But it's a Moons era, and Moons were allowed to have esoteric branches from day 1, as long as they are entertaining.
Perhaps we should start moving away from this? After all, how much could the list of requirements be shortened and still be accepted under the same branch category? Who decides this? Wouldn't it be unfair to the author of the first run that someone else could just remove some requirement from the list and make a "better" run that way? When runners can freely decide what the branch category is supposed to mean, it makes no sense, as anybody can obsolete anybody else's run by coming up with a different list of requirements.
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Edit by moderator: This thread has been split from Branch for Saturn's Chrono Trigger.
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Warp wrote:
feos wrote:
But it's a Moons era, and Moons were allowed to have esoteric branches from day 1, as long as they are entertaining.
Perhaps we should start moving away from this? After all, how much could the list of requirements be shortened and still be accepted under the same branch category? Who decides this? Wouldn't it be unfair to the author of the first run that someone else could just remove some requirement from the list and make a "better" run that way? When runners can freely decide what the branch category is supposed to mean, it makes no sense, as anybody can obsolete anybody else's run by coming up with a different list of requirements.
If it's
1) more entertaining (check out how low entertainment rating the run we're talking about has),
2) similar enough, and
3) there's an agreement among viewers and judges,
it'd obsolete if by the Moons rules, regardless of internal rules of the run. We never allowed endless amount of esoteric branches, and if we need, we obsolete different branches by one another.
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.
If it's
1) more entertaining (check out how low entertainment rating the run we're talking about has),
2) similar enough, and
3) there's an agreement among viewers and judges,
it'd obsolete if by the Moons rules, regardless of internal rules of the run. We never allowed endless amount of esoteric branches, and if we need, we obsolete different branches by one another.
Well, my "perhaps we should start moving away from this" suggestion stands.
Rather than have one singular runner decide at a whim what the particular list of requirements is, and then have another runner decide on a different list at his own whim and have it obsolete the previous one, pretty much arbitrarily, perhaps it would be a better idea that if we create a non-conventional branch for a game, its rules ought to be decided by majority consensus (of runners acquainted with that particular game), and agreed to not be changed unless there is a very good reason for it (and most definitely not at a complete whim of one single person).
That's pretty much how it works in regular speedrunning, and I don't see why it shouldn't work here as well.
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Warp wrote:
Well, my "perhaps we should start moving away from this" suggestion stands.
Rather than have one singular runner decide at a whim what the particular list of requirements is, and then have another runner decide on a different list at his own whim and have it obsolete the previous one, pretty much arbitrarily, perhaps it would be a better idea that if we create a non-conventional branch for a game, its rules ought to be decided by majority consensus (of runners acquainted with that particular game), and agreed to not be changed unless there is a very good reason for it (and most definitely not at a complete whim of one single person).
That's pretty much how it works in regular speedrunning, and I don't see why it shouldn't work here as well.
Keep in mind that we're talking about cases when it's not even possible to be objective with things like full completion. Whenever something subjective, even if it is an opinion of the (currently active) majority, it doesn't make sense to enforce such opinions blindly. It's not a democracy, it's art, it involves being creative, overcoming expectations and surprising the viewers. We want innovative thinking!
Otherwise, you're underestimating effort players and judges invest into making sure the given goals are sound.
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.
Keep in mind that we're talking about cases when it's not even possible to be objective with things like full completion. Whenever something subjective, even if it is an opinion of the (currently active) majority, it doesn't make sense to enforce such opinions blindly. It's not a democracy, it's art, it involves being creative, overcoming expectations and surprising the viewers. We want innovative thinking!
As said, it works for regular speedrunning. Why wouldn't it work here?
Otherwise, you're underestimating effort players and judges invest into making sure the given goals are sound.
It's not a question of whether the goals are sound and logical. It's a question of consistency and fairness. I don't think it feels fair for a runner to do a lot of work on a run, just to have it become obsoleted by another run that's shorter or "better" because of choosing a different set of rules.
If the rules for a branch are agreed and fixed, it becomes fair for everybody, and ostensibly leads to healthy competition where everybody is on an equal playground.
