Different difficulties could lead to unique routing, and It could lead to more submissions for existing tases if easiest and hardest are allowed so i agree. Just hope the two submissions are not nearly identical. The low% for Standard sounds good to me since it has become so common for players to want to do that too.
Just hope the two submissions are not nearly identical.
This is usually the main question people have with Standard branches, and the problem with solving it in an ideal way is: if we only split them for "enough difference", then most actual reality cases will be ones with unclear difference. Most of the time it will be hard to tell if there's enough difference for them to co-exist in a given case.
So a more future-proof solution is only combining them if there's no gameplay difference at all (or if only lag is different). For example, no difference in a TAS setting may happen if the TAS avoids all the obstacles that make a difference in regular play.
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.
Just hope the two submissions are not nearly identical.
This is usually the main question people have with Standard branches, and the problem with solving it in an ideal way is: if we only split them for "enough difference", then most actual reality cases will be ones with unclear difference. Most of the time it will be hard to tell if there's enough difference for them to co-exist in a given case.
So a more future-proof solution is only combining them if there's no gameplay difference at all (or if only lag is different). For example, no difference in a TAS setting may happen if the TAS avoids all the obstacles that make a difference in regular play.
My opinion follows:
I disagree with allowing 'easier' difficulty submissions blindly. It needs to be examined case by case and only accepted when it leads to a substantially different solution. For example:
* In Mortal Kombat, using the easiest arcade mode results in a faster movie, but would be a pretty lame version of the hard mode.
* In a racing game where difficulty only affects AI opponent of the player's speed, the result is a faster movie but also a pretty lame version of its hard counterpart.
On the contrary:
* A game whose easy mode contains different (easier) levels than those in hard mode would be a perfectly acceptable submission.
I believe the judges must have the last word on whether an 'easy' version of the movie represents a substantial difference from its hardest mode and, if not, should preserve the right to reject the submission.
I disagree with allowing 'easier' difficulty submissions blindly. It needs to be examined case by case and only accepted when it leads to a substantially different solution. For example:
* In Mortal Kombat, using the easiest arcade mode results in a faster movie, but would be a pretty lame version of the hard mode.
* In a racing game where difficulty only affects AI opponent of the player's speed, the result is a faster movie but also a pretty lame version of its hard counterpart.
We spent a lot of years fighting against lame movies, the most notable example was trivial ones. Over the years, a lot of users and staff members grew tired of restricting allowed things, and having to resolve borderline cases every once in a while was only a part of the problem.
I described the history of the triviality ban in this relatively recent thread. The discussion that happened concluded that there are obviously still things we don't want to accept to Standard because it's technically hard to judge them as speedruns (non-games). But overall, if there's demand and people want to be TASing those games, there's only a limited amount of them anyway, and more importantly, we want to remain relevant as a site to not make users leave and create lots of TAS communities with rules they actually like. We want to be a universal platform for TASing because that way everyone is benefited by sharing all the common knowledge, resulting in more people working on more great movies.
So the idea I'm now advocating is if we let people do silly things they like doing, they'll end up doing great things we like as well. If "lame" movies are a problem, we need to resync our views on the general direction of the site.
The whole point of the class system is to have a few goals that don't require user feedback about their entertainment qualities, because over the years everyone got sick of having to ask for feedback for every single submission just to decide its tier. People simply stopped posting, so we decided to stop asking, for things that depend on objective fundamental in-game mechanics, which we turned into Standard goals. Goals that are subjective in nature, like "playaround" or some other esoteric combo of requirements and limitations, still depend on feedback by design and go to Alternative class if they look good. Alt won't have "lame" movies, because otherwise why even have a class for subjectively cool things?
So due to this fundamental separation of goals between the 2 classes, we simply apply different principles to their respective goals.
Standard goals are something that originates from explicit in-game options and is well established in the speedrun/TAS communities as common goals in general. We just operate on a level that's not per-game, so we have to have universal rules, not per-game ones like on SRC. Now it may in theory sound like a good idea for us to also switch to per-game rules, but we technically can't do that because we don't have enough enthusiasts around all the games our users want to TAS. A whole bunch of those games only have 1 TASer.
Alternative goals are all about case-by-case exceptions for something that people enjoy watching, much like old TASVideos. This class separation is something we evolved into over the 2 decades, I can link threads that highlight main points of that evolution if you want.
A game whose easy mode contains different (easier) levels than those in hard mode would be a perfectly acceptable submission.
That sounds like something that's always been allowed as a separate branch anyway, since it'd contain different (unique) levels.
I believe the judges must have the last word on whether an 'easy' version of the movie represents a substantial difference from its hardest mode and, if not, should preserve the right to reject the submission.
