It's still incredibly bizarre to me that, in the name of reproducing the original game on the SNES, they decided to change core aspects of the game to make it ridiculously easier.
If MAME stuff ever becomes acceptable here, a run on the actual arcade version should really obsolete this version. Or at the very least, a run on a graphical remake that actually accurately replicates the original game's programming instead of this one's superficial attempt that clearly doesn't.
I took a somewhat closer look comparing the Nico run I linked above.
Fight 1: ~20 seconds faster here.
Fight 2: ~5 seconds slower.
Fight 3: ~35 seconds slower.
So, yeah. It can be improved.
As a fan of the gameboy version, I'm really curious of what does no glitch even mean in this case, what levels the story mode might have, and an encode.
I'll wait for more info.
You're going to be very disappointed as this is nothing like that. This is a really basic strategy game and I can't imagine there's much going on here but luck manipulation. There aren't levels. It's just a series of 'fights' with long cutscenes in between.
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8376506
I'm also relatively certain this can be improved by a lot, but the old runs that improved on the one linked above have been taken down.
- If the difficulty is completely irrelevant in the setting of a game (like health in a game where taking damage gives no benefits), the TAS should use the default difficulty. Wasting time to switch to hard should actually be considered suboptimal gameplay in such a case.
To me, this is an argument FOR putting it on the hardest difficulty, if for no other reason than to forego any kind of debate about it at all. Going the other way requires more than superficial knowledge about the game and its mechanics.
Or framed another way, a stat-based or straetgy game with heavy RNG being botted is going to be identical on every difficulty except for the amount of cursor jittering that happens to get the good result. The strategy and actual work by the TASer would be completely identical, but playing that on easy or even default for the weaker AIs and faster results wouldn't be appropriate.
I don't like equivocating to the "decide everything case by case" approach. That doesn't address anything at all. There will always be special cases, but that leans too far in the direction of "every game is special." It really seems to me like the current unstated policy is to accept everything that someone appears to have put a modicum of effort into, whether or not they and the audience actually have any understanding at all about what the changes in difficulty actually entail.
I don't think that collectively throwing up our hands and giving up because of fringe cases. I think it'd be more productive to pin down what the acceptable reasons are for allowing a lower difficulty and say definitively that things like "lower difficulty = skips entire stages" will no longer be acceptable.
I think a distinction still needs to be drawn between difficulty for Vault and otherwise. As I said before, Moons has always been fairly lax with anything that gets crowd approval generally being accepted. The Vault's supposed to be more free from that and entertainment isn't supposed to be a concern, so except in extreme cases, there's nothing there to 'suffer.'
Why was this played on normal (well, "Crazed") difficulty? Hard would follow the guidelines and be more impressive. Easy I have to imagine would be faster.
Why is it so hard to understand the fact that difficulty is chosen for an advantage over a game if there is no difference except the amount of hits you deal or get?
Because, like Tompa said, those differences can have drastic effects. I get the feeling you're referring to things like long boss patterns where the difference is sitting through ~3 repetitions as compared to sitting through ~6, instead of the example brought up where it can completely trivialize boss battles, or even obstacles in general. If the differences in damage taken/dealt means that otherwise challenging obstacles become simplistic due to being able to just walk through them thanks to inflated HP or being given ridiculously overpowered weaponry/fragile enemies, it seems incorrect to prefer the difficulty that promotes less precise play. There is the possibility entertainment will be impacted enough to prevent that, but again, the new and novel seems to always get the GREAT IMPROVEMENT, THUMBS UP, LOVED EVERY MINUTE sticker of the crowd over the old and dated.
Take Resident Evil 3, for example. Easy mode raises your health, lowers enemy health, starts you off with an extra powerful weapon and a ton of ammo for it, and hands you nearly every other available weapon for free not long afterward, along with all the ammo you could ever need. Either way, most of the gameplay will be running past zombies and then doing the standard spray-and-pray against bosses, the only differences will be some detours to collect materiel and which gun you spray-and-pray with, but I cannot believe anybody would say the difficulty that gives you all buttloads of bonuses and buffs the player/debuffs the enemies is the correct difficulty to run the game on.
