more HP means that it’ll take longer to beat enemies, and they’ll have more chances of hitting you and therefore kill you
Oh absolutely, this would have been very impressive if one couldn't... savestate or anything like that, yeah.
It’s impressive compared to RTA play you doofus. Nobody wants to watch a TAS on easy difficulty in a game that people run on hard so that it’s possible to lose a WR run to a boss. And your argument literally makes 0 sense: you’re literally saying “oh it uses savestates so it’s not impressive”. Welcome to TASVideos??? Good argument, man.
moozooh wrote:
But if you don't mind posting a few TAS examples where extra boss fight time results in a non-repetitive, unpredictable fight scenario (where the TASer has—rather than chooses—to employ a varied strategy stemming from the inability to end the fight sooner due to more boss HP), it would definitely enrich the discussion and your argument in particular.
You’re missing the point. It’s not about the TAS. It’s about how it compares to RTA runs of the same game. If the RTA community runs a game on hard to make it more difficult for themselves, everyone is gonna hate on a TAS that runs the game on easy, regardless of whether or not it becomes more or less repetitive. Even if in the TAS the fight becomes repetitive, it could mean that the TASer was able to optimally manipulate the RNG in ways that RTA couldn’t possibly ever do, showcasing a run much more skillfull than any RTA runner could do, which makes it impressive.
A Youyou Kengeki Musou easy RTA will showcase boss fights that are pretty much equal to a TAS, since bosses die too quickly to RNG you. On hard, they’d be worlds apart. That’s why hard is far more impressive. And the only difference is boss HP.
Edit: You clearly have a wrongly biased view on this. I’m just saying that it should be case-by-case, not “more HP? nope not allowed”. I 100% agree that in many games more HP is just a bad idea. Doesn’t mean it’s for all games.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Tangent wrote:
Speaking of which, something I'd really like to see a lot more scrutiny given when people say why they chose a lower difficulty. What I see myself a lot is that if the author gave a reason, any reason at all, that is the final word on it and any further discussion or check on the veracity of those reasons is treated as a personal attack.
No. Never. This kind of behavior is what I'm trying to prevent. Difficulty should never be the focal point of a run. It serves no purpose to attempt to dispute it. The reason why the author's explanation is the final word is because it should be the final word. Disputes are treated like personal attacks because it's a heavy implication that the author wasted days of their time on something they thought was going to be cool, only to have people completely disregard it because of a simple arbitrary choice they made. Given the overzealous nature of some of the regular posters, carrying these disputes over days and even weeks in some cases, I'm absolutely not surprised that these are being treated as personal attacks. Are they personal attacks? Not necessarily. But that doesn't mean they're not disrespectful in some way.
If anything, I want to see examples, not conjecture. As much as I hate to use this argument, if you're so caught up over the difficulty choice, why not try TASing it yourself? Instead of voting No because a harder difficulty could theoretically be more entertaining, try to prove that it's more entertaining. Seeing a word change in an options menu should never be the basis for how entertaining a movie is. If you don't want to TAS it yourself, maybe find video examples or something. This way, these difficulty disputes would at least have some credibility.
At the very least, is it too much for me to ask people to watch the run without taking the difficulty choice into account? Judge the entertainment value based off of the game and what the author chooses to do with it, not the fact that you saw the word "EASY" for a few frames. If you find the movie entertaining... Just leave it. At most, you can say something like "I'd like to see a Hard mode run someday, but this was great in the meantime" instead of hounding the author on why they didn't just make the Hard run.
Seriously, this is the only thing I truly want to change about how the site treats difficulty: The audience giving more leniency to lower difficulties. I don't disagree with Hard being more entertaining in most cases, but I do disagree with it being more entertaining in ALL cases. Just try to base your entertainment off of the run itself.
ALAKTORN wrote:
I disagree about the thing that says “if harder difficulty only gives more HP to enemies/bosses then it just gets more repetitive and shouldn’t be used” or whatever. I’ve always found that thought pretty stupid, more HP means that it’ll take longer to beat enemies, and they’ll have more chances of hitting you and therefore kill you, making a TAS that for example does the whole thing damageless a lot more impressive. I hold the Hard RTA WR in an action-RPG game and have always found the runs on its easiest difficulty to be pretty worthless, even though the only change is “bosses have more HP”. More HP give more chances for different patterns to be shown and more chances for the enemy to kill you.
That doesn't always apply, for the record. Your last statement, about different patterns and such, is a situation where we would definitely recommend harder difficulties, but what we mean by that original statement is more along the lines of something like this:
You have a boss that takes 50 hits to kill on Easy and 150 hits to kill on Hard. The fastest way to hit this boss is to crouch down in a spot where it can't hit you and kick away, 10 frames per kick. This manipulates it into using a pattern where it can always be hit, whereas if you were jumping around and being entertaining, it would unavoidably use attacks where you can't hit it for a second or two at a time. So you just have to crouch there and kick it for less than 10 seconds on Easy, but 25 seconds on Hard.
