Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4083
Location: The Netherlands
Since a few controversial submission judgments a month and a half ago, we've been discussing between several staff members about changing the rules for the Vault to be more open for sports games. We have come to an agreement to a new amendment to the Vault rules specifically for sports games.
The rule will open up only for certain types of sports games and submissions. Sports games that make trivial runs, do not provide useful speed records, or otherwise are considered unsuitable for publication are still rejected.
The new rule is as follows:
Sports games are allowed for the Vault under certain criteria only:
Team-based sports and sports running with a fixed time, such as baseball, football, soccer, or basketball are not eligible.
Games featuring multiple successive sports, such as Track & Field and Olympics, are eligible as long as one of the sports fits the criteria.
The game must have a meaningful ending point or meaningful completion criteria.
For example, many sports games have career, storyline, tournament or season modes that end with an ending or credit sequence. These would count as meaningful endings.
In sports that depend on a variety of environments or situations, such as golf, completion can be defined by clearing every environment or situation in the game.
TASes that only clear a single event without reaching a meaningful ending to the game are not eligible.
The run must not be seen as trivial.
If a run consists of doing a trivial strategy, made only nontrivial by having to do it over the course of several rounds, it will still be judged as trivial. For example, bowling games where the player gets a strike with ten pins every time.
Sports games in the Vault are restricted to one game per series per platform. For example, PGA Tour Golf III on the Sega Genesis may obsolete PGA Tour Golf II on the Sega Genesis. Which game obsoletes which is decided by which game makes a more technically impressive run, as decided by a judge.
For games with different characters/groups/countries with different statistics, only the fastest run is accepted. Runs using suboptimal characters are not accepted.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
It was rejected for being sloppy. The game looks eligible otherwise at a quick glance.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Warp wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
Sports games in the Vault are restricted to one game per series per platform.
Is there a reason for this? If the games are different enough from each other, why not...
Games in the same series on the same console are pretty much all the same game/engine, just with roster/team/stat updates across the board. If they're different from each other, that means that one game has to be superior to the rest, which is the one we would want published most of all. For the most part, the biggest differences in a series come from jumping from one console generation to the next, i.e SNES to N64, and the rules allow games in the same series as long as they're on different consoles.
I more or less treat this rule the same way as our ROM hack rules: We allow the "best" of the group and limit the rest so we're not flooded with low-quality hacks/sports games. Granted, I doubt people are going to be submitting sports games often enough for this to be an issue, but I personally think having that small limit in place will be better in the long run.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Joined: 10/28/2013
Posts: 130
Location: United States
I applaud letting more sports games in, but the language about "one game per series per platform" seems based more on distaste for the genre than anything.
Also, using PGA Tour Golf on the Genesis as an example is unfortunate, since that engine received major updates on multiple occasions. If you want roster updates with no other added content, it's team sports games that tend to be guilty of that. But I also think people who don't actually play sports games tend to overestimate how unchanged they are between releases.
Samsara wrote:
Games in the same series on the same console are pretty much all the same game/engine, just with roster/team/stat updates across the board. If they're different from each other, that means that one game has to be superior to the rest, which is the one we would want published most of all.
Kind of a funny double bind, that: if it's the same as others in the series, it gets cut; if it's different, it also gets cut (unless it's the best). I assume we'll be cutting two of the Donkey Kong Country games, then?
Anyway, on a more positive note, I'd love to see someone clear 18 holes in one of these high-profile golf games with 18 glitchy hole-in-one shots. It must be possible!
goldenband is spot on,tony hawk has a bunch of differences in the series,compared to team sports which mostly update the roster and a few extras.A lot of games end up having different courses,golf for example.
TAS i'm interested:
megaman series: mmbn1 all chips, mmx3 any% psx glitched
fighting games with speed goals in general
Skateboarding is an action sport which involves riding and performing tricks using a skateboard. I understand it has an excuse of adventure in order to introduce new courses and settings for the player to simulate the sport,but it's a sport game anyways.The thing is the game has so much more than just the sport,it got past tasvideos rules against sports easily.
TAS i'm interested:
megaman series: mmbn1 all chips, mmx3 any% psx glitched
fighting games with speed goals in general
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
goldenband wrote:
Kind of a funny double bind, that: if it's the same as others in the series, it gets cut; if it's different, it also gets cut (unless it's the best). I assume we'll be cutting two of the Donkey Kong Country games, then?
Your analogy's off in this case. We're talking about Vault here. I would say that this is more akin to how we don't allow non-standard categories in Vault: For a particularly crap game, every category ends up looking the same with minor differences. But even if it's a huge difference, it's still a crap game, and we reject the category. The same thing goes for a sports series: Even if they're different, they're never different enough to warrant separate publications to Vault.