More enemies spawn vs. less enemies spawn
More enemies could mean more lag and lag reduction is hard, but this shouldn't be an excuse to use the easy difficulty if the frame-rate doesn't drop significally in the overall run. At hard difficulty clever tricks to reduce the lag, like killing enemies or camera manipulation, are needed making the overall run more interresting.
In case the frame-rate drops significally the whole run, it makes the run annoying to watch, therefore the easy difficulty need to be chosen.
It's something you see especially in SHMUPs that like to cover the screen in enemies and bullets, but also frequently in run and gun games like Contra or Metal Slug. Again, I guess there's a possible argument to be made that the loss of entertainment and not looking like super human play MIGHT cover it (although most of the bullet dancing in Gradius, for example, could be done with fewer bullets just as easily), depending on the audience at the time, but at the very least for the genres that define themselves by flooding the screen with enemies and bullets, lag reduction should not be a valid reason for an easier difficulty.
But... this is exactly how categories work on every speedrun site ever. A category is established by a local authority figure and it remains the same unless there is a compelling reason for it to change. It makes perfect sense, what's so hard to understand about this? It's exactly because certain aspects of speedruns are unquantifiable and that the voters are an ever-changing vocal minority that judges exist to decide what works and what doesn't, making decisions that are supposed to make the site better.
Perhaps what would help is if we nailed down what "very compelling" means, because I assume you were referring to something like additional tricks or major differences, which won't be the case for most difficulty changes. Most difficulty bumps upward will be more or less the same gameplay, only tighter, better managed, and with less room for error, but by and large will not produce drastically different runs. And to reiterate, that's not how it has seemed to historically ever work for going from easier difficulties to harder. That in and of itself is reason enough and breaks the 'precedent.'
With regards to easy mode runs accepted with a purported future reestablishment of an obsoletion chain, that typically happened because they improved upon runs so heavily outdated that by that virtue alone they were far more technically impressive than their predecessors. It is a populist decision of sorts, but it is a special case that is not granted on a daily basis. It furthers the goals of entertainment and improvement of the site's content while trying to make the proper rule set known.
And like I said, I think that's a poor way to handle it as it depends by and large on who happens to be around at the time. On top of that, aside from the top beloved runs, the novel is always going to win over the old. I'd specify only in very few cases should the difficulty be allowed to go backward from harder to easier.
What exactly is your stance on the subject, anyway? You seem to be worried about things that are already in (relatively) working order. In your six years on the site you must have familiarized yourself with its workings enough so I don't have to recite them.
You're conflating disagreement with ignorance. Of course I know how it works. I disagree with some parts of how it works, and even above and beyond that, I want it to work better. See also the poll question.
In my own personal idyllic dream world, that hardest difficulty should be mandatory for the Vault, and should be required elsewhere unless the only thing that an upper difficulty adds is a test of endurance/patience. I'm 100% sure that's not going to be what comes of this (these discussions seem more of a venting grounds anyway). I disagree with some of the reasons people have been given and don't believe that it's as simple as they're making it in regards to just entertainment and speed. For example, Nobunaga's Ambition for a recent example, as many hours as I lost to it when I was younger, is basically devoid of entertainment in a TAS setting. Obsoleting that run for one on Easy because the Easy run is faster and more entertaining (ie less tedious/repetitive) is entirely inappropriate to me, but if the runs look basically the same and use the same strategies, but we prefer the faster and more entertaining one, that's what'd happen.
What I'd reasonably hope to see come from this discussion is if this were more codified one way or the other and not applied as haphazardly as it is now. eg, if easy difficulty cuts out entire stages, game mechanics, or major sections of gameplay, it's not acceptable to use.
Derp.
It doesn't look like there was any difference as far as the gameplay went there though, so I'd consider it an edge case against one where there WOULD be actual differences impacting things.
moozooh wrote:
Tangent wrote:
As for the Vault, its description says that the guidelines for difficulty still apply, but the guidelines are along the lines of "choose the most entertaining". It's contradictory. It's meant to be purely speed records, and if we're focusing solely on speed, that's almost always going to be on the easiest difficulty.
