Judge Guidelines

• Quantity is not quality.
  • Keep the number of different branches per a game minimal.
  • Avoid doing decisions that undermine this guideline (or other guidelines) now or in the future. For example, don't publish an arbitrarily rule-restricted movie just because there are few of movies for that game; doing so may lead to impossible-to-solve "why A but not B" debates later.
• Hard work should have a reasonable chance of being published. More on this below.
• Satisfy the audience's expectations.

There are no laws that work in all possible situations. Each case is slightly different, and a judge is required to use multiple perspectives when judging a movie: both short-term and long-term consequences to (including but not limited to): site content quality; authors' feelings; audience's trust in the site staff; site's maintainability; the rules of TAS.

• Reject movies that break the Rules.
• Judge movies in concordance to the Guidelines.

A judge has the greatest control over the content of this website in the long run. All judges must act towards the goal of having an encouraging and rewarding atmosphere for both the players and the audience. You must be fair towards both.

It is fairness towards the audience when judges disqualify worse submissions and qualify the better ones.

• Too many bad publications turn the audience away.
• Too few publications turn the audience away (and possibly the players too).

The players must have chances of getting their movie published.

• Don’t demand them do tedious laboursome optimizations that can’t actually be noticed in the viewed video ^[1]. (Example: 1-frame difference caused by different timing of a jump. (Exception: If the jump clearly bumps against an obstacle, it’s a visible difference.
  • And for this reason, don’t let someone win over other by only doing those laboursome optimizations. It turns the players away if we set a standard that those laboursome optimizations are actually required. (Exception: Movies that are close to perfection and relatively short (a few minutes) might be competed on frame scale.)
  • It may turn the audience away when meaningless new publications are done. (Publications which don’t look any different and differ only by less than a second.)
• For rejected submissions, refer to the relevant guidelines that would improve their chances of being accepted the next time. If possible, point out some specific mistakes.

Every newbie could be the next superstar. Their first submission might be rejected, but don’t destroy their self-esteem. Reject with reason, but only in the necessary amount.

[1]: Notice to new players: Experienced TAS players have often developed a great observation skill for typical mistakes in TAS movies. Mistakes that might be unnoticeable to you will be noticed by experienced TAS players and the judges. (But of course, we don’t know and see everything.)

Collect opinions

Be objective

Be verbose

• Apply the Editor Guidelines to your editions. Specifically:
  • Do not delete text written by others. (But you can reformat it for readability.)
  • Use clear, easy to read markup and language.
  • Attribute clearly.

Generally, when you add a comment to the submission, your markup should look like this for example (assuming you also have a homepage on this site by your name):

  ----
  [your username]: Rejected in favor of a [828S|faster movie].

(828S (an example) stands for a link to submission number 828.)