In a completely unrelated point:
I think TASVideos should introduce a proper process for movie _depublication_ (or retraction). For depublication, I mean the action of delisting a currently published movie and potentially retracting its acceptance.
If we expect the webiste to grow and receive an influx of new movies in the future, we need to account for the fact that the current review system is not infalible. Movies that fail to comply with rules or Codes of Conduct (which, tbh, maybe we should look into adopting as well) but manage to make it past the review process should be able to be delisted and removed from publication, at discretion from Staff. I understand this is not really feasible given the current codebase, but since soon this website will have a better technical backbone, I'd hope such a process can be established.
In a completely unrelated point:
I think TASVideos should introduce a proper process for movie _depublication_ (or retraction). For depublication, I mean the action of delisting a currently published movie and potentially retracting its acceptance.
If we expect the webiste to grow and receive an influx of new movies in the future, we need to account for the fact that the current review system is not infalible. Movies that fail to comply with rules or Codes of Conduct (which, tbh, maybe we should look into adopting as well) but manage to make it past the review process should be able to be delisted and removed from publication, at discretion from Staff. I understand this is not really feasible given the current codebase, but since soon this website will have a better technical backbone, I'd hope such a process can be established.
There was already a lot of debate about it, http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=472406
You end up with "oh oopies some emulator inaccuracy (probably most common way for movies to be "invalid") means we're removing your movie" which is not a very fun concept to deal with, especially when the authors can't exactly anticipate that hey some years later we found out your movie is invalid because some glitch you used relied on bad emulator.
Also other problems listed in that thread, but that's a big reason why we shouldn't allow unpublications due to breaking movie rules.
(Also, obsoletion gives the wanted effect anyways and is what's typically used for "invalid" movies)
In a completely unrelated point:
I think TASVideos should introduce a proper process for movie _depublication_ (or retraction). For depublication, I mean the action of delisting a currently published movie and potentially retracting its acceptance.
If we expect the webiste to grow and receive an influx of new movies in the future, we need to account for the fact that the current review system is not infalible. Movies that fail to comply with rules or Codes of Conduct (which, tbh, maybe we should look into adopting as well) but manage to make it past the review process should be able to be delisted and removed from publication, at discretion from Staff. I understand this is not really feasible given the current codebase, but since soon this website will have a better technical backbone, I'd hope such a process can be established.
There was already a lot of debate about it, http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=472406
You end up with "oh oopies some emulator inaccuracy (probably most common way for movies to be "invalid") means we're removing your movie" which is not a very fun concept to deal with, especially when the authors can't exactly anticipate that hey some years later we found out your movie is invalid because some glitch you used relied on bad emulator.
Also other problems listed in that thread, but that's a big reason why we shouldn't allow unpublications due to breaking movie rules.
(Also, obsoletion gives the wanted effect anyways and is what's typically used for "invalid" movies)
OK, this is fair, so I think I'll have to be a bit more specific.
As you correctly point out, an issue such as a movie relying on an emulation error can and is easily fixable by obsoletion. However, and this is why I believe delisting is important, not all issues can be solved by obsoletion. Allow me to present a couple examples.
Let's say, just as a theoretical example, that a movie gets submitted by author X and accepted, but during publication process we find out that the movie was plagiarized and belongs to someone else. This is a clear violation of our movie rules that require proper crediting. From what I've gathered, what would happen here if the movie was already published is that it would be modified to credit its proper author. However, that implicitly assumes that said author consents to their movie, which they did not submit, to be in this website. And said author could have completely legitimate reasons to not want their movie published. Do we just go against the author's wishes, probably guaranteeing that they won't even want to submit to the site again? This would certainly be a problem, because we clearly like what they do (we accepted a movie made by them, after all). The proper solution, if the author does not want the movie to be published, is to delist it. Maybe the author themself will end up submitting something else, or an improvement to this one, but if we fail to have a solution for this case, we might push away an author that under other circumstances would be featured in the site.
For another, completely random case, let's assume that a published movie contains a racial slur as part of its gameplay input. Note that I here say gameplay input and not dialogue or cutscenes, so let's assume this was a deliberate part of input in a movie that otherwise would not have such words. Obviously, such a movie would probably not get accepted, but if for some reason it does, a way to remove it should exist. And even if another submission existed for the same game that removes that word from the input, it doesn't solve the problem: the problem is not that the movie is not entertaining or suboptimal, the problem is that it contains language that should not exist in our site and that actively pushes people away. It is an ethical problem, and cannot be solved by technical solutions such as obsoleting the movie.
Of course, you know very well that the second case exists. I don't even need to tell you which movie it is.
Obsoletion is a fine solution for technical problems with submissions, but not all problems with submissions are technical, and those who are not cannot be solved by obsoletion. This is where a proper delisting system is needed, to solve what our current systems cannot solve.
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ikuyo wrote:
Let's say, just as a theoretical example, that a movie gets submitted by author X and accepted, but during publication process we find out that the movie was plagiarized and belongs to someone else. This is a clear violation of our movie rules that require proper crediting. From what I've gathered, what would happen here if the movie was already published is that it would be modified to credit its proper author. However, that implicitly assumes that said author consents to their movie, which they did not submit, to be in this website. And said author could have completely legitimate reasons to not want their movie published. Do we just go against the author's wishes, probably guaranteeing that they won't even want to submit to the site again? This would certainly be a problem, because we clearly like what they do (we accepted a movie made by them, after all). The proper solution, if the author does not want the movie to be published, is to delist it. Maybe the author themself will end up submitting something else, or an improvement to this one, but if we fail to have a solution for this case, we might push away an author that under other circumstances would be featured in the site.
