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ars4326 has stepped down as a Judge.
Nahoc has stepped down as both a Judge and a Publisher.
Scepheo is no longer a Judge due to inactivity.
EDIT: vvvv This has been done.
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Thank you once again, SethBling, for bringing so many wonderful new people to our forum. I only hope the next person wastes even more of the devs' time with an even more inane, easily solved problem.
(See I threw in a hint of sarcasm, told you I knew how to internet :D)
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I'm partially interested, I know arandomgameTASer was doing a bit of work on it as well recently but I'm not sure what came of it. I've got a bit much on my plate at the moment, both here and in real life, but I would love to see an insane Carrie TAS make it onto the site.
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I would personally leave them empty/deleted until someone with in-depth knowledge comes forward and offers to start filling them in. It'll take a lot of work and experience to really fill out each page to an acceptable level.
I do wish that more people would take care of the Game Resources in general. Hopefully we can convince some people to restart and populate the recently deleted pages.
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Brainstorming here so I don't forget later when I have time to work: Is that spawn based on a trigger? If so, do we know where it is? Could it still be faster to skip ahead then work backward to activate it?
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To anyone else who's confused: It seems like this run's meant to be a revival of the old Shoryuken route used by the run Spike linked. MMX2 had the weird issue where 100% used to actually be the fastest known TAS route, using the Shoryuken to shave off tons of time, but Hetfield's recent TASes proved that it's just barely faster to forego using it.
I'm guessing this is meant to be a new branch, rather than an improvement to Hetfield's run. I wonder why Hetfield's original run was judged as an improvement in the first place, instead of Fractal/Graveworm's run being given a 100% branch and Hetfield's published alongside as the any%?
EDIT: On that note, is it worth reviving the branch over something like an improvement to [1392] SNES Mega Man X2 "best ending, no upgrades" by FractalFusion in 33:51.62 that also collects the Zero parts?
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That's a good point. I added a line about that into the Guidelines:
"Note that every game is judged on a case-by-case basis, so these reasons do not always apply. For example, if a bossfight is only a second or two longer because of higher health, that may not constitute using a lower difficulty."
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Do you have any proof of this? From what I've seen, no one on the judging staff is treating difficulty any differently at this moment. Not even myself, despite what I've said in this thread. Every choice we've made regarding a lower difficulty being acceptable was thoroughly researched beforehand.
Easy mode is not against site guidelines. It never has been. Easy mode without proper explanation is against site guidelines. Easy mode when Hardest is the clearly better choice is against site guidelines. But Easy mode has never been against site guidelines. Hardest difficulty has been a preference for a long time, not a requirement. If it was a requirement, then this wouldn't even be a discussion, would it?
I judge differently than I watch: As a mere viewer, I don't care. I'll be entertained by anything. I can accept an author's choices because I've made the same choices myself. But as a Judge, I scrutinize. I'll test games, difficulty differences, et cetera. If an author says Easy is better, I'll make sure of that before I make my decision.
But also as a Judge, I wouldn't always reject based on difficulty choice. Cases for clear rejection would be if Hardest is vastly more entertaining, or if Hardest adds more levels (like Contra), or if the Easy run is meant to be an "improvement". But in cases where the runs are going to look very similar, I don't think it's that much of an issue to accept the Easy run with the caveat that a Hardest run would absolutely obsolete it. It's not the end of the world if that happens for a first publication.
And likewise, I wouldn't ever reject a Hardest difficulty run based on difficulty choice, as that's always been our preference, but there will be rare cases where I accept it with the caveat that an Easy run will obsolete it due to the removal of long periods of repetition.
It strongly suggests the exact same thing the previous guideline did, which was "Hardest is preferred, easy is acceptable with good reason". I don't see how what I wrote could be interpreted any differently than this:
If anything's changed, it's that there's more explanation as to why an easier difficulty could be okay. That doesn't mean it will be okay. It always has been, and always will be, a case-by-case basis. I thought I made that a little more clear in my last revision, but I could be wrong. I mean, everything else I've said so far in this thread has been misinterpreted...
Besides, considering the points you've been making throughout this thread, isn't it more entertaining that the rewrite is harder for you to understand?
