Nach: I've read How to Lie with Statistics ^^ My overly formal tone about the whole thing was meant in fun; I'm not making any claims that these numbers will be borne out over thousands. However, it seems silly to complain that these people might
like SM64 too much -- I'm pretty sure all the people in this thread complaining about the camera angles like SM64 quite a bit too, so if anything it seems like that would be a biasing factor *towards* accepting the hypothesis that people in general don't mind the camera angles.
And of course, the voting and forum commenting process are if anything far less scientific than the silly thing I did at youtube, and that's what every judgment ever is based on, so...
Baxter: The problem with that stance is that if TASers do in fact have some sort of tendency misjudge what the general public will like, we'd never know -- we just keep assuming that we as the experts know best, and that any public praise for a run we find suboptimal arises from 'not knowing what they're missing'.
At some point you have to accept that people actually like what they say they like. Maybe 17 youtube commenters aren't enough to convince you, but consider this: the overwhelming tendency of internet comments is to be critical. Time and again negative comments in forum threads outweigh positive ones, even as Yes votes far outnumber No votes (see, for example, this thread). It's perhaps a corollary of Penny Arcade's
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
When things on the internet bother people, they complain! Loudly! And yet, of nearly two thousand people who've seen the movie, only one (ONE!) has been moved to say something mildly negative about the camera angles, and no one has clicked the dislike button.
I'm not trying to argue that this movie is more aesthetically pleasing than the previous one (I think it is, but whatever). I'm trying to argue that accepting this clear 3-frame improvement over a published run is EXTREMELY UNLIKELY to result in some sort of calamitous mass exodus away from TASvideos by a nauseated public, or to fewer people showing it to their friends, or any other bad outcome from the perspective of the site's reputation or popularity.
As Kirkq argued, we shouldn't be publishing what a few people in this forum think looks the best. We should be bringing the latest and greatest SM64 run to an adoring public, and that's what this is.
After all, shouldn't a screenshot strive to be representative of the majority of the run? :P