or the other. Otaku, seemingly, attempted to deflect suspicion from himself in his conversation with adelikat, or at least that's how I choose to read it in hindsight. No screenshot for this one, only a partial text log, though I believe a screenshot can be provided if this isn't solid enough proof by itself:
It didn't matter, though. We sorta stopped caring at this point after 3+ hours of worrying about staff conduct only to find out that the whole thing was 100% faked. Memory sent Otaku a PM essentially saying "Hey, we know this is fake. We don't know if it's you or your ex faking it, but we know for a fact it's fake. Do something like this again and you're gone." Otaku's response to this PM was to leave the site. Screenshot of a text log this time, it includes the last DMs Otaku had sent to adelikat prior to him claiming to leave so I've boxed the relevant section:
We decided not to do anything from here because we figured the situation was too insane for him to ever come back from. We weren't ever going to trust him again, so it would've been smart for him to never show his face around here. Unfortunately, that lack of trust should have applied to him leaving as well because he came back a few months later like nothing happened and immediately started pulling some more stupid crap with edit and post spamming, publicly campaigning for a site award, forcing his way into a ton of submissions, and finally all of the drama in this thread culminating in him pulling out years old posts from staff as an attempt to defame them to try and win an argument that he repeatedly claimed he didn't care about at all. That, combined with calling the community "hostile and cold" despite being the one actively starting drama with people, led me to believe that a permaban was necessary here, and it had to happen sooner rather than later.
Two final notes: One, "pulling out years old posts from staff" is his favorite move, apparently. You can see in this thread that he did it with EZGames, he recently tried it with me and feos on a now-deleted Github issue after the ban, and it is extremely likely he did it with Spikestuff as well prior to the impersonation effort, due to Spikestuff having apologized for using alt accounts in the past. As far as I'm concerned, this is the fifth or sixth final nail in the coffin. There's no plausible deniability here, everything he did at the time and everything he continues to do just incriminates him further.
Two, I personally believe the ex-girlfriend is a real person. There's no evidence suggesting otherwise, not even anything circumstantial. Whether or not she's actually a crazy stalker who was harassed and manipulated by Otaku into pulling off his defamation scheme or if her backstory was a lie and she was a willing accomplice from the start is up for debate, though I could see either option being true.
