Sweet, personal attacks. You do know that ad hominem is a logical fallacy, right?
An argumentum ad hominem means to try to prove a claim as false by pointing out something objectionable about the person who made the claim. For example, saying "he is not a professional physicist, thus everything he says about gravity should be doubted" is an argumentum ad hominem.
I was not trying to discredit his opinion by making him look bad. I was simply calling him childish and stubborn because he apparently doesn't even want to discuss his opinion. That's not ad hominem, that's just a pure insult, nothing more.
2) I am *indeed* saying I prefer the current run to this one. I don't *like* the current run, but this one is even worse.
I don't believe that, but requesting honesty would be futile, I suppose.
And just like I'll probably get nowhere voting no, you'll also get nowhere whining about me voting no. The only difference is I'm aware of the fact.
Curiously, you don't even see that with that sentence you are admitting your stubborness and unwillingness to discuss about these things in a reasonable and civil way.
Try to grow up a little.
What would you do if someone made what you considered a really really terrible run that was accepted, and then someone obsoleted it by 1 second? How would you vote?
If both submissions are equally bad, I would either not vote or vote "meh" because I wouldn't really care which one of the two is kept. Given that the first submission was already accepted, voting no in the second submission wouldn't change anything. If both runs are extremely bad and what I would want is to remove them completely, a "no" vote on the second submission would be pointless with regard to that goal. Instead I would make a post about it.
If the newer submission is in any way better than the older, I could even vote "yes" to raise the quality even a bit.
A "no" vote has, in practice, the meaning "this should not be published" only for the first submission for the game. For subsequent submissions it means, in practice, if it should be obsoleted or not. Voting "no" means "this submission is not better than the previous, I liked the previous one more".
You are abusing the posting mechanism to protest against what you assume is a protest. Why?
Excuse me? I thought the forum exist *precisely* for people to post their opinions.
I didn't reproach his usage of the forum for his little protest. I reproached his usage of the voting system for that. If he had posted a 10-page essay about the evils of glitched runs, then fine. However, sabotaging a submission with a stupid protest vote is not the way to go.
In that he used it as a protest against overglitched runs, not as an opinion whether this run should be published, obsoleting the previous run.
He answered the question of the poll, what more can you ask for? Don't assume that he didn't watch it, because that you look bad.
Oh, sure, he read the question in the poll and honestly answered that question. It was not a protest against anything, just a honest unbiased opinion. And I also see a cow flying outside my window.
Necro is free to give his opinion on the run, and the only counterproductivity here is you being dismissive to his beliefs. Did he like the submission? No. Does he want it published? No. Does his opinion in this matter still count? Yes.
By voting no he is telling that the previous video should be kept because it's better. However, that's clearly not his opinion. That's not what he wants to say with his vote. He just wants to protest like a child with a tantrum.
Warp: Voting no on this submission is pointless in the same way that voting yes on this submission is pointless, in the same way that posting about why someone shouldn't have voted how they did is fifty times more pointless. Additionally, voting no means you did not like watching this movie, not that you liked the previous submission better. I know this because the question above the voting selection reads "Did you like watching this movie?".
I wouldn't even be surprised if he didn't watch the movie at all, but just abused the voting mechanism to make a protest.
Yeah man, your opinion totally doesn't matter, apparently. Why vote against the machine when you know you can't win?
He didn't vote "no" to express his opinion that this run is worse than the previous run, which is the goal of the voting. Would he be happier if this run was not published and the previous kept? Of course not. That's not his goal with his "no" vote (although it would be the result if "no" votes would win). He voted "no" as a stupid protest (about something we already know). It's a kind of minor sabotage. It's stupid and doesn't make sense.
In other words, he misused the voting mechanism to express a protest and perform a kind of sabotage, ignoring the purpose of the voting. That's not civil.
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Why can't I understand what that means? I have read it about 5 times and I still can't understand what it means. I'm baffled.
Voting no is kind of pointless here. We already know what your opinion is, so protesting once again (in the form of a "no" vote) is completely pointless. Your vote won't affect the final publication decision, so it's pointless.
Besides, with a "no" you are saying that the previous run was better than this one, and that you want the previous run to be kept and this one discarded. I don't think that's what you are trying to say. This vote is related to comparing this run to the previous publication, not some wish run of yours. So not only is it pointless, your vote even tells the wrong thing.
