This place just so happens to be relatively free of all that horrid misogyny and I'd like to see it kept that way.
Relatively free or misogyny? As in there is some misogyny, just not as much as on average?
Please give actual examples (other than a couple of threads where people asked how many female TASers there are; that's not misogyny in any way, shape or form).
I'm not an admin or moderator of this site, but I do care about it, and such accusations make my blood boil.
That's not the point. The point is that Samsara made some accusations about unequal treatment and how those threads "are the perfect answer to why there aren't more female TASers". I don't think the insinuation was that the reason is that people repeat lame internet memes.
Samsara takes gender issues seriously, and so do I. Don't think such accusations should be thrown lightly, because they are pretty serious. "It's pretty lame humor" does not warrant throwing such accusations.
I can't be the sole person to point out the inequality on the site, but I think it could easily be argued that two (now three) threads focusing on finding female TASers
Two threads out of how many thousands? And even those threads don't show any kind of unequal treatment that I can see (but please point out specifics if you disagree).
as well as one brief instance of assuming that a female TASer was male (granted that Gamer Maiden Sonia's response was a little overboard, but that's not the point) qualify as a few instances of male posters naively saying, "Wow! Girls are different!"
How does mentioning something that many people consider unusual mean unequal treatment?
Previously in this thread I wrote about how I always assume by default that anonymous people on the internet are male. Would you accuse me of "unequal treatment" for writing that?
Those two threads are the perfect answer to "Why aren't there more female TASers?" There most likely are, they're just choosing not to mention their gender because shit like that happens. "There are no women on the internet" on the first page of both threads. God.
I don't really understand what you are referring to. How are those two threads "perfect answers to why there aren't more female TASers"?
And "there are no women on the internet" is a meme. It's humor.
Is it really that hard to treat everyone equally? This is a site for talking about emulation and speedrunning. Gender shouldn't matter.
I haven't seen much unequal treatment on this site. Can you point actual examples? (Because an accusation of unequal treatment of people is kind of serious and shouldn't be thrown lightly.)
I don't know if I want or don't want to know what originated this thread... :P
Seriously, though, I have noticed that I always assume that an anonymous person on the internet is male, basically without fail. It kind of always surprises me when someone (especially a regular) turns out to be female. I'm not exactly sure why. I shouldn't make such an assumption and I shouldn't be surprised, but that's just how it goes. Why do I assume that? It's strange, when I think about it.
Nach wrote:
That's quite alright, every guy here I'm sure gets mad from time to time.
I have no problem with the current system and I've seen nothing here that makes me reconsider that. The only reason to change I've seen so far is that some people feel like their feelings are hurt because their TASes of poor/uninteresting games don't get as much attention as more famous games or more entertaining TASes.
The thing is: Is the current distinction between the two tiers useful. Could the distinction be improved and made more meaningful and useful?
There's always going to be subjectivity in judging.
Wouldn't it, thus, be an improvement to remove the subjectivity on the question of which tier a TAS belongs to?
You make a good point in the sense that 10 years ago the number rerecords was a very good measure or how much work was put into the TAS because rerecording was basically the only tool available (in addition to slowdown and frame advance).
However, as emulators have advanced and developed with more and more tools to aid TASing, rerecording has become more and more just one tool among many, so singling out rerecording from among all of them as some kind of measurement is getting less and less relevant or descriptive.
It's still something that's very accurate and easy to measure, though, so it has its value. It would just be nice if we could, as I suggested, separate the "amount of work" (ie. number of rerecords) done manually and done by a script. Both information would be interesting, but simply adding them up devalues their meaning (especially when compared to TASes that did not use rerecording scripts).
Zeroing the rerecord count for runs that have a clearly wrong number is an ok solution.
Perhaps in the submission procedure the submitter could be asked if the rerecord count is accurate (number of manual rerecords) or whether the actual number has been lost or inflated by a bot. (It could be noted that this is just for statistical purposes only and has no relevance on whether the submission will be published or not.)
I'll like to bump this thread once again because out of curiosity I went to the statistics page after a long time, and the problem has gotten even worse.
The top five "most rerecords" runs have over a million rerecords. The top-100 runs have all over 100k rerecords. I don't know how many rerecords people manually make, but I bet they don't make 37 millions of them.
On the other end we have a 5-minute SMB run with 3 rerecords and a 30-minute Metal Max Returns with 6 rerecords. Clearly something has been lost along the way. (I have no idea about the rest, but eg. 61 rerecords for a 14-minute Alien Storm run sounds suspiciously low, but I have no idea how much it really requires.)