Yeah please check the threads I linked so far, and also this post (below the ruler). Everything we're currently doing in terms of policies is based on a universal consensus between uses and staff about direction of the site that had to be improved since the 2012 switch to the tier system.
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 believe the judges must have the last word on whether an 'easy' version of the movie represents a substantial difference from its hardest mode and, if not, should preserve the right to reject the submission.
What do we do if different judges have opposite opinions on whether the differences are “enough”?
Leaving it solely up to the judge who claimed the run means it’s a 50/50 chance; and the TAS author is at the whim of whoever that judge happens to be. Trying to coordinate all judges/staff opinions for any given submission is going to be difficult just getting them all to review it; which would also further increase the judging load for the staff as a whole, as well as increase the time required to judge a run.
I personally feel that it’s better to have either only one difficulty accepted (generally hardest, but not always) or to have things as the current rules are in allowing multiple difficulties side by side even if they are similar.
As I mentioned on discord: From a practicality standpoint, it’s easier to have multiple publications that may be similar yet still different than it is to determine how much difference is enough to warrant separate publications.
EDIT: I wrote this while feos was finishing his post, and didn’t see his until after i posted.
Joined: 11/14/2014
Posts: 913
Location: South Pole, True Land Down Under
Easy vs Hard...hmmmm. Samsara told me a year ago that as long as the routing of a game is different, then they are acceptable. For me, I always do the most difficult version of a game, so that people are hopefully more amazed at the results.
Take F-Zero for example...The easiest difficulty, allows for an inexperienced player to make mistakes and still be able to keep playing. For one...hitting the "sand", will not hurt your speed when using an S-Jet. On the hardest level, it affects it greatly. So an Easy run would certainly have the potential of being faster, yet not as impressive.
While I'm on that same game...how about something off subject:
Another thing about F-Zero, are different cars. Now I can understand submissions that use different one, but in the end...I like the fastest version, even though other cars can create viewer tension and put you on the edge of your seat. In a way, this can create various levels of difficulty.
In the end, I like TASes that demonstration dominance over difficultly, with the fastest mechanics possible.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence.
----
SOYZA: Are you playing a game?
NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing.
SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real?
----
Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes?
Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :)
----
BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
I think it is worth considering how RTA speedrunning leaderboards treat difficulty options here. There are certainly some which exclusively compete on harder difficulties, yes, but equally, there are some that choose to allow any difficulty option, and may indeed typically run on Easy, even when the changes to gameplay are relatively minor (e.g. Half-Life 2).
A hard movie may be more impressive for some of those games, but if someone in the speedrunning community chooses to make a TAS, it's not unlikely that they'll choose something in line with what the RTA community does if it's faster. It would be a big shame if those TASes were rejected from the site merely due to not using the highest difficulty setting.
I think difficulty should be up to author discretion unless the movies are essentially identical aside from difficulty selection. Harder difficulty is not always more interesting. For instance, in one game I'm interested in, difficulty merely increases the health of enemies and just makes it longer and more tedious to defeat them, not actually more challenging or more interesting from a TAS creation or viewer perspective.
For the recent Top Gear 2 submission that prompted this discussion, I watched both the new (Easy) movie and the current (Hard) publication side-by-side, and they are almost entirely identical. But nonetheless, author discretion makes sense to me. I do think it's an interesting case because it's not necessarily an intentional new difficulty branch, but a new improvement that happened to change the difficulty to Easy and also had a faster time partly (maybe completely?) from that difficulty change,
Easy vs Hard...hmmmm. Samsara told me a year ago that as long as the routing of a game is different, then they are acceptable.
Right, this was with old rules that treated differences in any game modes as sub-games based if the amount of inherent gameplay difference is significant. The problem is that we never had an agreed borderline on when exactly we should considered it significant.
Years ago when rule clarifications were mostly decided my me and Nach, we set 50% of inherent gameplay difference to be required for different modes to co-exist in Vault. During the recent years admins and judges expressed that they disliked such a strict definition, so we retired it, but we didn't come up with any other strict definition that would be more encompassing. So it was mostly decided by a staff talk in each case.
To me it felt like we were missing something, though at the same time there weren't many borderline sub-mode submissions. But there were submissions done on differentdifficulties every once in a while, and most notably these two:
#9058: longbao's NES Rockman 2 Claw: Wild Version in 25:07.47#9084: longbao & CUI's NES Rockman 2 Claw in 23:47.43
They were done by the same author, and one of them was meant to obsolete an already existing movie, but during the judgment of #9058: longbao's NES Rockman 2 Claw: Wild Version in 25:07.47 I didn't notice the other one, so I thought the author just switched difficulty.
