This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2554: TASVideosGrue's NES Publication Grue in 07:54.12

Voted yes to get rid of top gear.

Meh voted, it is pretty optimized but I found a few spots that could be improved. Most specifically, 'The cave of many cats' and 'The April Fools castle'. I did all in all find the run pretty entertaining however. I'll make an encode soon.

Eh, this isn't so much a thread to vote to obsolete specific publications. It is a thread to vote for this specific method of handling publication obsoletions.

This run should be rejected immediately for using a bad dump. In all seriousness, is there any reason we need a submission/publication/etc. of this nature in order to carry this out? It's a good idea to be able to mark publications as obsolete, but this approach is unnecessarily hackish. I'd adding an option into the code to just unilaterally mark movies obsolete.

Voting no because I can't find the ROM.

This run should be rejected immediately for using a bad dump. In all seriousness, is there any reason we need a submission/publication/etc. of this nature in order to carry this out? It's a good idea to be able to mark publications as obsolete, but this approach is unnecessarily hackish. I'd adding an option into the code to just unilaterally mark movies obsolete.

This method offers a few advantages. #1 it keeps the history chain in tact #2 obsoletion is currently coded as an "obsoleted by" system. It needs to be fed something, so this serves as an easy place holder #3 the publication page would serve as a place to see all movies obsoleted in this manner #4 should a movie be obsoleted this way then later improved, it can easily be changed so that the new movie obsoletes it instead.

Eh, this isn't so much a thread to vote to obsolete specific publications. It is a thread to vote for this specific method of handling publication obsoletions.

Personally, I had this misconception because I thought the debate was not over whether or not unpublication should be implemented. Perhaps we should have separate, clearly labelled polls regarding whether unpublication should be implemented, and if it does become implemented, what methods should be used to handle it.

Rather than obsoleting, maybe there could be an icon or flag, like the star for starred runs, that indicates that it is known the run can be improved but simply hasn't been. Maybe a ripe fruit icon indicating the run is ripe for obsolescence. This, too, would preserve the history. It's just one extra metadata element/field in a database.

Eh, this isn't so much a thread to vote to obsolete specific publications. It is a thread to vote for this specific method of handling publication obsoletions.

Personally, I had this misconception because I thought the debate was not over whether or not unpublication should be implemented. Perhaps we should have separate, clearly labelled polls regarding whether unpublication should be implemented, and if it does become implemented, what methods should be used to handle it.

That was unpublication, which I interpreted as removing the publication from the site. This takes another route, obsoletion.

Maybe a ripe fruit icon indicating the run is ripe for obsolescence.

I disagree. It should be a rotten fruit :P

Personally, I think a much better implementation would be to add a new movie category called "Stale" or "Improvable by a large margin". Yet, the movie would still stay up, because it's better for newcomers if we showcase something we once thought was optimal rather than not having it at all. Imagine if this site just plain didn't have an OoT run. Everyone would be asking where it is. Because even though we now know it's horribly unoptimized due to some new tricks, it still showcases the power of TASing for that particular game, which is important to this site. Besides, do you really think we should go around unpublishing movies like that? People discover new tricks in the forums all the time, some of which are very large. Is that grounds for taking down a published movie? And even if you factor age into the equation, how would you determine how old is too old? I bet we'd eventually take down Solomon's Key for these reasons, just because nobody wants to run it, so it'll never get improved and Famtasia will never die otherwise. Heck, if adelikat and Tompa weren't so crazy, we'd probably have done the same with Bubble Bobble. Old movie, relatively boring, painfully unoptimized... yeah. We'd have found an excuse. Publishing the new Bubble Bobble run felt awesome because of these reasons. I think everyone else who worked on that run can agree that the motivation to finish that huge project just wouldn't have been the same if we could have instead just taken down the old run and said that it "doesn't count anymore"

Heck, if adelikat and Tompa weren't so crazy, we'd probably have done the same with Bubble Bobble. Old movie, relatively boring, painfully unoptimized... yeah. We'd have found an excuse. Publishing the new Bubble Bobble run felt awesome because of these reasons. I think everyone else who worked on that run can agree that the motivation to finish that huge project just wouldn't have been the same if we could have instead just taken down the old run and said that it "doesn't count anymore"

I was going to vote yes until I read your post. Lets undo Top Gear/FZero... but Ocarina of Time could simply be fixed by ungruing the last submission.

Here are my thoughts concerning the use of a TASVideos Grue like this submission suggests:

• Pro: This would effectively be a system of unpublication which allows for some flexibility, if radical policy change should happen again in the future. For instance, if people change their minds about this, the Grue's publication can probably get deleted.
• Con: I don't see this as being particularly different from unpublication, since all the "obsoleted" movies would get lumped together in a giant "Obsoletes:" field in the Grue's publication. In particular, it would be difficult to look through the obsoleted movies.
• Meh: No matter how you cut it, a Grue movie looks out of place. After all, it's not a movie. It feels like a hack, though hacks can be funny.