Especially the top of the list is rather irrelevant, as it's flooded by bot-generated rerecord counts. (I don't think this would be useful information even if we wanted to know how many times a bot retried, because it's not used consistently. Some people drop bot-generated rerecords completely, others only include the rerecords from a successful attempt, etc.)
Again, as sad as it makes me, I don't think the rerecords statistics serve any useful purpose anymore. The question is, what to do about it?
I have one question, and it's related to the same issue as with the "official world record" tag proposed in the past:
If we indeed go with "any%/100% tier" and "everything-else tier", what kind of run exactly qualifies for which of those two tiers? And I'm thinking precisely about total control runs (and also reset abuse runs, but let's leave that one out of this, as it's irrelevant.)
Would the "normal" any% run be considered the default any% completion (that would go the first tier) and the total control run a "special" kind of run that goes to the new Moon tier? Or would it be the other way around?
In other words, what exactly is considered "any%" in terms of the new vault tier?
(I ask this because I'm assuming that only one "any%" run is eligible for the new "vault" tier, rather than a bunch of them. Anything else goes to the new "moon" tier as an alternative goal run, if it's well-received enough.)
Edit: I just realized that "only one any% run is eligible for vault, anything else goes to moon" almost makes it sound like the importance of the tiers has been reversed: Now it would be a privilege to get to the vault tier, while the moon tier is just a dumping ground for "everything else". Perhaps this is a good switcharound? :P
Star is simply the highest-rated movies from moon (since to get added to star, it must have top ratings, and the lowest-rating movies are routinely removed from star)
I suppose I don't have any other choice than to give up, as it seems pointless to try to describe what the star tier really means (as far as I understand). I wonder how many times I have repeated the same things. Seems hopeless.
"Star" is an excellent name for the tier because it parallels the usage of the word when describing people. (The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it in that context as "a person who is preeminent in a particular field".)
"Moon" was originally just a "notable publication", in other words a "notice this" symbol in the recent publications list, chosen because of the "celestial bodies" theme. It got transferred as the symbol for the "better runs tier". It might also be because it can be thought as "a bit less than a star".
In this new tier scheme, however, it makes little sense as a name. It would only be named so because it has always been named so. But perhaps something more descriptive could be in place? Although granted, I can't think of anything better right at this moment.
In the same vein "coin" doesn't really depict "aims for fastest completion"... But yeah, I don't have suggestions for anything better.
It won't be published into moons, because it's not entertainment, and it's not speed run -> so it rejected.
I think you are being rather contradictory here. You are basically saying "an interesting alternative goal will be rejected if it's not interesting".
It either is interesting (in which case it can be published) or it isn't. It can't be both.
I'm honestly not sure what is it that you are actually trying to say.
What I meant by "removing Vault" was just removing the tier itself and merging all the Vault and Moon runs into a singular default category that still accepts all runs that would normally qualify for Vault. I apologize for the awkward wording. I'd appreciate if this were added to the OP (I can't edit it anymore) and the poll, as I think the voting reflects my accidental implication.
It seems to me that we may be reaching a consensus where the Vault tier will be renamed and the distinction between the new "Vault" and the Moon tiers will be changed to be about goals rather than about reception. So, in a sense, a big part of the current Moon runs will be merged to the "new Vault" (whatever its new name will be; "coins" seems to be a popular suggestion, but personally I find it a bit odd...) and the rest of the Moon runs will remain where they are.
Perhaps the poll options should reflect this possibility more clearly?
This way we could return the old question: "Should this run be published?". It would just mean different things depending on the branch:
- If it's a speed record, people vote for its optimality
- If it's a side goal, people vote for both entertainment value and optimality.
Because if (and only if) a speed record is not optimal, it will be rejected. Otherwise go to Coins.
If a side goal is optimal but boring, it will be rejected. If a side goal is enjoyable but suboptimal, it will be rejected. Otherwise go to Moons.
Sounds quite reasonable to me. I don't object.
(Btw, I still think that the "star tier" should be special. It shouldn't be considered just a "better-than-Moon tier". Basically any TAS ought to be eligible for a star if it showcases something representative we want to show. Having extremely high ratings can (and will usually) overlap with the Star tier, but it's not a requirement. Not all highest-rated run will necessarily get a star, and not all star runs will necessarily be on the very top of the rating list.)
The "all games deserve a TAS" principle is reserved for completion time only (with any% and 100% being the two possible goals).
Rly? Then it's really bad. Don't ask why. I don't know, it's complicated question. If run was not accepted only because it's not any% or 100%, and it's interesting (but not entertainment, because it's vault), and it was rejected ONLY because it's not any% or 100%, then it's silly.