This is worth brainstorming when it happens. I can't guarantee that we will have resources on figuring out potential problems in advance (we might). We used to invent rules in advance, for years. It's very exhausting and hard, results in bloated Movie Rules, and then we may still throw that rule away because reality changes or something obsoletes our prior knowledge.
ikuyo wrote:
For another, completely random case, let's assume that a published movie contains a racial slur as part of its gameplay input. Note that I here say gameplay input and not dialogue or cutscenes, so let's assume this was a deliberate part of input in a movie that otherwise would not have such words. Obviously, such a movie would probably not get accepted, but if for some reason it does, a way to remove it should exist. And even if another submission existed for the same game that removes that word from the input, it doesn't solve the problem: the problem is not that the movie is not entertaining or suboptimal, the problem is that it contains language that should not exist in our site and that actively pushes people away. It is an ethical problem, and cannot be solved by technical solutions such as obsoleting the movie.
I didn't know it was pushing people away.
There are examples of disclaimers that try to preserve the artistic part. We don't have a Movie Rule for this, but we have a Site Rule saying:
Additionally, this site is frequented by people of various races, nationalities, and sexualities. Hate speech will not be tolerated.
In Family Feud's case, I don't think we can conclude from the context of that movie that the slur was used as an instance of hate speech. But I don't have exhausting knowledge about this subject.
Overall, I feel like every situation when we could want to unpublish something is unique enough, involves different issues, and there can not be a generic solution. But if there is a consensus that we need to hide some publications, we'll probably implement hiding them.
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.
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feos wrote:
In Family Feud's case, I don't think we can conclude from the context of that movie that the slur was used as an instance of hate speech.
It may not be hate speech, but many people are still uncomfortable with using that word in the first place. (I conjecture that this is because people tried to pass off hate speech by rules-lawyering that their use of the word is actually "technically" not hate speech, so the norm just evolved to banning all usages of the word entirely.)
Also some context that may be relevant: I made an announcement on the Tool-Assisted Speedruns Out of Context Twitter that we wouldn't be posting anything from Heisanevilgenius's TAS because of the slur, as we kept getting it submitted over and over again. Numerous people in the replies expressed bewilderment that this site would accept such a TAS. I don't know if it's actively pushing people away (it's hard to tell when the effects are a lack of something, not the presence of it), but it's certainly not a good look.
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Fortranm wrote:
From what I understand - and please correct me if I’m wrong - the status of the player character in this game is, for the lack of better words, static, for most part. The acquisition of those 16 stars and the traverse inside Bowser stages, aka the absolute majority of this movie, are seemingly identical to their counterparts in a run 120 stars run (from what I vaguely remember) and simply arranged in a different order to my untrained eyes because of how “static” the player character is. In other words, it hardly provides anything not in an any% movie or an 120 star movie.
By that logic, we shouldn't carry any% runs of any game at all, because everything in any% would also be in 100%, just with the same "static" character.
Also, you may want to actually familiarize yourself with your arguments before you make them. Looking up logical fallacies on Wikipedia and trying to focus on arguing techniques can only get you so far if you don't even bother to research the other words you're saying, and honestly it just makes you look like a person who only cares about "winning" internet arguments.
Do I find these 16 stars runs enjoyable by themselves? I do,
You should've just stopped here, because this is all that should matter. If you claim to enjoy 16 star runs, why can't we have them published alongside the other movies? Why exactly do you come to TASvideos if not to watch entertaining content? That's been the goal of the site since the very beginning, and it's going to remain a goal going forward, so why argue against content that people, including yourself, find entertaining?
but that doesn’t mean I would be eager to watch them knowing how it they don’t add much of anything over any% and 100% movies in this game. If I’m a newcomer, I definitely would appreciate the fact that there isn’t a 16 star movie listed along the other ones.
How, exactly, would you "appreciate" it? Are you actually sitting there thinking "Boy howdy, am I sure glad TASvideos didn't publish a 16 star run of Super Mario 64"? And what makes you think other people would appreciate it? Surely there are people coming here specifically looking for a 16 star TAS, because the concept of a highly optimized 16 star run is appealing to them, and a site literally called "TASvideos" must surely have a TAS from arguably the most popular speedgame of all time, right? Would those newcomers appreciate the fact that we do not in fact have one, and haven't had one since 2007?
I don’t see how there is a tendency of “tell our audience what they want”, especially when that submission from 2011 has 36 No votes against 31 Yes votes.
2011 TASvideos was a cesspool. It was pre-Vault, still stuck in the days where the game itself had to be entertaining to even be published at all. The 2011 audience was made up of different people with different ideas about the site, and to be blunt, those ideas were absolute trash.
