That justifies accepting practically any sub-par submission.
Are you actively encouraging that the site should lower its standards? Explain why this rationale isn’t used on many other runs of equivalent quality that don’t make it through.
Again, this is like encouraging sloppy runs to be accepted and published because it can later be obsoleted.
If you this were your intent, then there should be more emphasis than the average movie on this submission having excellent quality, so it can be used as a role model of what the site represents. Drawing a lot of attention towards unpolished and only mildly entertaining runs is not going to help the site’s reputation, even if it does display that TASing is expanding across newer systems.
Though, what really bothers me is how much of a “sellout” this whole notion is. The game being run on a new system doesn’t dictate preferential treatment in its judging process, and doing this purposely for views is not really any better than a television show sexing up their female characters to increase ratings. A flawed analogy perhaps, but hopefully you get the idea.
I can see that Warp’s criticisms about un-democratic voting are being substantiated.
That PCE Dragon Egg run is rather curious.
They’re using the same flawed reasoning as you though, so I wouldn’t call that justification.
You couldn’t post this as a demo, or in the DS forums as a test run or something? Hell, just submitting it for people to see it was promotional enough. As I said before, this is abuse of power, this is selling out for views, and there’s nothing accomplished by having a poor promotional video unless you’re looking to tarnish the site’s reputation.
Just because this is a DS run doesn’t mean it made for a very unique viewing experience. And when did the site ever not have much emphasis on technical quality and optimization?
This is taken for granted, because you wouldn't have submitted it if you didn't thought it was publish worthy, under a TAS judge criteria. : D
I want to think the criticism here is that you should have waited some days to allow yourself to look the video with fresh eyes, or leave another person to judge it with the same fresh eyes. I know I have to wait at least a week to start perceiving flaws in my own works that constant exposure had hid from my sight. Maybe this run might have needed an update before publication (I can't say because I'm not trained to see improvements)
Of course, I also understand people that think oneself shouldn't be at the same time "judge and jury", which is a correct stance if there are reasons to think one might look first for oneself instead of everyone. I believe this wasn't the case, and if adelikat accepted the unoptimized run was more because a misjudgement than malice. It doesn't mean he was right, but it's a issue that can be fixed without harming others.
I thought I'd made it obvious with my last post, but as I mentioned earlier, I am brain fried.
I have withdrawn from the debate. Any more at this point would be useless and cause needless drama, IMO. It's one thing if the drama could be productive in the end. It's another if it'd just lead to flame wars and nothing else.
I was going to post something among the lines of "hey, cool, a DS TAS", but yeah. I reckon that any new visitors brave enough to check out the discussion thread linked to this TAS won't be coming back <_<;
Also, the link to the emulator's page seems to be broken.
I can't deny that I let my anger overwhelm my common sense, and that I blew things completely out of proportion. While some things here might have been a bit dubious, my behavior was not proper.
I would like to apologize for my behavior. I shouldn't have gone so extreme with this.
This will (once again) teach me that I should think things overnight before posting anything inflammatory. Now that I have reviewed the whole thing, I feel rather ashamed of myself.
I'm not going to fault you on it, Warp. Even if you did go a bit overboard, you did feel you have a right to be concerned and that's alright. You were looking out for the site in your own way, and in that respect, I do find it admirable.
Two different ways of love for the site, though they clashed. It's unfortunate that there was a lot of fighting, but I think things are going to be better for it.
Perhaps maybe you could give TASing this a try, even? I'd like to see what you can do with this.
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
All the politics aside, I'm happy to see this run published, and look forward to seeing it improved.
I also support the idea of generally not allowing a known improvement to bar publication.
As a player, most of my runs have 2 loosely defined phases; a research phase where I'm checking out strats and searching for improvements, and an execution phase where I'm actually recording.
During the execution phase, it's fairly common that I find some small improvements that affect earlier work. When deciding to go back and revise, pragmatic considerations arise: how big is the improvement? is it visually obvious or even detectable? how much time will it take to redo? is this something that will make my run vulnerable to obsoletion very quickly, with minimal effort?