If it's interesting, then it gets published into the Moon tier. If no alternative goal is interesting enough, the game can still have a completion-time TAS. What exactly is the problem? Do you really want to accept any arbitrary goal for every possible game, inundating the site?
Warp wrote:
Edit: Which gives me the idea: Change the tiers to "the any%/100% tier" and "the everything else tier". (I don't have good ideas for the actual names.)
Why should the vault tier need to feel like just a dump to throw the "garbage TASes" into? That's a rather unfair characterization of the tier. IMO vault is the default tier for every TAS. Getting to the moon tier is like a recognition for high entertainment value or other notable characteristic, but that doesn't need to mean that vaulted runs are just garbage.
(The star tier is special. It's basically moon-tiered runs hand-picked for a showcase of TASing. They aren't necessarily the best of the best, even though some of them might be. In fact, I would even say that a run that would otherwise be vaulted, could well be hand-picked for a star, if there's something special about it that makes it worth showcasing.)
I do understand, however, if some people might feel that their TAS, which they spent so much effort doing, kind of gets "shunned" by not getting so much recognition as to get the privileged moon tier label.
I suppose a relevant question would be: What does the two-tier system achieve that the ratings don't?
And the answer to that question is (according to my understanding): We want to give all games a fair chance to get a TAS, but we don't want arbitrary goals for all of them (because else the site would be inundated). The "all games deserve a TAS" principle is reserved for completion time only (with any% and 100% being the two possible goals). Only if an alternative goal is entertaining enough for a particular game, will it get a chance to be published as well (and this is what the moon tier represents).
Thus the even more relevant question is: If we merge the vault and moon tiers, would this mean that all games can be TASed with all possible goals, even non-speed-oriented ones?
Edit: Which gives me the idea: Change the tiers to "the any%/100% tier" and "the everything else tier". (I don't have good ideas for the actual names.)
I found this video of opening and examining the insides of a N64 very interesting.
It looks very neatly designed. Everything's on a single PCB, and not a single cable anywhere. Also, it's passively cooled, so it ought to be very silent (I don't know because I have never seen one live).
Link to video
I would personally like to see a single category or maybe a tag for fastest game completions (any% TASes).
This has been discussed before, and it even went to an almost-agreement phase where it was almost going to be done, but in the end it turned out to be too ambiguous (and even controversial).
The idea would have worked perfectly something like 5 years ago, but today it's too fuzzy. The reason for this is that there are more and more "total control" TASes (and IMO also reset-corruption TASes) that just jump to the end screen of the game rather than completing it. Does that count as "fastest completion", or should it be a TAS that actually plays the game through?
(Personally I would oppose the idea of classifying a total control run, and even runs that use resetting to corrupt the game, as "legit" world record completions, and from that point of view I'm somewhat glad that the system wasn't implemented after all. Although it's also a bit of a pity, as it would have conveyed useful information in the form of "this game can be hypothetically completed this fast".)
The poll is confusing because it doesn't make it clear what "No, remove the Vault" means.
Does it mean "remove the tier and all TASes belonging to it", or does it mean "merge the Vault and Moon tiers"? If it means the latter, I think the poll options should reflect that more clearly.
The tiers were partly created as a result of a desired shift in ideology of tasvideos.
For a very long time the main ideology of tasvideos was that we only publish the highest-quality tool-assisted speedruns. This did not only include technical quality, but more relevantly to this issue, entertainment quality. In other words, not only did we have (and still have) a very high standard of technical quality, we also wanted all published runs to be entertaining. Thus we rejected "boring" runs as being unfit for the goal of the site.
While that sounds good, at some point there was a slight shift in ideology: Rather than being just a collection of "most entertaining TASes", we wanted tasvideos to be like an archive for TASes of all games (that can be reasonably TASed). In other words, a principle of "every game deserves a TAS" (no matter how boring it might be). The concept "most entertaining TASes" can still be retained thanks to the rating system and also thanks to the tier system.
In my personal opinion, I approve of this change, and thus this change was for the better. I do think that all games deserve a TAS, and no game should be shunned (and I was a promoter of this idea). After all, what's "boring" is subjective, and what's boring to some people might not be boring to another. I like the idea that tasvideos is a kind of "archive" of all TASable games. Many people who played a certain game when they were young often would love to see it TASed, even if the game is "boring".
If the problem of the "vault" tier is that the name has some negative connotations (I'm not sure it has, but I understand if it can get that kind of negative fame), perhaps it could be renamed to something like "archive" or the like. (However, I doubt the problem is so severe that this is justified...)
I just wish they didn't replace Twilight's cozy tree home with an ugly bulky castle in the middle of a small village where it doesn't belong and is an eyesore.
But they have to sell toys, so...