It doesn't surprise me that the previous 16 star TAS was rejected with a slight majority of No votes, because TASvideos was never going to accept it in the first place. Our rules did not account for it back then, those rules reflected on the community, and the community turned against the run as a result. We were a lot more strict on content 10 years ago, and speaking up against that was generally repressed by the dozens of people who were still deeply rooted in the mindset that we had to police everything that comes in as heavily as we did. I definitely tried to speak up, but I was always met with a flood of people who just followed the status quo to the letter. Becoming staff in 2015 was even worse, because I found myself having a bigger voice, but I was being repressed even more than before. Nach was gaslighting the staff into thinking that his views were the site's views, and that the site needed to stay that way or else it would die, that bounced around within the staff and only furthered a highly negative culture within itself, which once again reflected on the community.
There are merits in this category existing for RTA because, for obvious reasons, doing a 16 stars run is very different from doing a 120 stars run for a player. However, when the real time factor is removed, that simply doesn’t seem to be the case. “Incredibly popular in RTA” doesn’t make it a reasonable TAS goal choice. As much as RTA and TASing overlaps, they are still very different things. “This category is well-accepted for RTA” is a bad argument in general for this very reason.
You've pretty much proven my point here. Your posting here has been nothing but you trying to speak for the community and forcing everyone else to want what you want. You're literally saying a goal choice is "unreasonable", and that is the absolute last thing we should be telling people, especially newcomers to the site. In my opinion, there's merit to every category existing, in both RTA and TAS. New categories means new ways of thinking about a game, new strategies for dealing with the differences, potentially things that could make it into bigger categories, revolutionizing the game and the speedrun for years to come. There is nothing unreasonable about innovation.
With all these said, I do agree that we can be open to more categories,
Clearly you don't, given that you are literally calling them unreasonable and saying that you wouldn't support them despite how much you enjoy watching them.
Let me get this straight. You're not okay with Super Mario 64 "16 stars", a run that accomplishes a clear goal using a different, but slower route to other published runs, but you would be okay with multiple Super Metroid "low%" runs that accomplish the same clear goal using different, but slower routes? And you're also okay with both Aria of Sorrow 100% runs being published alongside each other, despite the fact that they accomplish the same clear goal but one uses a different and slower route to the other? How does this make any sense? Is there a key difference here aside from the goal choices? Why should the goal choice matter at all when you're perfectly fine with the concept in general?
Be honest with me: Your entire argument here is based off the fact that you don't like Super Mario 64, isn't it?
With all due respect, why such a bad example of all things was chosen to prove a point is beyond me.
I sincerely doubt you respect me, and that's fine. You don't have to pretend that you do.
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.
So, being not all that familiar with Super Mario 64...
I understand the point of a 120-star run, or a zero-star (or minimal-star) run, or a fastest run regardless of amount of stars collected. That's basically 100%, low%, and any% for this game. I'm sure there are other viable goals for this game, too.
Now about 16 stars, though. I doubt most people find it entertaining to have 121 separate movies, one for each quantity of stars. So that begs the question: why not 15 stars or 17 stars? And I don't know. Apparently the stars in the Bowser stage don't count, so the category actually is "collect 16 stars before the Bowser stage". But there's a 30-star door before that stage. So the category actually is "collect 16 stars before the Bowser stage, and skip the 30-star door with the MIPS glitch but not another glitch, and do not use this MIPS glitch in other places".
If that is a valid goal, why isn't it a valid goal to "collect 13 stars before the Cool, Cool Mountain level, and skip the 50-star door with the BLJ glitch but not another glitch, and do not use this BLJ glitch in other places"? Or other mad-libs variants of the above. Now I fully admit I may be missing something about SMB64, but "that's how we used to do it when we knew less about this game" doesn't strike me as a compelling reason for a separate branch.
I'm all for expanding the site goal, but I still don't feel the site would be improved by allowing e.g. no-glitch, or one-glitch, or low-score, or low-key-press, or no-left-plus-right as distinct runs for e.g. Super Mario Bros. It's just too easy to make up goals like that that end up looking pretty similar to already-established goals, and having two or more runs that look indistinguishable to layman doesn't strike me as entertaining. $.02
So, being not all that familiar with Super Mario 64
Now about 16 stars, though. I doubt most people find it entertaining to have 121 separate movies, one for each quantity of stars. So that begs the question: why not 15 stars or 17 stars? And I don't know.
The category is 16 stars because you need to collect 15 stars to spawn MIPS and you need to collect Board Bowser's Sub in Dire Dire Docks to make DDD entry go further back in the hallway and grant you access to Bowser in the Fire Sea. You need access to BitFS to get the key to upstairs, which is required to beat the game.
Radiant wrote:
Apparently the stars in the Bowser stage don't count, so the category actually is "collect 16 stars before the Bowser stage". But there's a 30-star door before that stage. So the category actually is "collect 16 stars before the Bowser stage, and skip the 30-star door with the MIPS glitch but not another glitch, and do not use this MIPS glitch in other places".
You cannot use MIPS clip anywhere else because you cannot move MIPS upstairs. Upstairs is not loaded until Mario has the 2nd key and opens the door, and the door animation triggers a loading zone. Said loading zone resets objects and unloads MIPS. It is _impossible_ to use MIPS for any door upstairs, since you can't bring it from base level and there's no MIPS (or any grabbable object for that matter) upstairs.
