kierio04
He/Him
Joined: 12/25/2018
Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
For the past few years, I've encountered more and more people who either dislike TASVideos or have never heard of it. In the aim to try and track down the source of the problems, I've come across many frequently asked questions, and common concerns from members of many TASing communities. Below are some questions I've written myself, based on the overall picture of TASVideos I see outside TASVideos itself, in a means to hopefully enlighten some more senior members of this community on some very pressing issues. For the record... the questions below do NOT reflect my personal view on TASVideos! 1. Does the TASVideos audience only like or care about TASes with flashier tricks vs. raw optimisation? Furthermore, where there are dead/boring periods in a TAS, is it expected for you to keep the audience entertained at the cost of time? Put simply, do you still value entertainment more than speed? 2. Is TASVideos and the TASVideos audience only interested in a TAS which leads to ending screens or credits, rather than alternative game-modes? Especially those which are more popular or central to how the game is played? More importantly, why does TASVideos not have a framework for IL TASes yet? Finally, why is there not a more serious effort to do so, seeing as it leaves many games out? 3. For TASes where speed is not a concern (i.e. where obsoletion has nothing to do with time), why are times included in publications and YouTube uploads? does this not confuse people into thinking all the superplays are meant to be speedruns? 4. Assuming an established community already exists, where popular community figures or central channels would have the means to reach more users, what do you see as the benefit in allowing the TASVideosChannel to mirror TASes on YouTube? 5. Will there be work done to connect with larger games' communities which have never associated with TASVideos and don't see "the point" of it (either due to bad reputation or not knowing it even exists)? 6. Will there be more work done to fully eliminate the negative reputation TASVideos built up years ago which, due to larger games' communities splintering and never interacting with it, are unaware of the changes that have undergone recently? Additionally, would you address common hesitations or doubts, such as; strict timing standards, unfair emulator restrictions, being viewed as being an overly authoritative site for all TASes, or gatekeeping what can and can't be published? 7. Is TASVideos working towards accepting TASes of games with their own built-in tools? e.g. accepting PC games without having to go through alternate means such as libTAS, or accepting file formats that can only apply to a single game? 8. Would TASVideos ever accept retroactive submissions to fill in missing record histories for splintered communities that have refrained from submitting TASes, or been left out due to not meeting standards as described above? Before posting this here, I discussed a few ideas of my own to make the site more open to established communities: A. Games with enough TASers that they have an established community are allowed one (or multiple) representatives in an official TASVideos position, to vouch for and accommodate the needs of their community. B. You could have game-specific submission->publication->encoding workflows, thereby lifting the weight off the more general staff (basically, TASVideos could make space for the communities, and the communities would have some amount of control over how they use that space) C. GameResources pages have the option to redirect to an external wiki, should one exist (e.g. Super Mario 64 would redirect to Ukikipedia) D. I've also been thinking of potential designs for an IL framework, since that directly affects so many games (my own game included), and I would love to see that worked out To get this out of the way, I am aware that a lot of potential features are bottlenecked by site development. I get that! After this many years though, I haven't seen this sentiment change, especially for more major things (for example, ILs), so I really want to help push the planning process. All this being said... I grew up with TASVideos, and as such I'm enthusiastic in seeing a future where its legacy remains untarnished. I would love for an opportunity to help work through issues such as the ones outlined above. I have ties to a considerable number of established TASing communities (through endeavours such as the Multi-Game TAS Competition), and have the means to make a difference, should an offer come up to do so. Simply put, this is also me expressing my interest in a potential ambassador-like role, to help aid this process, if it goes through!
