Hi, it's Memory here, one of the three admins of TASVideos. Since joining administration 3 years ago, a lot about TASVideos has changed. We made many rule changes, starting accepting a lot more platforms, and received a massive influx of submissions and publications. Yet, we never really gave a new formal sort of mission statement or anything. I would like to change that.
Our mission is to provide access to and information about TASes and to provide assistance to TASers.
We have no intentions of acting as an authority on TASing. Acting as an authority in the past led us to becoming arrogant and receiving resentment from a lot of TASers. Despite what we thought, we never could control what people TASed. Instead what we did was drive TASers away from us.
Even before I became admin, attitudes were beginning to change. We questioned our rules. Now we're changing them to better serve the community. We are human though so there will be remnants of old attitudes in various pages that we forgot to update, but if you find them and bring them up to us, we can change them.
Now the general attitude is that if you're acting in good faith, we want to see you and your TASes here.
We still have our limitations, but those have become far more flexible. If anything, the biggest limiting factor is on the technical side. Site development is largely handled by a small number of people, so any help there would be largely appreciated. You can contribute to the site code on github.
I would like to openly apologize to any TASers or TASing communities we have ostracized in the past. We at TASVideos want to be better. We can talk if there's any questions or concerns.
The one big thing that is remaining the same and shall always be the same is that we want to emphasize collaboration over competition. We believe in open source principles. We want tases to be accessible to improvement. How the TASes are made and the tricks and glitches used should be public knowledge.
Thank you for reading all this. If people have any concerns or questions, feel free to ask.
EDIT: I really hoped I didn't need to state this, but we still will be banning people if they misbehave. This is not a thread for venting about moderation.
[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 agree that the tricks, glitches, strategies and how TASes are made should be public. I do wish more people were still able to submit runs here, like Logan. He submitted runs of games I had never heard of, many of which were published, allowing people to experience games they likely didn't know existed. I'm glad this community is changing for the better, and I hope to help out however I can.
DJ Incendration
Believe in Michael Girard and every speedrunner and TASer!
Note this is not about users who were banned for behavioral problems. Moderation does what moderation must.
[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
Split away derail caused by a known troll. Again, this is for TASers that want to act in good faith.
[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 have disagreements towards the savefile and verification movie issues, but in general i also agree the site moved forwards in general, so congrats all staff and judges for that!
There are a handful of games whose speedrun communities use premade savefiles for competing such as:
shadow the hedgehog, mario kart double dash, fzero GX and those verificatino movies would be quite long, i hope someday you can find a solution you guys can live with for these cases that isn't 4 hours or more verification movies.
I have considered collaborating with tasvideos staff helping with some staff activities but i don't feel like i would be able to abide by to your communication standards, as i'm considered too harsh and impolite, so i prefer just sending TAS movies, which is what i really want from the site after all.
I want all good TAS inside TASvideos, it's my motto.
TAS i'm interested:
Megaman series, specially the RPGs! Where is the mmbn1 all chips TAS we deserve? Where is the Command Mission TAS?
i'm slowly moving away from TASing fighting games for speed, maybe it's time to start finding some entertainment value in TASing.
I need to step in here and say I've always been faithful in what TASVideos has been trying to accomplish (within reason) in the past year: reach out to players and users, encourage them to pick up a hobby of making tool-assisted speedruns of games, and showcase their efforts to the world. And throughout the process, you have lifted restrictions and rejections, and you've helped open up to showcases of games that were once deemed unacceptable; and I praise you for it. Do keep at it with the hard work you (still) put into the site.
At the same time though, I agree that TASVideos still could use some helping out, mainly with the fact that more staff members would be appreciated to help speed up the workflow. Myself, I believe that technical information about games and tricks could be filled out; and more players could be invited here to tackle some existing movies, try to beat them.
I absolutely agree with the golden rule being presented here, which is keeping a calm attitude and not being disruptive while showcasing your work. We want to help each other out, help them overcome their difficulties, and communicate; cooperate. We need to be willing to let them help as well without entirely taking over the project.
Of course, it's not possible for everyone to make it through with behavioral issues. At least once, we've all had our moments where we misbehaved, accident or not; there were several over the years that have had malicious intentions, whether it's through submissions or through forum posts (including, coincidentally, TheAnonymousReaper). Understandably though, it's often their problem and not ours for when they're acting up.
However, I do not have any complaints about moderation; it's fair and just, and I know it will always stay this way: fair for the user, and fair for the staff (obviously as long as it has nothing to do with anything offensive or overly threatening).
Not an expert take; just my personal opinions weighing in on the matter.
Parts of the world (not counting TASVideos, thankfully) are being constantly endangered as we speak. Take care of yourself and everyone else out there, will ya?
Still very busy, so I apologize if there's any lack of activity.
[Moderator Edit: A portion of this post, and a preceding post, have been moved to another thread.]
