I have a lot of respect for both the Speed Demos Archive and the Metroid2002 communities, but its members need to realize that they are currently in no position to make suggestions for the tool-assisted community.
Let me explain this.
First of all, there's the fact that unassisted speedrun communities have always had members that have acted awful towards users of tool-assisted speedrun communities. This has been established time and again, and there are still occasionally comments on forums that are insulting to TAS community members. Unassisted communities have always made the best of efforts to try and separate the two, as have the tool-assisted run communities. Both for the same reason: to protect the fame of the unassisted runs.
In the old days, this was also done by TAS communities because its leaders were former speedrunners or otherwise very closely related to unassisted speedrun communities (I'm referring to Yonatan Donner, of course).
But these days, this is different. Bisqwit makes every attempt to separate our movies from the rest, going as far as putting stamps on every single movie released on this site, but not necessarily for the reason of protecting unassisted runs. Bisqwit just wants to make sure that people realize how these movies were made rather than pointing a finger at a different community and saying "Look, those guys can do it without save states and slowdowns. Go there if you want to see real skill."
People from the unassisted communities seem to feel like they do not get enough honors for their work. Since, afterall, what if one might see a tool-assisted speedrun and think it's real?
For that reason, the unassisted community seems to want to bizarrely drop all ties to tool-assisted communities and refer to them as "those guys who cheat".
Which brings me to point two: there's no doubt about the fact that tool-assisted speedrunners do not "cheat". Unassisted community members should cease bringing it up. There is no argument for that claim's validity. Cheating only occurs when someone uses tools to assist his speedrun which is to be submitted to SDA to compare with the currently existing records. Cheating does not occur when a tool-assisted speedrun movie is made for this site.
Still the unassisted communities feel that it would be appropriate to mention that tool-assisted runners are "cheaters". This, by the above reasoning, would imply that they are people who submit these movies with the intent of having them be comparable to the unassisted records! Of course, this is far from true.
So why do members from the unassisted community want the tool-assisted runners to label their runs as "cheated runs"? Why add this negative connotation which so many people would disprove of? The answer is that because when someone who does not know anything about speedrunning would watch the movie and exclaim: "Hey, that guy is cheating! That's not cool. I'm going to watch the fair and square run instead." The request for tool-assisted speedrunners to (inaccurately) label their movies as "cheated runs" is nothing but a means of the unassisted runners to, as stated, gain more fame for their work while tool-assisted speedrunners are cast aside and ignored.
As for point three: even though this is all relatively common knowledge, tool-assisted speedrunners have always remained relatively sober. Although when the request was made to rename these runs to "cyborg runs", the only reaction from the tool-assisted community was disbelief and anger, there have still been made efforts to help people discern unassisted speedruns from the tool-assisted ones. As said, all movies on this site have a visible stamp at the beginning that states how it was made using "tools" and that one may read more on the website. On the website itself, there are plenty of references to the "Why and How" page, both at the top of the front page as well as in some movie descriptions.
And yet, the unassisted community keeps coming back for more, with increasingly unwanted requests.
The unassisted community has done a lousy job of giving even the most basic of credit to tool-assisted runners. In an article on
MTV News titled "
Gamers Divided Over Freakish Feats Achieved With Tool-Assisted Speed Runs", Nolan exclaimed:
"My basic thought is 'don't like them, haven't made them, don't watch them,' " This type of cold attitude is seen as unwarranted and unreasonable by members of the tool-assisted community while apparently the leaders of the unassisted speedrun sites seem to disagree. Since they speak like this, one would wonder why they are still asking this community to do them favors; the only party that may benefit from the tool-assisted community exclaiming that their runs are "cheated" are the unassisted runners, since the people viewing the tool-assisted runs would now see a strong message that tells them there is "something wrong" with this movie for which he should reconsider watching it.
And all in all, the only way the unassisted communities appear to be making a distinguishment between the two communities other than attempting to give their name a negative association, are a few lines of text in site documentation that states that "the runs on this site are not made with save states".
Not one single time have I ever seen a document on a larger speedrun site that apologizes for the sometimes offensive and aggressive statements that unassisted speedrunners seem to make. Never have I seen one of the leaders of the unassisted communities speak about how even though the unassisted runners may disagree with what we do, there is not a need to go overboard in mentioning that this is so. I have also never seen any of the pages on both Speed Demos Archive or Metroid2002 give a good, clear and accurate description of tool-assisted speedruns, pointing to the site to let people know that there is also a subset of speedrunning in which things are done a little differently.
All the references to tool-assisted speedrunning are negative. Perhaps arrogant. Perhaps disagreeable. Perhaps unaccurate.
And yet, we are expected to change our ways to suit their needs.
In a nutshell: the tool-assisted community currently sees no room to give in to unassisted communities even more by giving inaccurate labels to its movies, partially because this would cause incorrect statements to be made about our movies by ourselves (which would be contradictory with both our philosophy and all of our written documents), and partially because it feels like it is unjustly required to do all of the work to help people realize that these movies are different from unassisted movies.
The people who are making these requests are to realize what they are asking us to do and think about whether it would be fair to us. This is not fair. It will not be fair until the unassisted community ceases to act as though we are stealing their prominence.
This is what I feel. I'm sure that the majority of this community feels the same way.
Please consider what I've said.