As an alternative, I would really support the idea of a separate category for "Outdated" submissions (though the category name could use some work), much like what fruitbane and CtrlAltDestroy mentioned. First, people can still readily look through these submissions, if they want inspiration for runs to improve or perhaps want to see which games to avoid. Second, a category change can be reverted if people change their mind about making a movie "outdated". Third, this avoids having an artificial extra movie to do bookkeeping. Given all that, I think my vote is a No, but it might actually be a Meh... I'm not sure. (I haven't actually clicked a vote yet.) I would not protest the Grue if it became a publication, but I think there is a better option.

Maybe "stale" could work as a category. "Known large improvements", "Highly unoptimized", something. We want a category that draws attention to these movies so that people may be more willing to obsolete them, or something easy to find if you want to find it. On that note, I vote the picture be a biscuit.

Extending on from what arkianruski said, maybe we should create a page for these movies and point new/inexperienced TASers to that page. There are probably disadvantages to this idea as well.

Just drop a link to the RBA WIP on the description of GuanoBowl's TAS... Otherwise I'd say take it down. I also like the idea of tagging those movies with "has large improvements".

Voting no. I don't see any compelling reason to clutter the publication pages with grue publications. F-Zero and Top Gear should both be removed. The publications should be deleted and the submission files grued. This should be done because this site hosts complete and finished TASes, these are, in my view, nothing more than published WIP runs. Publishing them was a mistake. Runs that are improvable are one thing, but they are however still valid as finished runs that do show tool-assistance to the requisite extent (otherwise they wouldn't have been published in the first place). These published WIP runs are completely outwith the ambit of the content that we present here. It is as if we have an unassisted run or a Long Play published, they are simply inapplicable to the site. I think that unpublishing movies is a bad habit to get into. The potential ramifications to the site content and the morale of TASers could be rather severe if used over zealously. As to OoT I think, if possible, we should do what should've been done in the first place and that is obsolete it with Bloobiebla's run, but I don't know how the obsoletion procedure works. For the record, I strongly dislike the idea of having a "Highly Unoptimised" tag. To me it just creates a "this is a shit movie" impression, which may well be the case, but I don't think it should be labeled as such. It is both extremely disrespectful to the author and doesn't represent the ways in which improvements can arise. For example, there are movies where the playing could be much more precise, but there is little in the way of large individual improvements. This would seem like a great candidate for a highly unoptimised tag, but it doesn't really belong in the same way it would apply to OoT. Conversely, some runs are very well played but have large known improvements (Sonic 2, Rockman) should we label these runs negatively, or should we unpublish these runs, some of the site's best content, too? Of course not.

I agree with fruitbane and CtrlAltDestroy wholeheartedly. Obsoleting movies this way is really no much different from unpublication, because this would effectively open the gates to saying "we don't want this movie here" to any outdated movie the staff doesn't particularly like, retroactively calling their publication a mistake.

F-Zero and Top Gear should both be removed. The publications should be deleted and the submission files grued. This should be done because this site hosts complete and finished TASes, these are, in my view, nothing more than published WIP runs. Publishing them was a mistake.

This argument is not much better. Instead of inviting players to obsolete an incomplete run with a full one, we're calling it a mistake and are done with it.

For the record, I strongly dislike the idea of having a "Highly Unoptimised" tag. To me it just creates a "this is a shit movie" impression, which may well be the case, but I don't think it should be labeled as such. It is both extremely disrespectful to the author and doesn't represent the ways in which improvements can arise.

That pretty much depends on the wording. TASVideos is a competitive scene so it's obvious that improving existing publications is a goal in itself, and every author knows that and realizes that one day their movie will be obsoleted (and if they did their best in making it, normally they would look forward to that day). So instead of calling a movie improvable, we could make some kind of a "wanted" tag that would lead to a page listing major improvements in movies together with conservative estimations of time saved that would make them eligible for publication (i.e., if the unassisted run of OoT clocks in at around an hour, a conservative estimate for a submission would be, say, 0:55). This should be done to avoid the fiasco of large improvements that remain very improvable upon submission we've seen twice with that particular movie.

As a mere fan, I voted "no" to this idea. I want to see a TAS for as many games as possible, as long as they're well-played and were at some point considered publication worthy. Besides, if applied too broadly, a huge percentage of films on this site would be "obsoleted", as there are known improvements to them, however small. If there are large improvements, that could be noted prominently as "New time-savers found since publication" or the equivalent. To me, it just makes little sense to obsolete runs that were once considered good enough to publish back in the day, without anything to replace them. More importantly, it makes the site less interesting for non-TASing fans.

I think that unpublishing movies is a bad habit to get into. The potential ramifications to the site content and the morale of TASers could be rather severe if used over zealously.