On topic, the site's entertainment changes have only made it easier to feel like starting a TAS, first with Vault and now with even more allowed games and categories. I no longer have to restrict myself to any%, or a full completion that may take hours, thanks to several always-acceptable Standard goals like NG+ and glitchless, let alone the freedom of Alternative publications. Perfect optimization is not expected now, so a racing game TAS for example isn't impossible to want to start without committing years to squeezing every last frame out of every turn. This is reflected in the several first publications of racing games this year alone. The definition of a game breaks down even more barriers to entry. It has never been easier to want to TAS on this site. I thank everyone involved in these changes, and hope to see those affected by the previous mindset return and enjoy themselves here. (Hi Flygon!)
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1773
Location: Australia, Victoria
The site and community has become totally alien to me, compared to from the time I left it.
That is a good thing.
A lot of things happened, and I remembered a lot of things when I became aware of this post, and a lot of hurt, and tiredness. I'm glad literally none of that matters now. For my sake, and the sake of the site.
This is good news, and I am glad for it. There's an incredible new community of people that weren't even around for a lot of these scarring events, and I'm glad you've all built something a lot better.
And for a lot of us that are now old, we have matured and become better people. Or so I do hope.
I did consider not writing this post, but I had these thoughts in the moment, and they won't reappear later.
One thing that I am honored to have done as a staff member was to have a hand in resolving long held issues with the Super Mario 64 TASing community and TASVideos.
Just to provide some context: at the start of 2017, Mupen-rr was Deprecated and this site would no longer accept m64 submissions. There was a couple reasons for this at the time.
One was due to the trouble with publishers not having good avi dumping tools, which is the method we use to encode runs by capturing video and audio into an .avi video format. From what I understand (and I could be wrong about this), the internal avi dumper in Mupen either didn't exist or was too broken to be usable (audio especially was busted since it would either not sync with video or have audio pops all over the place). The only alternative at the time was using an external video capture software called kkapure, which I can tell you from experience did not like Mupen-rr very much (It worked much better with emulators like PCSX). So not only was there only a handful of Publishers who were willing to work with this process, but it would also be a major time consumption for them as well.
The other reason was that the BizHawk N64 core was starting to become much more reliable although still not perfect. The mindset of the site at the time was to eventually move people to Bizhawk for more unified tools as well as the understanding that it would be more "accurate" due to using newer emulation that was supposedly regularly updated (though it ended up stuck on a 2013 build of the core, never actually updated).
It is my opinion that the way this announcement was done was, to put it lightly, ill-advised. For one thing, it was very dismissive to possible concerns the SM64 community would have with this announcement, particularly this part:
In any case, we do have a newer emulator with more accurate emulation and sane rerecording tools - BizHawk. It may be lacking certain features you want, if so, ask their developers to add them. You may be unused to its interface - get used to it. BizHawk also offers some tools that did not exist in Mupen64-rr which you might end up liking.
This is dismissive because it expects the community, who have built the extensive and robust tools that have made TASing SM64 very intricate and informative, to suddenly be able to port EVERYTHING to work in Bizhawk. It's understandable that the community would be upset by this comment considering how long the community has used Mupen and centered their tools around it (plus as I understand, emulation of Super Mario 64 in Mupen was considered close to accurate, just that other games had problems), but also because there was no guarantee that the tools could be ported at all, let alone work the same way. There was no reality where they could "get used to it".
Before I mention my involvement, I have to acknowledge a former staff member in 2020 who decided to troll the SM64 TASing community in a way that not only was unbecoming of what we expect from staff today, but further soured relations with both communities. I won't go into specifics about what happened but I’ll simply say that it made the rest of the site look bad.
Anyways, after I became part of staff, I wanted to understand what the community’s desires were when it came to continuing to use Mupen-rr, especially in the aftermath of what I mentioned above. After having some long conversations with those in the community, what I learned was that there was active development on improving the stability of Mupen-rr (which they called “New Mupen”) so it not only didn't crash easily, but also to address some serious security concerns in older versions of Mupen. I eventually asked these devs about encoding support and if those tools could be improved at all. With the help of the New Mupen devs and our own emulator devs like CasualPokePlayer, we were able to get it to a state where both our publishers as well as the SM64 community was satisfied with the state of the emulator. As of March 2022, Mupen-rr is now acceptable on the site for submission.
There's still some work to do. As mentioned in Memory’s post, there's a lot of un-updated language in some pages on the site that act as if Mupen is still deprecated or something along those lines. kierio04 is active in the SM64 community and is now an Ambassador to our site, and I’m hoping his connections will allow us to be aware of anything the community wants clarification on so that we can correct past mistakes made over the years.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't
12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!"
Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet
MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish
[Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person
MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol
Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2865
Location: Northern California
In regards to the moderation-related posts, we've set up a separate thread to handle them, as we would like for this thread to stay on the topic of our old content curation practices.
TASvideos' Third Strongest Site Admin 🩵 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.
do you think you can come up with a solution for the games i mentioned that requite gigantic verification movies?
I want all good TAS inside TASvideos, it's my motto.
TAS i'm interested:
Megaman series, specially the RPGs! Where is the mmbn1 all chips TAS we deserve? Where is the Command Mission TAS?
i'm slowly moving away from TASing fighting games for speed, maybe it's time to start finding some entertainment value in TASing.