Now, if you ask "why don't you use MIPS directly to get upstairs" the problem is that the action that triggers the loading zone behind the door is Mario actually opening it. You can make it past the door, but there's just a dummy room that looks like the spiral staircase to keep the illusion of a single connected castle. And the only way to force Mario up the door is to enter the opening door animation, which can only happen if Mario has the second key. This is why 1 Key is as low as Mario 64 will ever get in terms of completion.
You could argue that the only purpose of 16 stars as a route was to show MIPS clip, and yes, I agree. And I think that's good! Several runs exist with the explicit purpose of showcasing stuff that would otherwise not be seen. My own Iconoclasts submission exists so I can show you things like a fully sequence broken Tower, a Black battle that took me almost a week to optimize on its own, and the powerful Quantum Leaps that don't get used anywhere else in the run!
And, ultimately, regarding SM64, if anything, I'd like input from the SM64 TASing community. Doesn't it strike people as odd that SM64 TASers, one of the largest TASing communities, which holds competitions and activities yearly to this day, has minimal overlap with this community? Isn't it strange that one of the largest active TASing collectives is not here to say this themselves and people who literally have only one submission have to say it? Shouldn't that be read as a failure of this website?
And, ultimately, regarding SM64, if anything, I'd like input from the SM64 TASing community. Doesn't it strike people as odd that SM64 TASers, one of the largest TASing communities, which holds competitions and activities yearly to this day, has minimal overlap with this community? Isn't it strange that one of the largest active TASing collectives is not here to say this themselves and people who literally have only one submission have to say it? Shouldn't that be read as a failure of this website?
I fail to see how this is a sign of failure by itself. It doesn’t sound surprising for a group that cares more about one game in particular and one that cares more about TASing in general to not have much overlap as the focuses and interests can be very different, especially when either side has enough size, and that’s perfectly fine.
Samsara wrote:
By that logic, we shouldn't carry any% runs of any game at all, because everything in any% would also be in 100%, just with the same "static" character.
Except that’s often not the case, and any% and 100% are there for all eligible games to serve the purpose of archiving, which is not the topic of discussion here.
Samsara wrote:
You should've just stopped here, because this is all that should matter. If you claim to enjoy 16 star runs, why can't we have them published alongside the other movies? Why exactly do you come to TASvideos if not to watch entertaining content? That's been the goal of the site since the very beginning, and it's going to remain a goal going forward, so why argue against content that people, including yourself, find entertaining?
How, exactly, would you "appreciate" it? Are you actually sitting there thinking "Boy howdy, am I sure glad TASvideos didn't publish a 16 star run of Super Mario 64"? And what makes you think other people would appreciate it? Surely there are people coming here specifically looking for a 16 star TAS, because the concept of a highly optimized 16 star run is appealing to them, and a site literally called "TASvideos" must surely have a TAS from arguably the most popular speedgame of all time, right? Would those newcomers appreciate the fact that we do not in fact have one, and haven't had one since 2007?
I most likely wouldn’t have watched the runs if not for the purpose of this discussion, and my expectation wasn’t betrayed. I said they are enjoyable “by themselves”, and guess what? That is the equivalence of the assumption of ideal environment in physics.
Yes it is wrong to say the results are completely impractical but this is just a meme and it's good enough to help illustrate the point here.
The entertainment value of a thing more often than not exists in relation to the external world. If there really are 121 categories with one for each quantity of stars, one might still find each of them entertaining by themselves, but does that mean the same person in question is likely to enjoy watching all of them? Is it a good idea to include all 121 of them after all to account for the possibility of someone looking for each of them?
If uniqueness as a factor is ignored completely, we will immediately run into a paradox where a slight alteration of a highly entertaining movie is still entertaining, and the smaller the alteration is, the more “equally” entertaining they are! In fact, if we publish the current "1 key" movie again completely unchanged under the label “0 stars / low%”, it will double the amount of entertainment this site has to offer from that one movie file!
Or does it?
Samsara wrote:
You're literally saying a goal choice is "unreasonable", and that is the absolute last thing we should be telling people, especially newcomers to the site. In my opinion, there's merit to every category existing, in both RTA and TAS. New categories means new ways of thinking about a game, new strategies for dealing with the differences, potentially things that could make it into bigger categories, revolutionizing the game and the speedrun for years to come. There is nothing unreasonable about innovation.
Then what is stopping us from have 121 categories for this game? And why is the 16 stars category being discussed specifically?
Part of what I said is in response to your argument of it being a good example with being “incredibly popular in RTA” as one of the reasons. There are plenty of games with RTA categories involving playing a game up to a certain point with the result being identical to a partial any% for most part, and again, in a lot, if not most, of these cases the factors that make the category exist for RTA in first place rely on the fact that things are done in real-time. Being “incredibly popular in RTA” is bad argument for accepting a branch for a TAS. Period.
Samsara wrote:
You've pretty much proven my point here. Your posting here has been nothing but you trying to speak for the community and forcing everyone else to want what you want.
I can’t speak for an entire group of people. Of course I can’t. However, the whole point of discussion is to share reasoning with each other, and there is nothing stopping people who think otherwise from sharing theirs. As subjective as perception is, stuff like uniqueness is something that can be quantified in a relatively objective manner. Moreover, how am I, and others who provide feedback like this, not part of the “community”, whatever that refers to? While one can’t speak for everyone, there are mechanisms like polling to show quantified feedback from a pool…
Oh wait.
