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I'm finally opening up this feedbcak thread for TASGiving 2020. I have plenty of feedback of my own, but what went well and what should be changed for next year?
Feedback #1: RTMP sync sucks...but you knew that ;)
In all seriousness, I thought I'd finally register here (hi!) and keep an eye on this thread, seeing as I was part of the onsite production staff. (And, of course, partly to blame for the copious tech issues we faced - my sincere apologies to everyone impacted!)
Looking forward to comparing feedback here with my own personal notes.
I really enjoyed assisting with remote tech, although I made a LOT of mistakes along the way (sorry onsite). I do have some notes.
Remote tech feedback:
- Accessible availability schedule for everyone on remote. While this thankfully wasn't a huge issue this time due to longer runs being placed during gaps in availability not knowing when other techs would be joining in or available still caused some minor issues.
- Give remote techs access to approve/deny donation messages. This would serve as a backup and not be a primary responsibility
General Tech Feedback:
- Add distinct Discord roles for Remote and Onsite Tech. Also make each mentionable
- TAS runs should all be prerecorded and streamed from an onsite computer.
- Require Ethernet, unless not possible
- Live event issue tracker though something like GitHub, a Discord Bot, a spreadsheet, etc.
- Better instructions for Voicemeeter Banana
General Feedback:
- Perhaps simultaneously streaming to both Twitch and YouTube may draw in more eyes
- Event merch wasn't promoted enough (if at all) (I wasn't even aware of it until the event ended)
- While I do agree with follower only mode being enabled for Twitch chat, 10 minutes seemed to be a bit too long
- Current host should be listed somewhere on the overlay
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
compucat wrote:
I thought I'd finally register here (hi!) and keep an eye on this thread
So this is actually my biggest concern about the whole event.
As a whole, TASGiving felt almost entirely separated from TASvideos. I feel like the whole team should have been active here from the start, answering questions and providing information/updates. There was a long period of time where I actually forgot that TASGiving was even happening because of how little interaction there was over here. I'm aware that dwango had a hell of a lot going on in his life and wasn't able to provide our community with as many updates as he would have liked, but what was preventing the rest of the team from doing so in his stead? Why are members of the team only signing up to the forums now, long after the event ended? Why wasn't there any direct interaction via Discord? For a TAS-focused event, members of the primary TAS community shouldn't have to join a subcommunity in order to receive updates, especially when much smaller blocks of time have had incredibly active community participation threads devoted to them in the past.
It's honestly worrying me how much of a growing disconnect there seems to be between TASvideos and the TASbot community, and being left in the dark like this did nothing to alleviate those worries.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
I thought I'd finally register here (hi!) and keep an eye on this thread
So this is actually my biggest concern about the whole event.
As a whole, TASGiving felt almost entirely separated from TASvideos.
...
It's honestly worrying me how much of a growing disconnect there seems to be between TASvideos and the TASbot community, and being left in the dark like this did nothing to alleviate those worries.
Speaking as an active(ish) member of both communities:
TASGiving was almost entirely separated from TASVideos. The event was neither conceived nor planned in our forums, nor did it require any direct involvement from our site (or members of our site acting directly for our site) to be the event it was. Some TASes from our site may have been used during the event, but the licensing we use for our content allows for that. Yes, some members of both communities were involved, but that doesn't mean our site had anything to do with the event itself.
I can understand that some may have a desire for the TASing community as a whole to maintain a strong degree of cohesion. However, as with anything that grows as large as TASing has become, it's nearly guaranteed that disjointed perspectives/approaches will develop and ultimately lead to some degree of disconnection between those varying perspectives/communities.
We've arrived at this position in regards to TASing. And while TASVideos may be the largest and/or most well-known site for classic TASing and its resources, we hardly own the concept in the sense that we can make demands on other TASing communities: regardless of whether or not they've stemmed from our own. Using the phrase "being left in the dark" suggests that there is some impetus on the TASBot community to keep TASVideos 'in-the-loop' of all things that are happening there and that they have somehow failed (or intentionally kept information secret) when that information hasn't made it to our site/forums.