InputEvelution
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Editor, Judge, Player (53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
A lot of these questions are interesting to me, so I'm going to post some thoughts on the matter. Keep in mind that these are my personal feelings and don't necessarily reflect the overall views of TASVideos staff. 1. There was definitely a time when this was the case, but I feel like speed/entertainment tradeoffs are far less popular than they used to be, outside of playarounds obviously. I think keeping the option open for those who want to do flashier tricks is definitely worthwhile, but no, I don't think I would ever expect a submission to include speed/entertainment tradeoffs rather than just focusing on raw optimisation. 2. Absolutely not, TASes of alternative gamemodes should always be something that can be submitted here. I think there are already a number of TASes for alternative gamemodes that don't end in credits on the site, such as [6539] GC Resident Evil 4 "The Mercenaries: Base, maximum score" by Ubercapitalist in 07:31.40 or [4969] Linux Iconoclasts "Lethal Rush" by ikuyo in 10:23.99. On the matter of ILs...the biggest problem here is that it requires a lot of changes to the site infrastructure. We don't have a way to list RTA-measured or in-game time on movies in addition to power-on time yet, being able to have a list of levels for a game and TAS records/categories for each one that can display on game pages etc. would take a lot of site development time, and ILs also complicate TASVideos' existing publication process. Encoding and publishing every TAS for every game becomes a much bigger problem when every category of every level can also be submitted. I would love to see TASVideos accommodate IL TASes better - but I understand that there are a lot of complications in the process that make this challenging to solve, and the site only has so many developers to support it with making these changes. 3. This is honestly a really good point, and one I hadn't thought about before. The most likely answer is probably "consistency", but yeah, I do see some value in not including times on superplays. I suppose knowing how long a watch you're in for is nice, but that doesn't really matter on sites like YouTube where most people will be watching it. 4. Even in cases where TASVideos doesn't have the widest audience for a particular game, I still see the YouTube channel as providing some additional reach. It also ensures that, should something happen to the original video or its channel, that it is always available to watch somewhere. 5. I'd like to see that happen! Obviously it can be a tough sell in these situations though. 6. I do think we could be doing more to alert communities of the ways in which TASVideos has improved. Hell, I've even seen some assumptions about how we "used to" operate that to my knowledge have never been true, such as not allowing aiming for in-game time over real-time. Of the common hesitations and doubts listed, it's hard to think of a true one size fits all solution to addressing these: "strict timing standards" and "unfair emulator restrictions" demand a bit more context to the specific situations they come up in, while the view of TASVideos as authoritative and gatekeepy is something we could still be doing more to dispel in general. 7. Short answer is yes. Long answer is that this is again somewhat limited by the pace of site development. I actually started trying to implement a parser on the site for a game-specific tool a couple months ago, but as I'm not used to doing much programming things have been really slow...hopefully I can start making some progress again soon though. 8. TASVideos has actually done this before, so this isn't a situation without precedent...but, the last time it happened was like 15 years ago, so I'm not sure where the site would stand now. It could definitely be nice, though I can't say I have strong feelings either way on this solution. On the solutions offered: A. I think that could be a good idea. Though, there is a question of exactly how one determines how big is "enough" for a community to get this kind of representation. Should there be an objective measurement used (monthly active TASers? Total members?), or should things be analysed on a case-by-case basis? Also keep in mind that TASVideos Staff are already a relatively small team, and we don't necessarily want our own voices to get drowned out by ambassadors from too many communities. B. This is an idea worth considering, I think. Publishing staff will probably have more opinions on the matter though. C. This is a really good idea, assuming the resources are publicly available and well protected against vandalism. As it stands a lot of our Game Resources pages are really prone to containing out-of-date information, so linking somewhere reliable that does have current info would be a great way to deal with that.
