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Spikestuff wrote:
I can refer to Guilty Gear X: Advance Edition where Ky is obsoleted by Zato as they're both characters available form the start for an instance of a character that wasn't unlocked.
Since they are available from the start, a Standard movie starting from the game start requires the most optimal char to be used. Originally one char was considered the best, then later it was found that another char is better, so a movie with one obsoletes a movie with the other.
Since SaveRAM is not involved, movies of that game will be unaffected by the (year-old) changes in SaveRAM rules. The slower char will remain obsoleted, unless people take a second look and feel that it's entertaining and different enough to co-exist in Alternative, with the "uses suboptimal char" tag. If that happens, particular char available from the start would be the only difference, so we would put char name into branch label to distinguish the 2 existing branches.
It won't imply any policy regarding other games and their branches. Branch labels are only used to indicate what makes branches different for a particular given game. If we try to add other meanings to branch labels, it quickly becomes impossible to reliably handle.
Now, you also asked "Let's pretend that Zato's the "savegame" character for this, which is why I'm saying for the sake of argument" in a non-public chat.
If Zato was a savegame char, the whole point of this thread's existence is splitting savegame-anchored movies into their own goal sets and obsoletion chains, therefore it would be published as a separate Standard branch called "savegame", and the Ky branch would remain without a label. Because there would not be several branches coming just from char choice. Savegame would be the key difference, therefore it goes into branch label for all savegame goals.
Finally, if we imagine an unlikely scenario that after that distinction someone makes entertaining movies for suboptimal chars, labeling becomes more complicated, tho it doesn't mean we won't be able to solve it.
Most likely for Alternative, we would not care if it's a savegame char or not, so yes, in Alt a better savegame char can obsolete a base roster char. However it doesn't mean it'd be faster. It could be slower and more entertaining, and still obsolete, because in Alt we aim for entertainment.
Now I said above that if a suboptimal char exists in Alt, both char branches would be labeled, because it's what we do according to branch label policies. But it really looks like "princess only" is a better example here, where an Alternative branch aims for a specific char, while other branches aim just for the most optimal char combo whatever it is.
For that reason, chars that are used for Standard goals (and can be changed in newer runs if they are quicker) should not go to branch labels, unless char choice results in what we consider a separate game mode altogether.
Chars that are used for entertainment in Alternative goals will go to branch labels if showcasing them was the sole goal.
If the Alt goal is different, and any char could be used within that goal, then that goal goes to the label but not the char.
Finally if different chars co-exist in Alt within the same goal, they go to branch labels to distinguish which is which.
This is all just branch labeling policy, obsoletion policies are unrelated and don't need to care how we label things. It's the other way around: we agree on obsoletion (or split) policies, and then adjust the labels to work with it. Making movie rules depend on labels would be a very bad practice that makes things worse.
Spikestuff wrote:
I can also refer to Digimon Rumble Arena where an unlocked character wasn't allowed, and instead a character that's available from the start would have been preferred instead.
That submission would be accepted under the current SaveRAM rules as a separate "savegame" branch.
Spikestuff wrote:
But we're in the new site era now where we have a new submission that's using an unlocked character in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance which should outright obsolete the Kenshi run and be the preferred run. But isn't for some reason.
A character name as a branch implies we would accept and publish every character. Which isn't good on the site side, as Judges and Publishers will have to deal with a "mess" of fighting game TASes.
But I already experimented with that idea with 5 separate characters in Tekken 3 and they're ineligible to be accepted due to Yoshimitsu (and that puddle can get muddier, but let's avoid that puddle) and of course Guilty Gear X as I referred to earlier.
If individual char branches are not good enough to go to Alternative, they just go to Playground. There, they will have char labels, because showcasing those chars was their sole goal. As I explained above, we need to update labeling policies to account for the new class system.