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Warp wrote:
feos wrote:
Keep in mind that we're talking about cases when it's not even possible to be objective with things like full completion. Whenever something subjective, even if it is an opinion of the (currently active) majority, it doesn't make sense to enforce such opinions blindly. It's not a democracy, it's art, it involves being creative, overcoming expectations and surprising the viewers. We want innovative thinking!
As said, it works for regular speedrunning. Why wouldn't it work here?
Because
feos wrote:
It's not a democracy, it's art, it involves being creative, overcoming expectations and surprising the viewers. We want innovative thinking!
Warp wrote:
It's not a question of whether the goals are sound and logical. It's a question of consistency and fairness.
We are consistent and fair about only publishing the most entertaining side goal branches.
Warp wrote:
I don't think it feels fair for a runner to do a lot of work on a run, just to have it become obsoleted by another run that's shorter or "better" because of choosing a different set of rules.
If it is better because it is more entertaining, it feels fair for a runner.
Warp wrote:
If the rules for a branch are agreed and fixed, it becomes fair for everybody, and ostensibly leads to healthy competition where everybody is on an equal playground.
Are talking about the same completely arbitrary set of rules? Because when I say "arbitrary set of rules", it means it makes no sense to enforce them. When you say "arbitrary set of rules", you want us to enforce them. But you do not like it when we enforce entertainment requirements. Are you seriously expecting the site to stop asking for entertainment in Moons?
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.
As said, it works for regular speedrunning. Why wouldn't it work here?
Because
feos wrote:
It's not a democracy, it's art, it involves being creative, overcoming expectations and surprising the viewers. We want innovative thinking!
That doesn't answer my question. You are stating why it's done like this. You aren't answering why it wouldn't work.
Warp wrote:
It's not a question of whether the goals are sound and logical. It's a question of consistency and fairness.
We are consistent and fair about only publishing the most entertaining side goal branches.
That answer makes no sense. You are pretty much saying "we are consistently inconsistent", which may work as a joke, not as a serious answer.
I think you understand what I mean when I say that the current system doesn't feel fair for a runner, but you deliberately want to avoid answering that.
Are talking about the same completely arbitrary set of rules? Because when I say "arbitrary set of rules", it means it makes no sense to enforce them. When you say "arbitrary set of rules", you want us to enforce them. But you do not like it when we enforce entertainment requirements. Are you seriously expecting the site to stop asking for entertainment in Moons?
You aren't making any sense anymore. That paragraph is completely nonsensical, and has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
It's quite clear that you don't want to have a conversation with me about this. Does anybody else do?
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It's quite strange how you completely ignore the fact that we only publish unvaultable goals if the result is entertaining enough.
If we stop preferring more entertaining runs for such goals, and instead enforce arbitrary opinion of arbitrary "majority", how will it become more fair to any runner?
The line about creativity perfectly answers your questions. If someone comes up with creative ideas that don't fit into this arbitrary rule set that you want us to start enforcing, we are being unfair to them, because by your suggestion we will need to reject their highly impressive and entertaining movie simply because it doesn't fit into arbitrarily picked rules. And you want it to happen in a tier where entertainment is the fundamental goal.
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.
Maybe I'm being overly cynical here, but actually what it sounds to me like is laziness. It's much easier to just allow runners to create whatever they want, and see what kind of reception it gets, and publish it like that, and possibly have it obsolete a previous run in the same (pretty ill-defined) "branch", pretty much disregarding the efforts put into the previous run (especially if the new run uses a different set of requirements), than it would be to go through the process of defining what the branch category actually means, and come up with an unambiguous ruleset that could be used to determine if the run belongs to that branch or not.
Does it even make sense to define "branches", if their definitions are completely malleable and up to the whims of whoever wants to make run for that "branch"? If the public reception is warm enough, then out the window the previous exact definition of the branch goes.
Also, this brings up another question, related very closely to that: How exactly do you determine if a run belongs to a particular branch or not? Suppose that it's deemed "entertaining enough for Moons", but uses a rather different set of goals than the previous run. How many differences are too many, for it to be considered belonging to that particular branch category? Who makes this decision, and based on what? A judge, based on personal feelings?