I assume that you *don't care* which one of the two runs, the previous one or this one, is published, because in your opinion both are equally bad. In that case either not voting or a "meh" vote would have been correct, instead of a pointless attempt at a protest.
Megaman sucks and that game doesn't represent what a TAS really is.
I am completely puzzled. Every now and then someone will come up with a strange idea of what a TAS is and isn't and will then make a big fuss about it, and some people will jump on the bandwagon (remember that enormous thread where some people were claiming that TASes have nothing to do with speed?) What puzzles me is that these ideas are clearly in contradiction with practice, yet they still get some support.
Now, here's one of the oldest, most original definitions of a TAS:
"This is a sparring program. Similar to the programmed reality of the Matrix. It has the same basic rules – rules like gravity. What you must learn is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others – can be broken." ― Morpheus, The Matrix
This quotation was put at the beginning of the Common Tricks page because it so beautifully describes what a TAS is: It bends and breaks the internal physics of the game, usually by exploiting glitches in the system, thus achieving feats that would otherwise be seemed as impossible. Just like in the Matrix.
The Megaman TAS is a beautiful example of this. The physics of the game are broken in the most ingenuous ways in order to achieve speed. That's the whole spirit of TASing.
Since there seems to be some confusion about what the technical rating means, perhaps it would be a good idea to create a description of that rating which would help people to vote. (A description of the entertainment rating could be created too, but I suppose that's less confusing to begin with.)
Of course the exact meaning of the technical rating may be seen as a question of opinion. However, the problem with this is that if different voters have a different notion of what it means, the votes will get biased and the error margin will get larger, making the rating less useful. As a co-developer of the rating system I had my own idea of what the technical rating would mean, but I didn't think back then about actually describing it. (In fact, putting it into words back then would have been much more difficult than now that I have had time to think about it.)
So here's my proposal for the description of the technical rating:
When judging the "technical quality" rating, two elements of the video should be considered: How close to optimal the run length is (ie. if it's as fast as possible), and the techniques used to make the run.
Judging the techniques used to make the run relies, naturally, quite a lot on the submission description of the video, which is why submitters should describe these techniques in detail. Techniques usually have one goal: To make the run faster. These are things to consider about the techniques:
How much work was put into studying the game and background research (eg. searching for key values, decompiling, searching for glitches, routes...)? What kind of tools were used to make the run? How innovatively and ingenuously the tools and techniques were used? Was perhaps a new tool developed to make the run possible? How much work overall was put into making the run (while the number of re-records can be used as an indicator for this, it shouldn't be used as the only indicator)?
Other minor things can be considered too, although their weight on the rating should perhaps not be as accentuated. These things may be game-specific, such as how innovatively glitches were used to save time, how damage was used for shortcuts and so on.
So, no matter how technically perfect the movie is, it will never technically be perfect? A technical rating less than 10 tells me "at least one person thinks this movie could be faster."
IMO, while speed should be one of the main factors, if not the main factor, in the technical rating, the rating is a quite poor indicator if it is given by that alone.
Think of "technical" as coming from the word "techniques": The more marvelous techniques the run uses, the highest the technical score. Techniques have one goal: To optimize the speed. What techniques were used for that goal? How innovative were they? How much work was put into studying and developing these techniques? Were the techniques used in an ingenuous way?
By that logic, early videos that didn't even have frame advance capabilities should be rated less simply because of that.
You write as if that was a bad thing. I don't see why it would be.
Early videos have their merit, but let's admit it: many of them are quite "sloppy" by today's standards. I don't see many of them deserving the highest technical rating. There may be exceptions, but very few.
If a run is really framewise perfect, then it deserves a 10 for technical rating by definition.
When implementing the rating system that was not really what I had in mind as a definition for technical rating (even though it was Bisqwit who in the end decided the rating categories). I can't speak for Bisqwit, but I'm somewhat convinced that he doesn't think so either. Defining technical rating by simply the number of frames the video uses is way too limited and IMO not in the spirit of the ratings. (Of course the number of frames should have a significant effect on the rating, but IMO it should in no way be the only affecting thing.)
Just out of curiosity: Why do you need .NET to make such an application? It doesn't sound like something which would need such an API.
