Summarizing the results, in a chat manner.
What is any%?
It is some branch that is
- relatively fast
- relatively legit
How can it be relative? It's either fastest possible or not.
It is
compared to the other branches, and if all of them are slower, this one is faster. It also depends on conditions. Each branch, if it's of the required quality, is fastest the author could do it. So there are 2 conditions that make it relative: 1) the target category and 2) the player's skill. There are also cases where 100% (or any other condition that is usually slower than any%) appears to be the fastest.
No, it's clear and absolute.
It's clear for some people, and not for others. And for those who find it clear, it always differs. Once you consider something that depends on people's opinions absolute, you would need to force it in some way, which would harm those opinions.
After all, it has been the main goal of TASVideos - to make fastest possible runs.
It hasn't. The goal has always been to make
entertaining + optimized runs. And for the first 9 years, optimized but boring submissions were rejected, so entertainment was dominant. Only after Vault was added, boring speedruns started getting accepted too. Now both these goals are officially equal.
Ok, then how can legitimacy be relative?
It is all about conditions. There are conditions that can disqualify the run in some people's eyes. For example, some people can think using debug codes is legit, some can't. Some consider SRAM corruption legit, some don't. Looking at the time alone, one may feel NewGame+ runs are the fastest possible. But many people disagree. Legitimacy depends on conditions and on people's opinions on them.
What is a game-breaking glitch? I don't get the meaning, it's undefinable.
It is the example of whose legitimacy people can disagree about. It is some trick (bug, glitch, shortcut) a legit speedrun can use, by opinion of some, and that can't be part of a legit speedrun, by opinion of others. No matter what it is, people feel differently about its legitimacy.
There is a thread where people were asked if they want some kind of a glitch be mentioned in the fastest existing branch (uses X glitch), or in the fastest one that avoids it (no X glitch). Each option got voted for by ~40% of people. It means, that they have some understanding of what must be mentioned in the branch. Both groups want it be mentioned somehow somewhere. So obviously, they can define it. They just half on the matter how exactly it should be done.
Well, it all now appears to be relative (any%, fastest possible, goals, glitchiness). How can you build a guideline with so unreliable grounds?
There is only one way. It is, to rely on statistics. If something is so rare it looks exceptional, it needs to be mentioned. If something is so common it looks default, it doesn't. If several different cases are used equally (more or less), they all need to be mentioned.
That is the principle. And the guideline itself?
Movie branches exist to tell the viewer what approach the player used while TASing the game. There can be 3 foundations an approach is build upon.
1) Something that the game directly suggests (from menu, for example).
2) Something the game just allows (may have some indication though).
3) Something the game shouldn't allow, but it does (an erroneous assumption, a bug).
The use of these might need a label. To know if it does, we must answer a question:
Is the applied approach so common that the opposite is an exception?
- If it is that common, we don't label runs that do it the common way, and label runs that don't, if there are counterpart runs of the same game.
- If it's not that common, we label each approach, if there are counterpart runs of the same game.
When assessing the range, something must be considered possible unless we are sure it is not. Obsoleted movies should count.