People make mistakes, and people can choose to behave differently and course correct. TASVideos is an amazing community, and was always welcoming and inclusive (though I've been away for a long time) - so I hope that is what it will become again :)
I'm not sure where to post this, but can there please be a way to somehow archive level only TASes? I think full blown publication may be overkill, but a full game only run can be incredibly daunting; I personally hop multiple games at once because I keep getting stuck on specific stages. Userfiles isn't a good enough solution, since there's a file limit + no way to have a leaderboard or some other comparison to quickly check multiple submitted runs to compare like we have for movies. Does anyone else feel like full game only is a barrier? It feels like this already pushes away people, even if TASVideos was completely open community wise and accepted almost anything.
Hello! I've been watching TASes for years (probably even decades) and just started making my own. As I'm pretty new to the community, please excuse me if I bring up points that have been already longly debated and feel free to redirect me to related threads.
I have several questions related to accepted movies:
- there is a rule saying new game+ movies are accepted, but you need to provide a movie that produces the used save file. This can be a heavy task and I've encountered several examples of people being deterred by it. For instance, this person says they are not considering submission as it would mean making a 40h+ movie to be able to start. Personally, there are some unlockable mini games I would be happy to TAS for games that do not have a TAS (for instance, Wario Ware on GBA, which also already has some TASes for mini games that have not been published). What is the rationale behind it? Ensuring reproducibility?
- Will some old movies refused in the past be judged again? I was surprised to see that the TAS of a game as popular as Flappy Bird was rejected for being too boring. Sure, it is on the whole, but due to past popularity of the game (although on a different platform), this could still interest a lot of people, and relaxing of judging rules have lead to a lot of less interesting movies be published since then. I'm not taking this example for no reason, as:
- this makes me wonder what the rules are for infinite games. In the past, they've been excluded from submission. I'm considering to TAS several of them (example), setting some goal to stop them before they start being boring ("reach 1 million point" or things like that). I'd rather know in advance if they have a chance to be rejected for boringness like flappy bird.
Thanks for all the efforts you make for this community!
- there is a rule saying new game+ movies are accepted, but you need to provide a movie that produces the used save file. This can be a heavy task and I've encountered several examples of people being deterred by it. For instance, this person says they are not considering submission as it would mean making a 40h+ movie to be able to start. Personally, there are some unlockable mini games I would be happy to TAS for games that do not have a TAS (for instance, Wario Ware on GBA, which also already has some TASes for mini games that have not been published). What is the rationale behind it? Ensuring reproducibility?
Short answer: yes. Starting a TAS when the game or system has a non-default state (e.g. save files or savestates), begs the question of whether it's even possible to reach that state legitimately. The verification movie provides proof that the starting state is actually achievable and wasn't artificially created.
Why does that matter? I think there are multiple factors. In my mind, the biggest reason goes back to what a TAS fundamentally is (normally): a speedrun with super-human accuracy, speed and consistency. If you're configuring the system in a way that couldn't be achieved by regular inputs alone, then it feels a bit cheated. Why not go further and start arbitrarily modifying RAM during a TAS.
As the genre has grown however, the definition of a TAS has also changed and expanded. I can see how starting from hand-crafted states, even if not legitimately achievable, could be interesting to some TASers. Still though, the reproducibility has remained a vital part of the curation process on TASVideos.
Edit: Forgot to mention, we've got a thread for discussing this. There's at least one or two others for historical context too.
For what it's worth, verification movies aren't required to be optimized, and do not count against the submission's time or any other statistics. It's entirely acceptable for a verification movie to simply be someone playing through a game casually to unlock New Game+ or similar. The TAS author doesn't necessarily have to be the one to create the verification movie either. You also don't have to create a new verification movie for each subsequent TAS; the movie can be reused for multiple TASes by multiple people.
zapkt wrote:
- Will some old movies refused in the past be judged again?
Yes! In fact, we have a thread dedicated to that. Understandably there are a lot of TASes that might be affected by any given rule. Sometimes judges will check affected movies immediately after a rule change, but sometimes its not possible or some movies get missed. Anyone can use that thread to suggest previously-rejected movies that fit this scenario.
Note that movies that were cancelled will require the original author(s) to request judgement instead.
zapkt wrote:
- this makes me wonder what the rules are for infinite games. In the past, they've been excluded from submission.
I'd rather leave this to a judge to answer. One may respond in this thread, otherwise, especially if you'd like to ask about any other specific games or goal ideas, you can ask in our Discord or in this other thread.
zapkt wrote:
Thanks for all the efforts you make for this community!
Likewise, thanks for engaging with us and taking the time to ask your questions!
- this makes me wonder what the rules are for infinite games. In the past, they've been excluded from submission. I'm considering to TAS several of them (example), setting some goal to stop them before they start being boring ("reach 1 million point" or things like that). I'd rather know in advance if they have a chance to be rejected for boringness like flappy bird.
To make things clear, we're definitely considering loosening requirements of verification movies for save data pending that thread.
We generally don't ban movies of that nature for being boring either, we have accepted a month long desert bus tas in the past year. We try to go back to older movies when we can but we are unfortunately a bit understaffed and do require some people to point out these movies we have overlooked.
[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