CoolHandMike
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Editor, Judge, Skilled player (1064)
Joined: 3/9/2019
Posts: 872
Giving this a reply. I am a judge, but not an admin so I cannot say definitively about a lot of things. 1. Does the TASVideos audience only like or care about TASes with flashier tricks vs. raw optimisation? Furthermore, where there are dead/boring periods in a TAS, is it expected for you to keep the audience entertained at the cost of time? Put simply, do you still value entertainment more than speed? People have different tastes in how they tas. During dead/boring periods like "autoscrolling" parts Tasvideos rules do not expect authors to fill the time with tricks for the audience. I would find it more entertaining to watch, but it would not effect any judgement. There is a goal "playaround" which is for the tases that want to play around in the game for entertainment's sake. There is also the more default Standard goal of fastest completion. There can also be entertainment tradeoffs. If there are more specific questions people should ask those. 2. Is TASVideos and the TASVideos audience only interested in a TAS which leads to ending screens or credits, rather than alternative game-modes? Especially those which are more popular or central to how the game is played? More importantly, why does TASVideos not have a framework for IL TASes yet? Finally, why is there not a more serious effort to do so, seeing as it leaves many games out? Tasvideos has been more oriented towards speedruns that complete the game for Standard class, being speedruns. It is not always extremely clear cut though. However there is the Alternative goals playarounds, or Playground which accepts a lot of tases which cannot be accepted into anything else. Are you talking more about the Mario 64 "all trees" submission here for example? As far as IL tases go that is something that has been talked about internally, but needs more discussion, and it is probably more on the admin/dev side of things. 3. For TASes where speed is not a concern (i.e. where obsoletion has nothing to do with time), why are times included in publications and YouTube uploads? does this not confuse people into thinking all the superplays are meant to be speedruns? Playarounds probably fit this category, but having the time in the title is just the standard title format afaik. Do you have an example of where someone thought this was confusing? 4. Assuming an established community already exists, where popular community figures or central channels would have the means to reach more users, what do you see as the benefit in allowing the TASVideosChannel to mirror TASes on YouTube? Tasvideos as a whole does have a lot of experienced tasers and encoders which could help make the end tas movie even better. Without the additional exposure there might be users that would not even know about a tas too. There are so many games and communities it is probably impossible to know and be current with all of them. 5. Will there be work done to connect with larger games' communities which have never associated with TASVideos and don't see "the point" of it (either due to bad reputation or not knowing it even exists)? I don't know. Personally I do not want to go out and "sell" Tasvideos to people. 6. Will there be more work done to fully eliminate the negative reputation TASVideos built up years ago which, due to larger games' communities splintering and never interacting with it, are unaware of the changes that have undergone recently? Additionally, would you address common hesitations or doubts, such as; strict timing standards, unfair emulator restrictions, being viewed as being an overly authoritative site for all TASes, or gatekeeping what can and can't be published? There are site rules that are followed so not everything can be published. If something does not quite fit, the rules might be amended if our userbase wants those changes though. If there are questions about a potential tas or submission the author/authors should ask. 7. Is TASVideos working towards accepting TASes of games with their own built-in tools? e.g. accepting PC games without having to go through alternate means such as libTAS, or accepting file formats that can only apply to a single game? This is probably technical so I will leave it to others. But I imagine that even if it cannot be published, Playground probably would cover it. 8. Would TASVideos ever accept retroactive submissions to fill in missing record histories for splintered communities that have refrained from submitting TASes, or been left out due to not meeting standards as described above? Could you give one or two examples? Before posting this here, I discussed a few ideas of my own to make the site more open to established communities: A. Games with enough TASers that they have an established community are allowed one (or multiple) representatives in an official TASVideos position, to vouch for and accommodate the needs of their community. What needs would they accommodate? B. You could have game-specific submission->publication->encoding workflows, thereby lifting the weight off the more general staff (basically, TASVideos could make space for the communities, and the communities would have some amount of control over how they use that space) Sounds like a massive rework of the site. Up to the devs and admins. C. GameResources pages have the option to redirect to an external wiki, should one exist (e.g. Super Mario 64 would redirect to Ukikipedia) Editors could add those links currently if they want within the page for more info. D. I've also been thinking of potential designs for an IL framework, since that directly affects so many games (my own game included), and I would love to see that worked out ILs do sound interesting, but it would have to carefully considered.
discord: CoolHandMike#0352
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Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5789
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kierio04 wrote:
1. Does the TASVideos audience only like or care about TASes with flashier tricks vs. raw optimisation?
The audience is not homogenous; different people have different preferences.
kierio04 wrote:
Furthermore, where there are dead/boring periods in a TAS, is it expected for you to keep the audience entertained at the cost of time? Put simply, do you still value entertainment more than speed?
This remains up to the author. However, to my knowledge, in a situation where an improvement to a run is only made possible if it doesn't contain a speed/entertainment trade-off the previous author knowingly made, it's not considered an improvement. That being said, you're conflating two different things here: if the entertainment effort happens in the "dead/boring period", then having it in the run by no definition "values entertainment over speed".
kierio04 wrote:
2. Is TASVideos and the TASVideos audience only interested in a TAS which leads to ending screens or credits, rather than alternative game-modes? Especially those which are more popular or central to how the game is played?
