Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
That's why we have these threads in place, so we can actually deliver a redesign that everyone likes, both in terms of functionality and aesthetics. I sound like I'm making an announcement for a new "trendy" startup in Silicon Valley. TASVideos: Think Outside the Xbox (because we can't TAS it yet). Buzzwords. Web 2.0.
I'm glad we have a small consensus for Django(AC) this early on, and even people willing to work with it, though I think it'd be lovely to see some good examples of it in use if we really want to be serious about it. Not that I'm helming this project or anything, but hey, it's something that would be useful when the people who actually matter hunker down and make a decision.
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
Samsara wrote:
That's why we have these threads in place, so we can actually deliver a redesign that everyone likes, both in terms of functionality and aesthetics. I sound like I'm making an announcement for a new "trendy" startup in Silicon Valley. TASVideos: Think Outside the Xbox (because we can't TAS it yet). Buzzwords. Web 2.0.
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: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6437
Location: The land down under.
One request that I have that I wish for.
This is mainly for the forums, but I wish for a dark theme.
I wish for it as it would be a nice feature for those that use the forums at night and the only strong source of light would be coming from their monitors.
The only downside that I can see from this is from the bright users, who try and hide their text, with the border from behind, and the dark theme users could see it.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
One request that I have that I wish for.
This is mainly for the forums, but I wish for a dark theme.
I wish for it as it would be a nice feature for those that use the forums at night and the only strong source of light would be coming from their monitors.
The only downside that I can see from this is from the bright users, who try and hide their text, with the boarder from behind, and the dark theme users could see it.
Idea #1: a community spotlight section (on the front page) that promotes a TAS video from YouTube or niconico that is not necessarily a speedrun. Could be a Smash TAS or a new Pokémon glitch or whatever. Videos would be picked by a vested editor from a specific forum thread and would be up there for, idk, 2 days or something.
Idea #2: a more detailed "profile" section for every user which has, by default, all your submitted movies and informations.
Idea #3: autocomplete search for games and players, like on speedrunslive.com
Idea #4: social links for tasvideos (twitter, youtube, etc)
1. More emphasis on publication ratings, for sure. Make it easier to rate movies, give people more of an incentive to rate, perhaps change what gets rated if we can find some things that work better than Entertainment/Tech Quality.
Ratings are subjective. Everyone has their own rules how they rate things and technical ratings sometimes seemed unfair (to me at least). I suggest a) you keep the current system and the current ratings instead of flushing all the rate data, or b) let people give a single rating, namely how much they liked the run.
2. A more streamlined system for co-authorship and movie credit in general. Perhaps a system that allows users to be rewarded with player points for being involved in a movie, without having to be made co-authors? Examples: Someone who provides a helpful Lua script, or someone who helped route the game but didn't provide any actual input in the TAS.
I have always been fine with the way it has been. I don't think we need an extra submission data entry "people that helped". Just put that info in a Thanks section in the submission text. Also, it seems very unreliable/inconsistent to measure how much someone helped and give points according to that. But then again, you could introduce a different point system next to the player points, called "assist points". I think I could see myself liking that, but I can't tell.
4. I suppose it's high time we really discuss what we want to do with the tiering system. Do we really want to keep tiers in a literal sense, where Vault is under Moons and Moons is under Stars, or should we discard that in favor of a more categorized system, such as Speed and Entertainment? Should we loosen the rules on what goes into Vault, allowing more diversity in there, or should we loosen the rules on what we can and can't accept as new branches in Moons? There's a lot to discuss here, though I would personally like to move away from Vault and "tiers" in some way, shape or form.
I find the tier system confusing and just ignored it pretty much throughout the years. If I were a regular site visitor, I'd probably come to the site looking for runs of games I played, without caring what tier. That's actually something I've done way back in 2006 before I registered on the forum. I won't care what tier the runs would be in. All they seem to tell is how well received a run was before publication anyway which doesn't really tell anything about how good the run actually is.