This kind of goes to another point as well: If the list of requirements used by the runner is actually "too different" to be considered belonging to that branch, then what? Is a new branch created, or what? Is it rejected (even if it's deemed entertaining by the public)? If a new branch is created for it, doesn't this go against the principle of keeping the number of different branches reasonable?
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You haven't been around since we added the tier system, have you?
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 think I have to side with Warp on this subject and say that his possibly cynical view is accurate. I am afraid the situation has deteriorated to a point where the site does not really serve as a way to keep records. Especially in RPGs, where there are many possible goals and many different routes and glitches you can choose to ban or not, I gradually stopped seeing the published movies as the fastest way to do things, but just that someone, at some point, decided to submit a TAS that was made the way he thought best, and somehow during the submission the staff convinced itself it was the proper way so that they wouldn't run out of movies to publish.
In any case, I have been around for a long time and I never really understood what is actually meant by "entertainment". Judging by the movies recommended to newcomers, it seems to me it means clickbait superplays like the soccer and Family Feud TASes (and possibly the Brain Age and fighting game playarounds that had stars a few years ago), which have nothing to do with speedrunning at all and just exploit visually appealing bugs, and also runs of popular Nintendo franchises. This is in fact a general trend. The "entertainment" value of a run seems to correlate with the game's popularity, perhaps the notable exceptions are some platformers or action/adventure games that take less than 20 minutes to finish and are not so boring for people who never played them.
About the branch rules, the site has been very inconsistent about what obsoletes what, resulting in arbitrary definitions that are not followed by the communities that speedrun the specific game. And I am not really counting all the mess with the rules about emulators and U vs J versions. For example, in my 2011 catch'em all Blue run it was mandatory to use SGB, even if it was slower. This delayed the publication of the run for many days because people could not agree whether they would apply aspect-correction to the encode or not. Then, later they declared SGB to be inaccurate and started pushing BizHawk, that only did normal GB, making it possible to obsolete the run by simply doing the same thing it already did, but on the newer emulator.
Then, they introduced tiers, unobsoleted a 2007 run, then changed their mind and obsoleted it again. All of this would only make sense if you were trying to enforce the rules, until an N64 guy submits a run breaking the U vs J rule, after openly admitting it was just because he does not like the site, and people chicken out and accept it. Later, they just continue to use a banned emulator and they are granted an exception.
I think it's time to accept that nobody in the speedrunning communities takes the site criteria seriously because they are too chaotic, and start negotiating with them on what's acceptable for each game. This will give runners more safety when working on TASes because it will define clearly what the site actually wants.
I have a couple of questions about your post, it might help clarify your position, as I don't understand it super well right now.
1)
You seem to have two contradictory goals in mind:
1a) TASVideos should have an objective, unbiased set of rules that are strictly adhered to with no movie-specific exceptions. In paragraph 1 you consider this to be a bad thing: "Especially in RPGs, where there are many possible goals and many different routes and glitches you can choose to ban or not, I gradually stopped seeing the published movies as the fastest way to do things, but just that someone, at some point, decided to submit a TAS that was made the way he thought best, and somehow during the submission the staff convinced itself it was the proper way so that they wouldn't run out of movies to publish. "
1b) TASVideos should develop movie-specific rules (or exceptions to general rules) to make it easier to keep records. In paragraph 5 you consider this a good thing: "I think it's time to accept that nobody in the speedrunning communities takes the site criteria seriously because they are too chaotic, and start negotiating with them on what's acceptable for each game. This will give runners more safety when working on TASes because it will define clearly what the site actually wants."
Which goal do you want more?
2)
I guess this one isn't a question, it's just an observation.
The name TASVideos doesn't stand for Tool-Assisted Speedrun Videos, it stands for Tool-Assisted Superplay Videos, and it always has (AFAIK). Therefore non-speedrun content (like playarounds, score attacks and ACE demonstrations) are permitted on the site.