I doubt the RotJ submission would have blown up like it did had the author not been hounded on the difficulty choice. Besides what he said in his explanation, anyone pressing him could have looked up the other differences between difficulties and seen that Jedi difficulty would end up being quite a bit longer due to the autoscrolling sections requiring more kills. Health is also a non-issue due to enemy spawns being random and able to be manipulated away in a large number of cases, and they should be manipulated away to save potentially minutes worth of lag over the course of the run. That should have been enough evidence. Also, there was the decision made on the original Super Star Wars run, where Easy difficulty having more health and less damage taken lead to a more entertaining run overall due to the ability to use a lot more damage boosts without needing to stop.
Honestly, as much as I agree that proper research should be done before choosing a difficulty, I don't think it requires an essay and a discussion lecture to really stick. In most cases, "Autoscollers will be longer and a lot more boring to watch" or "Boss health is increased and they're not any more exciting" will suffice. Like I said in an earlier post, if you're so head-up about the difficulty choice being wrong, prove it yourself. Prove that Hardest is so much more entertaining that it justifies your No vote. Don't sit there and force more information out of the author.
Besides, considering the points you've been making in this thread, wouldn't it be more entertaining to challenge yourself to do the research and provide the evidence instead of just waiting for it to land in your lap?
I can definitely agree with this, but I'd like to think that a casual viewer would be more impressed by the speed of a boss being taken down. In cases where boss health is the only difference, they'll see a boss get destroyed real quick on Easy and not as quick on Hard.
But thinking about it from a perspective where I'm a "casual viewer", like watching RTA runs, I admit I'm more impressed with a runner who runs on harder difficulties. The problem is something moozooh explained in an earlier post: A TAS won't encounter any trouble, they'll just dance around any difficulty in the exact same way. What impresses me about RTA runs on harder difficulties is that they have to deal with the consequences, whereas a TAS doesn't.
So that eventually leads to a situation where hardest difficulty is more entertaining in both RTAs and TASes, but for completely different reasons: It's more tense in RTAs, because mistakes cost a lot more, and they could be the end of the run if you're not playing your best, which makes it more exciting for the audience to watch in turn and more impressive when these challenges are overcome. In TASes, the entertainment has to come from what the game itself throws at you. If all it throws at you is bosses with 3x health, then there's no entertainment to be gained from it.
I'd love to try an experiment where a few TASes done on Easy are submitted with no mention of the difficulty choice at all: Nothing about it in the submission text and the opening title screens cut out so that no one sees the choice or even the option to make the choice. Just something to see whether or not the actual run itself is the subject of entertainment, rather than seeing the word "HARD" for a couple of frames before the run.
Okay, but like I said in my previous couple of paragraphs, "mastery" doesn't necessarily mean "hardest difficulty", and vice versa. One can be a factor in the other, but it really depends on what everyone's definition of "mastery" is. Personally, I think mastery is beating a game far faster than intended, regardless of the extenuating circumstances. I'm sure a lot of people agree. "Mastery" is bending the game completely to your will. To me, difficulty doesn't necessarily play a major role in that. It can contribute to it, but when I think "Wow, they really kicked the crap out of this game", it's never due to the choice of difficulty, it's due to the author kicking the crap out of the game.
Bottom line to all of these points: Hardest is still the preferred difficulty choice. Nothing has changed in the Guidelines except for a little more clarity on difficulty choices. The only way that guideline will ever change is if we adopt a system where one difficulty or another is a hard requirement. Every game has been, and will continue to be, judged on a case-by-case basis.
Hounding authors on difficulty choice does nothing but add unneeded drama. Proving your arguments yourself is much more effective and it makes you look like less of a jackass in the long run. It is always okay to disagree. It crosses over into "absolutely not okay" when you spend 10 posts doing it with little more than "You're wrong, Hardest is best in all cases".
One last thing about my rewrites, hopefully this should clear up any future misunderstandings about my rewrites apparently promoting some sort of militaristic, dictator-level agenda:
Notice that all of these points are inherently related to either the removal of repetition or the addition of entertainment:
*More health for damage boosts - This always makes a run faster and more impressive. In some cases, this can make or break major skips by virtue of having the health for it much earlier than normal. You can have more health, take less damage, and tear your way through stages with reckless abandon, recoiling off every enemy in your way and saving huge amounts of time over a Hard difficulty run that can't do that without dying.