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I would like to contribute in the CSS/design changes. Maybe I will even try to make some samples images of what I'd like the site to look like.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
MUGG wrote:
Ratings are subjective. Everyone has their own rules how they rate things and technical ratings sometimes seemed unfair (to me at least). I suggest a) you keep the current system and the current ratings instead of flushing all the rate data, or b) let people give a single rating, namely how much they liked the run.
Ratings are subjective, yes, but even if everyone has different opinions, when everything averages out the result is a clear indication of what the movie's rating should be. The more people rating a movie, the more clear the rating is going to suggest the movie's quality. 3 people giving an average rating of 5 could mean anything: It could be 3 votes of 5, 4-5-6, 3-5-7, 2-5-8, 1-5-9, 0-5-10 even, or some other weird mix of three numbers that average out to 5. 25 people giving an average rating of 5, on the other hand, means that the ratings in general are going to be more biased toward 5.
We need the rating system simplified in order to make ratings make more sense. Tech Quality in particular makes no sense, everyone rates it drastically differently and only a handful of people can really, truly determine a movie's technical quality. In my eyes, Tech is a horrible rating to have, since a movie is guaranteed to have high tech quality just on the virtue of it being accepted. Most people just rate it the same as they rate entertainment, because I guess they're unaware of the implication that the game being terrible must mean the quality of the TAS is terrible as well.
I'm not suggesting anything that would wipe away all the ratings of every movie on the site, I'm sure we could keep 12-13 years of ratings around for the redesign, but my intent is just to make them more visible and useful. We've had threads asking us to make rating movies easier, and that's what I want to happen at bare minimum, but overhauling the system in general and giving new factors to rate may also be beneficial in giving more weight to a movie's rating.
2. A more streamlined system for co-authorship and movie credit in general. Perhaps a system that allows users to be rewarded with player points for being involved in a movie, without having to be made co-authors? Examples: Someone who provides a helpful Lua script, or someone who helped route the game but didn't provide any actual input in the TAS.
I have always been fine with the way it has been. I don't think we need an extra submission data entry "people that helped". Just put that info in a Thanks section in the submission text. Also, it seems very unreliable/inconsistent to measure how much someone helped and give points according to that. But then again, you could introduce a different point system next to the player points, called "assist points". I think I could see myself liking that, but I can't tell.
I wouldn't mind a separate point system for my idea. I feel like credit in general is a huge gray area, almost every time I've submitted a movie over the past year I've felt like I had to give some sort of credit to a user who, overall, had little to do with the actual TAS itself. The Umihara Kawase submissions are a perfect example of this, where I had no actual collaboration or contact with the Nico TASer whose routes were used and optimized and thus did not include them as a co-author, but without them the TAS wouldn't be nearly as optimized as it is.
The thing is, we already have published TASes where co-authors have no actual input in the file and only a minimal amount of contribution in general. We have published TASes where several co-authors were credited for minor timesaves without having any actual input in the file. We have published TASes where there are co-authors who did nothing but re-sync other peoples' improvements into current files, with those people not even being credited. We have published TASes where there are co-authors who literally did nothing for the movie. I'm not saying any of these are bad, I'm saying that this kind of stuff already means that player points are "diluted".
This is why I think my idea has some solid ground. Credit is dangerous territory. Some people will refuse credit for actual TASing work they've done, some people will expect credit for doing little to no work in general. Some people will argue that other people should get credit, to the point where they want credit forced upon those people. Some people should be getting credit for the things they provide to the site, even if they're not TASes.
So maybe we should go with something like "Assist Points"... or "Credit Points", since I've been using the word "credit" three times per sentence anyway. Offer these new points for doing things that may not have anything to do with actual TASing, but are still useful to the site. Make a yearly award out of it, even. "Contributor of the Year" or "User of the Year" has always been an award I'd like to see, just for the people that don't TAS but are extremely kind and helpful toward the community. This could be a great way to initiate that award and get people to start offering more contributions.
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.