As for what entertainment means, obviously you can't define entertainment objectively, because every person, culture and audience has different ideas of what is entertaining. Because one of TASVideos' goals is to showcase interesting content, this means inevitably entertainment is going to be self-referentially defined as 'whatever TASVideo goers and likely potential TASVideo goers are likely to be entertained by'. This is why, for example, audience feedback and the ratings system are used as factors when judges talk about how entertaining a TAS is. This is probably the most relevant definition you could come up with, so I think it's OK for it to work this way, despite not being rigorous.
One more note - the requirement to be 'entertaining' only has to be met if your TAS isn't eligible for Vault, and for most pure speed related records (where you're just making an any% or 100% TAS of a non-trivial game), you'll have no trouble getting accepted to Vault regardless of how boring it is. Maybe it's not always clear in borderline cases whether a TAS goes into Vault or Moons, but overall the inclusion of the Vault category makes the site strictly more inclusive about accepting TASes. I remember back in the day before tiers, TASes that aimed for pure speed would be rejected for not being entertaining enough, which doesn't happen anymore.
3)
Re: the SGB thing. I mean, this is an example specifically from 2011. Is there anything this bad happening nowadays? The thesis of your post is that the situation is 'deteriorating', but this is specifically a situation that has gotten better, so I'm not sure how it strengthens your view to include.
Also: 'making it possible to obsolete the run by simply doing the same thing it already did, but on the newer emulator.' -> Is this something you consider to be bad? It's not like the obsoleted TAS goes anywhere, it is still accessible on the site and its video will still be on the TASVideos youtube channel, and it's not exactly something you'll get bragging rights for.
4)
Do you know of any pure speed TASes that reasonably should have been accepted, within the past few years, that weren't? It would strengthen your thesis of 'the situation has deteriorated to a point where the site does not really serve as a way to keep records' if you can point to some records that aren't being kept.
(Alternatively, is there a case where a pure speed TAS would have been worked on/submitted, but wasn't, due to TASVideos rules/the author's problems with them? That could work too.)
Didn't know the history, thanks! (I joined later.) I'll correct the post.
I apologize if I sounded a bit blunt in my response. I oftentimes fail to check how the tone of what I write looks like.
Anyway, in order to actually contribute to this discussion, some thoughts about entertainment vs. limiting rules:
Speedruns (be they unassisted or tool-assisted) are entertaining all by themselves, no matter what the goals may be. If they weren't, nobody would make them, and nobody would watch them. It's not like speedrunning is some kind of boring job that just has to be done by somebody. People play games fast because they like it (most often because of the challenge and the competition), and people watch them because they find them entertaining and exciting.
Some people here seem to think that burdening "entertainment" branches with a strict set of rules would somehow destroy or diminish the entertainment factor. What is this idea based on? Do you really think that people would stop watching speedruns if the (non-any% non-100%) branches were more clearly and unambiguously defined?
An argument could be made (which has been at least implied) that fixing with great precision the rules of a given branch would limit creativity from the runners. My suggestion was not, however, that the site staff would come up with a list of rules and requirements, but that it would be made by the runners themselves, by consensus. (But once it has been decided, it would be set in stone, and changed only if there are very, very good reasons for it.)
I would once again ask: This exact thing works at speedrun.com. Why wouldn't it work here? There, many games have many categories that have technically speaking "arbitrary" rules and limitations, but these have been decided and agreed by the speedrunners themselves. The list of limitations in some categories for some games can be quite extensive (and sometimes not without slight controversies). But nevertheless, it works there, and can result in very popular speedrunning categories (once again Ocarina of Time being the posterboy for this, although it's of course not the only example.)
When the rules are clear and unambiguous, and not up to each individual runner, it helps creating healthy competition. This doesn't have to come at the expense of entertainment. In fact, it can be quite the contrary.
If each runner can decide on his own special exemptions for a particular branch, it kind of erodes the whole idea, and I'm sure it can cause demotivation. Imagine if, for example, in the OoT MST category a speedrunner could decide at his own whim that he will allow himself to use the GIM glitch (which is normally banned in that category), for instance, and actually have a shot at getting his run on the MST list. Imagine the backlash that would cause. Not least from the other speedrunners.