Obviously that is a super exaggerated example, but I hope it gets the point across about what we mean by adding repetition. If more boss health makes the fights genuinely more interesting, such as new patterns or new phases, then by all means it's definitely the better choice, but in these cases where all you're doing is tapping a button every set number of frames without moving otherwise, it's not exactly great.
On the same note, regarding things like player health management: You're playing a game where enemies don't drop items. If, on Hard, you have to go 9 seconds out of your way for a health pickup that allows you to use a damage boost to save 10 seconds, whereas on Easy you could just take the damage boost immediately, then I would call that adding repetition as well. Obviously, if enemies could drop health pickups, then Hard wouldn't be a problem at all for that case.
The point is that games are different, yo. Some games will always be more entertaining on higher difficulties, while some games will just be more repetitive and boring to watch. It has to be treated on a case-by-case basis. I see a lot of people making assumptions in Easy submissions that may not even turn out to be true. It's frustrating, especially as a Judge, to look at an Easy submission and see a rash of unexplained No votes that pretty much require me to spend the better part of my day looking into a game to see just how right or wrong they are.
feos wrote:
I have an interesting example. The game we're currently tasing, Gargoyles, has 3 difficulty settings, and it only affects the damage you take. The damage isn't refilled between levels, but most levels have refill items. Though, some of them aren't available in the tas route.
So at first we thought that Easy would allow more damage boosts, then we tested Normal, and there's only a few places where we're heavily running out of health and need heavy planning. And the time it takes to pick Easy in menu (2 seconds) doesn't seem to justify what time we can gain just for playing Easy. So we decided to stay on Normal.
The point is, Normal makes for a more interesting gameplay due to the mentioned heavy hp management in those places, and it's actually harder to tas, because of the amount of testing required. And at the same time, it is probably real-time faster. Hard is just too hard, and is unlikely worth it.
That's also an example of adequate explanation to me.
Normal is also fastest in Run Saber, since the primary difference between each difficulty is how fast the enemies move. This leads to less than a second of difference between each difficulty since it's barely noticeable, and it takes about a second and a half to switch difficulties. Normal also ends up being slightly harder to TAS since the slower enemies get in the way in a few areas, requiring some creative movement solutions to get past them.
And yes, I would call that an adequate explanation.
Warp wrote:
I don't like this at all.
Remember that those were just my personal opinions, and I'll even apologize for them today. I wasn't particularly in the right state of mind when I wrote them. It's a bit too late for me to edit them now with all the quoting and discussion, but just keep in mind that none of them are actually going to go into practice.
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.
You have a boss that takes 50 hits to kill on Easy and 150 hits to kill on Hard. The fastest way to hit this boss is to crouch down in a spot where it can't hit you and kick away, 10 frames per kick. This manipulates it into using a pattern where it can always be hit, whereas if you were jumping around and being entertaining, it would unavoidably use attacks where you can't hit it for a second or two at a time. So you just have to crouch there and kick it for less than 10 seconds on Easy, but 25 seconds on Hard.
Yeah I agree for that example. I’m sure there’d be people who’d still prefer using hard regardless, though.
Nobody wants to watch a TAS on easy difficulty in a game that people run on hard so that it’s possible to lose a WR run to a boss. And your argument literally makes 0 sense: you’re literally saying “oh it uses savestates so it’s not impressive”. Welcome to TASVideos??? Good argument, man.
The argument, so to say, is that watching a video on this site we know well beforehand that the chance of a boss to hit the player equals to 0% unless it's faster to take that hit. Therefore the main difference, and the entertainment value, lies in the particular methods of avoiding said hits while maintaining maximum damage output of the player character (assuming they can't all be tanked using the available resources). Nobody is surprised that a deadly hit is avoided, but is seeing the same hit avoided the same way, say, 10 times in a row instead of 4 really more impressive to you? Why?
ALAKTORN wrote:
It’s not about the TAS. It’s about how it compares to RTA runs of the same game.
Although I do agree that this should be taken into consideration for games with established speedrunning communities, I feel that fitting the rule sets against RTA runs in every single case, which seems to be what you're asking for, is unrealistic and wrong for the site, as the site should maintain its own goals first and foremost. But this isn't prohibited in any way, either, which is why we had (and still have) in-game time runs and whatnot for many popular games that were timed this way in respective RTA communities. If you want this to be forced, however, I would disagree with it because forcing external references is ridiculous. The ruleset should reflect what is most entertaining in a TAS, not what is most comparable to whatever else. If they coincide, good; if they don't, well, make a convincing case and hope for the better.
The guidelines as rewritten by Samsara reflect the direction the site has been taking, not trying to establish a new direction. I.e. they reflect what has already happened in the (recent) past, and it should be clear the direction has changed from a harder, broader approach towards more of a case-by-case basis. So if you would come up with some judging decisions you disagreed with, it would probably be more helpful for the discussion, assuming you would like to be helpful at all.
ALAKTORN wrote:
You clearly have a wrongly biased view on this. I’m just saying that it should be case-by-case, not “more HP? nope not allowed”. I 100% agree that in many games more HP is just a bad idea. Doesn’t mean it’s for all games.