It's because TASVideos's purpose is not that of a catalogue or a sports authority. We're an entertainment site first and foremost. First the difficulty is chosen, and the chain of obsoletion that follows is thereby constrained to the initial choice; a precedent law of sorts. It seems contradictory at first, but as soon as the initial submission is established, it doesn't have to change unless there's a very compelling case that would probably even be enough to take it out of the Vault in the first place.
It's practically mantra that decisions of the past aren't binding precedent for future decision, so this seems both wrong and counter to what most decisions that have been made for games played on the easiest difficulty have stated re: runs on a harder difficulty would obsolete, even if slower.
People seem really focused on entertainment, but that seems like a discussion that's over before it begins to me. Any goal choice using any game setup that's sufficiently entertaining has always been acceptable. I think there are two more important things to be focusing on; the situation where there's a run on both an easy difficulty and hard difficulty, and the Vault.
I don't think that anybody has ever tried to obsolete a run on a harder difficulty with a run on an easier one, but if we're going to say that all that matters is speed and entertainment as judged by whatever subset of users is around that month as compared to the original one's, I can certainly see it happening that a run on easy would end up with a higher entertainment score. Obsoleting a run that was more challenging to create simply because of that seems completely wrong.
As for the Vault, its description says that the guidelines for difficulty still apply, but the guidelines are along the lines of "choose the most entertaining". It's contradictory. It's meant to be purely speed records, and if we're focusing solely on speed, that's almost always going to be on the easiest difficulty.
Well there's always the chance someone will complain about something. But let's say a run like Warp describes is submitted. What would there be to complain about re: difficulty that couldn't be easily dismissed? I'm not thinking of anything.
Probably half the runs on this site, if not more, fall under what Warp described: Runs where the difficulty makes no discernible difference aside from a few extra seconds of repetition. The problem is that people are complaining in the first place, not that their claims can't be easily dismissed. If it makes no difference, why do people complain often enough to necessitate a discussion thread? Shouldn't people want the faster, smoother looking run over the slightly slower and slightly more repetitive version? When a TAS ultimately trivializes the difficulty to the point where all runs look the same, it makes no sense that people would still try to enforce using the hardest difficulty.
I don't want to see the guideline/rule itself changed, because I do believe there are obvious cases where easier difficulties should be forbidden: For example, if the game ends early and tells you to play on a harder difficulty for the true ending, then that's a solid reason to reject a run on Easy. I want to see the attitude of the audience changing to become more relaxed, so that we don't have more prolonged arguments over why a run uses Easy when Hard just means you attack bosses two or three more times.
I probably missed something, but after rewriting this post about 10 times I've stopped caring about making sure it's perfect.
If someone says "I chose easy because it's easier than hard", that's not a good enough reason. That's the definition of an easier difficulty. If someone says "I chose easy because this trick is impossible on hard," and that statement is false, it should be pointed out, not left to cause further misunderstandings.
There seems to be the attitude that any reason given for choosing a lower difficulty has immediately and conclusively dismissed all further discussion on it, and any further mention is a personal affront. I would say that is the bigger problem than people disagreeing and expressing their opinions in a forum specifically for that. If the desired outcome is to squelch all discussion on why a difficulty decision was made and keep people from having to justify why they chose it, then the guideline should be removed entirely.
I don't care how much evidence you present to me, I'm still not going to do a Jedi mode TAS.
Okay? Claims were made that appeared to be in error. I showed why I believed them to be in error. Better understanding overall can be nothing but a good thing.
I'm sure there are games where only one difficulty level is used, and not always the hardest.
Doom. (Common is Ultra-Violent, hardest is NIGHTMARE (besides usual difficulty bumps, enemies randomly respawn, making luck a huge factor))
It's easy to imagine a game where some difficulty settings are pointless to run (only a small number of levels are playable for example).
Most Contras, Golden Axe, actually, about a third of the things on the list here.
There might be games where even speedrunning is easier to do on some harder difficulty level (again, no example in mind, sorry), but when playing normally, it doesn't apply.
Kingdom Hearts 2.5 (Critical mode = ton of bonus starting abilities, permanent +25% to damage dealt, 2x damage taken, -25% exp earned)
===========
TWEWY just occurred to me as a fringe bizarre case. It has a relatively freely adjustable difficulty through (most) of the game. It'd seem a little weird to just set it to easy mode as soon as it was unlocked though, and even weirder if you were to bump it around for the better drops.
