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Great story!
However, there's two factual errors:
1) I wouldn't be thinking the things you suggested.
2) I wouldn't be baking a cake, or anything else where one adds sugar.
The rest of the mannerisms, activities, and dialogue seems very much in character.
However it is a bit insulting you think I programmed NachBot as folows:
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Radiant wrote:
I would prefer to see a 13-exit run; it's 20% better than an 11-exit run!
How about a small only run which completes all levels?
(yeah good luck with that one)
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ALAKTORN wrote:
I thought this was just a cheating April Fools run, but it’s actually legit? wow, interesting
Go download lsnes rr2 and play it back yourself.
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Due to a lot of feedback viewing this plan negatively, and some loopholes pointed out, we're putting this on hold till we better work out the details.
If you already paid for this, please contact adelikat or myself for a refund.
The content we currently have on pro we're leaving in place. This is in order to provide incentive to join pro once we're ready to roll-out, even though this will take a while.
In order to make your mouth water, and wish we roll out pro sooner rather than later, here's a taste of the content you're missing out on:
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Bisqwit wrote:
installed some kind of RAM-based TSR in the game
Indeed. And it takes it's input from the extra controllers.
From what I can tell, the extra input can specify Mario's coordinates, and can specify some level location information as well.
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Rena wrote:
Impressive. How is he retaining control of the game while allowing it to run normally? Does he call back into the main game loop from his little routine in the controller registers, or patch some global pointer to JSR to player 2 or something?
Watch the run with controller input, it's rather interesting, and should help illuminate what is happening.
Masterjun:
Just thought I'd inform you that the new run you submitted privately is now on pro.
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Moogle wrote:
The main problem is the cost. I'm not sure how the price was determined, whether it was out of necessity or ignorance I can't say; but a $25 monthly fee is blatantly excessive, especially considering other subscription services such as Netflix don't even charge half this price. Seriously, this equals out to $300 dollars a year. I could buy a yearly pass for Xbox Live for a fifth of this price and have far greater of a time playing games with my friends than I would passively watching a tool-assisted run of a game.
Would you feel better if we divided up the pricing, and offered different pricing options?
Say for example, BizHawk Pro has a yearly subscription fee of $50, PCSX2-Pro has a yearly subscription fee of $75.
A $1/month account lets you watch up to 10 videos a month, a $5/m account lets you watch 2 a day, and $15/m is unlimited?
Not saying these are the final prices, but perhaps ballpark as we work out the costs and can gauge feedback.
Fortranm wrote:
Wow, first TAS by Nach?
No.
Although first TAS on TASVideos where I'm explicitly mentioned as Nach as an author.
Edit:
As Mothrayas & ceiling_tire mentioned above, the screenshots also happen to be accessible to anybody:
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Kurabupengin wrote:
How about this? Guests can watch a vid on your stupid site 3 times a day... Whatdya think?
Being insulting is not a way to get your desires met.
I'm willing to consider options, ad-supported entry, trial limits, and stuff, but not if you're going to be disrespectful about it.
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Johannes wrote:
but I'll release the improvements in small increments to make more money.
Grrr....
Okay, you found a major loophole with what we were planning. I feel like we should now scrap the whole project, but I really don't want to, adelikat and I already laid out good money for this.
It's clear we won't accept runs unless they really are the best. So if you hold onto something which we notice, we won't accept it to pro. On the other hand, you could toy with us with small things continually that we don't notice. Not sure what the best approach is. Perhaps a minimum threshold for improvements? Then again, you'll just try to find a loophole with that too. Maybe a limit on how many times you can submit the same game and route each year? This needs more thought.
funnyhair wrote:
Now people will just be releasing runs for the money, even if they are not optimized or the best they can be.
The whole point of pro is to not accept a single movie there unless it really really stands out and appears flawless. Think of it as only supplying allegedly flawless star tier.
funnyhair wrote:
Plus as someone who cannot afford the 25 dollars a month, this sucks.
Based on what Johannes said above, and some of the ridiculous feedback we're getting, we'll need to rethink this. Perhaps our pricing is indeed too high.
Mothrayas wrote:
Speaking of which, I noticed that it's possible for guests to see the movie screenshots by using the image URLs. Should that be fixed as well?
ceiling_tire wrote:
To cement my point, look, I can post the images on the front page here
-snip-
But look, I can post too images that are not
-snip-
Eh, I'm not too worried about that. If people want to figure out our structure and steal images, big deal. The main thing is to ensure they do not have access to the movie files themselves.
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ceiling_tire wrote:
thanks you guys for accepting my game and giving me an account. when do i get the money?
Sorry, we're a bit swamped at the moment. We should be transferring it within the next hour.
ceiling_tire wrote:
the screenshot is boring, can i suggest another?
Yes, but as above, we're swamped with a lot of the logistics. PM your suggestion and adelikat or myself will change it.
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Mothrayas, thank you for reporting the img bug, it's been fixed.
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£e Nécroyeur wrote:
My question is this: can I buy my way in with a TAS of sufficient quality? Or would I still be required to pay the initial fee before then receiving a 1 year extension to my subscription?