Spikestuff wrote:
In my opinion the character should obsolete the other regardless if they're an unlocked character or not and if they're an unlock then they should have the tag of well in this case `Second quest/Post game-completion`. We have tags, we should make the tags work at the very least, we still make new ones to this day.
This allows it to be simplified, and any other run from an unlocked roster or a standard one can instead go to Playground whilst the actual fastest can obsolete one another.
Adding extra clauses to movie rules is the opposite of simplification. Especially when those clauses go against the already existing agreement (always split SaveRAM in Standard unless all unlocked content fails to make the movie quicker). And especially against the current site direction of letting everyone have their favorite goal published (as long as we can afford it).
If our wording of the current policies needs to be clearer, we can and should improve it.
Spikestuff wrote:
This also allows another type of branch for fighting games, where you have the fastest character, a playaround and then "all endings", at least for the fighting games that show off different endings.
A fighting game movie that goes through all chars doesn't sound like a very popular goal among players or viewers, so I think it would be incredibly rare. If replaying the game with all chars is the only form of full completion for a particular game, maybe it's fine for Standard. But that's a discussion we haven't had yet, and adding it to this one seems to only make it even more complex. Like look at all the posts I already made in this thread, and tell me how many people have read them all and understood them.
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Thanks, that's a solid enough reason then!
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However, it was only after I had got this done and the encode uploaded that I checked the No-Intro database. The database said that while the split games are considered "good" dumps the original data of the memory pack is considered a "bad" dump.
I can understand that but it's kind of a bummer to realize the version you've made a completed TAS on was considered a bad version.
How easy would it be to resync on the good dump version?
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Should all be done.
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Great work! Here's a 4K encode
Link to video
Would you be interested in continuing the Genesis journey by checking out Demolition Man?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
How many of them are actual co-authorships, and how many are different names of the same user?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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upelly wrote:
Hi everyone, I just want to clarify, I made several mistakes in my original submission, including with the framerate (I had not realized the game has an unusual framerate). I will be re-making the TAS in the future with a latest version (v1.6 on pip) and the correct framerate, once there is an official LibTAS release with the required functionality. As for this submission, I'm not sure what the procedure is but please feel free to discard this TAS
If you hit the Edit button on the submission, you can then change the Status to Canceled.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Counting public opinions...Savegame based unlockable character should always obsolete clear save character in fighting games (and possibly racing) if it's faster.
2/16 (12.5%)
Spikestuff wrote:
SRAM should obsolete, but only for Fighting Games, and the information has to be very clear about it in the Publication. It will also cause the least amount of headaches.
I just fully agree and wish there were special rules for some genres
On the fence but a compromise of some kind looks acceptable.
4/16 (25%)
Samsara wrote:
I'm really on the fence about this. The easiest way to handle this would be through superseding, i.e we accept the first one we get and obsolete with the other, but we still have to figure out what option we prefer. SRAM better fulfills the goal of being as fast as possible, though it introduces conflicts of "legitimacy", for lack of a better word, in that a run that starts purely from power-on can be instantly verified as legitimate while SRAM needs further investigation to prove that nothing unfair is being carried over.
I think obviously we accept it as-is right now, but I think I might prefer the SRAM one, because it's faster and doesn't detract anything from the normal run? I can see why others might feel differently though, from a legitimacy standpoint. I also thought we were going in the direction of not superseding Standard branches even if content overlapped, so maybe both would be ok.
What if we limit the "SRAM-anchored movies would never compete against 'clean' movies under Standard" clause to the Fastest Completion types of categories only, or at least do not apply them to the Full Completion categories? While they are all categories under Standard, full completion is ultimately not exactly about "beating the game as fast as possible" in the most literal sense and is arguably less "sensitive" to certain differences that would have caused relatively bigger impacts to fastest completion runs in many cases.
Maybe that doesn't sound like a good justification for this specific proposal, but the general idea is that it's probably reasonable to allow obsoletions between save-anchored and "clean" movies for non-fastest completion categories based on how different they actually are instead of having a blanket "ban" on all obsoletions between movies with different save-anchor statuses under all of Standard.