(I'm sorry for gushing over speedrun.com so much, but I can't help but like how they do things.)
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Warp wrote:
Speedruns (be they unassisted or tool-assisted) are entertaining all by themselves, no matter what the goals may be. If they weren't, nobody would make them, and nobody would watch them. It's not like speedrunning is some kind of boring job that just has to be done by somebody. People play games fast because they like it (most often because of the challenge and the competition), and people watch them because they find them entertaining and exciting.
This statement is not objectively true.
Speedruns are not entertaining by themselves, because our voting, ratings, and discussions show that many of them are considered boring by our audience. If Speedruns were entertaining objectively, every Speedrun submission would be well received, but the fact of the matter is, they are not.
Entertainment is also subjective, for three reasons:
1) Different cultures and upbringings put emphasis on different things, and some of them don't even have a concept of entertainment in terms of what most of the site thinks of as entertainment.
2) Some people have various conditions of Autism, which leaves them unable to appreciate certain kinds of things, and cannot even understand nor appreciate what most other humans find interesting.
3) People have different tastes and different exposure to games, changing their perception of what they like in various runs.
For the majority of our users, the goals and what is done in a run absolutely matter, and Speedruns are not found entertaining by themselves. That's objective truth here. Based on your personal preference that you prefer the absolute Speedruns and do not understand the entertainment we talk about, I strongly suspect you fit into category 1 or 2 of what I just described.
Many of our users make the content that they do because they enjoy the process and want to see whatever outcome they produce, want to get it published here for the recognition, or want it to show off to friends or make money on some site. Not everything speed based comes off as entertaining and exciting for our audience.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Hello Patashu,
I don't think the goals you enumerated are contradictory. Most of all, because of what makes a game interesting to run is not some vague notion of "entertainment", but how complex the entire thing is, and then it takes skill to come up with tricks (and in RTAs execute them) so that it makes sense to have some competition. That's why I am not particularly fond of runs that just do crazy stuff to draw attention. It does give publicity to the site, but as a competition oriented way, it's meaningless. Today, when I look at a TAS like Brain Age, for example, I simply think "hey, it's obvious that the algorithm the game uses to detect the drawings has flaws. why is it special that someone is using emulators to draw things to get around it?"
Ultimately, an unambiguous set of rules that makes it possible to judge movies, and the definition of branches that are substantially different and have a minimal complexity is up to the community that runs the game, I don't see contradiction. Many people who vote on the runs have never made a TAS, and even some judges only worked at a subgenre and some experiences may not carry out to others.
The way I see things working on the site is that there is a small subset of games that people want published no matter what, and people who run them get away unofficially by bullying until the rules get changed or interpreted on a different way, while in other cases the rules get enforced arbitrarily and there's no appeal.
As Warp said, it's lazy to think we'll just sit here and people will continue feeding us "entertaining" runs. In the past the site used to provide services not found elsewhere, like allowing to discuss routes, and doing all the publication work, putting things on youtube to advertise the run. Now, if anyone wants to make a TAS public, each game has a discord server and they can stream it on Twitch and save the video. What's left for the site to do is basically a quality stamp, which is very nice, as it shows that the run was properly assessed before being made public. However, if this publication process does not accurately reflect quality, why bother with it?
Competition is not the center of TASing, nor should it ever be tbh. As somebody relatively new to the site who got into it through the RTA community, I still get plenty of enjoyment out of playarounds and the like. Creative thinking is what draws me to the hobby above all else.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Thanks for your reply, p4wn3r.
1)
Sure, TASes like Brain Age are not particularly deep, because they basically repeat the same glitch over and over . But TASes that aren't deep but are flashy can be an onramp for TASing interest. Look at how popular the earlier TASBot blocks have been, even though they featured a lot of ACE/playaround TASes, where you do one glitch and then do whatever you want after that. Personally, the International Superstar Soccer Deluxe TAS, despite not solving some convoluted optimization problem related to score or speed, has been one that I've watched and laughed super hard at several times since I found it, have shown it to other people for similar reactions, and has an incredibly high view count on nicovideo (in the millions IIRC - on youtube it's not bad either, 232k). Once you're more familiar with TASing and your tastes have matured, you might not appreciate it as much as something finely optimized and incredibly detailed, like say Dawn of Sorrow "all souls" or YI 100% (the two highest rated TASes on the site ATM), but these TASes still serve an important and useful purpose, despite being 'non-competitive'. Not every TAS has to be all things to all people, and indeed it can't be.
