If we're trying to apply vault rules to a board game tier, why are we not just accepting board games to the vault tier instead?
Tangent wrote:
If the current rules ARE sufficient for board games, then no additional tiering or categories are needed.
Board games are not (generally) vaultable because there can't be any% or 100% completions of them. (See the first post in this thread for a deeper analysis of that aspect.)
Has there been any discussion or debate about that point in the thread? Yes, ones with actual campaign modes provide something more analogous to regular game (but are no less tedious: See Super Battleship), but where are you seeing the debate on whether winning a match of the only game mode available in Chess, Monopoly, Othello, etc is actually winning the game?
I don't see how. The core standards of the vault tier are: Play at the highest difficulty (unless you have a very good reason otherwise), complete the game as fast as possible. The "board game tier" would have those exact same requirements.
As for entertainment, it's a rather non-issue for vault, so why should it be an issue for this proposed new category?
Precisely.
z1mb0bw4y wrote:
The entire reason why board games aren't excepted to vault is because they're all too "same-y" and typically not interesting.
As Warp says, entertainment (how interesting a run is) is not an issue for the vault; speed is the issue for the vault.
The entire reason why the vault doesn't have board games is because the site as a whole had a "no board games" clause which actually predates the existence of vault. So we could either make a new tier that's "exactly the same as the vault, but for board games", or we could simply remove the "no board games" clause from the vault (keeping all its other requirements, of course).
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Radiant wrote:
The entire reason why the vault doesn't have board games is because the site as a whole had a "no board games" clause which actually predates the existence of vault.
What?
There was never a "no board games" clause before Vault, they were just accepted or rejected depending on whether game choice was good/the run was entertaining, just like every other game. A number of Monopoly runs have been submitted and published back in 2006, several years before tiers or such a clause were introduced.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Indeed. The old rule was more like "no boring games" (rather than "no board games"). Being more inclusive was an excellent change. We should keep going in that direction just a bit more, IMO.
Wouldn't that just encourage people to turn on say, fanciful chess animations that contribute nothing to the game nor does it make it any way different from normal play but looks "nice"?
It has been brought to my attention that the Vault in fact already contains board game runs.
So that strikes me as a strong argument to allow board game runs to be published in the vault (assuming the run meets standard site criteria). After all, precedent shows that we've already done that for years, albeit sporadically.
[1884] NES Solitaire by FractalFusion in 00:42.80[2014] SNES Clue by Deign in 00:26.50[2289] GBA Hikaru no Go by pirohiko in 12:02.33
Note that all of these have poor enough viewer ratings that they clearly don't belong in any other tier.
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Radiant wrote:
It has been brought to my attention that the Vault in fact already contains board game runs.
So that strikes me as a strong argument to <snip>
Me, in the same topic wrote:
Or, it is a mistake caused by automation. It's really not a strong argument for anything.
Remember a common TASVideos adage: "Past mistakes do not justify repeating the same mistakes again".
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Or, it is a mistake caused by automation. It's really not a strong argument for anything.
Remember a common TASVideos adage: "Past mistakes do not justify repeating the same mistakes again".
Whatever makes you think this is a past mistake?
Considering that (1) those board game runs clearly do not belong in moon or star tier, and (2) by site policy we never un-publish any run, it follows that yes, they do belong in the vault; and as currently under discussion in the workbench, improvements to such movies can also be accepted in the vault. Since the vault contains board games by precedent, it follows that the vault can accept board games.
So the vault contains board games, and should continue to contain board games. I don't see any problem with that.
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Radiant wrote:
Whatever makes you think this is a past mistake?
The fact that it is in that tier by mistake due to the fact that it breaks the rules of that tier?
Radiant wrote:
Considering that (1) that run clearly does not belong in moon or star tier, and (2) by site policy we never un-publish any run, it follows that yes, this does belong in the vault.
No, it really does not follow. It means a run was published in error, or was assigned to a tier in error.
By the same logic, runs that do not belong in the vault (as per hard-set rules), can be said to belong in Moons or Stars too. In fact, elevating them to moons is the better solution because it at best violates a subjective issue, whereas putting un-belonging runs in the Vault is an objective rule violation. There are precedents for handling it that way as well.
Radiant wrote:
And since the vault contains board games by precedent, it follows that the vault can accept board games.
Error is a terrible thing to set precedents from.
EDIT: This is also exactly a reason why I was aiming to get the four tier system discussed, as it avoids this problem, without relying on the worst kind of precedent-based loophole abuse.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
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For anyone curious as to why certain genres are not vaultable.
Our reasoning when creating the vault was that we want to set a limit on triviality. However, the vault needs to be minimally subjective. Rather than just have "must be non-trivial" and us argue about it endlessly for all eternity we attempted to put as many non-subjective rules in there to minimize how often that would be a problem.