I have to agree with that, i think this is quite right, this could affect morale of both experimented and newby tasers, regardless, not saying it will necessarly be like that, but its nowhere near encouraging, witches hunt heh... I also agree its quite not respectfull to put a "this is shit" label on a movie, like, plz dont look at it, its SO bad we had to label it, yet, we absolutly need to get ride of shitty run (like OoT ect...), this can be done maybe without hurting anybody (grue somewhat help on this matter, diverse attention eventually). Im personnally feeling more important the players defense than the public misleading, remove players > no movies to watch... after all. This is very biased opinion of course. Analvideos.org should stay as it is, a joke, not a concrete fact, even if sometime we are asking a lot in term of quality ect...

voting no too on the unpublication process, all the published movies where because they where once in our standards, so they are still valid attempts, it's not a run fault if it's not optimal it's the runners understandable lazyness to not redo a X hour movie with XXX hours of work behind a published movie should stay published and if someone complain about the suboptimisation of a run, they can do the job themselves a good way to separate "curently optimal runs" from "obseletables runs" would be to put a "This movie is obeseletable" tag in the page with a link to a wiki/thread for the improvements, or a target icon like the stars / moons icon for the stars movies. if we begin to remove all the suboptimal movies we should remove all the movies with "sacrifice time for entertainement" in the submission text.

I chose rerecord counts and movie length as such that they wouldn't mess with site statistics in any meaningful way.

The routine which generates the statistics tables considers 0 rerecords to mean "does not have a valid rerecord count, ignore this movie in the rerecord statistics". Any editor can actually turn that feature on or off by editing the MovieStatistics page. It's specified with the "need=<column name>" specifier. I don't remember now, however, if this could also be turned on for the movie length as well (in other words, a length of 0 would be considered invalid and thus ignored). I wouldn't be surprised if it worked with that as well, but even if it doesn't it should be relatively easy to add. That would be a much cleaner way than using some "average" values.

Out of all the posts here, I agree with Mukki's post the most. I think it's one thing to remove runs that break the rules of publication (e.g. Top Gear), since it helps maintain the standard of movie publication at TASVideos in general. It's another thing entirely to take somebody's TAS and say "this can be obsoleted by a lot, so we're going to remove it until the new run comes along." I think it's pretty disrespectful to the TASer to simply remove their work from the site just because a TAS made now could do better. Even putting a "this can be obsoleted by a lot" tag on the movie just enforces an idea that TASVideos is a site that only cares about getting better and better movies instead of really appreciating a current author's contribution to the site. "Hey, we appreciate your work in the past, but we really don't like your movie anymore and are going to tell viewers that it's not very good". If you're going to argue that only TASes with "large improvement potential" would be removed, where do you draw the line? From what I've heard, Ocarina of Time seems to be improvable by over an hour, but as far as I can tell, it's the only run on this site with such a large known improvement. If you're going to try and implement unpublishing, you'd have to lower the bar a bit, but how far would you go? Is 20 minutes on a 2-hour movie enough to unpublish? What about 10 minutes? What if there's a new route that you could take in the TAS to save only 5 minutes, but it looks much better (i.e. more entertaining)? I just see this whole business as getting too close to a system where only the most current, up-to-date TASes have a place on this site. I don't think we should even start on this road at all except for currently-published TASes that violate the rules of the site. For an example of what I'm talking about with obsoletion "potential", let's go through my 3 currently published TASes: -Link's Awakening DX any% in 1:09:49 - Based on Swordless Link's progress, this one has about 5 minutes of improvements. -Super Demo World 100% 2:08:02 - Since I finished it right after a lot of new tricks were discovered, there are probably 5-10 minutes of improvements here. -Mario vs. Donkey Kong any% in 44:52 - I'm working on the improvement right now, and I would estimate the total time saved as about 2 minutes. Would any of those TASes be candidates for unpublication? I would guess that they would not be... but what if, say, a new trick was discovered in Link's Awakening that saved 10-20 more minutes? What has changed? Obviously, the same movie is currently published in both cases. The only thing that's changed is your perception of the current movie's quality. It's somehow become "unpublishable" simply because of discoveries made after its initial publication. The mentality of "this movie was okay in 2007, but its not okay now" is just wrong, in my opinion, and makes TASVideos seem like some kind of soulless machine that churns out new things and throws out the old. It's a bad path to go down. One more point I'd like to make is that unpublication seems to favor high-profile TASes because they get a lot of attention, both internal to this site and external. I think unpublication would naturally happen more often for popular games, which means that players are getting punushed simply because they chose a popular game to TAS. In summary, I guess my point is that everything you're trying to accomplish with unpublication is already covered internally with the publish-obsolete system, and the latter benefits both the site as a whole and its authors by maintaining their content, even if it's improvable.