Can this be disputed? Yes. If it's a matter of 3 hits to die on Easy versus 1 hit to die on Hard, then that isn't really much of a suitable difference, unless a major skip is possible with a damage boost. Time saved with damage boosts should be significant, not mere frames here and there.
*Less enemies leading to less lag - Probably the most disputable, but I was mostly thinking of the Super Star Wars series here. After attempting to TAS Empire Strikes Back, it struck me that we were manipulating away as many enemy spawns as we could anyway due to how much the game lagged when even one enemy was on screen.
If enemies cause lag, and enemies can be manipulated away, then naturally you'll manipulate away enemies to reduce lag. If Hard adds more enemy spawns, that's just more enemies to manipulate away in order to reach the exact same effect as you'd get on Easy. If enemies don't cause lag, then it's not an issue, obviously.
*Faster bossfights on repetitive bosses, especially if their lower health can lead them to be one-cycled - I specifically say "repetitive" bosses, as many people (including myself) have pointed out that more boss health is not always a bad thing. If you're standing in one place and smacking a boss for 10 seconds, that's repetitive. If you're constantly moving around and dancing around projectiles and getting in hits whenever you can, that's not repetitive. If the boss is constantly changing its pattern, that's not repetitive. But there are still cases where more health is repetitive, and even as the old guidelines said, this is where we're more concerned about speed, because speed in these cases is the most entertaining option.
Phew, that was rough.
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Copy-pasting from the issue tracker:
Unpausing at the end of a file activates live-recording mode once new blank frames are added. This persists upon loading a branch. This only happens specifically when the movie is unpaused: Live-recording deactivates whenever frame advance is used, and frame-advancing past the end of the current file does not activate it.
Reproduction steps:
1. Create a new tasproj file and paint 100 frames of input
2. Set a branch at frame 1
3. Unpause the movie and let it run past frame 100
4. Pause the movie, load the branch, then unpause again
I think the intended behavior is that live-recording only activates whenever the movie is set to Read+Write, but this is happening with the movie set to Read-Only.
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I'd like to stress for probably the 10th time that the difficulty guideline was not changed. It was rewritten to be more clear. We are not operating any differently than before. Easy mode is not an automatic, unquestioned acceptance. I have no idea where anyone's getting that idea from. We will almost always accept Hardest difficulty choices, while other difficulties will continue to be subject to some Judging scrutiny. I've made a few small changes to the rewritten Guidelines to reflect this.
I also have never said that no one is allowed to question or discuss the difficulty choice. I only expressed my opinion that "I don't like the run because it's not on Hard difficulty" is not valid criticism, and it does nothing but add white noise and drama to submission threads. We don't need any more of that. Feel free to discuss differences between difficulties if you feel they're enough to warrant the TASer redoing the run, but at least do the slightest bit of research on them first. Don't just assume that "Hardest = Most Entertaining" in all cases. And if the author refuses to redo the run, let that be the end of it. There's absolutely no reason to press them further. The discussion will have already played its course, the author will have already said their piece, and the Judge will take it all into account when its time to make their decision.
Bring up the differences, provide examples if you can. Hell, go ahead and TAS a level or two on the hardest difficulty if you really want some solid evidence to back up your point. Just leave it after that, please. We'll handle the intense scrutiny, that is literally part of our job.
Of course, I can say the same thing to the authors. I think TASers need to do their research as well, so that they can make an informed choice of difficulty for their final run. It's much easier to say "Hard difficulty makes the 1st boss 10 seconds longer, and all I do is crouch and punch it" rather than "Hard difficulty adds health to bosses, so it'll be longer and more boring", and it's much more convincing to boot.
That's really all I have to say. If there are any further misunderstandings, I'll try to clarify some more.
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If the script deactivates itself, the Lua Console should display a message related to what went wrong. Could you post what it says?
EDIT: Also make sure you're only activating the script with the ROM loaded first, since trying to load it without a ROM will always return an error.
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That script is for VBA anyway. This post has a version of the script updated for use in BizHawk. I also recommend reading the rest of that thread for more information on TASing Aria of Sorrow and posting there with further questions and updates.
Also, welcome to the site!