Most board game speedruns are trivial. No matter how many times Warp argues otherwise, I assure you it is. I could do a NES battle chess or chessmaster TAS in a matter of 15 minutes or so.
There are exceptions to rules. However, the thinking is that if the game were non-trivial, wouldn't it have some entertainment value? (The minimum requirement for moons isn't very high). So we are only talking about the subset of TASes that are not too trivial but not entertaining enough for moons. That's a small intersection, and one that to me is an acceptable causality if it means the vault being quiet and non-subjective.
All this was about the vault rule, not about a new tier, but yeah, I thought this was a good place to post this information.
I see that we're talking about board games only in this thread, but I would like to remind everyone that sports games, educational games and game show games are also excluded from Vault for the same reason.
I'm with Warp on this, at least on the principle. I see no reason why some genres should be excluded from Vault, as the whole point of this tier (at least for me) is the best theoretical speed that a game can be beaten. adelikat's argument about the triviality of making board game runs may be true for some of them, but not only is it false in the general case, but I don't see why not have the trivial ones have their own records anyway.
Now, here are the subjective issues I see with applying such a thing blindly:
- There would be lots of implementations of the same board game to manage.
- Theoretical optimization and TAS optimization may be incompatible.
- Ending input early may cause the resulting movie to continue by itself for hours.
- A.I. difficulty depends exclusively on implementation.
- Optimizing input speed and animations is usually not interesting for these types of games.
So, the question is: should we care about this kind of subjectivity for the Vault tier? In my opinion, the only reason we would care about this would be in fear of introducing too many low-quality TAS to the site to the point where it would endanger its reputation. Considering that the Vault tier is pretty much the "forgettable garbage" tier already, and has not caused any issues with the site's reputation, I don't see how it would be a problem.
That's why I would resolve the situation like this:
- Remove all genres exclusions from Vault.
- Allow all versions and categories for all official games in Vault.
- Let other communities bother with theoretical optimizations for the abstract version of games.
As for the creation of new tiers, it's in my opinion that it would only introduce artificial fragmentation and confusion. It's already possible to sort movies by user rating, so I don't see why additional tiers would be necessary. The improvement I would do however is make this sorting more obvious.
Note that that game has an actual story progression an a well defined ending, so I think it fully qualifies for vault.
adelikat wrote:
Most board game speedruns are trivial. No matter how many times Warp argues otherwise, I assure you it is. I could do a NES battle chess or chessmaster TAS in a matter of 15 minutes or so.
Would you be playing them on the hardest difficulty? (I think I have expressed repeatedly that IMO playing such a board game on the easiest difficulty usually has no value and goes completely contrary to the notion of "a perfect player crushing the computer at its best".)
The fact that it is in that tier by mistake due to the fact that it breaks the rules of that tier?
Ah, I see you've pre-empted the entire discussion here by moving these runs to Moon tier, despite the fact that they also break the rules of that tier :P
I'm not sure how that helps. I think it makes much more sense to set up tiers so that "Vault is for pure speedruns, Moon is for entertaining runs", instead of (as it is now) "Vault is for pure speedruns except for boardgames, Moon is for entertaining runs and for non-entertaining boardgame runs".
SmashManiac wrote:
I'm with Warp on this, at least on the principle. I see no reason why some genres should be excluded from Vault, as the whole point of this tier (at least for me) is the best theoretical speed that a game can be beaten. adelikat's argument about the triviality of making board game runs may be true for some of them, but not only is it false in the general case, but I don't see why not have the trivial ones have their own records anyway.
...
That's why I would resolve the situation like this:
- Remove all genres exclusions from Vault.
- Allow all versions and categories for all official games in Vault.
- Let other communities bother with theoretical optimizations for the abstract version of games.
As for the creation of new tiers, it's in my opinion that it would only introduce artificial fragmentation and confusion. It's already possible to sort movies by user rating, so I don't see why additional tiers would be necessary. The improvement I would do however is make this sorting more obvious.
I completely agree with SmashManiac.
Also, as near as I can tell, the issue that there are lots of implementations of the same board game only seems to hold true for Chess, Checkers, Go, and Mah Jongg; perhaps two or three others. So I don't think that issue is as big as this thread suggests it is. Perhaps the Vault should explicitly exclude these particular common games, instead of excluding all board games ever?
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Radiant wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
The fact that it is in that tier by mistake due to the fact that it breaks the rules of that tier?
Ah, I see you've pre-empted the entire discussion here by moving these runs to Moon tier, despite the fact that they also break the rules of that tier :P
I'm not sure how that helps. I think it makes much more sense to set up tiers so that "Vault is for pure speedruns, Moon is for entertaining runs", instead of (as it is now) "Vault is for pure speedruns except for boardgames, Moon is for entertaining runs and for non-entertaining boardgame runs".
I like how you very conveniently skipped the next part of my post where I explained all this.