Hey, I don't exactly have any additional ideas outside making editing both pages and addresses more user-friendly and streamlined (ajax or whatever it's called for address adding/removing, for example). But if this is done, please whatever you do, do not "bloat" the site with tons of UI elements. I don't think it matters to most people, but for others that have a slow network, it kinda makes the site sluggish.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Samsara wrote:
So maybe we should go with something like "Assist Points"... or "Credit Points", since I've been using the word "credit" three times per sentence anyway. Offer these new points for doing things that may not have anything to do with actual TASing, but are still useful to the site. Make a yearly award out of it, even. "Contributor of the Year" or "User of the Year" has always been an award I'd like to see, just for the people that don't TAS but are extremely kind and helpful toward the community. This could be a great way to initiate that award and get people to start offering more contributions.
feos wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
Maybe quantify their productivity in some other way. For example, it may be possible to keep track of statistics for game resource/article edit counts, uploads of scripts or other relevant files, etc. But I think player points should be for the actual TASers only. Otherwise the term gets diluted too much.
I think being a part of the run with your research is a good thing, having some separate currency that would be additional to player points is also interesting, but I'd just replace it with a single rank (Researcher) without assigning researcher points, because such points would 1) compete with player points in prestige, lose that battle and end up being meaningless (you can't evaluate quality of help by mere quantity), 2) be faceless, due to not being tied to games that bring those points, unlike if researcher is added to a team.
I'm not sure what Samsara means though, being a part of the team or just getting those points by site database juggling?
I think the best solution would be just adding a guy to the team. Little input contribution is no problem when being added, hence significant research contribution shouldn't be either.
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.
I'm so glad this is being looked at. Do you have plans to start implementing this? Does this mean we're going to be changing the language of the site to a code that people on the site actually have expertise in, or is this just pushing out ideas? Either way, long overdue.
In response to your ideas
Samsara wrote:
1. More emphasis on publication ratings, for sure. Make it easier to rate movies, give people more of an incentive to rate, perhaps change what gets rated if we can find some things that work better than Entertainment/Tech Quality.
In an ideal world, we would get enough ratings on every movie that we could get a good average rating. Sadly, I think no matter how much you promote it, there will be movies that have next to no ratings just because they don't cover games that are well known enough.
Maybe, instead, we can get a committee of say 20 to 50 people who show good rating habits and assign 5 people to each game that get published to watch and give a rating to. Maybe even writing out a quick review explaining. That way you'll know each movie will have at least five good ratings to help the average
Samsara wrote:
2. A more streamlined system for co-authorship and movie credit in general. Perhaps a system that allows users to be rewarded with player points for being involved in a movie, without having to be made co-authors? Examples: Someone who provides a helpful Lua script, or someone who helped route the game but didn't provide any actual input in the TAS.
I'm all for incentivising any kind of help to the site whatsoever, if not player points, then maybe coder points, or something. It's a nice way of saying "we recognize your work" and at the end of the day, how much prestige do player points give anyway?
Samsara wrote:
3. Submission voting changes. An idea I came up with very recently involves changing the question back to "Should this be published?" and giving a Yes/No answer, but upon selecting Yes or No you get different sub-options that provide a reason for your vote, something like a dropdown menu. This seems like a more efficient way of gathering better feedback on movies without requiring everyone to post their thoughts in the thread... But it's still probably a terrible idea in some way.
I think the focus here should not be on the voting per se, but getting people to respond in the thread of the submission queue. Sadly, I don't have any good suggestions for that.
Samsara wrote:
4. I suppose it's high time we really discuss what we want to do with the tiering system. Do we really want to keep tiers in a literal sense, where Vault is under Moons and Moons is under Stars, or should we discard that in favor of a more categorized system, such as Speed and Entertainment? Should we loosen the rules on what goes into Vault, allowing more diversity in there, or should we loosen the rules on what we can and can't accept as new branches in Moons? There's a lot to discuss here, though I would personally like to move away from Vault and "tiers" in some way, shape or form.
I've said my opinion before and it hasn't changed since last time. Drop tiers, keep stars because a curated list of the best runs is actually useful. Make it more category based. Encourage categories outside of fastest completion. Organize site by game.