Samsara wrote:
It doesn't surprise me that the previous 16 star TAS was rejected with a slight majority of No votes, because TASvideos was never going to accept it in the first place. Our rules did not account for it back then, those rules reflected on the community, and the community turned against the run as a result. ...Nach was gaslighting the staff into thinking that his views were the site's views, and that the site needed to stay that way or else it would die, that bounced around within the staff and only furthered a highly negative culture within itself, which once again reflected on the community.
Trying to reason is trying to speak for the community and forcing everyone else to want what I want, according to you, but when there are mechanisms for feedback, those still don’t count because, for some reason, they must be a simple reflection of the rules at the time and have little to no value? If those aren’t meaningful in showing consensus, then what is?
I hope you aren’t implying that opinions of any sort only count when they align with yours.
Samsara wrote:
Let me get this straight. You're not okay with Super Mario 64 "16 stars", a run that accomplishes a clear goal using a different, but slower route to other published runs, but you would be okay with multiple Super Metroid "low%" runs that accomplish the same clear goal using different, but slower routes? And you're also okay with both Aria of Sorrow 100% runs being published alongside each other, despite the fact that they accomplish the same clear goal but one uses a different and slower route to the other? How does this make any sense? Is there a key difference here aside from the goal choices? Why should the goal choice matter at all when you're perfectly fine with the concept in general?
Be honest with me: Your entire argument here is based off the fact that you don't like Super Mario 64, isn't it?
I don’t dislike this game for sure, but I don’t like it enough to want to watch a 16 stars movie, in the shapes it can be at this point that is, when I have or can watch a 120 stars movie. But I did mention that I see more point in having “120 stars, no BLJ” than that if allowing more categories is what we are talking about. The point is that using “old route” as the very definition of a branch is not a good idea, and the examples provided aren’t even good for this purpose either.
I listed those as examples of having more branches, not using a “route” as a goal in of itself. As I said, a route is the path from a starting point to a destination, and “forging a set of mechanisms consistently throughout the run” is part of the goal. I even said more than once that there can possibly be more clearly defined goals that end up having the “16 stars” route as the optimal path; it’s just that the other things about the result, from what we know as of now, make it not a good choice for a published branch at least in my opinion.
Samsara wrote:
Clearly you don't, given that you are literally calling them unreasonable and saying that you wouldn't support them despite how much you enjoy watching them.
The idea that I’m not supportive of having more categories because I think “them”, assuming you mean the the ones you listed, are unreasonable is a false dichotomy. The ones you listed aren’t the only choices for more branches to have, right?
FYI, I point out fallacies because I spot them. The link to Wikipedia is for the convenience of whoever gets to read this. :D
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Radiant wrote:
Now about 16 stars, though. I doubt most people find it entertaining to have 121 separate movies, one for each quantity of stars.
Now I fully admit I may be missing something about SMB64, but "that's how we used to do it when we knew less about this game" doesn't strike me as a compelling reason for a separate branch.
I'm all for expanding the site goal, but I still don't feel the site would be improved by allowing e.g. no-glitch, or one-glitch, or low-score, or low-key-press, or no-left-plus-right as distinct runs for e.g. Super Mario Bros. It's just too easy to make up goals like that that end up looking pretty similar to already-established goals, and having two or more runs that look indistinguishable to layman doesn't strike me as entertaining. $.02
Look at this from a different angle. How many different+entertaining branches would TASers want to make for a given game? At what point will they say "Okay there are a few more wild goals we could do but they are entirely esoteric even from our POV"? At which point will new branches stop entertaining even the target audience of that game?
For almost 2 decades we used to answer that it doesn't matter. All we cared about was general audience. Now obviously I'm not advocating throwing general audience out of the window. But can't we finally start meeting somewhere in-between? It's the only way to embrace the hobby as a whole, which will make the community more stable and vivid.
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.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Fortranm wrote:
I fail to see how this is a sign of failure by itself. It doesn’t sound surprising for a group that cares more about one game in particular and one that cares more about TASing in general to not have much overlap as the focuses and interests can be very different, especially when either side has enough size, and that’s perfectly fine.
See we're asking ourselves a question if this is exactly what is best for both communities. It's fine if it has to be that way, but who gets to decide how it is in the end? We do! All of us, as a community. We're basically rewriting the site from scratch, so it makes sense to rewrite the policies to better serve the hobby, to make it more fun if that's possible.
To answer directly, it may or may not be a sign of failure considering former (probably outdated) goals of the site, but we should also check if it makes sense to preserve this situation in the future as well.
Fortranm wrote:
The entertainment value of a thing more often than not exists in relation to the external world. If there really are 121 categories with one for each quantity of stars, one might still find each of them entertaining by themselves, but does that mean the same person in question is likely to enjoy watching all of them? Is it a good idea to include all 121 of them after all to account for the possibility of someone looking for each of them?
If uniqueness as a factor is ignored completely, we will immediately run into a paradox where a slight alteration of a highly entertaining movie is still entertaining, and the smaller the alteration is, the more “equally” entertaining they are! In fact, if we publish the current "1 key" movie again completely unchanged under the label “0 stars / low%”, it will double the amount of entertainment this site has to offer from that one movie file!