Jos (on Discord) wrote:
Having two branches for fighting games for starter characters and unlockable characters isn't the end of the world IMO, but it is kind of a strange split
The cause of this argument right now is, as I see it, because TASVideos wants to draft one rule to apply to all games. And if that's something you want to do, I think the fact that fighting games get this branch split that isn't aligned with how the fighting game community acts is an acceptable compromise
The best solution is allowing them to co-exist as separate branches.
10/16 (62.5%)
feos wrote:
I don't want save-anchored movies to compete with power-on ones in Standard, because the former kinda give themselves a handicap which would somehow not count as a part of its completion time. I feel it's fair to instead have more branches. But in Moons, I think we can obsolete goals with and without save-anchor if they are too similar, and if there's consensus. I'd argue save-anchored would generally be more entertaining.
This seems like the most reasonable way of handling things to me, if the unlockable characters aren't significantly different gameplay-wise to the base characters.
I see more reason in not allowing unlockable characters to standard than I do in having them obsolete base characters.
In any case, it's effectively just NG vs. NG+, and it seems wrong to me that a NG+ run would obsolete a NG run.
I think the most clear and logical ruleset you can have for any game is to have the run from a fresh unaltered save file, regardless if this is the fastest category or not. It should never be completely obsolete by a run which take advantage from having a save file.
Personally I don't like watching these fighting games, but I do think it's an interesting principle to see how fast one can beat a game out of the box from power on.
https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Posts/528739
I really don't quite get what's so bad about having seperate publications for fresh starts and save starts in fighting games (and racing games, and other games where the game is still played from a 'new game' state - but in an unlocked (hard) mode).
If a game has people working on SRAM-cleared TASes then they should be able to get those TASes published as such.
Allowing both SRAM-cleared and SRAM-anchored movies as opposed to only one or the other gives TASers the freedom to work on what they actually want to work on without having to worry about their movie being disallowed on the site before they even make their first input. And I'm very much in favor of staying on that path of acceptance, rather than reverting back to more restrictive policies.
i'm proposing there be two branches: one that starts with the roster available from power-on, and one that uses whatever the best character is after everything is unlocked (presumably what the fighting community, which you're an ambassador for, wants)
InputEvelution (Evelyn) (on Discord) wrote:
I don't play fighting games much, but I watch TASes of them. I personally am very interested in seeing what can be done just with characters who are unlocked from the start
dwangoAC (on Discord) wrote:
I, for one, am almost always in favor of being an inclusionist and don't see more branches as a problem unless they're way overboard; I'd want to see the reasoning for the branch explained well and any gotchas as it were but I'm in favor of accepting the nuances of other speedrunning communities and noting where things deviate from TASVideos norms (while also having a concession that they may not be considered standard runs on the site)
TASVideos doesn't work like a traditional leaderboard, you're arguing that a "slower" run shouldn't exist but that "slower" run still has value to some viewers
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Desyncs for me with SolarWolf 1.5+dfsg1-3, 1.5+dfsg1-5, and 1.5+dfsg1-6, and libTAS 286306e and latest interim. Also it needs to sync on an official libTAS release so it'd have to wait for it even if it syncs. And if it only syncs on interim and not on official release, we could make a custom release from that old commit... if it synced.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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I don't feel this goal belongs even to Wiki: Playground, because entering a game genie code instead of doing anything in the game can technically be done to all games that GG existed for. And for games it didn't exist for, there are other ways of external-cheating that don't even involve live memory editing: you just hack the game to instantly end. So I'm not convinced there any play in this movie.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Spikestuff wrote:
Misinterpreting my concerns:
Spikestuff wrote:
A character name as a branch implies we would accept and publish every character. Which isn't good on the site side, as Judges and Publishers will have to deal with a "mess" of fighting game TASes.