There are members in each community who have no desire to be involve with the other community. We cannot suggest that it is somehow wrong/improper for long-standing members of the TASBot community to not be members here. If someone actively involved in the TASBot community has no desire to create/submit TASes themselves or get involved in our forums, they have no reason to create a membership for our site regardless of how involved they may be on the TASBot side of things.
While it would be nice for someone in the TASBot community to keep TASVideos apprised of everything that's occurring in that community, it's just not feasibly possible in my opinion. I'm in both communities, and I sure don't have the time to do it. I can't keep up with everything happening in either community individually, let alone be able to concisely summarize all that's happening in one of those communities to effectively present that summary to the opposite community
Beyond the feasibility though, I don't feel that it's necessary or even overly important that the TASBot community to be expected to constantly report back to TASVideos on what's happening over there.
While they still promote classic TASing and TASVideos, the TASBot community has grown into something with a much broader view of what to do or even can be done with TASing tools compared to what TASVideos is focused on. This should be easily observable by how often the TASBot community has exhibited things which 1) cannot be submitted on TASVideos due to limitations of our site and 2) would be rejected for not meeting the rules of TASVideos if they were able to be submitted.
We cannot fault the TASBot community for growing further apart from (or perhaps someday even larger than) TASVideos simply because they have chosen to take TASing in a different direction than what our site's restrictions are for potential publications.
It is the absolutely these varying directions that the TASBot community is taking with TASinng concepts that fundamentally disjoint it from our site. That community doing anything in lines of communication to keep our community involved/aware of what they are doing is as much a courtesy as it is anything else.TLDR: I understand how it may be frustrating to some TASVideos members to not know what may be going on with the TASBot community; but we should not feel "left in the dark" when we aren't directly told everything that's happening in that community. There is no forced regulation on them to tell us anything they are doing in the first place, nor should there be. The impetus for knowing what's happening in either community is the responsibility of any individual of one community wanting to know what's going on in the other.
While there is a degree of sadness that the TASing world as a whole is becoming somewhat disjointed, we should not be surprised by this. Further, we really should be thankful that our site continues to be mentioned and promoted when the varying directions that other TAS communities follow give them the opportunity to promote our site as well as their own pursuits.
I don't disagree that it's natural that it's disjointed, in fact I have no problems with that. I think the frustration more comes from the fact that the ambassador of the site is one of the organizers. If TASBot is its own thing then imo we need to start looking into outreach events of our own and reconsider how we handle things. We need to stop relying on the TASBot crew to do that for us and reconsider how we treat the ambassador role.
EDIT: To clarify, this isn't really directly a criticism of the TASBot community or the ambassadors in question. Life is a thing, people find their own groups etc. However, as a site tasvideos needs to revisit the role and how we want to handle outreach. I don't think this is a particularly appropriate topic for this particular thread though so I'll leave it there.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
I feel like TASVideos as a community itself needs to help participate and organize these events, because I do have to agree, we have left the TASBot crew to that theirselves. I see many different speedrunning communities of certain games helping organize events and when it comes to events with tool-assisted runs, we as TASVideos need to get involved. It will help with reaching more people to us, and we could get involved in many different things sort of like how speedrun.com has.
I like to comment on submissions and look around the site. You have probably seen me before (if you have been around for a while) either on the site, Discord, or any other social media. I recently took up making temporary encodes for new submissions.
Also, I never forget to greet Tompa wherever I find him!
"when resyncing stuff sucks it's called Resuccing" - EZGames69
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Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Memory wrote:
I don't disagree that it's natural that it's disjointed, in fact I have no problems with that. I think the frustration more comes from the fact that the ambassador of the site is one of the organizers. If TASBot is its own thing then imo we need to start looking into outreach events of our own and reconsider how we handle things. We need to stop relying on the TASBot crew to do that for us and reconsider how we treat the ambassador role.
EDIT: To clarify, this isn't really directly a criticism of the TASBot community or the ambassadors in question. Life is a thing, people find their own groups etc. However, as a site tasvideos needs to revisit the role and how we want to handle outreach. I don't think this is a particularly appropriate topic for this particular thread though so I'll leave it there.
This is exactly the problem with it. If the burden of bridging the gap between the two communities lies on TASvideos, it would in theory fall to the ambassadors, but the ambassadors themselves are the ones running the subcommunity in the first place.
