In light of adelikat's statement and actually getting some good arguments against the feos proposal, I am now in favor of having no tiers at all and using categories to organize the site.
Anything that's an improvement gets a disproportinate number of yes votes, especially if it's a significant improvement. See: Any Atari game frame war.
1)Rules about transition from Vault to Moon is very unclear sometimes. From recent examples http://tasvideos.org/2697M.html such a small improvement was enough to do transition; But dunnius's NES Hydlide in 05:11.62 improvement which nearly twice faster than 09:07.32 predecessor - still not enough for transition, it is strange imho.
I don't know if this really fits in the discussion, but there's something flying around about, "Improving a vault into the moon." Forgive me if this isn't really applicable. I made this run nine years ago, before the tiers came out. When tiers were implemented, it was automatically assigned Vault, according to its user ratings. Just this last week, someone improved one level in it by six seconds, and left almost all the rest untouched. Look what tier it's in.
The problem that I have with vaulting something is that it ends up hidden, and so it is less likely to get voted on. Also, vaulting a movie that is rated as a 6 is rather harsh; it hides too many decent runs. I suppose there is also an aspect of "The TASer wasted time making this" element to the vault category. I understand why Vault exists, to have a place for runs that would be gruefood under the old system, or for really old runs that squeaked by in voting.
2)Voting system is imperfect: Vote: Did you find this movie entertaining? Vote: Should this movie be published? It is two absolutely different questions. Sometimes boring movies deserve be published. And sometimes (rarely but still) entertaining movies not deserve.
What concerns me here is that so far, nobody claims that they don't understand the system; and yet, the votes we actually get on submissions often don't match the poll questions. Which implies to me that either a) people are lying on this poll, b) the people who don't understand the system didn't look at this thread at all; or c) people fully understand the system but intentionally subvert it because they disagree with the way it works. FWIW, I voted "subpar but we can't come up with anything better", because IIRC there are technical problems with changing the options to something other than Yes/No/Meh, and although it's clear that people aren't using the poll for its intended purpose, I can't think of a better solution to that. If you change the poll to "Do you think this should be published?", it then isn't producing the information that judges actually care about. (Arguably, it isn't anyway, but we should at least give it a chance.)
The only problem is that people tend to vote Yes (or at least Meh) even for mildly entertaining runs, simply because they consider the run technically well-made, or they don't want to look like an asshole voting No, or they actually want to support the author/the game franchise/etc, even though they watched the movie using fast-forward and skipping huge parts because of boring content. On the contrary, people who actually dislike the run usually abstain from voting (e.g. if you drop watching an encode, you may as well close the tab and forget about the submission. Or you may obey the rule "must watch [supposedly to the end] before voting").
To be fair, there are several Moon runs from months back that don't even have ratings displayed yet. People only really rate either popular games or really entertaining games. That being said, this is still valid criticism, and it's part of why I don't even support the Vault tier at all. It's discouraging in my opinion. No one wants to spend weeks on a really good movie only to have it end up in a section of the site that isn't even listed by default. The big problem is that the defining factor of Moon VS Vault is the game itself, and that's kind of arbitrary when you really think about it. A run is tiered according to the game itself, not according to the run. People vote based on the game itself, not on the run. Highly optimized runs of bad games still get awful scores, while a less-optimized run of a "good" game will get much better scores. I'm sure now that this movie is published and Vaulted, it's just going to end up ignored with a low score even though it's a huge, well-done improvement that I found pretty entertaining even without watching the last one for comparison.
If run going in Vault, it marked as "not entertainment", literally: "don't watch it, it's only waste of time", and as result: less votes about ratings, and so on. More than that, vault runs are hidden in list by default. With runs in Moons/Stars category, completely different situation, they marked "this run cool, watch it", and result: more votes about ratings, and so on. And they are visible in list by default. Where is issue here? Good runs forces its ratings to be good, and not entertainment runs forces its ratings to be bad. In other words, it's not good that rating is affected by tier. For me, vault is like "black mark". All going bad after you got it. :D
Borderline cases are serious business (Vault something poorly received until it gets good ratings, Moon something unclear until it's rated poorly, and then switch tiers with proof), but this one is in no way a borderline case! feos looks at #3795: Samsara's NES Moon Crystal in 08:35.12 votes. feos looks at #3795: Samsara's NES Moon Crystal in 08:35.12 judgment note. feos does the same all the time. others do the opposite, get complained about it, and it's still officially more legit. feos fails to understand how that fucking instinct is supposed to work. As I said, each time I accepted something uncertain to Vault, there were always people mad about it.