But I already experimented with that idea with 5 separate characters in Tekken 3 and they're ineligible to be accepted due to Yoshimitsu (and that puddle can get muddier, but let's avoid that puddle) and of course Guilty Gear X as I referred to earlier.
I'm not seeing any misinterpretation.
Spikestuff wrote:
tl;dr what I wrote.
Is unlock character faster?
> Yes
Obsolete.
You stated an opinion. I'll count opinions in the next post.
Spikestuff wrote:
Spikestuff wrote:
Understand what we, the side that's against this arbitrary branch is trying to tell you. Don't gloss over it.
I'm not responding back if you don't get our point of concern, cause everything doesn't always work. And definitely doesn't work here for fighting games.
Which part of myexplanations fails to work in fighting games and why, exactly?
DrD2k9 wrote:
Just a suggestion on inclusion of “savegame” as part of a branch name (for any genre): Have “savegame” always be the first part of the branch name as it’s the main differentiator for that particular branch. Then any additional branch name identifiers would follow.
So for the above example: Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance “savegame, arcade mode”
I don't mind.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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So I was still missing an explanation on what makes fighting games with unlockable characters fundamentally different from all other games with unlockable characters - so different that they would require an exception in movie rules despite lots of people asking for power-on and savegame branches to co-exist for all games. The reason to have such an exception in the rules has to be really good and can't depend on someone's preference, because exceptions complicate things going forward. So when we add an exception, we need to understand it really well, and word it really well, for players to abide by those rules and fur judges to enforce them. The exception must feel natural to the people involved, because otherwise it feels forced and pointless. We don't want that in Movie Rules (anymore).
Since the staff talk was brought up, I thought maybe I'd find more information there, so I'll try to go through points mentioned there and see if the current system handles them or not.
Reminder: We're discussing a situation when we have 2 movies of a fighting (or racing) game, and an unlockable character is the fastest. The question is whether we can have both as branches in Standard and why.- "NewGame+" does not work as a branch label in fighting games where you unlock a char.
Indeed, we're switching from that label which only works for unlockable modes, over to "savegame" which seems to communicate the main point accurately in all cases. We also have a movie tag for it that basically means the same thing.
An icon was suggested, but we don't put icons into encode subtitles or youtube titles, and it'd mean the same thing as the "savegame" branch that does go into video.
- They can't be separate branches, because then they'd have to be labeled by character name, which would mean we have to allow different chars to co-exist in Standard (or look like we already do).
Not true. As I mentioned in the previous post, we only put the char name in the branch label if showcasing that specific char was the sole purpose of the movie and it didn't end up in Standard. Since Standard wants optimality within certain allowed goals, only the most optimal char is allowed, so whichever is currently known to be optimal for a particular goal will be used. If a different char is discovered to be more optimal, its movie will obsolete, and neither needs a char name.
The savegame branch would just be labeled "savegame" + whatever other standard goal it would have, if applicable. For for Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance it becomes "Arcade Mode" and "Arcade Mode, savegame".
If a suboptimal character is submitted just for entertainment, and it succeeds in that, it will be put into the branch label. And it still doesn't mean all other branches of that game now have to spell out the char, because they still only aim for the optimal one.
One semi-exception to requiring only optimal chars in Standard is cases when chars actually work as different game modes because of how different they are. Then they go into the label.
That's all I could find that didn't look like miscommunication, uncertainty, or repetition. In the next post, that will hopefully be the last one, I'll do numbers and count opinions.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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EZGames69 wrote:
Robotron 2084 displays the (!) sign on several inputs, mainly the joystick inputs that are used for moving and shooting.
Fixed.
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Anyway, back to my summary posts...
First I want to explain how the current system works, given the suggested new branch label. Then I'll go through potential complaints about it and see how to resolve them.
For almost every Standard goal there can be a "savegame" counterpart. I gets a special branch label highlighting its savegame nature, and formerly it was "NewGame+", but "savegame" is a much better term, because it covers all cases and communicated the main point more clearly and accurately. It also gets a special movie tag.