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No. Never. This kind of behavior is what I'm trying to prevent. Difficulty should never be the focal point of a run. It serves no purpose to attempt to dispute it. The reason why the author's explanation is the final word is because it should be the final word. Disputes are treated like personal attacks because it's a heavy implication that the author wasted days of their time on something they thought was going to be cool, only to have people completely disregard it because of a simple arbitrary choice they made. Given the overzealous nature of some of the regular posters, carrying these disputes over days and even weeks in some cases, I'm absolutely not surprised that these are being treated as personal attacks. Are they personal attacks? Not necessarily. But that doesn't mean they're not disrespectful in some way.
If anything, I want to see examples, not conjecture. As much as I hate to use this argument, if you're so caught up over the difficulty choice, why not try TASing it yourself? Instead of voting No because a harder difficulty could theoretically be more entertaining, try to prove that it's more entertaining. Seeing a word change in an options menu should never be the basis for how entertaining a movie is. If you don't want to TAS it yourself, maybe find video examples or something. This way, these difficulty disputes would at least have some credibility.
At the very least, is it too much for me to ask people to watch the run without taking the difficulty choice into account? Judge the entertainment value based off of the game and what the author chooses to do with it, not the fact that you saw the word "EASY" for a few frames. If you find the movie entertaining... Just leave it. At most, you can say something like "I'd like to see a Hard mode run someday, but this was great in the meantime" instead of hounding the author on why they didn't just make the Hard run.
Seriously, this is the only thing I truly want to change about how the site treats difficulty: The audience giving more leniency to lower difficulties. I don't disagree with Hard being more entertaining in most cases, but I do disagree with it being more entertaining in ALL cases. Just try to base your entertainment off of the run itself.
That doesn't always apply, for the record. Your last statement, about different patterns and such, is a situation where we would definitely recommend harder difficulties, but what we mean by that original statement is more along the lines of something like this:
You have a boss that takes 50 hits to kill on Easy and 150 hits to kill on Hard. The fastest way to hit this boss is to crouch down in a spot where it can't hit you and kick away, 10 frames per kick. This manipulates it into using a pattern where it can always be hit, whereas if you were jumping around and being entertaining, it would unavoidably use attacks where you can't hit it for a second or two at a time. So you just have to crouch there and kick it for less than 10 seconds on Easy, but 25 seconds on Hard.
Obviously that is a super exaggerated example, but I hope it gets the point across about what we mean by adding repetition. If more boss health makes the fights genuinely more interesting, such as new patterns or new phases, then by all means it's definitely the better choice, but in these cases where all you're doing is tapping a button every set number of frames without moving otherwise, it's not exactly great.
On the same note, regarding things like player health management: You're playing a game where enemies don't drop items. If, on Hard, you have to go 9 seconds out of your way for a health pickup that allows you to use a damage boost to save 10 seconds, whereas on Easy you could just take the damage boost immediately, then I would call that adding repetition as well. Obviously, if enemies could drop health pickups, then Hard wouldn't be a problem at all for that case.
The point is that games are different, yo. Some games will always be more entertaining on higher difficulties, while some games will just be more repetitive and boring to watch. It has to be treated on a case-by-case basis. I see a lot of people making assumptions in Easy submissions that may not even turn out to be true. It's frustrating, especially as a Judge, to look at an Easy submission and see a rash of unexplained No votes that pretty much require me to spend the better part of my day looking into a game to see just how right or wrong they are.
Normal is also fastest in Run Saber, since the primary difference between each difficulty is how fast the enemies move. This leads to less than a second of difference between each difficulty since it's barely noticeable, and it takes about a second and a half to switch difficulties. Normal also ends up being slightly harder to TAS since the slower enemies get in the way in a few areas, requiring some creative movement solutions to get past them.
And yes, I would call that an adequate explanation.
Remember that those were just my personal opinions, and I'll even apologize for them today. I wasn't particularly in the right state of mind when I wrote them. It's a bit too late for me to edit them now with all the quoting and discussion, but just keep in mind that none of them are actually going to go into practice.
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I should mention that what I said is just my personal opinion and shouldn't immediately be taken as the direction the site's going. The Guideline rewrite is a little closer to how we've been dealing with things as of late, but it's still subject to changes based on the discussions it'll spawn and the thoughts of the higher-ups.