Definitely not only; I'm curious where this perception came from. Although, what are the examples of game modes that don't have any sort of ending screens? Is this a common thing I'm not aware of? And again, the audience is not homogenous. I don't like to speak for the entirety of it.
kierio04 wrote:
Why does TASVideos not have a framework for IL TASes yet? Additionally, why is there not a more serious effort to do so, seeing as it leaves many games out?
As far as I'm aware, we haven't yet seriously considered how exactly we want to handle these in terms of code, processes, and visual presentation, but we want to. Note that this requires certain development effort and has only become feasible recently. The previous (pre-2022) site could not support this other than by making each IL its own individual publication entry (I believe this is not how this should be done), so a policy to only have full-game runs was born out of this limitation. We will get rid of it as soon as we figure this out, as it doesn't serve any purpose other than deterring people from submitting something we cannot properly support.
kierio04 wrote:
3. For TASes where speed is not a concern (i.e. where obsoletion has nothing to do with time), why are times included in publications and YouTube uploads? does this not confuse people into thinking all the superplays are meant to be speedruns?
It's just a common template, and nobody bothered making separate ones for non-speed goals. It's likely confusing, but I don't think we've received many complaints about this over the years so it was never given a priority. I do agree this should reflect the goals properly, or at least not confuse them with speed.
kierio04 wrote:
4. Assuming an established community already exists, where popular community figures or central channels would have the means to reach more users, what do you see as the benefit in allowing the TASVideosChannel to mirror TASes on YouTube?
We spent several minutes just figuring out the wording behind this question, lol; it's very confusing ("allowing" TVC to mirror TASes?). The interpretation we settled on is that you're asking whether we should use TVC YouTube uploads where an author's own upload would suffice for the wide reach and could be used instead. Notably, regardless of whether we do a TVC upload or whether the author even submits their work to TASVideos at all, their audience will still see their upload, so these users are still reached with or without our help. The issue that was brought up was that some authors prefer not to submit high-profile TASes to TASVideos at all so that TVC doesn't "leech" their views, so we implicitly miss out on these submissions because they never reach us anyway. (This also made me think whether such authors would consider submitting their work here under the CC BY 2.0 license problematic, given how much redistribution freedom it entails.) This resulted in a long and eventful discussion internally. My own opinion is as follows: It's fine if authors use their content to develop their own platforms if this is important to them; however, I do think that some degree of cooperation for mutual benefit should happen in this case. Unlike virtually every other platform in this whole speedrunning ecosystem, TASVideos does not extract monetary benefit from other people's works—but it needs opportunities for publicity and outreach to grow its own community which is a major cornerstone of its continued existence. Hence, if an author requests us to use their own upload, I think it's fair if we ask them to put the links to the submission/publication and our welcome page at the top of their video description. Other senior staff may have different opinions on this matter.
kierio04 wrote:
5. Will there be work done to connect with larger games' communities which have never associated with TASVideos and don't see "the point" of it (either due to bad reputation or not knowing it even exists)?
Hopefully! As I said above, we do need to grow our outreach. More ambassadors would be welcome.
kierio04 wrote:
6. Will there be more work done to fully eliminate the negative reputation TASVideos built up years ago which, due to larger games' communities splintering and never interacting with it, are unaware of the changes that have undergone recently?
Again, hopefully. There are many communities and not enough staff members familiar with them. When I find myself discussing TASes in another community, I always take the opportunity to bring up TASVideos and/or mention the positive changes if it's already brought up. But that doesn't happen too often because I'm only active in a few relevant communities, we need people with wider reach.
kierio04 wrote:
Additionally, would you address common hesitations or doubts, such as; strict timing standards, unfair emulator restrictions, being viewed as being an overly authoritative site for all TASes, or gatekeeping what can and can't be published?
Pretty sure we address these things all the time, haha. I don't mean just explaining why they are what they are: we also make meaningful changes to our rules (almost always relaxing or streamlining them) regularly. As for being viewed as overly authoritative, this is sadly part of the lasting damage done by the previous administration. The current administration has never positioned itself or the site as an authority on TASes or TASing; we just try to do our thing as best we can. We won't stop trying to do better.
kierio04 wrote:
7. Is TASVideos working towards accepting TASes of games with their own built-in tools? e.g. accepting PC games without having to go through alternate means such as libTAS, or accepting file formats that can only apply to a single game?