There's no obsoletion between different standard goals, even though sometimes different movies can be considered the same goal and supersede one another, for example if a game without an ending was completed to the end of the first full loop, and then someone extends it to reach a kill screen. Basically it's when a new movie contains an oldmovie while having the same goal.
"Savegame" goals that can't go to Standard, can go to Alternative if they look entertaining and and different to the audience than their Standard versions. Due to the nature of goals that aim for entertainment, it's possible that different Alternative goals will look very similar, and to avoid clutter we can properly obsolete some run that the audience likes less by something that feels like a new and improved version of it, even if the goals are not identical.
Having to pre-moderate Moons by only allowing things that actively entertain the audience so much that it's verbal about it, over the years wore out, because it stopped making sense to remain overly restrictive. So when we were brainstorming about retiring the tier system, I had this vision in mind:
feos wrote:
what we need to adjust compared to old TASVideos is lowering the entertainment cutoff and increasing the branch count cap.
So instead we post-moderate when there's an agreement that there are too many branches that are too similar.
Now, I said that "almost" every standard branch can have its "savegame" counterpart. Of course there can be exceptions when it's agreed that it doesn't make sense to separate them, for example when there's little to no gameplay difference added by post-completion. Then there are cases when something that you can unlock, while looking subjectively cool, is suboptimal in terms of objective speed. For example if you want to complete some game as quickly as possible from a fresh save with base characters, with unlocked extra characters you still need to complete the game ASAP. If new characters don't help with that, it just means base characters are more optimal. Which is why we have the "uses a suboptimal char" movie tag, and movies aiming for that simply go to Alternative instead of Standard.
Interestingly, suboptimal chars make labeling kinda tricky. Not necessarily harder to do, but it may look inconsistent across all movies on the site.
Publisher Guidelines wrote:
The point of branches is to highlight specific goals that runs may conform to. These goals are highlighted, because they introduce gameplay differences into TASes that are significant enough to be published as separate branches. Two kinds of goals exist:
Internal condition - something the game directly and unambiguously offers as an optional component of play which significantly affects what is seen from the game (warp usage, player amount, character choice).
External condition - something the players limit themselves to (exact completion percent, pacifist, certain glitch set).
We don't have a concept of "default goal", therefore we don't use labels like "any%" as a branch label. Instead we identify what is unique in every branch or set of branches, something that the other branches of the same game don't represent.
We put internal conditions into branch labels if there are (or can be) counterpart runs, for example if we have different movies using 1 player and 2 players, both will tell player count in branches. But if we would not allow some internal conditions to co-exist on their own, they don't have to be mentioned explicitly.
For example we don't allow branches for each character to co-exist in Standard, so any Standard movie will need to pick the most optimal character, and it won't be mentioned in the branch label. But if there's an Alternative counterpart branch that uses some character just to showcase it, that character will be mentioned in the label.
And here's a part even I'm not sure about, because it never happened before. If the standard goal uses the most optimal char, and the alternative movie uses a suboptimal char, sometimes they are spelled out in all branches:
Super Mario Bros. 2Castlevania III: Dracula's CurseCastlevania: Bloodlines
sometimes only the suboptimal char is spelled out
Super Mario Bros. 2Final FantasySuper Mario Advance
and sometimes only some branches spell out chars
Sonic 3 & KnucklesSonic Advance
Due to crazy differences between how games approach things we need to put into branch labels, I don't feel it's possible to make it all look 100% consistent. And the problem here is that putting chars into Standard labels may make it look like we accept different chars to Standard on their own, which we don't. Maybe we just need to accept (instead) the fact that branch labels can only make sense within one game? After all it's just a way to communicate differences between branches, which is usually needed for one game. Across different games, it may be possible to have a unified name that marks similar branches, but it's not guaranteed.