When I found out there was another submission as well, I really hated the idea of rejecting either of them, and with sending either difficulty to Alternative it's unclear which of them to prefer in Standard, in general. Playground would've been even weirder, so it wasn't even considered.
So given the current trend of the site to trust authors more in what they want to do, knowing that realtime speedruns already split by difficulty for some games, and considering how difficulty mode is one of the most fundamental, well-known, and clear explicit in-game options, I thought it made perfect sense to open Standard to another set of categories.
nymx wrote:
Take F-Zero for example...The easiest difficulty, allows for an inexperienced player to make mistakes and still be able to keep playing. For one...hitting the "sand", will not hurt your speed when using an S-Jet. On the hardest level, it affects it greatly. So an Easy run would certainly have the potential of being faster, yet not as impressive.
I agree, I just want to note that we don't have to only feature impressive movies anymore. We can feature whatever makes sense to TAS, and limit to things that we can technically still cover/process without major problems. Closer to a record archive.
nymx wrote:
While I'm on that same game...how about something off subject:
Another thing about F-Zero, are different cars. Now I can understand submissions that use different one, but in the end...I like the fastest version, even though other cars can create viewer tension and put you on the edge of your seat. In a way, this can create various levels of difficulty.
In the end, I like TASes that demonstration dominance over difficultly, with the fastest mechanics possible.
We don't seem to be ready to accept every character as a separate branch in Standard yet, so the same with cars. Obviously anything extra can still go to Alt if it looks good.
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: 11/14/2014
Posts: 913
Location: South Pole, True Land Down Under
Reviving this thread.
I've placed one of my submissions on hold so that I can wait for changes to "Standard". Low% is obviously a good thing to include, but I can't accept until rules are adjusted for it. Its either that, or take a chance on wrecking a submission, in Alternate, that I know should be accepted.
Do we know if this will be rectified soon?
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence.
----
SOYZA: Are you playing a game?
NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing.
SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real?
----
Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes?
Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :)
----
BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
Currently, under the "Use the correct version of the game" section of the Movie Rules, there is a clause stating that English versions of games are preferred:
NTSC is usually preferred over PAL. USA versions, labelled (U), are preferred as a majority of our audience is English speaking, though any NTSC release can be used interchangeably. Using a PAL version of the game is allowed in some situations:
I have not been a fan of this clause for a while, but I was reminded of it again recently when McBobX expressed some confusion about whether or not he was able to TAS the Japanese version of Mega Man 7, and expressed some regret at not having done so for his recent submission. I feel that it would be for the best if the clause stating a preference for USA/English versions was removed, for the following reasons:
The clause is confusing to new users. It is not immediately clear from reading what consequence, if any, may apply to movie acceptance if someone uses a version other than NTSC-U, especially in the presence of more serious rules submissions must abide by. As in the above case, this can potentially mislead people into believing their submission will be judged more harshly if they don't TAS on English, introducing a level of ambiguity that goes against the goal of making the Movie Rules clear and easy to understand.
(As noted by Drakodan) The vast majority of RTA communities do not have any kind of policy mandating the use of a particular language in speedruns. The presence of such a rule on TASVideos is a bit unusual, and someone coming into TASing from outside this circle may not see much sense in it.
The majority of site users speaking English already means that the majority of submissions to the site are already likely to be in English. Even in the event that removing this rule did lead to a sudden increase in submissions of games in other languages, I feel that this is not likely to be a problem because...
A game that can be officially played in multiple languages is unlikely to be obscure enough for a judge to have a difficult time figuring out what's going on.
"People will do worse TASes in Japanese for a lazy obsoletion" is not going to be a problem when there is already a separate rule specifying that regional differences between text and cutscene lengths are discounted during judgement.
Now, OceanBagel has made the counterpoint on Discord that for movies with Alternative goals which are judged partially on entertainment, noting that English is preferred by viewers may be important. I don't think that someone making a TAS on a non-English version of the game is likely to be a dealbreaker for acceptance (especially when such submissions already regularly need judges to request more feedback), but I think the wording of this clause could still be improved if it were to remain. Perhaps if it was phrased differently, along the lines of "All NTSC versions are acceptable, but USA versions are preferred because such and such, here are the conditions under which PAL is acceptable", it would be clearer to users that they won't have their TAS rejected if they play on Japanese or another language. Being more specific about the relevance of language choice to movies with Alternative goals could also help somewhat.
Reviving this thread.
I've placed one of my submissions on hold so that I can wait for changes to "Standard". Low% is obviously a good thing to include, but I can't accept until rules are adjusted for it. Its either that, or take a chance on wrecking a submission, in Alternate, that I know should be accepted.