There are runs, this one included that are borderline enough not to fit neatly into vault or moons. How the hell is Riddick Bowe Boxing a moon tier? Perhaps we should abandon tiers since I don't see it working well.
Stars are highlighted on the front page (newcomer recs is outside the scope of the current argument), Moons are displayed in all movie publication lists, and Vault movies are only there if all runs per platform are requested. That's all various differences/levels of highlighting/visibility of runs, and that is where the hierarchy aspect comes in.
Regarding board games, many of the board game runs that have been rejected, were rejected exactly because of the lack of interest value to them. If they were interesting, people would be entertained by them and voted accordingly, which hasn't really happened convincingly for many of them.
For the rest of it, I still don't really see this "tier" being worthwhile enough to have on the site, as it seems to be a dumping ground for ideas that might be somewhat novel but are still either just boring or are not actually proper runs/playthroughs, and also don't achieve the site's/current Vault's goal of being a speedrun archive. And I still haven't seen anything that suggests it would end up holding more than a small handful of runs.
I still have yet to see an argument as to how or why splitting off any%/100% and esoteric goals from each other achieves anything at all. Again, what does that achieve? Why should, say, Super Metroid RBO be split away from Super Metroid 100%? What purpose will it have?
The tier system was introduced to allow the site to function as an archive for speedrun records, while also still highlighting entertaining runs. Hence, we have Moons (and Stars) as higher tiers which are more easily showcased, while in the lower end we can still have speedrun records for less interesting games with less interesting runs for those who want to look for those games/runs. If we remove the hierarchical tier aspect, then what is the point of having "tiers" (or whatever you want to call them) in the first place? How do you want to use that to highlight good runs, regardless of whether they're standard categories or not? It's just dividing exotic categories away from standard categories for no particularly good reason. Why does Super Metroid RBO have to be in a different grouping than Super Metroid 100%? What purpose will it have?
The "tier 3" seems to introduce a new idea of concept runs that don't finish a game normally, and while we have a very select few of those on the site already, I don't see the reason to create a whole new "tier" just for what seems like it will be no more than a small handful of runs. Unless you want to change the direction of the site, away from focusing on full runs of games, but as long as hardly any currently publishable runs of that sort exist, I don't think it's a good idea to add a whole new "tier" for those.
Post counts do not matter, people matter. How many people have agreed to these ideas?
Aside from that, in my view, we currently have too many categories/groupings/tiers already. Instead of creating yet more of them, a better approach would be to get rid of the "notable improvements" pseudo-tier (there's an ongoing discussion about that) and fold "recommended for newcomers" into Star tier since they have substantial overlap.
The SM64 community uses the term 'freeruns', as in runs that don't have the objective of going fast, but rather show off impressive feats. This might be a fitting name.
Category names CATEGORY1 was suggested to be named Coins. This keeps our usual reference to SMW:Language: cvoid JudgeMovie() { if (SubOptimal) return Reject(); if (any% || 100%) return Accept(CATEGORY1); if (!Entertaining) return Reject(); if (BreaksSomeRules) // but still entertaining return Accept(CATEGORY3); else return Accept(CATEGORY2); }
Coin: Common, but good to find. Moon: Rare, in SMW one of these is worth 300 coins. Star: Very rare - you can't recreate the effect with coins or even a Moon, but only by finding a Star.
I believe it was considered, but unable to be handled at the moment. It would require a lot of time and effort and site restructuring and it's still likely that people aren't going to be receptive to the change.
Hello, Somehow I made a TAStudio file that contain no movie system Id. I'd like to know if I can add it manually to try to recuperate what I did yesterday? I can't repro how I did it sadly. I just did my movie, then saved.
Gave up on the rings.
I can see how it theoretically has a different purpose than that, but practically speaking it's pretty obvious that doesn't work.
Also with the movie rating and the entertainment poll question, I believe there is voting bias from if one likes or dislikes a game. Entertainment should be based on how the TAS plays the game, not the game itself.
I don't think it's even possible to take ratings seriously, since indeed they make little sense, when only the people who actually TAS a game know exactly how technical its runs are, and people who see a game for the first time might be not entertained at all and give 3s for a well done movie (I use to do that a lot lately). These 2 don't seem to be improvable, so no matter how you change the system, it'd still make that little sense.
They are to be judged solely on whether or not anyone can find any way to improve them. If improvements are known, they are not eligible.
Is there any other option make all the game(NES/SNE/PCE/Genesis.....) the same windows size?