Yeah, clearly, based on this post and the entire discussion before it. And it's not just you looking in the mirror. I mean I should probably quote this snippet again because you have clearly and unbiasedly ignored it again:
"...It is preferred to play on the difficulty that would make the most interesting and entertaining run. Usually, this is the hardest difficulty". And also, "any difficulty choice will be accepted as long as you adequately explain why you chose it"
It absolutely covers your case so I don't even understand what you're arguing for or against.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Speaking of which, something I'd really like to see a lot more scrutiny given when people say why they chose a lower difficulty. What I see myself a lot is that if the author gave a reason, any reason at all, that is the final word on it and any further discussion or check on the veracity of those reasons is treated as a personal attack.
No. Never. This kind of behavior is what I'm trying to prevent. Difficulty should never be the focal point of a run. It serves no purpose to attempt to dispute it. The reason why the author's explanation is the final word is because it should be the final word.
Unfortunately, the way the guidelines are written, and the way they are tied to the blank (any%) branch for a game, encourages this behavior, in fact even gives it a great deal of importance.
What we have is what should be an objective requirement, beating the game as fast as possible, that is given the subjective modifier of 'following the difficulty guidelines.' Not only that, but this falls under the TECHNICAL requirements for the run. This encourages scrutiny not only of entertainment value, but whether or not the chosen difficulty is justified in being the any% branch run for that game. This is quite an impactful decision to make, and given that it has to be done on a game by game basis, it's no wonder we wind up in such a mess! 8D
In order to put the focus on entertainment, difficulty setting cannot be tied to technical validity. Either make fastest completion flat out fastest completion, or define the default fastest completion run to be on hardest difficulty, and make it a rule not just a subjective guideline. In both cases, other difficulty settings would naturally become branches and be judged as any other branch, by entertainment value.
Remember that those were just my personal opinions, and I'll even apologize for them today. I wasn't particularly in the right state of mind when I wrote them. It's a bit too late for me to edit them now with all the quoting and discussion, but just keep in mind that none of them are actually going to go into practice.
I did indeed interpret it as being a serious (perhaps even semi-official) proposal for the new guidelines. I'm sorry I jumped to conclusions.
I don't think that an easy-difficulty run should obsolete an existing hard-difficulty one (with possible, but rare, exceptions, if there are good reasons for it). However, there may be merit in having both as separate branches, if both have something to offer. (After all, this is pretty common eg. in Quake speedrunning.)
If a game has only an easy-difficulty TAS, and later somebody makes a hardest-difficulty one, then creating a new branch for the latter should be at least seriously considered.
Speaking of which, something I'd really like to see a lot more scrutiny given when people say why they chose a lower difficulty. What I see myself a lot is that if the author gave a reason, any reason at all, that is the final word on it and any further discussion or check on the veracity of those reasons is treated as a personal attack.
No. Never. This kind of behavior is what I'm trying to prevent. Difficulty should never be the focal point of a run.
What makes difficulty so special that, unlike every other arbitrary choice the author could possibly make, it is above any discussion or reproach? And what if the author's justifications are incorrect or inappropriate? There's even a case where the author accused an existing Japanese TAS which used a password that sets the game to hard mode as setting a password for a cheat, and it was judged believing that.
The author isn't infallible, and just because they made a claim, that doesn't make it the word of God.
I'm pretty sure I'm stating the obvious here, but just so that the discussion isn't carried away too far, the guideline in question reads:
Well, no. The guideline reads to me (and will likely be interpreted as) "easy mode is always acceptable and people are not allowed to vote against it". It's more verbose than that but that's the gist of it.
If that wasn't the intent it needs to be reworded in less circumlocutious fashion.
Warp wrote:
This looks to me like the complete reversal of the principle that has been in place so far. In other words, this new guideline actually prefers easy difficulty over hard difficulty in almost every case (and is, in fact, quite contradictory to the statement that "usually, this is the hardest difficulty").
No. Never. This kind of behavior is what I'm trying to prevent. Difficulty should never be the focal point of a run.
Yes, we get that YOU feel this way, but please understand that (1) this is a complete reversal from how the site used to be run, and (2) as this thread shows, there is absolutely no consensus for this change.
Warp wrote:
I did indeed interpret it as being a serious (perhaps even semi-official) proposal for the new guidelines. I'm sorry I jumped to conclusions.
By my count, at least three movies have already been accepted based on this 'guideline', despite strong disagreement in the relevant submission threads.
I'm tempted to simply say "make a new category for easy mode", but then problems such as it being exactly the same for all speedrun purposes, being slower than Hard, or sometimes even be quite different looking to the point of new routes makes this rather hard. The former 2 points even more so, since it's not something one can easily find by looking at game values.
People are citing hypothetical examples for situations that might occur in a TAS with a given difficulty choice, which isn't so great if you want to set a general rule for all submissions to this site. In fact, I don't think there is a "one-size-fits-all" solution to this question, other than just deciding for each game individually which difficulty setting makes for the most entertaining TAS. Even if a general rule for all games is established, inevitably, some game is gonna come along that works completely differently from all others in terms of difficulty choice, throwing a curveball into the mix. Games are just too different from eachother to make one rule for all of them.