Do we know if this will be rectified soon?
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.
Currently, under the "Use the correct version of the game" section of the Movie Rules, there is a clause stating that English versions of games are preferred:
NTSC is usually preferred over PAL. USA versions, labelled (U), are preferred as a majority of our audience is English speaking, though any NTSC release can be used interchangeably. Using a PAL version of the game is allowed in some situations:
I have not been a fan of this clause for a while, but I was reminded of it again recently when McBobX expressed some confusion about whether or not he was able to TAS the Japanese version of Mega Man 7, and expressed some regret at not having done so for his recent submission. I feel that it would be for the best if the clause stating a preference for USA/English versions was removed, for the following reasons:
The clause is confusing to new users. It is not immediately clear from reading what consequence, if any, may apply to movie acceptance if someone uses a version other than NTSC-U, especially in the presence of more serious rules submissions must abide by. As in the above case, this can potentially mislead people into believing their submission will be judged more harshly if they don't TAS on English, introducing a level of ambiguity that goes against the goal of making the Movie Rules clear and easy to understand.
(As noted by Drakodan) The vast majority of RTA communities do not have any kind of policy mandating the use of a particular language in speedruns. The presence of such a rule on TASVideos is a bit unusual, and someone coming into TASing from outside this circle may not see much sense in it.
The majority of site users speaking English already means that the majority of submissions to the site are already likely to be in English. Even in the event that removing this rule did lead to a sudden increase in submissions of games in other languages, I feel that this is not likely to be a problem because...
A game that can be officially played in multiple languages is unlikely to be obscure enough for a judge to have a difficult time figuring out what's going on.
"People will do worse TASes in Japanese for a lazy obsoletion" is not going to be a problem when there is already a separate rule specifying that regional differences between text and cutscene lengths are discounted during judgement.
Now, OceanBagel has made the counterpoint on Discord that for movies with Alternative goals which are judged partially on entertainment, noting that English is preferred by viewers may be important. I don't think that someone making a TAS on a non-English version of the game is likely to be a dealbreaker for acceptance (especially when such submissions already regularly need judges to request more feedback), but I think the wording of this clause could still be improved if it were to remain. Perhaps if it was phrased differently, along the lines of "All NTSC versions are acceptable, but USA versions are preferred because such and such, here are the conditions under which PAL is acceptable", it would be clearer to users that they won't have their TAS rejected if they play on Japanese or another language. Being more specific about the relevance of language choice to movies with Alternative goals could also help somewhat.
The very first sentence of the chapter already says:
Any official release of a game is allowed as long as you can explain your choice, and as long as that version is easily available for verification.
The next sentence says this (you even quote it):
any NTSC release can be used interchangeably
I have no idea how anyone can read this as "NTSC-J may be judged more harshly".
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 no idea how anyone can read this as "NTSC-J may be judged more harshly".
I don't really know how to respond to "I don't see how this could possibly be a problem" other than to provide screenshots of the conversation I mentioned in my original post indicating that it is, in fact, a problem.
Should we say it 3 times in the rules instead of just 2?
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.
In this case, aren't the rules working exactly as intended? Since there's no gamplay difference, English is prefered so the text is readable to a wider audience.
Alright, so for my experience with Mega Man 7, what happened was that because the obsolete TAS was done on the Japanese version and I made my TAS on the USA version, most of the time save was basically eaten... Going from 73 seconds all the way to 31 seconds... Some people who saw the TAS even showed an impression of "Only 31 seconds saved? That is low for the skips used!". It definitely looks like so, because it shouldn't be this small comparing to what people expected. I mostly went with USA version because that is what is preferred and I don't want to disregard that.
For the regional rules, I do agree with allowing Japanese version, just like USA, under a single category of NTSC. Reason for that, as feos stated, people coming to TASing might use Japanese version because that is what they're used to (if they are RTA runners for instance, and prefer it), and still provide optimized TAS. For PAL, that is different story because not just frame rate differences (PAL 50 vs NTSC 60), but also this results in potentially different gameplay, like SMB or Super Metroid (don't have direct examples of this but I heard some cases of these 2 games).
All in all, in my opinion, movie rules should clarify that players are free to use any NTSC official release as long as the gameplay optimizations are increasing (relying on text only is not allowed). Heck, even skipping cutscenes within same region is not a valid reason if gameplay is not optimal. I definitely have some examples of such cases here, here and here (for the last one, please forgive my young self... he was so excited to submit a faster TAS :P)
EDIT: Rules now do state what I talked about above... And they're in effect already.
I don't really know how to respond to "I don't see how this could possibly be a problem" other than to provide screenshots of the conversation I mentioned in my original post indicating that it is, in fact, a problem.
