Arc
Editor, Experienced player (766)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 534
Location: Arizona
I don't want to see speedrunners against handicapped TASes. I think that the TAS Block should promote TASVideos and the creative potential of TASes. The Dream Team Contest 5 (Metal Force) looked really fun. Why not have a Dream Team Contest for every GDQ? Give teams plenty of time (like the whole GDQ week) to craft optimal TASes. Reveal the winner by playing the four fastest submissions at GDQ.
Experienced player, Moderator, Senior Ambassador (897)
Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007
Hi everyone - first, I'm still recovering from everything, it was many hours of work to organize so many different things and I have not yet read every post in this thread. For those with constructive criticism, know I'm taking all of it into consideration. I'd like to echo that yes, we had to be very careful what information we gave the TAS'ers and we went through a total of 5 runthroughs from TAS'ers ahead of time, tweaking the documentation each time to try to find the right balance where the realtime runners stood a chance. Seeing as the result was within a few seconds I think we balanced it correctly, but know that it was not my intent to annoy others and I'm sorry for those who found the experience to be unpleasant. I would also like to personally apologize for the bad commentary. There were some things that were out of my control. I had worked with CoolMatty ahead of time on what we were going to display on screen but he developed a health concern so serious that he had to seek immediate care. The developers of the game (Jordan and Rusty from Vector 35) and I had a long conversation with Hannah who took over in his stead and we had everything written down in a notepad, but Hannah fell ill and was not in the stream room. It fell to Vulajin to understand what needed to happen, and while we had discussed everything ahead of time it was just too much to overcome. As a result, the name of the game was never displayed, the schedule was never updated, and I was unaware of both problems until after the event. Of the things I did have control over, I'm most disappointed in my inability to be properly prepared to provide commentary. I was still getting urgent requests from p4plus2 and the level designers (SethBling and Panga) and while we had rehearsed absolutely everything several times from a technical perspective I never forced everyone to put down their various soldering irons, controllers, laptops, and other tools long enough to walk through a "who is going to say what?" rehearsal. This resulted in haphazard (or entirely missing) introductions of people, poor visibility of what the goals of each portion were, and a complete lack of review of what a TAS is (other than the review I did an hour prior to the start of the block when announcing the closure of the speed TAS competition). In part, reacting to feedback from SGDQ 2015 that the introduction was too long and reacting from Twitch chat and Reddit repeatedly saying that they could care less about our nerd stuff, I cut out the vast majority of the review of what a TAS is, but I now see that this was very unwise on my part. The pendulum swung too far in the other direction, and the consequences were the confusion people had about what had happened. For those who are interested in downloading the game, I've temporarily placed the file here until it goes live officially: http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/PwnAdventureZ.zip
I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
To be fair, you did an excellent job at presenting and commenting. Sure, there were some things that were missing (as I commented in the other thread, I think it should have been made much clearer what the physical setup for each demonstration was, and that each run was indeed being run on a real unmodified console running the actual unmodified game), but besides that, the commentary felt really fluent and natural, rather than eg. forced and haphazard. The only thing that was a bit of a pity, related to that lack of description of the setup and what's happening, is that many viewers didn't get the proper picture of what was going on, and some of them even got the wrong impression. (For example many thought that the games were modded, rather than being original. Some even thought that they were run on an emulator rather the the real thing, because it wasn't explained nor shown that it was indeed the real console. IIRC in the SMW demonstration it wasn't even mentioned at all what the game was or what console was being used. It wasn't even clear if it was a console at all, or just a PC running an emulator.)
Active player (469)
Joined: 2/1/2014
Posts: 928
I agree with Warp. I say the presenation for TAS is getting better, but there are many out there that need things repeated to them a couple times (maybe cause they missed that part or tuned in late). Definitely showing off the hardware would have been a great addition as well (while getting everything setup)
Techokami
He/Him
Joined: 6/23/2008
Posts: 160
Yeah, I wanted to see that bastardized Nintendo DS! (Also, the Brain Age demo was amazing! Can we get some of those pictures as stock avatars for the forums??)