Instead, I feel that the author should be doing his research on the game and pick the most appropriate difficulty setting for his goals. The author should be able to inform the audience of his difficulty choice and give reasons as to why he picked it when multiple difficulty settings are available. The audience can then respond whether or not they agree with the author's decisions, and the judges decide whether or not the author's choices were correct. In any case, I feel the author's difficulty choice, if well thought out, should be respected.
Yeah.
As a relative outsider looking at this discussion as a real-time speedrunner, I ask myself what TASVideos is really supposed to be. To me, this comes down to whether the "TAS" in TASVideos should stand for "Tool-Assisted Superplay" or "Tool-Assisted Speedrun." A quick Google of "TAS" shows the TASVideos homepage as the first result, the second being the Wikipedia entry for "tool-assisted speedrun." Yet, the Welcome to TASVideos page refers to TAS as "tool-assisted superplay."
There is a difference between a "superplay" and a "speedrun." A superplay can justify making a tradeoff within a given category for entertainment over speed. A speedrun cannot. The primary aim of the speedrun is to go as fast as possible.
I can't say I have been involved in this community long enough to make an informed opinion, but I wanted to share my perspective as this discussion has begun to question my expectations of what I look for in this site.
I have the tendency to post a few too many Kappas.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
I'd like to stress for probably the 10th time that the difficulty guideline was not changed. It was rewritten to be more clear. We are not operating any differently than before. Easy mode is not an automatic, unquestioned acceptance. I have no idea where anyone's getting that idea from. We will almost always accept Hardest difficulty choices, while other difficulties will continue to be subject to some Judging scrutiny. I've made a few small changes to the rewritten Guidelines to reflect this.
I also have never said that no one is allowed to question or discuss the difficulty choice. I only expressed my opinion that "I don't like the run because it's not on Hard difficulty" is not valid criticism, and it does nothing but add white noise and drama to submission threads. We don't need any more of that. Feel free to discuss differences between difficulties if you feel they're enough to warrant the TASer redoing the run, but at least do the slightest bit of research on them first. Don't just assume that "Hardest = Most Entertaining" in all cases. And if the author refuses to redo the run, let that be the end of it. There's absolutely no reason to press them further. The discussion will have already played its course, the author will have already said their piece, and the Judge will take it all into account when its time to make their decision.
Bring up the differences, provide examples if you can. Hell, go ahead and TAS a level or two on the hardest difficulty if you really want some solid evidence to back up your point. Just leave it after that, please. We'll handle the intense scrutiny, that is literally part of our job.
Of course, I can say the same thing to the authors. I think TASers need to do their research as well, so that they can make an informed choice of difficulty for their final run. It's much easier to say "Hard difficulty makes the 1st boss 10 seconds longer, and all I do is crouch and punch it" rather than "Hard difficulty adds health to bosses, so it'll be longer and more boring", and it's much more convincing to boot.
That's really all I have to say. If there are any further misunderstandings, I'll try to clarify some more.
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.
While I completely understand why people feel the way they do about difficulties, in particular with easy difficulty over hard difficulties, I can not stand it when people use the fact that someone chose an easier difficulty as their ONE and ONLY complaint against a run. Nor can I stand it when the difficulty choice is clearly explained, but they still harp about it.
I'm not going to go too far into it because I don't feel like stirring up trouble, but I've had 2 submissions of mine get completely destroyed due to certain individuals not letting this issue go. It's annoying at best, and discouraging at worst.
It's literally the most minor thing possible involving a TAS and goal choice, but it's spiraled into this gigantic shitstorm that barely makes any sense. Let it go.
Moozooh put it best:
moozooh wrote:
The guidelines as rewritten by Samsara reflect the direction the site has been taking, not trying to establish a new direction. I.e. they reflect what has already happened in the (recent) past, and it should be clear the direction has changed from a harder, broader approach towards more of a case-by-case basis. So if you would come up with some judging decisions you disagreed with, it would probably be more helpful for the discussion, assuming you would like to be helpful at all.
effort on the first draft means less effort on any draft thereafter
- some loser
While I completely understand why people feel the way they do about difficulties, in particular with easy difficulty over hard difficulties, I can not stand it when people use the fact that someone chose an easier difficulty as their ONE and ONLY complaint against a run. Nor can I stand it when the difficulty choice is clearly explained, but they still harp about it.
I'm not going to go too far into it because I don't feel like stirring up trouble, but I've had 2 submissions of mine get completely destroyed due to certain individuals not letting this issue go. It's annoying at best, and discouraging at worst.
I doubt at least the RotJ submission would have blown up like it did had the difficulty choice actually been clearly explained instead of met with vagueness, followed by hostility and unresearched claims. Other submissions were treated similarly when questions about the difficulty were asked at all, which ended up being answered by other people, and/or the submission immediately canceled without an author response.