To be continued...
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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JosJuice wrote:
CoolHandMike wrote:
For one I do not think the term "SRAM" or even "SaveRAM" really means a lot to most people. So a more obvious term through the site could be better.
A new and clearer term would especially be appreciated for Dolphin, as the GameCube stores game progress on flash memory in memory cards but also has an SRAM chip that stores console-wide settings. Normally when TASers say "SRAM" they mean game save data, but that usage of the term doesn't make sense on its face when talking about the GameCube.
What about the term suggested by Masterjun (and Wikipedia) - "savegame"? The purpose here is more important than the underlying technology (battery backed SRAM, Flash, etc), and it's clearly different from emulator savestates. And works as movie branches too instead of NG+.
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Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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KusogeMan wrote:
Is any of these runs remotely interesting? Is this what the site is trying to achieve with the bizarre SRAM rulesets? Nobody has ever made any category for this in an actual speedrun of the whole MK series, so i have to guess the answer is no.
[...]
I believe the game dev's intended gameplay modes and speedrunning community choice divisions should be a focus of TASVideos main categories when it comes to racing and fighting games TASers. The SRAM division is interesting for adventure and RPG games, like banjo kazooie whcih has a data carryover glitch, or newgame plus categories which exist in rpg to make new versions of the adventure, but shouldn't affect competitive games in which unlocking content was the only way devs could expand game hours. The respective game community should be the standard, this works for most games and when the time comes for a game in which it doesn't, you can use your other rulesets or entertainment value. Wanna make up some weird category that doesn't exist?
KusogeMan wrote:
To me this site is like an archive of sorts, if a speedruns exists, it should also have the corresponding TAS to show the audience what perfect play in the speedrun would be.
These 2 posts are quite remarkable because they highlight the misconception about our goals while also guessing them almost right and self-contradicting.
The site is an archive of TASes indeed, because our goal is being a service for TASers that remains relevant over the years. If we are not useful for various TASer groups, they split away and we eventually become useless for more and more such groups. And to remain useful we want to educate, encourage, and inspire people to become skilled TASers, and then to meet their requirements with our policies, like the Judge Guidelines now say:
Above all else, treat our community with care. Be kind and courteous to them, always respect their work, encourage them to continue, and use your knowledge and skill to help them improve.
Always adapt to the needs of the community. Consider every angle of a problem, and work together with the rest of Staff to provide the best solution.
The site should change to fit the community. The community should never change to fit the site.
Service-based leadership even happened to be adelikat's vision for the new admin team and I independently happened to have a bunch of pagesabout it and they got Samsara's approval back in 2021.
So we absolutely want to give TASers more freedom and safety for their experiments, because only then they can create truly powerful things.
What we've never done though is considering developer intentions when deciding on policies (or anything ever), because creativity means doing the unexpected. The only thing we have is the product itself (the game) and content that exists objectively, and that's the main purpose of the Standard class. There is a category that is subjectively closer to intended gameplay, but we've never questioned the fact that it may also be glitched to death in its own regard, and heavy glitching is very much not what the devs intended to present to the world. Sure some people may not be entertained by such movies, but developer intent is never brought up as a complaint. We simply don't care about it.
What speedrun communities do may be relevant in cases when we want to allow some branch based on how supported it is, but lack of support in speedrun communities has not ever been brought up as a factor when arguing that we should not support it either. We have our own community for such decisions, and our own site goals that I explained in details. Telling our own community to "deal with it" because some people who have never posted here don't speedrun a given category yet, is ridiculous level of arrogance.
And the self-contradiction part is where an archive is meant to feature achievements while also limiting them in some specific case because suddenly it doesn't matter at all what can be achieved there.
KusogeMan wrote:
Once again, TASers prefer to do slower movies than go through SRAM verification movie hassle.