You could also compare it to how we handle ports in Vault: We generally take the most technically superior port of a game, regardless of the console it's on. If it's entertaining enough, we can publish it alongside in Moons. If Madden '91 gets a ridiculous playaround that makes it to Moons, then we can still publish Madden '92 in Vault alongside it, but having both in Vault just doesn't make sense when they're almost exactly the same game.
I don't think the rule limits nearly as many things as people seem to be complaining about, but then again when has this site ever not found a way to complain about positive change?
andypanther wrote:
What if someone found a non-trivial way to speed up a game that normally runs on a timer? Shouldn't the game be accepted in such a case?
Speeding up the timer is still unacceptable (as far as I'm concerned at least). A lot of older sports games run on faster/shorter timers anyway, and a lot of them also give you the ability to change the timer. More than that, though, a timer-based sport inherently means it's not a speedrun, as there's no way to make it faster other than by changing the length of the timer. Even if you can change the timer non-arbitrarily, it's still there, and as such anyone who could do that would be able to beat the game in the exact same amount of time.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Why does the rule apply only to sport game franchises and not all game franchises?
Maybe rather than have a strict rule that's blindly applied to everything, it should be considered on a franchise-by-franchise basis (and perhaps even game-by-game basis)? Clear rules are nice, but not if some games get unfairly hit by them.
Clear rules are nice, but not if some games get unfairly hit by them.
Like which?
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.
Why does the rule apply only to sport game franchises and not all game franchises?
Maybe rather than have a strict rule that's blindly applied to everything, it should be considered on a franchise-by-franchise basis (and perhaps even game-by-game basis)? Clear rules are nice, but not if some games get unfairly hit by them.
Sport franchises usually only have variable rosters, and minor variances in mechanics. Other franchises have many more variances (story, maps, mechanics, etc.).
Why does the rule apply only to sport game franchises and not all game franchises?
It's really just an extension of the (already in effect) Hack rule for the Vault, as well as an application of the requirement that TASuperplaying stand out from unassisted play. Vault Tier Requirements wrote:
Hacks (defined as being modifications of an existing eligible game) are not eligible for this category. We demand hacks with entertainment value, therefore they are judged by the Moon tier requirements.
The gameplay still needs to standout from non-assisted play.
Joined: 10/28/2013
Posts: 130
Location: United States
I can't speak to Madden, but I can tell you that there would certainly be meaningful differences in execution between these games:
Bases Loaded 1, II, III, IV
Pete Sampras Tennis / Sampras Tennis '96
HardBall series
Among others.
It just seems like this restrictive policy is driven by a desire to keep the site focused on certain kinds of games and not others. But then, I'm a bit of a radical, since I personally would like to see every released game have its own TAS, and entertainment treated as a secondary, not primary concern. This isn't a physical library with limited space, and I think people here wildly overestimate the extent to which the outside world values this site for entertainment vs. superplay.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
goldenband wrote:
I can't speak to Madden, but I can tell you that there would certainly be meaningful differences in execution between these games:
Bases Loaded 1, II, III, IV
Tennis. Trivial solution, ineligible unless made non-trivial.
HardBall series
Sounds like baseball again, so ineligible.
It just seems like this is driven by a desire to keep the site focused on certain kinds of games and not others.
You mean focused on unique games instead of the exact same ones over and over again?
But then, I personally would like to see every released game have its own TAS, and entertainment treated as a secondary, not primary concern.
I don't necessarily disagree with you on that first point, but entertainment has always been a primary concern for us, and it always will be. The Vault was implemented 8 years into the site's existence, before that there were far more limitations on everything, and that's because the site was founded on entertainment as a principle, because entertainment value is what sets us (and TASes in general) apart from normal speedruns. We create art wherever we can in our runs, things that can only be done with superhuman timing and precision. Otherwise, we'd just be a more optimized speedrun.com/SDA. We can't just remove entertainment as a focus because of that.
I still don't understand why this is the most divisive rule, especially when most sports that have a series of games attached to them are already banned under the rules for being timed/trivial. If you can find me a game series that not only fits every other rule we have, but also has at least two completely distinctive, drastically different playing games in it, then perhaps we can make an exception. But I just don't see that happening ever.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
I'd like to add that these rules are for the Vault - the most basic completion goals available to the site.
Nothing is preventing you from trying to make an entertaining video out of any of these games, the rule just specifies that less-entertaining runs of these games are ineligible for publication to the Vault.
The site has a couple of really entertaining sports games published (not to the Vault): http://tasvideos.org/1118M.html and http://tasvideos.org/1438M.html come to mind.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