It should be clear from this thread that not everyone shares the same opinion about difficulty choices in games, and that "easiest is easiest and fastest" is not a clear enough or sufficient explanation for a lot of people. Asking for the reasoning behind a choice when it's not well explained or know, and then giving an opinion in response to it should not be held to any different standard than any other choice the author might have made. Why was a route chosen? Why was a goal chosen? Why was a character used? Why was a glitch not used? Stating a justification for a choice does not close the book on opinions regarding it. Why should difficulty be held to a different standard?
Joined: 10/28/2013
Posts: 130
Location: United States
It just seems like there's a divide between people who think this site's primary value is as a source of entertainment*, and people who think this site's primary value is as a place to demonstrate total mastery over games in a structured environment.
If you're in the second category, as I am, then -- with occasional exceptions -- these runs on lower difficulties just don't have much resonance. I don't have a problem with a multiplicity of runs on different difficulties, but when it comes down to it, the run on the hardest difficulty is the one that has what I want, and what I come to this site for.
*(though it's not clear to me who's being entertained, since I think there's ample evidence that casual viewers, i.e. the semi-mythical "general public", strongly prefer runs on Hard -- or, at the very least, not Easy -- and care more about the mastery angle than the entertainment angle. In other words, they find mastery more entertaining than, er, "entertainment". So whose tastes are we really catering to here?)
I would like to repeat a point I made earlier.
There's a difference between what we find "entertaining", and what the wider public (mostly consisting of gamers) finds "entertaining".
Because most of us have seen hundreds of TASes, sometimes even dozens of TASes of the exact same game, we have a rather skewed perspective on what is "entertaining". To many of us "needless" repetition in a TAS is "boring" because we have seen so many TASes, and we get tired of seeing the same thing again and again. But that's not how the casual member of the wider public sees it. They are most often seeing the TAS of that particular game for the first time, and they may have seen only a handful of TASes overall.
Enemies/bosses having more HP, thus requiring a few hits more, is not by necessity more "boring" to such a casual viewer (especially someone who has played the game.) It may feel like it to us, but as said, we have a skewed view.
I'd like to stress for probably the 10th time that the difficulty guideline was not changed. It was rewritten to be more clear. We are not operating any differently than before.
Rather, certain judges are operating differently than other judges. Some judges expect a run to be in hard mode and will generally reject easy-mode runs as being against site guidelines. Other judges except a run to be in easy mode and will likely reject hard-mode runs as being slower. So effectively, runs are being treated very differently depending on who ends up judging it.
Easy mode is not an automatic, unquestioned acceptance.
But your proposed guideline does strongly suggest that. Like I said before, if that isn't your intent, please reword it.
Tangent wrote:
I doubt at least the RotJ submission would have blown up like it did had the difficulty choice actually been clearly explained instead of met with vagueness, followed by hostility and unresearched claims. Other submissions were treated similarly when questions about the difficulty were asked at all, which ended up being answered by other people, and/or the submission immediately canceled without an author response.
Indeed.
Warp wrote:
There's a difference between what we find "entertaining", and what the wider public (mostly consisting of gamers) finds "entertaining".
Indeed as well.
goldenband wrote:
there's ample evidence that casual viewers, i.e. the semi-mythical "general public", strongly prefer runs on Hard -- or, at the very least, not Easy -- and care more about the mastery angle than the entertainment angle. In other words, they find mastery more entertaining than, er, "entertainment". So whose tastes are we really catering to here?)
There's a difference between what we find "entertaining", and what the wider public (mostly consisting of gamers) finds "entertaining".
Yeah that's totally fine, people have different worldviews. I mean not everyone is a Democrat or Republican, for example.
Radiant wrote:
Samsara wrote:
I'd like to stress for probably the 10th time that the difficulty guideline was not changed. It was rewritten to be more clear. We are not operating any differently than before.
Rather, certain judges are operating differently than other judges. Some judges expect a run to be in hard mode and will generally reject easy-mode runs as being against site guidelines. Other judges except a run to be in easy mode and will likely reject hard-mode runs as being slower. So effectively, runs are being treated very differently depending on who ends up judging it.
Can you give some examples to this? I find this hard to believe.
goldenband wrote:
there's ample evidence that casual viewers, i.e. the semi-mythical "general public", strongly prefer runs on Hard -- or, at the very least, not Easy -- and care more about the mastery angle than the entertainment angle. In other words, they find mastery more entertaining than, er, "entertainment". So whose tastes are we really catering to here?)
Yeah, this is accurate. But again, Samsara didn't actually change the ruling on this by, uh, rewording the description. It's the exact same as before, only less vague. Runs are still judged on a case-by-case basis so it's not like it really matters in the long run.
Tangent wrote:
I doubt at least the RotJ submission would have blown up like it did had the difficulty choice actually been clearly explained instead of met with vagueness, followed by hostility and unresearched claims. Other submissions were treated similarly when questions about the difficulty were asked at all, which ended up being answered by other people, and/or the submission immediately canceled without an author response.
"Met with vagueness"
First post I made in the discussion involving it:
arandomgameTASer wrote:
jlun2 wrote:
Ok, isn't that the entire point of hardest difficulty? Seriously, of course easy mode will be fastest. How come no one bothered questioning this? By that logic, might as well quickly do a TAS of a game, say spongebob and obsolete it by using the easiest difficulty.