As for a suggestion I have, author's notes and commentary should be more visible and encouraged. Notes should be on the movie page, not hidden in the submission text, and a bigger deal should be made of commentary.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
arkiandruski wrote:
As for a suggestion I have, author's notes and commentary should be more visible and encouraged. Notes should be on the movie page, not hidden in the submission text, and a bigger deal should be made of commentary.
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.
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.
As for a suggestion I have, author's notes and commentary should be more visible and encouraged. Notes should be on the movie page, not hidden in the submission text, and a bigger deal should be made of commentary.
I think the user roles as seen here are a mess to look at and I would welcome an overhaul to how user roles are handled, to get rid of the gazillion different combinations of roles like "Judge / ... / Experienced player". What does the ... stand for anyway?
Legit question: Would it help if the site code was open sourced (not user data though) and allow anyone to try and help? Or is that already a thing and I'm just under a rock?
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: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4089
Location: The Netherlands
I had no idea that page even existed, seems it was grown out of a discussion between ais523 and dwangoAC about the Pokémon Plays Twitch submission. Then I wrote a little thing about it and completely forgot it ever existed since.
Anyway, the division listed there is simple - every run that aims to be a speed record (so basically everything that isn't a playaround, including exotic categories like Reverse Boss Order and the like) goes in class A, the playarounds and glitchfests like Mortal Kombat and MvC go in class B, and the technical showcases (ACE, PTT) go in C.
The main idea is to do away with the tier convention entirely, or at least consider this a separate/unrelated factor. These are not tiers and should absolutely not be treated like tiers.
That said, I never actually worked out the idea, or remembered its existence for more than a day, so I am currently not endorsing it.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
When I talked to adelikat earlier, he said the site was written in a language that no one who works here is an expert in, and redesigning the site is less of a fun project than making kick ass emulators, so volunteers have been scarce.
I posted a site redesign suggestion to the recent NTSC vs. PAL thread, and that suggestion would fit much more perfectly here. (Although it's also quite relevant there because it's a solution to the problem of perceived clutter if we start to accept copious amounts of TASing categories for each game.)
Someone mentioned earlier that they don't like the speedrun.com site redesign. I don't know if they were talking about its current design, but I think it's currently really good, and would fit tasvideos.org perfectly.
If you go to http://www.speedrun.com/ and write the name of a game in the search bar on the top, such as "super mario", you get suggestions starting with "Super Mario" as a series, and then individual games in that series. If you select "more..." from the list, you get a page listing all the games in the series (for which there are speedruns): http://www.speedrun.com/games#Name=super_mario
If you select one of the games (either from the search box suggestions or that page), such as "super mario bros", you get a nice page dedicated to that particular game: http://www.speedrun.com/smb1
It has the game's cover art, and some basic info (such as publication date), and links to resources (such as guides, forum, statistics...). On the right hand side different speedrunning categories are arranged neatly into tabs.
This allows for large amounts of categories. For example Ocarina of Time has a whopping 13 categories: http://www.speedrun.com/oot
If tasvideos.org used a similar design, then there could be two possibilities: One possibility would be to not use tabs, and instead list all the TASes for that game as a list (in a reasonable order, starting with "any%", followed by "100%" if it has one, and so on). The other possibility would be to use tabs for each category, and show the entire publication history of that category in its tab.
This kind of design would easily allow us to get rid of the principle of keeping the number of categories for a single game minimal (which I think is rather unnecessary).
If tasvideos.org used a similar design, then there could be two possibilities: One possibility would be to not use tabs, and instead list all the TASes for that game as a list (in a reasonable order, starting with "any%", followed by "100%" if it has one, and so on). The other possibility would be to use tabs for each category, and show the entire publication history of that category in its tab.
This kind of design would easily allow us to get rid of the principle of keeping the number of categories for a single game minimal (which I think is rather unnecessary).
Something to note down however, is that for new categories, it's relatively easier to make a new real time speedrun compared to a new high quality TAS. It might sound obvious, but if you let any arbitrary category be accepted, chances are, the popular games get the most up to date runs while lesser known games get a highly optimized any% with the other branches slowly going more dated (especially for games which you cannot easily splice in improvements).