Hello programmers, I have a small question, I'd like to know what is the current state of TAStudio concerning creating a TAS movie? Is it safe or not? I'm asking this because I got a bug recently with TAStudio while recording a N64 run. So I'm not sure if it's usable or not. Niamek
This is mainly a continuation of the above, but an obsolete movie deemed RFN should retain its flag unless it actually suits the new movie better than the old.
RFN and Star-tier have a very strong overlap that tricks people into thinking of recommended movies as a secret better-than-Star 4th tier. I believe this isn't exactly a sensible, let alone desirable situation. They have to be high-quality, well-received, and show the advantages and benefits of employing tool-assistance, yes. But at the same time they have to cater to the circumstances, mindset, and behavior of newcomers rather than your core audience.
Imagine a person who got here by following a link found on the first TAS they've watched, or just randomly on the internet. At this point they proceed in one of the two ways: 1) they search for one of their favorite games directly or watch whatever captures their immediate attention on the front page, in which case they will likely keep missing the Newcomer Corner list entirely until they're no longer newcomers (or until they leave the site for good); 2) they actually locate the Newcomers Corner first (which I don't believe happens all that often, and that is a problem for another discussion).
0) they should be run past actual newcomers to see if the idea works at all; 1) game itself should be aesthetically pleasing or capitalizing on nostalgia value enough so that seeing or hearing it isn't a detriment to the experience; 2) they should be reasonably short to avoid boredom or fatigue (5–15 minutes is ideal, 15–30 okayish, anything over 30 minutes is seriously pushing it—you don't want any of the items on the list skipped due to not having enough free time to watch something they don't yet know if they'll enjoy); 3) they should clearly identify as tool-assisted without having to make a second guess, and as such portray many TAS-only scenarios showcasing the required precision; 4) they should contain various different strategies/tricks/glitches to avoid feeling like it's the same thing going on repeatedly; 5) they should contain fun/clever/impressive stylistic decisions wherever possible. [2320] SNES Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island "100%" by Baxter, Carl_Sagan & NxCy in 1:59:35.12 This is a great example of failing criterion #2 spectacularly.
[2741] Genesis Sonic 3 & Knuckles by Aglar & marzojr in 26:53.06 There's a very good reason why my entertainment rating for this branch started at 10 with nitsuja's first attempt and gradually arrived at 9 by now: because every single trick is being gradually replaced by zipping and Tails-facilitated OOB travel. They are nowhere near as interesting to look at as good old TAS-precise platforming. In my opinion, this flag should either be moved to an earlier iteration of this branch or to some other run of S3&K or S2 entirely (although by this time all Sonic games are just one huge zip).
Compared to its predecessor, I find it barely acceptable at best. It's very hard to follow without intimate knowledge of the game, boss fights take either too long or too short, much of the soul usage variety is gone, one of the best fights is skipped, and general character progression dynamics is all over the place. It's most certainly a TAS for the fans in the first place. It also contains at least two known unimplemented improvements as well as a couple more potential improvements. I believe the RFN flag should either remain at the previous movie or be transferred to the warpless any% which has almost none of the problems while containing virtually all the same benefits as this and the warpless all-souls.
[1248] SNES Family Feud "playaround" by Heisanevilgenius in 06:46.71 Decent pick. There's nothing TAS-exclusive aside from input speed, but it's a nice playaround that, in my opinion, is very good at making the audience want to see more.
[1546] NES Gimmick! "100%" by Aglar & Hotarubi in 07:44.45 Excellent pick.
[2676] NES Super Mario Bros. "warpless, walkathon" by Mars608 & HappyLee in 25:19.23 Has any newcomer ever watched all of it? Not only the flag; the existence of this movie and the fact that a shorter branch was sacrificed for it confuses me. The warped version was a neat novelty run and was good because in the six minutes of its runtime it could show pretty much every known way to overcome the in-game obstacles without pressing B. What exactly is being accomplished by having a movie four times its length escapes me. It doesn't contain four times the tricks. It doesn't even contain four times the amount of situations previously considered impassable without B. It can't allure even all the people who love Mario, judging from the sheer number of rating votes on it and the fact that it has the poorest entertainment rating of all SMB movies at 7.2. 7.2 is barely above average and probably below median as far as site-wide rating statistics goes.
Some movies, including a few obsolete ones, that I believe are quite fit for being recommended for newcomers.
At some point we had a TASVideos showreel, which is actually a really fucking good video that is hard to find for some reason.
What I still don't get is why it is important or significant enough to be chosen as a goal, because nobody has explained that at any point.
Suggestions.
Staff discussion dwelled on a list of 10 (probably 15)