Ok, I guess I poorly explained that.
Jedi Mode in the Super Star Wars games are not suitable for TASing because:
*They give bosses more HP
*You take more damage
*more enemies spawn
So point #1 means all the bosses are slower, #2 means less cool speed tricks, and #3 means more lag optimization, just for a movie that is virtually identical to the Easy Mode, only slower.
So in the interest of entertainment and speed, for this run in particular, I decided that Easy mode is the best option. Obviously the use of hardest difficulty should be different based on the run.
See the discussion thread on http://tasvideos.org/3779S.html and the judgement ruling for more info on that, as this applies to all of the SSW games.
So, uh, I really don't know what to tell you. You're wrong?
effort on the first draft means less effort on any draft thereafter
- some loser
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Radiant wrote:
Rather, certain judges are operating differently than other judges. Some judges expect a run to be in hard mode and will generally reject easy-mode runs as being against site guidelines. Other judges except a run to be in easy mode and will likely reject hard-mode runs as being slower. So effectively, runs are being treated very differently depending on who ends up judging it.
Do you have any proof of this? From what I've seen, no one on the judging staff is treating difficulty any differently at this moment. Not even myself, despite what I've said in this thread. Every choice we've made regarding a lower difficulty being acceptable was thoroughly researched beforehand.
Easy mode is not against site guidelines. It never has been. Easy mode without proper explanation is against site guidelines. Easy mode when Hardest is the clearly better choice is against site guidelines. But Easy mode has never been against site guidelines. Hardest difficulty has been a preference for a long time, not a requirement. If it was a requirement, then this wouldn't even be a discussion, would it?
I judge differently than I watch: As a mere viewer, I don't care. I'll be entertained by anything. I can accept an author's choices because I've made the same choices myself. But as a Judge, I scrutinize. I'll test games, difficulty differences, et cetera. If an author says Easy is better, I'll make sure of that before I make my decision.
But also as a Judge, I wouldn't always reject based on difficulty choice. Cases for clear rejection would be if Hardest is vastly more entertaining, or if Hardest adds more levels (like Contra), or if the Easy run is meant to be an "improvement". But in cases where the runs are going to look very similar, I don't think it's that much of an issue to accept the Easy run with the caveat that a Hardest run would absolutely obsolete it. It's not the end of the world if that happens for a first publication.
And likewise, I wouldn't ever reject a Hardest difficulty run based on difficulty choice, as that's always been our preference, but there will be rare cases where I accept it with the caveat that an Easy run will obsolete it due to the removal of long periods of repetition.
But your proposed guideline does strongly suggest that. Like I said before, if that isn't your intent, please reword it.
It strongly suggests the exact same thing the previous guideline did, which was "Hardest is preferred, easy is acceptable with good reason". I don't see how what I wrote could be interpreted any differently than this:
Old Guidelines wrote:
Where a game has multiple difficulty levels, it is preferred to play on the hardest difficulty level (for more interesting gameplay) unless the only difference between difficulty levels is enemy/boss hit points, in which case the easiest difficulty levels are preferred in the interest of speed.
If anything's changed, it's that there's more explanation as to why an easier difficulty could be okay. That doesn't mean it will be okay. It always has been, and always will be, a case-by-case basis. I thought I made that a little more clear in my last revision, but I could be wrong. I mean, everything else I've said so far in this thread has been misinterpreted...
Besides, considering the points you've been making throughout this thread, isn't it more entertaining that the rewrite is harder for you to understand?
Tangent wrote:
I doubt at least the RotJ submission would have blown up like it did had the difficulty choice actually been clearly explained instead of met with vagueness, followed by hostility and unresearched claims. Other submissions were treated similarly when questions about the difficulty were asked at all, which ended up being answered by other people, and/or the submission immediately canceled without an author response.
I doubt the RotJ submission would have blown up like it did had the author not been hounded on the difficulty choice. Besides what he said in his explanation, anyone pressing him could have looked up the other differences between difficulties and seen that Jedi difficulty would end up being quite a bit longer due to the autoscrolling sections requiring more kills. Health is also a non-issue due to enemy spawns being random and able to be manipulated away in a large number of cases, and they should be manipulated away to save potentially minutes worth of lag over the course of the run. That should have been enough evidence. Also, there was the decision made on the original Super Star Wars run, where Easy difficulty having more health and less damage taken lead to a more entertaining run overall due to the ability to use a lot more damage boosts without needing to stop.
Honestly, as much as I agree that proper research should be done before choosing a difficulty, I don't think it requires an essay and a discussion lecture to really stick. In most cases, "Autoscollers will be longer and a lot more boring to watch" or "Boss health is increased and they're not any more exciting" will suffice. Like I said in an earlier post, if you're so head-up about the difficulty choice being wrong, prove it yourself. Prove that Hardest is so much more entertaining that it justifies your No vote. Don't sit there and force more information out of the author.
Besides, considering the points you've been making in this thread, wouldn't it be more entertaining to challenge yourself to do the research and provide the evidence instead of just waiting for it to land in your lap?