2)
To have an unambiguous set of rules that is set in stone, you have to handle corner cases and borderline cases with an iron fist, and the rules would have to never ever change over time. I think this is simply a case of misplaced priorities - it is more useful to TASVideos overall to accept a TAS if it is incredibly good, but bends/breaks some of the rules. This shouldn't be seen as a sign of being weak - it is simply the compromises we have to do in an imperfect world, where things aren't always nice and neat. Plus, this kind of rule bending is permissive - rules are always bent in favour of publishing a TAS, not rejecting it. What does that leave to complain about, unfair treatment? Well, maybe if you TAS Ocarina of Time 100% and it takes 5 years to complete, you too can get dinner and back massage of your choice :)
Anyway, so you want TASVideos to reach out to the speedrunning community for each game (so I guess www.speedrun.com?) and ask them what the definition of each branch for that game should be? Which side is the pro-active one here (what event triggers the branch definition discussion between TASVideos staff and speedrunners)? RTA speedruns ban many things that TASes allow like L+D/U+R, do we now need to strike all TASes that use these from TASVideos? What about cases where the TAS and RTA rules for a category explicitly do not overlap, like SMW any% no ACE, which allows cloud in RTA but not in TAS (because TASers consider it to be as powerful as ACE)? Do we strike that TAS from TASVideos because it's not a SMW speedrunner approved category? I just want to get a better idea for how you would expect this to work and why.
(I personally think that the correct response to 'this TAS branch is slightly different from the RTA branch it's most closely related to, and I don't like that' is to create and submit the TAS that does the branch the way you want it to be and better optimized. Obsoletions of slightly different criteria can and do happen. It's not an un-competitive act, because all the similar aspects of gameplay can be compared to verify that the level of optimization and game knowledge is the same or better everywhere.)
3)
Just out of curiosity, I checked and there were 143 moons TASes published in 2016, vs 47 so far in 2018. We would expect about 42 so far if we were on 2016 pace, so we are a little ahead of 2016 pace. So if there is an impending 'TASpocalypse' where TASvideos slides into obscurity, the numbers do not bear out for it yet.
If you personally don't feel TASVideos is right for your TAS, you aren't obliged to submit it. (That's why you can't submit someone else's TAS on their behalf, for example). And in fact there are a ton of Japanese TASers who put stuff on nicovideo and never submit it to TASVideos, so TASVideos can't ever really be a collection of all TASes worth recording. But things seem to be going fine overall, and TASVideos' collection continues to grow year after year, with improvements and new games alike.
I'm not even sure if I have any point here, I might just be rambling now.
(4: I also agree that TASing is not necessarily a competitive endeavour. Of course speedrunning has many co-operative elements like glitchhunting and routing, but TASing even more so, as the input itself can be worked on by many people, rather than it being a contest of personal skill. We also give co-authorship when multiple people contributed to a TAS, which is great.)
@Patashu
(1) You have some good points. Sure, maybe it's because I'm getting older, but even then, I don't like the idea of surrendering control of the politics surrounding TAS movies to people who watch them for the first time. From my experience, most people who do any activities just for the flashy things end up leaving after a few months anyway. I am not really impressed that these TASes get lots of vies on Youtube (incidentally, I once asked on IRC whether views were a metric for "entertainment" and they denied, so I think not even this metric is good for the site administration). The answer for this is simple: they were designed to elicit this response from the audience. When you go for speed, you do not have the freedom to do that. No surprise that they end up more boring. Besides, what did these 232k people who watched it contributed to the community anyway? At least if they were paying we would have financial incentives to cater to them, but not even that.