Another situation I'd like to see clarified is when the difficulty chosen has major effects on the number of stages/amount of game. For concrete examples, the Flintstones run in the queue, assorted Fire Emblems, Pinocchio, etc. The standard seems to be "It's acceptable, but a run on the right difficulty would obsolete it, even though we know it'll be much slower." I'd like to see that kind of thing a little more codified.
Aside from that, Moons has always been anything goes. If you can make a case for playing at medium hard while upside down and never using the B button, that's publishable. It's been acceptable for the Vault too though. Entertainment isn't supposed to be a factor for the Vault, and accepting games on easy difficulty for it because that's the most entertaining is a contradiction to me.
I don't like chosing an easy difficulty specifically because that makes the game easier to play or simply because it's fastest. That seems counter to the very idea of a super human player crushing the game at its most difficult. Not that I expect the floodgates to open up, but I don't like the idea of 'faster' submissions due to playing on easier difficulties, even if the actual gameplay would be functionally identical.
Example list ho.
(Sports)
http://tasvideos.org/4482S.htmlhttp://tasvideos.org/4577S.html
(Racing)
http://tasvideos.org/4322S.html
(Card)
http://tasvideos.org/4704S.html
(Autoscroller SHMUP)
http://tasvideos.org/4802S.html
The spirit behind the difficulty guideline is pretty simple: choose difficulty according to what makes the most interesting run. That's all there is to it.
By default, that would be the hardest difficulty because those are obviously more impressive to complete, but it definitely does not always apply. If raising the difficulty just means that boss battles take more repetitive action and damage-taking speed tricks have to be forgone, then it is definitely justifiable to pick a lower difficulty.
I don't know why people are making such a big issue out of this. We get a more interesting run this way, so why force the change?
What speed tricks would have to be foregone here on a higher difficulty? Only rarely does health dip under half. That doesn't seem to be a limiting factor.
And to clarify, I fully expect and have no issue with this being accepted, but I strongly disagree with the reasons given for why a lesser difficulty was chosen (fewer enemies, easier to TAS, faster) and believe that a slower run on a harder difficulty should obsolete this, regardless of speed. I'd also hate to see games on harder difficulties obsoleted because of the reasons given here.
I'd like you to explain why those are appropriate reasons to choose a lower difficulty for this game, but not appropriate reasons to choose a lower difficulty for other games.
I don't give a crap about other games, that's for a different topic. All I told you was why I chose the difficulty for this game in particular.
Then don't.
Why are they valid reasons for this game? Because the run would be harder to make and require more resource (health) management? Yeah, obviously. That's what a harder difficulty means. The boss HP is perfectly understandable and I have no issues with that. Every other reason you've given is exactly why the guidelines say TO use the hardest difficulty, and I don't feel it's appropriate to use them as reasons to avoid it. Like jlun2 asked, where does it end then?
It's not even like there haven't been numerous times where runs on a lower difficulty were accepted with the stipulation that a slower run on a harder difficulty would obsolete it either, which is what I'd expect to happen here anyway.
The question was raised about why a lower difficulty was chosen, at least one seems to be the complete opposite of a valid reason for choosing a lower difficulty in a ton of other games.
1) A harder difficulty is slower
2) A harder difficulty is less entertaining
3) A harder difficulty is harder to TAS
How much clearer do you want me to be? Would you like me to write a thesis on the pros and cons of each difficulty while I'm at it?
I'd like you to explain why those are appropriate reasons to choose a lower difficulty for this game, but not appropriate reasons to choose a lower difficulty for other games.
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Invariel,
I addressed that in the very first post I made in this thread. To recap:
Past remarks are not precedent for future decisions.
That point wasn't actually discussed in that thread at all.
That run had numerous optimality problems which were clearly the far more deciding factor over difficulty choice.
If an admin wants to split it, they can split it.
The question was raised about why a lower difficulty was chosen, at least one seems to be the opposite of a valid reason for choosing a lower difficulty in a ton of other games. I think that in and of itself bears attention, even if it's just for eventual historic reasons for future runs instead of being sent to The Spinoff Zone.