For a while, actually. If something isn't supported yet, it's because there is literally no code written to support it yet. We want to be able to handle more games with built-in tools or replay systems; this has similar priority as the support for any new system.
kierio04 wrote:
8. Would TASVideos ever accept retroactive submissions to fill in missing record histories for splintered communities that have refrained from submitting TASes, or been left out due to not meeting standards as described above?
I don't see a problem with it—it has been done way before by Bisqwit, although in those cases the movies had already been sent to him prior, before the submission–publication workflow had been implemented. We could do something like this if there is demand for it. Do note that, due to the nature of TASing, "record histories" are naturally fuzzy and they don't represent quite the same thing as unassisted record progressions due to the ease of both falsification and implementing incremental improvements. So, in my opinion, the missing movies must represent known and significant qualitative steps over the preceding records and people from the respective communities need to strongly vouch for these submissions to ensure what's being submitted is an actual historic record and not something made to look like one. We'll need to think about the workflow for this.
kierio04 wrote:
A. Games with enough TASers that they have an established community are allowed one (or multiple) representatives in an official TASVideos position, to vouch for and accommodate the needs of their community.
This is going to sound very vague, but over the past couple years, we've had some internal discussions about the future directions of the site, and there's a lot to be excited about. Ideally, we should first decide which radical changes (if any) to go with—perhaps they will synergize with this idea, but they could also make it obsolete!
kierio04 wrote:
B. You could have game-specific submission->publication->encoding workflows, thereby lifting the weight off the more general staff (basically, TASVideos could make space for the communities, and the communities would have some amount of control over how they use that space)
Oh yeah, we also have some ideas on how to enlist the help of game experts for submissions. I think they're pretty cool, but we need a couple rounds of both internal and public discussions to finalize the vision so that we don't end up creating a lot of unnecessary work for each other. Encoding and publication workflows are, thankfully, quite general (they don't require game-specific knowledge/expertise and are transferable skills) and are handled by the core staff. This part of the workflow we'd probably prefer to keep as it is for now, as it actually works very well even with our constrained resources, though we constantly work to expand our encoder and publisher rosters.
kierio04 wrote:
C. GameResources pages have the option to redirect to an external wiki, should one exist (e.g. Super Mario 64 would redirect to Ukikipedia)
This should be done, yeah. Good call. Most of the Game Resources pages had been written before all of these external wikis even existed (shows how old the site is...), but the information there is not maintained and is almost entirely obsolete by now.
kierio04 wrote:
D. I've also been thinking of potential designs for an IL framework, since that directly affects so many games (my own game included), and I would love to see that worked out
By all means, please, do share them with our devs! We welcome any help.
kierio04 wrote:
Simply put, this is also me expressing my interest in a potential ambassador-like role, to help aid this process, if it goes through!
Rather than "ambassador-like", why not an actual ambassador? :D The admins have taken note of your interest, we will most definitely get back to you on this.
Darkman425
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Editor, Judge, Skilled player (1621)
Joined: 9/19/2021
Posts: 325
Location: Texas
That's quite a hefty post there with a lot of interesting questions worth asking. I've also got a fair amount of answers myself, as someone who's followed the community since maybe 2008-2009 but only formally joined in 2021.
kierio04 wrote:
1. Does the TASVideos audience only like or care about TASes with flashier tricks vs. raw optimisation? Furthermore, where there are dead/boring periods in a TAS, is it expected for you to keep the audience entertained at the cost of time? Put simply, do you still value entertainment more than speed?
I know a lot of older TASes published to the site sometimes have a fair amount of deliberate speed/entertainment tradeoffs simply because the author just found doing so cool. For example, see the submission notes for [435] SNES Super Demo World: The Legend Continues "all 120 exits" by Fabian & JXQ in 2:13:17.90 which has a dedicated section of Intentional "Mistakes". I feel that a lot of folks nowadays who get into TASing come from RTA backgrounds so they usually prefer shorter times when possible. Of course this isn't always the case even now. If I find it interesting and/or amusing I'm willing to intentionally lose time to do things such as entering names or showing off a weird but interesting quirk here and there in my published TASes. Sometimes I'm even willing to lean into a game's bit if I find it funny to do so, most notable in the SMW QLDC hack publications that I've made solo. Ultimately, I absolutely do like a good speed/entertainment tradeoff but it would definitely vary between folks.
kierio04 wrote:
2. Is TASVideos and the TASVideos audience only interested in a TAS which leads to ending screens or credits, rather than alternative game-modes? Especially those which are more popular or central to how the game is played? More importantly, why does TASVideos not have a framework for IL TASes yet? Finally, why is there not a more serious effort to do so, seeing as it leaves many games out?