This claim lacks any statistical data across any amount of TASers other than like 2 people, and it assumes intentions of everyone else in a very specific illogical way. There's no way to measure how many people on the site considered making a savegame movie and decided to do a power-on one instead because of the "SRAM verification movie hassle".
Savegame movies always existed and they were always fine. If someone looks at how hard it would be to make a verification movie, yet they don't mind making a full TAS, they somehow consider the verification movie harder to make than the entire power-on TAS? That's ridiculous to imagine, because I don't know a single game where a full TAS is easier to make than a verification movie. Sure, making a verification and a full TAS is harder than just the full TAS, but the verification movie usually kinda fades compared to amount of work that goes into a well research and optimized movie regardless of verifications.
If someone is so afraid of making a verification movie, it sounds like they just don't have enough energy to TAS at all. So if we try to force them to TAS harder by obsoleting the easier-to-make thing, it feels bizarre to expect that they will make a proper savegame movie just out of obedience.
On the other hand, if we have room for both branches, everyone could pick a project they currently feel the energy for, and be tempted and encouraged to work on harder things because it's cooler, not because they have to. Creativity and inspiration are incompatible with involuntariness.
To be continued...
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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The post is becoming impossibly long so I'll break it into several...
So I've reread everything once again to understand what the community thinks (including the non-public chats that spawned these new questions), and it's hard to summarize it all because a ton of different things were used as arguments, and not enough effort has been put into stating problems, questions, and reasons in the clearest way possible. So if I miss or misinterpret some idea, please explain it again as clearly and logically as possible.
I should start with explaining the current direction of the site.
During the first years of TASVideos we were very restrictive in what ends up being represented as publications, because there was a ton of misconceptions in the outside world that had to be disproved, and this new hobby kinda had to prove itself by featuring the most awesome stuff first. The most entertaining movies were preferred, and the rules weren't super strict otherwise.
This was considered too restricting and the concept of tiers was introduced, so in addition to the most interesting movies we could have boring movies that accomplish some very standard and basic goal (initially the only allowed Vault goals were fastest completion and full completion). But since for every single submission we had to decide on a tier, it led to tons of borderline cases where simply based on feedback (or lack thereof) we were unsure how to judge something.
Since people like to be creative and they don't always aim to follow well-established paths, we also had to clarify more and more things in Movie Rules to make judgments more consistent and future-proof. Because old rules and wording would either not solve some new problem, or the solution was worded in a cloudy way that could be interpreted differently by different people.
Those trends would build up over the years and eventually turn into unmanageable mess that was the least future-proof, because it was impossible to keep maintaining. So we retired the tier system and switched to a class system that let us depend on feedback much less for goals that are well-established and standard, and only need feedback for goals that are inherently subjective.
That alone helped immensely, but then we realized there were other problematic trends that failed to make everyone's life better. The most problematic ones were prosecutorial bias and gatekeeping. We were so restrictive that we risked becoming irrelevant, because TASers could eventually abandon the ship that was purely viewer-focused and not creator-focused.
So we reevaluated the main goals of the site, and switched from being an exposition of cool things to being a service for the TAS community. Being too restrictive did result in parts of our community having to go on their own for a bunch of years and currently we're trying to fix that. And for authors in general, we switched from being judgmental about their works to being helpful for them, because that's how we get more people involved and educated, which leads to more content in general, and as a result to more awesome content that the site always wanted to have.
On the other hand, inclusivity on TASVideos is not an entirely new concept. It's the neatest way to have a compromise between conflicting camps if their opinions can't technically be implemented directly at once. We discuss opinions and boil them down to something objective, and then rely on things that are the most objective for all parties.
Allowing different things as different branches used to be the most harmless solution to any kind of disagreement about goals, because different crowds could have something they care about featured on the site and up-to-date. People spent the recent years fighting for acceptance of some goal that used to be rejected entirely, or only allowed under very strict conditions. So we started actually believing that giving creators more freedom benefits everyone long-term, because results of their hard work won't be considered "unnecessary" after the fact anymore, by judges who've never even played those games.