Warp wrote:
There's a difference between what we find "entertaining", and what the wider public (mostly consisting of gamers) finds "entertaining".
I can definitely agree with this, but I'd like to think that a casual viewer would be more impressed by the speed of a boss being taken down. In cases where boss health is the only difference, they'll see a boss get destroyed real quick on Easy and not as quick on Hard.
But thinking about it from a perspective where I'm a "casual viewer", like watching RTA runs, I admit I'm more impressed with a runner who runs on harder difficulties. The problem is something moozooh explained in an earlier post: A TAS won't encounter any trouble, they'll just dance around any difficulty in the exact same way. What impresses me about RTA runs on harder difficulties is that they have to deal with the consequences, whereas a TAS doesn't.
So that eventually leads to a situation where hardest difficulty is more entertaining in both RTAs and TASes, but for completely different reasons: It's more tense in RTAs, because mistakes cost a lot more, and they could be the end of the run if you're not playing your best, which makes it more exciting for the audience to watch in turn and more impressive when these challenges are overcome. In TASes, the entertainment has to come from what the game itself throws at you. If all it throws at you is bosses with 3x health, then there's no entertainment to be gained from it.
I'd love to try an experiment where a few TASes done on Easy are submitted with no mention of the difficulty choice at all: Nothing about it in the submission text and the opening title screens cut out so that no one sees the choice or even the option to make the choice. Just something to see whether or not the actual run itself is the subject of entertainment, rather than seeing the word "HARD" for a couple of frames before the run.
goldenband wrote:
there's ample evidence that casual viewers, i.e. the semi-mythical "general public", strongly prefer runs on Hard -- or, at the very least, not Easy -- and care more about the mastery angle than the entertainment angle. In other words, they find mastery more entertaining than, er, "entertainment". So whose tastes are we really catering to here?)
Okay, but like I said in my previous couple of paragraphs, "mastery" doesn't necessarily mean "hardest difficulty", and vice versa. One can be a factor in the other, but it really depends on what everyone's definition of "mastery" is. Personally, I think mastery is beating a game far faster than intended, regardless of the extenuating circumstances. I'm sure a lot of people agree. "Mastery" is bending the game completely to your will. To me, difficulty doesn't necessarily play a major role in that. It can contribute to it, but when I think "Wow, they really kicked the crap out of this game", it's never due to the choice of difficulty, it's due to the author kicking the crap out of the game.
Bottom line to all of these points: Hardest is still the preferred difficulty choice. Nothing has changed in the Guidelines except for a little more clarity on difficulty choices. The only way that guideline will ever change is if we adopt a system where one difficulty or another is a hard requirement. Every game has been, and will continue to be, judged on a case-by-case basis.
Hounding authors on difficulty choice does nothing but add unneeded drama. Proving your arguments yourself is much more effective and it makes you look like less of a jackass in the long run. It is always okay to disagree. It crosses over into "absolutely not okay" when you spend 10 posts doing it with little more than "You're wrong, Hardest is best in all cases".
One last thing about my rewrites, hopefully this should clear up any future misunderstandings about my rewrites apparently promoting some sort of militaristic, dictator-level agenda:
Guideline Rewrites wrote:
Good reasons to use easier difficulties are:
*More health for damage boosts
*Less enemies leading to less lag
*Faster bossfights on repetitive bosses, especially if their lower health can lead them to be one-cycled
Notice that all of these points are inherently related to either the removal of repetition or the addition of entertainment:
*More health for damage boosts - This always makes a run faster and more impressive. In some cases, this can make or break major skips by virtue of having the health for it much earlier than normal. You can have more health, take less damage, and tear your way through stages with reckless abandon, recoiling off every enemy in your way and saving huge amounts of time over a Hard difficulty run that can't do that without dying.
Can this be disputed? Yes. If it's a matter of 3 hits to die on Easy versus 1 hit to die on Hard, then that isn't really much of a suitable difference, unless a major skip is possible with a damage boost. Time saved with damage boosts should be significant, not mere frames here and there.
*Less enemies leading to less lag - Probably the most disputable, but I was mostly thinking of the Super Star Wars series here. After attempting to TAS Empire Strikes Back, it struck me that we were manipulating away as many enemy spawns as we could anyway due to how much the game lagged when even one enemy was on screen.
If enemies cause lag, and enemies can be manipulated away, then naturally you'll manipulate away enemies to reduce lag. If Hard adds more enemy spawns, that's just more enemies to manipulate away in order to reach the exact same effect as you'd get on Easy. If enemies don't cause lag, then it's not an issue, obviously.
*Faster bossfights on repetitive bosses, especially if their lower health can lead them to be one-cycled - I specifically say "repetitive" bosses, as many people (including myself) have pointed out that more boss health is not always a bad thing. If you're standing in one place and smacking a boss for 10 seconds, that's repetitive. If you're constantly moving around and dancing around projectiles and getting in hits whenever you can, that's not repetitive. If the boss is constantly changing its pattern, that's not repetitive. But there are still cases where more health is repetitive, and even as the old guidelines said, this is where we're more concerned about speed, because speed in these cases is the most entertaining option.