Or does it?
Uniqueness is going to remain a factor, and slight alterations of some goal may be treated as speed-entertainment tradeoffs within the same goal that's different enough from other goals.
Once again over the years the whole goal of the site was to minimize branches. Different branches could obsolete one another not even because they're nearly identical, but because there's just "too many" of them. Some of this was fixed by unobsoletions years ago. But the stated goal is still minimizing them.
So we ask ourselves if it's a good idea in general to aim for this. Isn't our goal providing room for TASers and their audience to have fun together? If there's enough people interested in working on some esoteric goal, and enough people willing to watch and enjoy it, why do we need to limit them explicitly? Only allowing the very best of the very best results in too many instances of hard TAS work to be disregarded due to formal policies that we don't know if they are still relevant after almost 2 decades.
We ask TASers to think outside the box, but we should do the same with our policies too! I'm saying this as a person who managed to keep the status quo as a senior judge for 3.5 years, while finding reasons why some rule needs tweaking and another should stay as is. Also as a person who managed to improve a few of our policies over the years, I say that if the barrier is too high, people will get exhausted and demotivated.
Fortranm wrote:
Part of what I said is in response to your argument of it being a good example with being “incredibly popular in RTA” as one of the reasons. There are plenty of games with RTA categories involving playing a game up to a certain point with the result being identical to a partial any% for most part, and again, in a lot, if not most, of these cases the factors that make the category exist for RTA in first place rely on the fact that things are done in real-time. Being “incredibly popular in RTA” is bad argument for accepting a branch for a TAS. Period.
Yeah I should say that popularity of some branch among RTA players does play a role in the end. Because people keep competing, keep finding new tricks, which makes the category still relevant in a TAS too. Since long ago there's nice synergy between the 2 scenes, so I'd like to support it more.
Fortranm wrote:
Samsara wrote:
It doesn't surprise me that the previous 16 star TAS was rejected with a slight majority of No votes, because TASvideos was never going to accept it in the first place. Our rules did not account for it back then, those rules reflected on the community, and the community turned against the run as a result. ...Nach was gaslighting the staff into thinking that his views were the site's views, and that the site needed to stay that way or else it would die, that bounced around within the staff and only furthered a highly negative culture within itself, which once again reflected on the community.
when there are mechanisms for feedback, those still don’t count because, for some reason, they must be a simple reflection of the rules at the time and have little to no value? If those aren’t meaningful in showing consensus, then what is?
The main questions are:
1) Has anything changed since then?
2) Should it?
3) Why?
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.
I have and my point of stands. A lot of RTA categories don't even make much sense once the real time factors are removed and vice versa.
It is true that a popular category in RTA tend to have more people trying to improve the routing and the findings can improve a TAS with a similar goal choice in some cases. Even then, this is more of a case where two things effectively have correlation in results, not that a popular RTA category automatically makes a reasonable TAS category and vice versa.
Moreover, even this potential benefit is hindered when we are talking about using an old "route" as the goal in of itself, as that is already a major handicap on routing improvement. The very concept of using an old route for the sake of it seems to be against major changes to a great extent.
Game modes of a same game should be accepted side by side even if they don't have many differences as they are considered as different game modes by developpers/creators of the game since they can be chosen by the player on the menu of the game or whatever. The only exception would be fighting games as the choice of your character is a part of the gameplay.
How do you define what is and what isn't a mode?
I took my time to think about it and used as a basis the definition that we can find in french here.
This is my proposition to define a game mode :
game modes are the different ways the user can choose to play from the menu before starting to play.
Depending on the context, it can designate the number of simultaneous players or the type of gameplay sought (when the game offers a choice).
This fix the problem of fighting games but can maybe also add the difficulty choice problem in the discussion... This is only a WIP and this needs some discussions and feedback.
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ViGadeomes wrote:
I took my time to think about it and used as a basis the definition that we can find in french here.
This is my proposition to define a game mode :
game modes are the different ways the user can choose to play from the menu before starting to play.
Depending on the context, it can designate the number of simultaneous players or the type of gameplay sought (when the game offers a choice).
This fix the problem of fighting games but can maybe also add the difficulty choice problem in the discussion... This is only a WIP and this needs some discussions and feedback.
Difficulty, as well as all sorts of options like game speed, colors, audio. What if some option allows a high number of variants of the same stat? Do we allow every variant? On top of every other variant of every other option?
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.
I took my time to think about it and used as a basis the definition that we can find in french here.
This is my proposition to define a game mode :
game modes are the different ways the user can choose to play from the menu before starting to play.
Depending on the context, it can designate the number of simultaneous players or the type of gameplay sought (when the game offers a choice).
This fix the problem of fighting games but can maybe also add the difficulty choice problem in the discussion... This is only a WIP and this needs some discussions and feedback.
Difficulty, as well as all sorts of options like game speed, colors, audio. What if some option allows a high number of variants of the same stat? Do we allow every variant? On top of every other variant of every other option?
I think this problem ultimately solves itself because it has to be justified in video submissions. As in "you can submit whatever you want, just be prepared to explain it and make it interesting for judges".
I think this problem ultimately solves itself because it has to be justified in video submissions. As in "you can submit whatever you want, just be prepared to explain it and make it interesting for judges".