We can definitely afford some extra slots in Alternative for things that are not as stunning in terms of entertainment, unless questionable branches become a problem, which is when we start obsoleting the most mediocre ones. And in Standard, we can have extra slots for movies that shouldn't compete with the most basic and natural (literally standard) goals.
This is why I was surprised to realize that we may have missed something important during the initial discussion half a year ago, and that in fact savegame rules we established failed to solve fighting games. And racing games. And non-fastest-completon movies. We've had a staff talk and couldn't agree on how obsoletion should work in those cases, so the most reasonable next step was bringing it up to the community.
And the result was quite interesting. It wasn't a hard community split between 2 options that can't co-exist where an independent solution was necessary that could work both ways depending on statistics (objective data settling the conflict of subjectivities). Instead it was a request to change the direction and goal of the site for one particular case of fighting games ... two particular cases of fighting and racing games ... three particular cases of fighting and racing games and also non-fastest-completion movies.
And it would have just been a new consensus if the community went "oh! right! yes!" and agreed that it makes sense to change the direction and goal of the site in those individual cases. Or if that extra clause clearly felt like it matches the direction and goal of the site and fulfills it more faithfully, and we simply missed it the first time around.
For example, that happens when some clause has all the traits of a workable solution:
Overwhelming majority of the audience subjectively likes it or at least doesn't particularly mind it
The logic is compelling to people who agree and even to those who don't enjoy it
Even if logic and feelings don't cut it, it still looks like the most fair option given the situation at hand, one that's the most faithful to our top priorities
However that did not happen, and a lot of people were actively against savegame ever obsoleting clear save branches in Standard. I've read all this talk several times by now, and I still don't quite understand logically which problem exactly such obsoletion would solve without causing new problems. And it does seem to contradict the site's goals.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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infinitephantasm wrote:
hello, wanted to ask a question about a movie for beatmania 2ndMIX i was thinking about submitting, but wasn't entirely sure if i should. it's normally an arcade rhythm game, which would usually probably warrant something like a max score run with a lot of showiness in extra keypresses, due how the game works involving scoring and bonuses. but, the movie i made uses a hidden code/button combination in the game's song select to skip playing any songs at all, jumping straight to the ending (detailed more here -- normally, this allows you to play any song in the game).
would something like this be worth submitting, or should i just abstain and try for something a bit more interesting? i'm not entirely sure if using something that technically falls on the category of level select (even though in a rhythm game, you pick the songs freely) such as that would be considered not OK.
Skipping everything and simply calling an ending sounds like skipping any and all gameplay, which then raises the question "what are you even speedrunning?" But yes, skipping straight to the ending has been disallowed for a very long time.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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EZGames69 wrote:
But that not only requires the authors of the old tas to make a submission for level 20 (since the submission I linked isn’t even the current fastest level 20 from my understanding), but it would essentially be the equivalent of taking the last inputs of the movie file after the last resync and using that as it’s own separate publication.
I don’t know if the RNG would be the same after said reset compared to first power on, but if it is then I’m not sure what the point would be other than having two separate publications with one just being essentially an identical segment from the all levels pub. It would be redundant in my opinion.
We have a somewhat recent example (tho in theory it could have gone to Playground if the author was interested).
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Your submission must play the game from the beginning, and must finish the game, or reach the most suitable endpoint the game allows. Level selects, single-level movies, or otherwise incomplete movies are not allowed.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
The player already provided a movie file that beats level 20 HI speed with the same inputs used in the submitted movie during level 20, and I was also able to do the same with other levels. This means that the submitted movie does include the inputs of a fastest-completion run in it; in other words, by fulfilling the full-completion goal, it does also fulfil the fastest-completion goal.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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So if both movies were played optimally (given current knowledge), one would absolutely not include another, right?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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dwangoAC wrote:
on the basis of it being a different category
Elaborate?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