(2)
Patashu wrote:
To have an unambiguous set of rules that is set in stone, you have to handle corner cases and borderline cases with an iron fist, and the rules would have to never ever change over time
That's totally untrue. Rules for many things change a lot of the time. Look at soccer, for example. The offside rule was implemented because lots of games were just "get a guy very close to the goal post, make a long pass to him, and have him score". It was a rule change that made the game more competitive and was applied authoritatively, without things like "oh, this was such a beautiful goal, why have it invalidated because the guy was offside?".
Patashu wrote:
Well, maybe if you TAS Ocarina of Time 100% and it takes 5 years to complete, you too can get dinner and back massage of your choice :)
I think you don't have the experience of evaluating someone. This excuse is used every time. Every time a student/competitor says that he/she had worked extremely hard and it was annoying to see the effort rated badly. The thing is: it does not work that way, it really doesn't matter how much work you put on something. All it matters is if what you're doing conforms to the expectations the evaluator has set.
Patashu wrote:
RTA speedruns ban many things that TASes allow like L+D/U+R, do we now need to strike all TASes that use these from TASVideos?
That is a very complicated issue, and I think the specifics will be extremely difficult to work out. It is important, though, that the final decision is authoritative, enforceable and representative of all the communities involved. Once you start rejecting wrong things that people do for the right reasons, they start obeying, believe me.
(3) The number of published movies is a very bad metric for overall relevance, mainly because of the Cobra effect. I know several people who have published hundreds of papers and their contribution to science is very close to zero. Something similar seems to be happening here. Some years ago the requirement to get something published were much more stringent, RPGs sometimes got axed just for being too long. If the videos keep growing, it can be simply because you are constantly bending the rules to make them pass.
(4) Fair enough. It is fine to neglect the competitive aspect, especially if one is limited to watching stuff and just saying "I like it" or "I don't like it". Even then, it takes a lot of work to do the TASes, and people who do it will inevitably demand something in return. The recognition that you have, at some point, been the best, is a very low price to pay for the movies.
I would once again ask: This exact thing works at speedrun.com. Why wouldn't it work here? There, many games have many categories that have technically speaking "arbitrary" rules and limitations, but these have been decided and agreed by the speedrunners themselves. The list of limitations in some categories for some games can be quite extensive (and sometimes not without slight controversies). But nevertheless, it works there, and can result in very popular speedrunning categories (once again Ocarina of Time being the posterboy for this, although it's of course not the only example.)
I think TAS in general is too small for that.
If you want stringent category consistency and community governence, maybe looking at the issue the other way around would be better. Why can't Speedrun.com just have a 'Tool Assisted' branch for each category they offer? They already have the infrastructure for it, at least.
1)
Sure, TASes like Brain Age are not particularly deep, because they basically repeat the same glitch over and over . But TASes that aren't deep but are flashy can be an onramp for TASing interest. Look at how popular the earlier TASBot blocks have been, even though they featured a lot of ACE/playaround TASes, where you do one glitch and then do whatever you want after that. Personally, the International Superstar Soccer Deluxe TAS, despite not solving some convoluted optimization problem related to score or speed, has been one that I've watched and laughed super hard at several times since I found it, have shown it to other people for similar reactions, and has an incredibly high view count on nicovideo (in the millions IIRC - on youtube it's not bad either, 232k). Once you're more familiar with TASing and your tastes have matured, you might not appreciate it as much as something finely optimized and incredibly detailed, like say Dawn of Sorrow "all souls" or YI 100% (the two highest rated TASes on the site ATM), but these TASes still serve an important and useful purpose, despite being 'non-competitive'. Not every TAS has to be all things to all people, and indeed it can't be.
I used to think myself that these TASes weren't all that deep but I later came to an understanding that they are far more deep than they appear on the surface. From my personal experience, having your TAS remain entertaining when there are no opportunities for speed like waiting periods and autoscrollers is in fact quite difficult.
I think this idea that as we become more familiar with TASing that playarounds and the like are somehow less appealing and less deep is entirely backwards. In fact, what I believe actually happens is that we grow more accustomed to speedruns, we close our minds off to the appeal and the depth of playarounds.