The thing is, not reaching out more to TASvideos implies that something is driving a wedge between the two communities, and if we don't know what's doing that we don't know how to fix it. We set up the ambassador team in the first place because of the TAS showcases at GDQ, which did wonders for driving people over to the site and bringing TASing to a much wider audience, but if that entire ambassador team has branched off into their own thing to promote, to the point where even members of OUR community have completely acknowledged and accepted the divide and are defending them, then it makes it all the more clear to me that there is a massive problem here that needs to be fixed. It's obviously on our side, so I'd just like to know what it is. And I don't mean "it's obviously on our side" as "we hired bad ambassadors", because we clearly didn't (the event was a success after all). What I mean is that we're doing something to push them away to their own subcommunity. How TASGiving was handled was a major indicator of that in my eyes, and it's clearly something that needs to be fixed as soon as possible so that the TAS community as a whole can come together, grow and expand further.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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As for feedback about preparing the event, I took on a role of creating and updating the schedule, the release of which was delayed repeatedly due to a lack of official submissions. Samsara, I missed your forum post about wanting to commentate two runs and that's my bad, it shouldn't have taken weeks for Dwango to mention the submission form indirectly in that thread. I can elaborate privately but I'm sorry we didn't speak to that request quickly and directly.
As to the event stream, it was clear from how it kicked off that none of the rest of the event had been planned for a deadline in which to have the tech ready, there were no backup plans in place to run a simplified stream and get started on time, it was simply delayed until it got finished an hour after start time. I don't have anything else I can contribute about that except to say that it was disappointing to see the old rush everything at the last minute strategy instead of the AGDQ 2020+ it's all ready to go a week before the show strategy.
I agree we should have separate discussions about how to improve ambassadorship among staff. The events we've been showing TAS content at have been working great, but yes there are opportunities to improve the way we use them to unify the TASing scene.
Unfortunately I was only able to catch a little bit of the event live, but what I saw looked pretty well put together and seemed to be going pretty well (at the time I saw it), so well done to the organizers and tech people for at least getting that far.
Probably could have used a few more months of lead time, as putting together TAS content is just slow by nature.
I don't really get the other criticism about involving this site more, the opportunity was there to get involved (though apparently some lack of communication caused an issue as above.) But honestly there weren't many posts in the event thread even expressing that much interest, where as event planning needs active people actively doing stuff. Seems reasonable not to keep pumping at a dry well.
But also maybe some more lead time in the future can give more people the chance to get involved without being faced with a short deadline right out of the gate, maybe.
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I had a post here that I wrote at 1 AM that was supposed to be about my desire to see the TASVideos and TASBot communities stay cohesive but I wrote it badly and I've pulled it for now. I intend to take the part that was specifically about ways to handle that cohesiveness and make a new post as it's outside the context of TASGiving itself.
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Radiant wrote:
...what is TASGiving 2020? I've completely missed that.
TASGiving was a charity livestream similar to a GDQ featuring TAS content with commentary that successfully raised $10k for National Alliance on Mental Illness. The main event site is at https://TASGiving.org and we're posting videos on my YouTube channel. I hope we can do it again, albeit with more time to plan and promote it; you're not the first person that didn't see any of the posts, videos, banner announcements, Discord pings, or other ways we attempted to reach out and most of that came down to not getting the promotion out early enough.
You should avoid games with looooong time goal. I was looking forward to FF14 trial / raid that was supposed to start at 11pm / 12am (at my time), but one guy that was doing mario game or something else that it was supposed to go 2 hour 30 min but went on and on and on for 4 hours. Went to bed at 1 AM without seeing FF14 stuff.
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ventuz wrote:
2 hour 30 min but went on and on and on for 4 hours. Went to bed at 1 AM without seeing FF14 stuff.
I think this was a combination of the schedule being behind by an hour (that one's on me) plus perhaps the estimate was put in wrong, his estimate should have been 3:30 and appears that way on the video now so I'm not sure where 2:30 would have come from. Most events struggle with staying on time and overall we did fairly well but that first day was definitely the most offset.
TASGiving was a charity livestream similar to a GDQ featuring TAS content with commentary that successfully raised $10k for National Alliance on Mental Illness. The main event site is at https://TASGiving.org and we're posting videos on my YouTube channel.