Phew, that was rough.
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.
Rather, certain judges are operating differently than other judges. Some judges expect a run to be in hard mode and will generally reject easy-mode runs as being against site guidelines. Other judges except a run to be in easy mode and will likely reject hard-mode runs as being slower. So effectively, runs are being treated very differently depending on who ends up judging it.
Do you have any proof of this?
Basically this:
Mothrayas wrote:
One point I do believe should be discussed is the enforceability of the guideline as it currently stands. As Samsara said, sometimes runs are rejected for not using the hardest difficulty, and sometimes they are not. Currently the difficulty "rule" is only a guideline so it need not be enforced in its current state. However, we'll probably want to handle this more sensibly than "sometimes do enforce it, sometimes don't".
Samsara, I believe the simplest solution would be for you to ask the other judges to make a brief statement in this thread here. If they are all on the same line with you on this (as they may well be), then the only problem is that site users simply don't know that.
That's a proof of a different thing. Mothrayas could have said that from either standpoint; he was talking about the consistency of ruling rather than in favor of a specific preference.
If you accept the guideline as treating the games on a case-by-case basis, the confusion is largely alleviated and contained to particular wording on past decisions which cannot be easily tampered with.
The problem as I see it right now isn't in choosing or judging a particular difficulty, but rather in the consistency of said difficulty choice in the obsoletion chain.
Suppose a first-gen run of game A is submitted on Hard. Then run A2 is submitted on Easy because that allowed extra tricks, but since it was also faster in comparable segments it has to be accepted as well as an improvement. Then run A3 is submitted by another player, this time on Hard again, because it apparently looks more impressive that way, and as the author has managed to beat run A2's time despite being deprived of extra timesaving tricks of the Easy difficulty, it is judged as superior and accepted as an improvement yet again. The next author could once again claim that entertainment is in the eye of the beholder and use all the tricks available by the easier difficulty in A4 to surpass the harder run, which will likely be accepted. At some point run A5 won't be able to surpass run A4's time on Hard and will have to resort to continuing the chain on Easy.
Is there a sensible way to deal with this that is clear to understand and adhere to and not being a powerful drama magnet? That is the kind of problem we should be discussing instead of being stuck on reiterating the obvious.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4089
Location: The Netherlands
Radiant wrote:
Samsara wrote:
Radiant wrote:
Rather, certain judges are operating differently than other judges. Some judges expect a run to be in hard mode and will generally reject easy-mode runs as being against site guidelines. Other judges except a run to be in easy mode and will likely reject hard-mode runs as being slower. So effectively, runs are being treated very differently depending on who ends up judging it.
Do you have any proof of this?
Basically this:
Mothrayas wrote:
One point I do believe should be discussed is the enforceability of the guideline as it currently stands. As Samsara said, sometimes runs are rejected for not using the hardest difficulty, and sometimes they are not. Currently the difficulty "rule" is only a guideline so it need not be enforced in its current state. However, we'll probably want to handle this more sensibly than "sometimes do enforce it, sometimes don't".
First of all, that is no proof, and second of all, your conclusion does not even follow from the statement I wrote.
Nowhere did I write, nor suggest, that certain judges are acting differently from other judges. If that actually happens (consistently), that's a problem, because each judge is expected to be equally fair towards all submissions in terms of judgment, and I definitely would want to hear more about it.
What I actually wrote is that runs sometimes are rejected for hardest difficulty and sometimes not, and this is because they are case-by-case scenarios for each submission. That has nothing to do with any individual judge(s). This is because of feedback which is different for every submission. Submissions with very significant viewer backlash against the difficulty choice are more likely to get rejected.
Radiant wrote:
Samsara, I believe the simplest solution would be for you to ask the other judges to make a brief statement in this thread here. If they are all on the same line with you on this (as they may well be), then the only problem is that site users simply don't know that.
Honestly, the way this discussion has been going, I am going to abstain from posting my own take on this for now. It seems like it's already hard enough to not conflate one judge's personal opinion with what the actual guidelines say, and throwing more opinions into the mix would probably just make it even worse.
Let's try to backtrack the discussion a little bit.
The guidelines state essentially: Play the most interesting difficulty - which is usually the hardest difficulty, but if the hardest difficulty only adds repetition, easier may be preferred instead for the interest of speed. When it's unclear which one is better, we can accept whichever if it is justified well enough.
As far as I can tell, that is what the guidelines state, that is how we are judging difficulty in submissions, and that is how we used to judge difficulty in submissions before Samsara rewrote the guidelines to clarify what we've been doing already.
If there is any inconsistency going on between those (between the guideline's message and what we're doing, or between what we did in the past/what we do in the present) then I'll certainly be more interested in that. But what I've been reading so far is largely a lot of criticism towards Samsara's personal opinion regarding easy mode - which is not official, and which is not what our guidelines say, and which is not what any judge is actually acting on, past or present, including Samsara herself. If you still have criticism towards something the guidelines say, then please clarify again in a way that's unambiguously about the guidelines and not a judge's personal, unenforced opinion.
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