I believe that there is a great amount of strategy and efficiency to be had in playaround TASes as well. Let's take Brain Age for example. On the surface, it appears to just be abusing the same glitch over and over to get the game to accept nonstandard answers. But is that really all it's doing? No. If that was the case, the TAS would just input squiggles and it would be the same effect. Instead it uses the opportunity to draw high quality art of Nintendo characters and the like. There can be no room for sloppiness: the lines must be drawn well, and the art must be drawn in an efficient manner. If either one of these things were not true, than the movie would be able to be obsoleted by another that does either of those things better. As it is, the movie would only be obsoleted by another that does something more incredible and entertaining.
Is there no "depth" to making jokes? To telling stories? To making art? Of course there is. However with TASes, some express that there is no depth to any of the above and I find that absurd.
I realize that this is entirely off-topic, but this is a common sentiment I've seen and one I would like to address.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
This ranting has deviated the conversation away from the original topic I wanted to discuss.
I understand why the Moons tier exists (even though I have for long rallied for a change in the status of Vault vs Moons, elevating the former rather than it being considered a garbage dump for all the "boring" runs, but that's another topic). My objection, however, is not to the purpose of the Moons tier, but the rather arbitrary way in which runs obsolete other runs there.
I'm repeating myself here, but I believe it deserves repeating: An author may do a lot of work for a run with a non-standard goal, and may for example define a detailed list of goals and/or limitations for the run, in order to increase its entertainment value.
This run might be officially published, even though it was one single person who decided on that list. Ok, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, assuming that everybody else is ok with that list, and it's considered reasonable.
But then, another author might take the list, change it somehow, remove some items, and create another run that's "better" (by some subjective measure), perhaps precisely thanks to having modified the list of requirements. And this new run may have a chance of not only be published, but obsoleting that previous run on the same "branch", even though the branch may have not been defined almost at all (at least not with any sort of detailed precision).
I would imagine this could easily lead to demotivation in some cases. Why do so much work on creating a run, only to have someone else obsolete it with another run with different goals and restrictions?
With any% and 100%, the goals and restrictions are usually pretty unambiguous, and if a run gets obsoleted, it really means that the new one is achieving those goals better than the old one. With some of the Moons categories, however, it can be completely arbitrary.
It's still unclear to me why the same approach as used at speedrun.com wouldn't work here. Different categories are pretty well defined, and the restrictions and goals are agreed by the community by consensus.
It's also still unclear to me who decides, and how, if a new submission belongs to a certain branch or not, if its list of goals and restrictions is different from the existing one. (If this was answered, I missed it.)
p4wn3r, since you've used the Ocarina of Time 100% TAS as your third strike against the judging system, let me paraphrase the submission thread that you arbitrarily didn't post in.
Emulator Accuracy was not a factor for that movie, as it does not rely on emulator inaccuracies. Nor was the difference between the abandoned and accepted emulators significant for Ocarina of Time.
Our encoding team was pushing for the abandonment of Mupen64-rr due to sync and avi dumping issues, which to my understanding was the primary reason for the abandonment of Mupen64-rr. As there was a volunteer encoder for this movie who stepped forward before submission, that made it a non-factor towards the decision.
Hello, Pokota. I am pretty sure that if I had posted on the thread, the complaint would be that I was trying to derail the thread of a wonderful run. I did not bother to post there because a former staff member already had (although not in a very civilized way) and the post was grued.
And, to be honest I am not really interested as to why that particular run was allowed to go through. The word banned means that you should not do it. It can be because the runner is very nice and just did not know. It might be because mupen is the worst emulator ever and he tried to abuse it to get a faster time. From the institutional point of view, it doesn't matter. He's violating the rules anyway.
It's also not relevant the reason you decided to ban it. There might be a good reason behind it, or you might just not like the name. Again, it doesn't matter. The important thing is that when you say something is banned, it in fact is.
And all those reasons were addressed in the thread. They were discussed. They were drawn. They were quartered.
The very thing you're hung up on - that the emulator was abandoned and no continuance was requested? I was among the first to raise an objection on those very grounds.
E: And if you're referring to the post by Samsara... how would you have reacted if the post had been directed at you instead of Moth?