Usually, I do end up re-doing the earlier portions, but I would never want to be required to. At a certain point, I think it's totally legit to flag the improvement for use by future TAS'ers and call it a day. This is especially true with improvements that aren't known to the author until after submission.
After all, there's nothing better to entice someone into doing a run than having a known improvement to start with, which practically guarantees publication. And enticing people into doing runs (especially on new platforms and games!) is, I think, what will keep this site going in the long term.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Well said.
The other thing I don't like about rejecting for those kinds of improvements is that it kind of discourages openness about improvements. Like if you know you didn't use a new trick early in the game, do you hide it in fear of rejection? I don't see how that helps the community at all.
As someone who mainly just watches the videos and sometimes looks at the forum for extra discussion, I kind of agree that as long as it improved upon the previous runs and is faster than the best human run, it should get published. It's a given that these things will get improved time and time again, so keeping the improvement/publication process open results in the most entertainment for the viewers coming to the site. As long as people give proper credit in the runs, there shouldn't be any drama over who gets to be "the name" behind the TAS.
I will go ahead and say that when I read Mr. Delikat's statement I had the completely opposite reaction. Hurrah for being more open to entertaining content!
If you think I am setting the precedent to publish movies that have known improvement then you would be....right. I don't know if you noticed but things have gotten more lax on TASvideos regarding that.
...
Well, that says it all, really. The site has begun a slow decline. Wonderful.
I will go ahead and say that when I read Mr. Delikat's statement I had the completely opposite reaction. Hurrah for being more open to entertaining content!
The various rejections of entertaining games in the past have mostly been due to bias against the game/genre. I don't think that will change. =/ It'd be nice, but...
Well said.
The other thing I don't like about rejecting for those kinds of improvements is that it kind of discourages openness about improvements. Like if you know you didn't use a new trick early in the game, do you hide it in fear of rejection? I don't see how that helps the community at all.
I really don't see this at all.
Accepting easily flawed runs like this sets a low standard and basically means the next run for this game is guaranteed to be accepted.
And I would say hiding this run (not posting any WIPs that I am aware of) is far worse than hiding a flawed run in fears of rejection, because in this case it seems you were in fear of improvements.
TASing is like a science, authors should be striving for 100% optimization and be honored when proven wrong.
To summarize:
This run was not entertaining and quite boring (although I mainly blame the game for this)
It suffers some basic and amateurish flaws.
And it has been rushed to publication for ulterior motives.
Ignoring rest of thread.
Thoughts:
- Wow, published only a few days after submission. Bonus points since it's still a badly-emulated game. Double bonus points since it's a new console. Triple score for another reason.
- Overworld = zzzzzzzz
- This game was boring to play and even worse to watch. The fact it went out of its way to be incredibly bland (getting 100 or close on each flagpole, shell-riding the whole way though all the levels, etc) and took every possible warp was even more uninteresting.
- Worst final boss ever. There's just no other way to put it.
Final thoughts:
- This movie sucks. The emulation is still far from perfect, the game is bad for speedrunning, and aside from the novelty of being the first DS TAS, it is almost entirely unremarkable.
2.5/2.5. The entertainment vote only went up because I managed to watch the whole thing, though that could be considered as part of the novelty.
There also seems to be a good number of "Rejected because an improvement was submitted before publication," type rejections.
Yeah, and also some April fools submissions, that only got yes votes since it was the first of April.
Yes. Generally when I refer to "rejected movies I would have published", I mean things like Catrap. Serious submission, but relatively unknown game.
I was originally going to remove the pre-publication obsoletion and joke submissions, but the amount of work required made it not worth bothering.
The comment for "Madou Monogatari I" in particular bugged me. It sounds like someone saying "well, the majority overwhelmingly believes that this should be done, but I don't, so, too bad!"
Fuck off, IST.
Also, I think adelikat is currently working on an improvement. Best of both worlds etc.
Also someone publish the goddamn Chrono Trigger submission.