Would it be really painful to make such an application in a portable language such as Java which would run everywhere? (Personally I'm not very fond of Java as a programming language, but its portability is simply a superb feature.)
Note that with "amount of work" I was not referring to the amount of rerecords nor the time taken to make the run. While those can, of course, be considered, I didn't mean they should be the main factors.
By "amount of work" I was referring more to the variety and ingenuity and developement put into making the run possible. Also the amount of preparation for making the run (such as studying the game inside and out to discover glitches, key memory values and so on) is an important factor.
Of course if the submitter doesn't describe in detail everything he did in order to make the run, it's next to impossible to judge it. However, that's the submitter's own fault. He should describe in detail the entire process of making the run. It does not only help rating the run, but it's also interesting info to read.
Of course nothing stops someone from lying in their submission description, but I think we can trust the majority of submitters to be honest.
Perhaps a page could be written outlining the basic ideas behind the two rating categories? If there's any interest, I could write some kind of draft and post it here.
Note that the technical rating is not only about how many frames long the run is. Also other things may affect it. I would even go so far as to say that even if a run uses as few frames as it is technically possible to complete the game, it still doesn't necessarily mean that a 10 should automatically given to it.
I would say that also the amount of work put into the run may/should also affect the technical score, at least a bit. For example the amount of work that has been done in order to deliver the newest rockman video is just amazing. Just that alone should raise the technical score. Another good example of work put into a run which I admire is the new Gradius run. The work put into the Zelda TAS is also completely amazing. (There are several other examples too).
There are other runs, however, which are very simple and straightforward, and the "work" done to do them consists basically of just doing frame advance and using savestates until the run is as fast as possible (or the runner thought possible). While such run may be framewise optimal, it still doesn't mean that it deserves a 10 for technical score.
I have always wondered if "takes no damage" means "it's not necessary to take any damage in this game to complete it as fast as possible, and this run consequently takes no damage anywhere", or if it means "the game could be completed faster by taking damage, but this runs does not, and thus is a bit slower than the fastest possible". I have mostly assumed it is the former.
One problem I can see with several of dubious categories (such as "no zipping", "takes no damage" (when taking damage is faster), "does not abuse programming errors", etc) is that the amount of videos to be published with all the combinations of these categories would be rather large.
Perhaps someone would want a rockman video where there's no zipping, but taking damage is ok? Or perhaps no damage and no zipping, but other bug abusing is ok? How about a run with no bug abuse at all, with or without taking damage? The amount of possibilities start rapidly growing quite large (exponentially with the number of such categories, actually).
So, which combination of categories would please most people? Some people might want to see a "does not abuses bugs" run, while others might just want to see a "no zipping" run, while others might not mind taking damage while others might want a no-damage run. If we come up with even more such categories, the amount of possibilities explodes.
It would be prohibitive and useless to publish all possible kinds of movies for the same game. Currently only about 2-3 movies are published for certain games, and the differences are often quite extreme (such as the ones caused by "no warps"). If the difference between two movies is subtle (such as "takes no damage", which would perhaps make a difference of just a few seconds) then it starts rapidly becoming pointless to publish both movies.
While the technical rating *in theory* should be a neutral judgement on the technical achievements of the run (without things like "I don't like this game" or "I don't like how the run was made, it's boring" affecting it), we should still remember that nevertheless it still just reflects the *opinion* of people.
Regarldess of that, I still think that it's not worthless. It's interesting to see what's the average opinion of people about the technical quality of the run. Of course it mostly reflects "I *think* it's worth this much technically" instead of "I have made extensive calculations and noticed that 5 frames could be saved from the total, thus I vote just 9", but opinions are still valuable.
The "perfect" score was not, in fact, intended to mean "there's just no way it can be improved, it has reached absolute perfection, it completes the game in the minimum possible amount of frames, it's a run which I would watch 1000 times in a row". It was meant to be more like "this is about the best video I have ever seen here, it was absolutely fabulous, I can't even imagine how it could be improved". Perhaps the use of the word "perfect" was a bit misleading.
The reason for the descriptions in the values is to try to make votes equal in meaning. For example someone could think that 7.5 is the "average" vote, while someone else could think that 5 is. If these two people consistently vote with these meanings in their mind, the results would be biased (especially if one of them votes considerably more than the other). The purpose of the descriptions is to try to give the same value meaning to all voters.