I should rephrase what I said, actually: Votes based on difficulty that aren't properly explained should be discounted. I would absolutely count them if they provided reasons on why a harder difficulty would make a more entertaining run in general, but I rarely see that. Even some of the discussion in this thread amounted to nothing more than "I don't like it because it's not Hard", which aside from being the second time I've heard that phrase today, isn't really proper criticism at all. Breaking down the differences and proving "harder is better", aside from being the second time I've heard that phrase today, is what really makes the votes count to me.
"Harder difficulty would make a more entertaining run in my eyes, since it would add more movement variety to the run due to having more enemies" - This would be more valid of a reason to me over...
"Not Hard, no vote" - It explains nothing relevant to the rest of the movie, implies that the voter didn't even watch it past the difficulty choice, and it's also the second time I've heard that phrase today.
But that's just what I think. My words right now are only representative of my feelings, not the feelings of the site as a whole. That's why I'm opening it all up, so we can hopefully come to a conclusion that satisfies everyone... Also the second time I've heard that phrase today.
Perhaps it's unfair to suggest, but like I said I don't want the difficulty choice to define a run to the point where something entertaining could be banished to Vault. Counting those votes as they are wouldn't be much different than saying "Easy = Vault, Hard = Moons", and I don't think anyone wants to classify things that way.
I'm aware that some people don't like runs on Easy. I understand it as well. Even in the recent Spiderman VS Kingpin case, I was skeptical about the difficulty choice in regards to the game, but I still found the run very entertaining. Not many others did, it seems. If you take a look at that thread, none of the No votes were really explained any further than "It's not on Hard, so I voted No". It's discrediting the entirety of a movie simply based on a personal choice that doesn't even have a major impact on what the movie ends up looking like.
Maybe I should've just said "Explain your freakin' votes to make it easier for Judges to properly tier a movie". That would've worked better.
As for Vault runs being Easy no matter what, that's still primarily going to be a case-by-case matter. I would even go as far as to say Strider shouldn't have been used as an example there, as it's very much on the cusp of being promoted to Moons (and I think it deserves to be there, myself).
I'm aware that we've accepted Vault runs with speed/entertainment tradeoffs, but we've also rejected them for the same reason, so there isn't necessarily a set precedent either way. We're still discussing potential changes to the tier system and the Vault and such as it is, so even all of my personal opinion (still stressing that it's my own personal opinion and not representative of the site) could be completely obsolete by a future change.
Aaaand once again I'm too lazy to comb over my post to correct all the weird disjointed thoughts. So here it is.
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The way I (and a lot of other people) see it, difficulty choice is purely for entertainment purposes. So if a movie's already in Vault or destined for Vault, I would agree that easiest difficulty would be preferred. The thing is, the main point I want to make is that one difficulty should never be absolutely enforced over another, and that people shouldn't judge a run purely by its difficulty. This happened in spades over the recent Spider-Man VS the Kingpin submission, where an entertaining movie got flooded with No votes because of the difficulty choice. That shouldn't be happening in general.
As for difficulties obsoleting each other, it should always be a case-by-case basis. An easier difficulty being faster doesn't always mean a surefire obsoletion, there are multiple different factors that need to come together for that to happen. Likewise, a harder difficulty also doesn't mean a surefire obsoletion for the same reason.
I'm not sure how the other Judges feel, but to me:
* An easier difficulty run has to remove boring repetition to obsolete a harder difficulty run, unless it's a Vault run, in which case it just has to be faster
* A harder difficulty run has to be noticeably more entertaining to obsolete an easier difficulty run, unless it's still not entertaining enough to make Moons, in which case it would be rejected for being slower
* Any non-standard difficulty choice (Easy for Moons, Hard for Vault) should be adequately researched and explained in the submission text
* Any opinion in a submission thread that simply states "I'm voting No because it's not on X difficulty" should be disregarded, as it says nothing about the entertainment value of the movie itself
Hopefully that helps clear things up.
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I've rewritten the Guidelines on difficulty choice based on discussions in this thread, IRC, and recent events in general. It's still technically a draft, so if anyone has any suggestions on things to add or change, feel free to post them here.
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