The current members who have access all bought their way in with a professional level TAS, except Bisqwit. We gave Bisqwit a free account since we feel we owe him something for creating the site in the first place. I might also add that adelikat and I had to lay out our own money up front to do this, to pay the players the agreed upon amount for their pro TASs. We're hoping you take this seriously and strongly consider joining.
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Hi xxNKxx, we're naming it "pro" because all runs on the new site are made by professional TASers. The players are also paid, so it's the professional counterpart to the free and hobbyist TASVideos.
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Bisqwit wrote:
Well, frankly, this suggested business model is not likely to produce anything but mere pennies, if even that.
Time will tell.
Bisqwit wrote:
I don't know which CDN you are talking about,
Rackspace Cloud Files.
Bisqwit wrote:
from what I know the subscription fees to high-speed content delivery networks are quite high, and if you are going to use one of those, your membership fees just aren't going to cover it and leave you any reasonable amount of money to cover both of your living expenses.
If this doesn't seem to work out so well, we'll pull the plug. It's why we specifically decided to go into the launch process today, in order to gauge interest. If it doesn't go well, you know the drill. You're the one who invented using today as a day to test run new objectives and designs.
Alternatively, if the CDN bit is losing money, we'll drop the CDN feature, and just use private torrents. Maybe even substantially slash the price if we go that route. What does everyone think?
Bisqwit wrote:
I'd say waste of effort, waste of dividing up the audience, and waste of a good website.
Everyone on pro still has access here, so it's not true division. We're also not doing game resources on the new site, and leaving it all here in the public. The only thing non paying members will miss out on is immediate access to the best runs, and the fast to download HD encodes. Regarding audience, I'm sure some runs will get leaked anyway, so they'll get discussed by the mass public in any case.
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skychase wrote:
April fools ?
We picked today as our launch day, so if things don't go over so well, we can pull the plug and say it's just a joke.
skychase wrote:
Damn, I could watch naked tatooed girls all year for 1/6 of this price.
CDN hosting isn't cheap. Please see this pricing calculator.
skychase wrote:
Edit: 03:24.02 SMB, yeah right ¬_¬
People once thought that about SMW too. Then you have runs like this. Total control is the new way to TAS. I wish we would've spoken to cpadolf though to get his Super Metroid run published on the new site. We forgot about him when we looked over TASers who make the must cutting edge movies to approach about early access.
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Bisqwit, I understand your frustration, this started as your baby. But adelikat and I aren't getting any younger, and we have children to feed.
As a middle ground, any obsoleted runs from TASVideos Pro will be submitted and published on the main site. The encodes on the main site won't be HD though, and you'll have to stick to torrents, YouTube and archive.org.
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jlun2 wrote:
Infact, my favourite part of the run was this:
Very funny. You don't even have an account yet.
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Mothrayas wrote:
Whoa, just noticed the Donkey Kong Country publication. Sub one minute, nice. Didn't think you were able to push it down so low.
Yeah, it's very very good.
We managed to publish a few runs shortly after this announcement went up. Still have nearly a dozen TASs queued up to encode for the pro site, these new HD encodes take a while,
Hope I can get at least one more published within the next couple of hours. So check back then.
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We're launching a new professional gaming site for our best TASers.
On this site, our entertainment requirements will be a step beyond current TASing practice. We'll also be awarding players who get a professional run published with $100.
If you have a run which you think is really special, upload it to userfiles marked as private. Then alert an administrator with a link to your run to review.
Players with runs published on TASVideos Pro will get 1 year free membership. For everyone else, the cost is an inexpensive $25 USD per month. Members will also receive access to our ultra-fast CDN for getting HD encodes of every video.
We still have a few logistical issues to work out, so we're only giving our professional players who earned their keep access at the moment. For everyone else, we should have a PayPal account setup later this week.
For more information, please see our wiki page.
Edit:
Based on feedback, it seems we have more planning to do and issues to work out than we thought. See discussion for more details.
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I find it insulting that no one asked me to join in on the production of this.
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Judging wasn't easy for this either.
Especially since I normally rely on people like CoolKirby who have interesting and thorough non-biased comments on most submissions, and I couldn't get anything from him here :(
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With new improvements, the threaded grue is now capable of eating this.
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Good luck :)
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I've given this some thought. I don't think typical action games would work out too well. Even for RPGs, you need games were you can't ever truly get game over, or get stuck into an impossible non-winnable situation.
In the late 90s Nintendo launched a bunch of games where truly losing is impossible (Just imagine if Pokémon allowed one to throw away the SS Anne ticket, or the HMs were actually TMs).
Therefore the following RPGs seem like good ideas:
EarthBound
Chrono Trigger
Lufia
Lufia 2 (E)
I'm actually not entirely sure if the latter ones allow for truly losing or not.
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Okay, fix involves simply changing some 3s to 7s.
Should be a piece of cake to backport.
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Edit:
Based on feedback, it seems we have more planning to do and issues to work out than we thought. See discussion for more details.