This is how I've always thought about it. I feel that the workbench does a good job of filtering out bad or uninteresting submissions already, without worrying about movie rules. In general, I think rules about the content of a TAS should be less restrictive so there are more good TASes being submitted and accepted to the site. But if a TAS in the workbench is too similar to a published one, people will be quick to point that out no matter what the rules say. So I don't think there needs to be a rule about that because the audience will decide anyway if it's not interesting or different enough for the site.
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ikuyo wrote:
I think this problem ultimately solves itself because it has to be justified in video submissions. As in "you can submit whatever you want, just be prepared to explain it and make it interesting for judges".
The discussion is about allowing all modes for Standard. I don't think it's a good idea to make acceptability depend on how well an author can explain it. That doesn't feel appropriate for "common, objective goals" that should be "as objective as possible". I don't even know what the spirit of the rule would be, so I won't be able to direct the conversation in case people have contradicting opinions.
FitterSpace wrote:
This is how I've always thought about it. I feel that the workbench does a good job of filtering out bad or uninteresting submissions already, without worrying about movie rules. In general, I think rules about the content of a TAS should be less restrictive so there are more good TASes being submitted and accepted to the site. But if a TAS in the workbench is too similar to a published one, people will be quick to point that out no matter what the rules say. So I don't think there needs to be a rule about that because the audience will decide anyway if it's not interesting or different enough for the site.
Then I don't see the reason to exclude character choice from allowed goals. But again, we can't allow all modes for standard and then say "actually we'll be deciding fully from feedback what is actually acceptable, every time". One of the fundamental problems with Vault and tiers in general that led to revamping the entire system to depend on feedback less is that it's VERY hard to get enough definitive feedback every time it's needed. And people who can be convinced to post still don't represent opinion of the entire community, so next year the feedback on the same situation can be completely different because different people happened to be around.
Tiers were replaced with classes to mitigate the "borderline hell" situation, when people just can't agree on something that in general makes sense. But whether or not something makes sense still has to be decided on a more generic level, only then it will make sense to accept it without unnecessary scrutiny.
Personally I can't say that blindly accepting all modes makes sense to me. And only accepting those that get feedback agreement, means it doesn't feel like an obvious and popular, standard goal.
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.
Personally I can't say that blindly accepting all modes makes sense to me. And only accepting those that get feedback agreement, means it doesn't feel like an obvious and popular, standard goal.
This is something I didn't really consider. I guess what I mean is that there should be rules for how things are organized but I think it's okay to bend the rules if a submissions comes around that challenges it. You're right that workbench submissions don't always get a lot of feedback, and that feedback can change based on who happened to post at the time, so that can't be the only way publications are decided.
In the past, TASVideos had rigid rules and it was annoying to deal with. But from what I can tell it looks like TASVideos is moving in a more inclusive direction, and I fully support that. So I think you all are doing a good job. I don't have any strong opinions about specific rules (that I can think of), just the rules in general. As long as the rules are more inclusive and can change with the times, I'm good.
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Fortranm wrote:
I have and my point of stands. A lot of RTA categories don't even make much sense once the real time factors are removed and vice versa.
It is true that a popular category in RTA tend to have more people trying to improve the routing and the findings can improve a TAS with a similar goal choice in some cases. Even then, this is more of a case where two things effectively have correlation in results, not that a popular RTA category automatically makes a reasonable TAS category and vice versa.
Moreover, even this potential benefit is hindered when we are talking about using an old "route" as the goal in of itself, as that is already a major handicap on routing improvement. The very concept of using an old route for the sake of it seems to be against major changes to a great extent.
I never necessarily wanted "popular in RTA" to be the sole reason we accept a category, but when you really think about it, doesn't "popular in RTA" imply that a large community consensus has been reached about that goal making sense? In that regard, it would never actually be the sole reason for a category's existence. There's almost always going to be entirely reasonable factors for why RTA runners gravitate towards certain categories, and the ones that don't seem to make sense are usually fairly obvious as to why that is. Even then, I don't want to stop people from TASing whatever they want.
Ultimately, nobody on TASvideos should be policing what gets submitted to us before it even gets submitted to us, especially if their reasoning is "Your category is unreasonable to TAS": Not only does it heavily stifle TASers' personal freedom, but it actively drives them away and serves to further the belief that we're nothing but elitists who make terrible decisions. We're not like that anymore, we're explicitly trying to move away from our past elitism as fast as we possibly can.
As feos said, there's nice synergy between TAS and RTA now, and we need to support it as much as we can. We're long past the days where we had to try and stand out from RTA. We want both communities to co-exist happily and constantly benefit each other going forward. I want someone from an RTA community to come here, submit a TAS of a category they run, and not immediately be told that what they did was "unreasonable". There is no such thing as an "unreasonable" TAS. Period. If we reject that theoretical TAS, it has to be with sound, agreeable reasoning that the author agrees with as much as we do.
ikuyo wrote:
I think this problem ultimately solves itself because it has to be justified in video submissions. As in "you can submit whatever you want, just be prepared to explain it and make it interesting for judges".
I agree with this, though I'd personally word it slightly differently.
The way I see it, if it makes sense to the author to make and submit, it should make sense to us as well. If it doesn't make sense to us, we need to figure out why that's the case, and I think the key piece of that process is asking ourselves why it doesn't make sense instead of making the author justify it. People generally submit in good faith, hardly anyone intends to cause a kerfuffle with a submission.