As for using decimals, I don't think that's necessary. When developing the voting functionality some people in fact protested to the big amount of values. Some even suggested that something like 3 values would be enough ("I didn't like it", "average", "I liked it"). I think someone even suggested just 2 values ("I didn't like it", "I liked it"). Another common suggestion was 5 values.
Yet in a different forum (the IRTC to be exact) it was at some time in the past felt that 0-10 is not enough, so they used 0-20, which allows the voters more nuance. I didn't want to go to such extremes, so I just put the 0-10 range.
That's sort of what my post was getting at: if people are feeling dissatisfied with broken runs, maybe they can play a "takes no sloppy damage"
Besides being a completely wrong name for a category ("sloppy damage" means that the damage is uninentional or unnecessary, which is hardly the case in any run) it's also very difficult to define: What is considered "sloppy-looking" and what isn't? If in my opinion some damage is not "sloppy-looking" but in your opinion it is, who is right?
Goal strategies should be clear and unambiguous. "Takes no damage" is very unambiguous and easy to check. "Looks good" isn't.
and "no zipping" run.
I'm doubtful about the real value of such a version of the rockman run. Forbidding one glitch abuse while allowing countless others seems a bit artificial. Note that this is a bit different from a "no warps" run in that zipping doesn't really skip entire levels. The "no warps" category is good because you get to see the whole game.
Of course one could argue that "no zipping" is the same: You get to see the whole game, but this is much more debatable. In many cases the "zipping" doesn't actually skip any screen nor actually deviates considerably from the intended route. A good example is the very first zipping in the rockman run: I see absolutely no problem with it. It looks cool.
Btw, I said it earlier, but let me repeat: I'm not at all opposed to the idea of a "takes no damage" version of any movie. If someone really wants to submit such a movie, then by all means. I won't protest that. I'm just not sure if it will get enough yes votes to be published. Perhaps it will.
I'm very sad that taking damage became the preferred way of doing things in TASes.
What do you mean "became"? The main goal of TASes has *always* been to complete the game as fast as possible using whichever means. I have been following this from the very beginning, from the very first TAS that Bisqwit published. His (and basically everyone's) concept was "complete as fast as possible by any means" from the very beginning. I even vividly remember when I was making my first tries at Rygar that Bisqwit told me something along the lines of "try to utilize those HPs by taking damage for speed". This was like during the first year since this site was first created or so.
It was not after several *years* later when someone got confused with the statement "we are not doing this to compete with everyone, we are doing this just for entertainment" (IOW, we are not trying to compete with regular speedruns for world records or anything like that) and somehow understood it as "the goal of a TAS is not speed but making an entertaining movie" (IOW a machinima video), after which all the fuss started.
Luckily the fuss and confusion kept itself in the forum only. The movies themselves were (and are) still judged and published based on speed, which is what TASing is all about.
If what you want is a machinima video, then you can try youtube or whatever.
I think that "I prefer no damage runs" is a somewhat odd statement. I do understand it, but it just sounds like the alternative is that the runner gets damage freely and arbitrarily (iow the runner doesn't care if he gets damage or not), making it look like sloppy play.
However, usually damage is taken only if it saves time. If it doesn't save time, the common agreement is that it should not be taken. The most common situation in most runs taking damage is that there are about 100 enemies to pass, and in about 10-20 of them damage is used to do so faster.
This just raises the question: Why does it make such a big difference whether the runner dodges (in a perfect way) 80 or 100 enemies? During the run we get to see several dozens of examples of perfect dodging. Why 20 more would make a difference? We already know that they can be dodged if the player really wants to.
Why taking damage has to be seen as sloppy play (even when knowing it's completely intentional and carefully planned and executed)? Why can't we have a more positive view of the situation and think about it as a cool strategy to save time? It's not like the runner would get damage from every single enemy, or even arbitrarily.
Personally I think it demonstrates a much more admirable strategy to see where the runner is taking the damage to save time and where he isn't (eg. because he can't, lest he die). In a way, a "takes no damage" when damage could save time feels like a lazy way of making the run: The runner doesn't have to make any planning nor decisions about when to take damage and when not to.
In other words, planning the damages is more laborious and difficult and requires more work to implement, while a no-damage run would be much easier and thus not as admirable. It's a lazy way of doing the run because one important planning element is removed, lessening the amount of work.