Mothrayas wrote:
By the same logic, runs that do not belong in the vault (as per hard-set rules), can be said to belong in Moons or Stars too. In fact, elevating them to moons is the better solution because it at best violates a subjective issue, whereas putting un-belonging runs in the Vault is an objective rule violation. There are precedents for handling it that way as well.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
By the same logic, runs that do not belong in the vault (as per hard-set rules), can be said to belong in Moons or Stars too. In fact, elevating them to moons is the better solution because it at best violates a subjective issue, whereas putting un-belonging runs in the Vault is an objective rule violation. There are precedents for handling it that way as well.
I get the impression that you see Moon Tier as the "bottom bucket" where all runs go that don't fit in any of the other categories; whereas most people seem to see Vault Tier as this "bottom bucket".
So which is it? Is the Vault the category below Moon, which holds movies that aren't eligible for Moon? Or is the Moon tier the category below Vault, holding all runs that aren't eligible for the Vault?
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Radiant wrote:
I get the impression that you see Moon Tier as the "bottom bucket" where all runs go that don't fit in any of the other categories; whereas most people seem to see Vault Tier as this "bottom bucket".
So which is it? Is the Vault the category below Moon, which holds movies that aren't eligible for Moon? Or is the Moon tier the category below Vault, holding all runs that aren't eligible for the Vault?
It's not a "bottom bucket" thing. It's the fact that one tier has rules that restrict the categories and genres of runs that are accepted to it, and the other does not. Thus, it makes sense to put these runs in the tier where they are not explicitly breaking the tier's objective rules.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
With the other tier rehaul discussion some time ago I suggested that the vault tier would be elevated from the "trash heap tier" to a privileged tier where only the very best are eligible (ie. the any% and 100% world records; which would mean that they are not in fact eligible for Moon). I don't think vault deserves its current bad rep.
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Warp wrote:
With the other tier rehaul discussion some time ago I suggested that the vault tier would be elevated from the "trash heap tier" to a privileged tier where only the very best are eligible (ie. the any% and 100% world records; which would mean that they are not in fact eligible for Moon). I don't think vault deserves its current bad rep.
I have yet to see my criticism to that idea two pages back be addressed.
Mothrayas wrote:
The problem I have with this is similar to what I already stated, you would have Super Metroid and You Have To Burn The Rope in the same "tier". For that matter, it puts runs of the same (high) quality level in different tiers (with e.g. SM 100% in one tier, and SM "Reverse Boss Order" in the other tier) - which undermines the hierarchical structure of tiers, as both tiers are now more or less "equal" to each other. In effect, the whole concept of tiers is now negated, and it just splits the site content in two categories, esoteric goals and non-esoteric goals. It solves the ambiguity issue with tiers, but negates much of their purpose as well, which is to filter out lower rated runs and make the high quality runs stand out more (regardless of whether they have an esoteric goal or not).
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Yes, initial tiers intent is not to only sort, but to also promote. When they are divided by entertainment, it works quite well. The "all any% and 100% go to some common tier" idea has this flaw that can't be fixed right away - it does nothing to promote. Unless we are ready to add some flags to 1/3 of all published runs.
Note: hiding Vault runs is part of this promotion, but promotion is done not only by that.
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.
1. Newcomer attention: Lurk no further, watch them all!
2. Stars: Pick your favorites and be surprised.
3. Moons: You're really into it, here is some more of what might entertain you, but we don't guarantee.
4. Vault: Are you really sure you want to dive that deep?
My thought is, if we simply publish any%/100% to one tier, all the rest to another, and let users do the hiding part, or even sort by rating, it won't be as good in promotion as it is now.
But Demo tier or allowing board/sports games for Vault has no contradiction with this intent, neither has Middle tier and whatnot. So I'd consider discussing revising Vault's purpose done, but Demo and board games have no disadvantages to me.
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.
Note that that game has an actual story progression an a well defined ending, so I think it fully qualifies for vault.
This at a glance seems like a good reason to allow certain board games, but then it could allow something like this, which has less "gameplay" than Myst. Also there was an arguement somewhere regarding most "Go" AI is quite crap, but that's a different problem.
1. Newcomer attention: Lurk no further, watch them all!
2. Stars: Pick your favorites and be surprised.
3. Moons: You're really into it, here is some more of what might entertain you, but we don't guarantee.
4. Vault: Are you really sure you want to dive that deep?
My thought is, if we simply publish any%/100% to one tier, all the rest to another, and let users do the hiding part, or even sort by rating, it won't be as good in promotion as it is now.
One idea that comes to mind that would implement both goals (ie. promote the favorites, and clarify the distinction between the tiers) would be to split the proposed "new vault" tier into two: One containing the favorites and another the rest.
But yeah, I'm just tossing ideas at the wall here and seeing what sticks. I understand if this isn't a very realistic or non-problematic option either.