Most importantly to me, no newcomer is coming here expecting to have to justify what they did like they're being interrogated by the police, so I don't really think we should be making them do that.
FitterSpace wrote:
I guess what I mean is that there should be rules for how things are organized but I think it's okay to bend the rules if a submissions comes around that challenges it. You're right that workbench submissions don't always get a lot of feedback, and that feedback can change based on who happened to post at the time, so that can't be the only way publications are decided.
This ties in to my point as well. The rules we have in place should universally make sense to everyone, but those rules shouldn't always be universally applied to every submission, and people should be allowed to challenge them at will, whether it be through discussion or submission.
All of our "hard rules" for rejection - low optimization, unfixable desyncs, poor emulation, et cetera - involve things outside of the actual game or category. Any other rule can and should be bent and shaped to accommodate new submissions if these "softer" rules are the only things """""wrong""""" with those submissions.
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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Samsara wrote:
If we reject that theoretical TAS, it has to be with sound, agreeable reasoning that the author agrees with as much as we do.
This is incredibly true! How else are we ever gonna inspire people to make better movies? Only by showing them a better path towards their own goal!
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.
Difficulty, as well as all sorts of options like game speed, colors, audio. What if some option allows a high number of variants of the same stat? Do we allow every variant? On top of every other variant of every other option?
I didn't mean this kind of options (cosmetic changes as I ever saw this called) as part as what I was calling a Game Mode. I don't really know how to word it tho... I understand the trouble of defining such thing.
I consider them as settings under the options of the game and not a Game Mode.
What I see beeing a Game Mode is really on the first menu of a game where there are defined choices before the pre-gameplay(name...) or the gameplay.
A new game mode can also be unlockable after beating another game mode like this is the case of #7264: Tarion's GBA Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance "Juste, Boss Rush" in 05:01.34.
A New Game+ could also be another Game Mode if this is clearly obvious in the main menu before starting the game.
Concerning difficulty, even if I don't consider this setting as a clear Game Mode, I have some thoughts about accepting more difficulties TASes for the same game if it doesn't only change what we normally see in games with this setting : anything that have to do with our HPs, HP of ennemies/bosses, more aggressive AI/ennemies/bosses ...) I am thinking about games that remove some levels in eazier difficulties for example but this is not our subject right now.
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This is clearer indeed, and I don't have enough gaming outlook to recall games where the main menu has tweaks to the same global mode. I'm afraid there may be, and since we're switching from hard rule based approach to guideline based, it's better to have some helpful list of things defining the spirit of our rule: things that make a mode make sense to be its own branch regardless. Things to look for when we're not exactly sure. Things that make it obvious it's a separate mode. Known example is when a mode is a separate level set.
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.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
I forgot to mention this a week ago, but rule changes will most likely not start going through until we've all settled into the new site, as the staff are primarily focusing on site changes. That, of course, doesn't mean you should all stop suggesting/discussing things! Now pardon me while I copy/paste this into other threads, changing the words slightly so it looks more like I'm not doing that.
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:
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Let's get back to SM64 shall we? I started thinking about how we would branch them so 16-star route makes the most sense, and I found myself wondering why we even mention stars in branches that don't aim to maximize them.
https://tasvideos.org/Games/PublicationHistory/246
"All 120 stars" is clear in that its goal is getting all stars, and the number is iconic.
What about "70 stars, no BLJ"? Can you get less stars without BLJ?
What about "1/0 star" and "1 key"? It looks like the amount of stars and keys obtained is just a consequence of whatever route appears to be the absolute fastest. It would probably make sense to spell out the collected stars/keys if we had those as separate branches, or if it was an in-game option to collect exactly that many. But here... it looks like it's just baseline branch?
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.
From what I understand, "70 stars, no BLJ" is effectively just the standard NMG for this game. In fact, the rules on SRC for "70 stars" is just beating the game without using certain glitches.
The other ones are just any% at the time, yeah.
That's something that has been brought up here: https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/20039?CurrentPage=7&Highlight=510892#510892
Labeling the any% as something else seems to be a common practice for 2DMariogamesingeneral for some reason.
feos wrote:
I started thinking about how we would branch them so 16-star route makes the most sense...
There is this Japanese re-release that has the BLJ patched (and this is the version the Chinese localization by iQue and later ports like Super Mario 3D All-Stars based on). I wonder if "16 stars" would just be any% if done on those versions.
Yes it is wrong to say the results are completely impractical but this is just a meme and it's good enough to help illustrate the point here.
The entertainment value of a thing more often than not exists in relation to the external world. If there really are 121 categories with one for each quantity of stars, one might still find each of them entertaining by themselves, but does that mean the same person in question is likely to enjoy watching all of them? Is it a good idea to include all 121 of them after all to account for the possibility of someone looking for each of them?
If uniqueness as a factor is ignored completely, we will immediately run into a paradox where a slight alteration of a highly entertaining movie is still entertaining, and the smaller the alteration is, the more “equally” entertaining they are! In fact, if we publish the current "1 key" movie again completely unchanged under the label “0 stars / low%”, it will double the amount of entertainment this site has to offer from that one movie file!
Or does it?