We've definitely had TASes of alternate modes. Recently we had a publication of an alternate mode for Crash Nitro Kart that had nothing to do with the racing at all: [6523] GBA Crash Nitro Kart "Crash Party USA" by Mikewillplays in 11:40.51 Alternate game modes are definitely less tackled since usually someone interested in making a TAS of a game simply plays the main game itself. I feel it's an interest problem primarily. However, that also causes a feedback loop of nearly nobody TASing alternate modes which gives the perception that the site doesn't want them. I feel that there should be more TASes of those other modes but those two factors means not many folks are submitting any.
kierio04 wrote:
3. For TASes where speed is not a concern (i.e. where obsoletion has nothing to do with time), why are times included in publications and YouTube uploads? does this not confuse people into thinking all the superplays are meant to be speedruns?
Definitely a legacy thing. However, I do find knowing how long something like a playaround is since that time is a rough estimate is good to tell me if I have time to focus on it in its entirety or just having it on the background while doing other things.
kierio04 wrote:
4. Assuming an established community already exists, where popular community figures or central channels would have the means to reach more users, what do you see as the benefit in allowing the TASVideosChannel to mirror TASes on YouTube?
Extra positive exposure to other communities wouldn't be a bad thing. Sorry I don't have more to say about this at the moment, though.
kierio04 wrote:
5. Will there be work done to connect with larger games' communities which have never associated with TASVideos and don't see "the point" of it (either due to bad reputation or not knowing it even exists)?
The staff has talked about this a lot and we've wanted to help link with other communities. I see TASVideos as a (and not the, although this site kind of has that de facto representation) central hub for general TASing, so it makes sense that larger communities that require more specialized knowledge and tools would make their own dedicated community with those sort of tools. Of course, there's also just been a lot going on that we've not had the time/energy to get that outreach done.
kierio04 wrote:
6. Will there be more work done to fully eliminate the negative reputation TASVideos built up years ago which, due to larger games' communities splintering and never interacting with it, are unaware of the changes that have undergone recently? Additionally, would you address common hesitations or doubts, such as; strict timing standards, unfair emulator restrictions, being viewed as being an overly authoritative site for all TASes, or gatekeeping what can and can't be published?
As I said previously, we've been working to clear up the (understandable and sometimes correct) reputation of 2010s era TASVideos elitism. The whole overhaul of movie classes and submission rules are a big part of that. Of course, communication between this community and others is a key part of making it work. We're open to good faith interactions about how the site works and if there's something that someone could find questionable.
kierio04 wrote:
7. Is TASVideos working towards accepting TASes of games with their own built-in tools? e.g. accepting PC games without having to go through alternate means such as libTAS, or accepting file formats that can only apply to a single game?
With the site being open source, it's definitely in the cards to implement game specific tools. I feel a big problem is that those who develop said tools don't really know that we're willing to work with them to see if getting them implemented for the site can be done. While a technical hurdle can be overcome with working together, I believe the main problem is a communication problem.
kierio04 wrote:
8. Would TASVideos ever accept retroactive submissions to fill in missing record histories for splintered communities that have refrained from submitting TASes, or been left out due to not meeting standards as described above?
I know that it's been done with very old TASes that were published but nearly forgotten until an archival effort was done to republish them. For those that never were submitted to the site but still fits somewhere between publications, it might be an interesting discussion in of itself. That one might need its own discussion but I'm kind of drawing a blank of anything that'd fit the criteria at the moment.
Splitting this here for answering the possible site ideas.
kierio04 wrote:
A. Games with enough TASers that they have an established community are allowed one (or multiple) representatives in an official TASVideos position, to vouch for and accommodate the needs of their community.
More staff in theory might not be a bad idea, although part of the problem is finding folks who are willing to handle proper site responsibilities and representation. A lot of folks see that sort of work as difficult, when I feel the bigger hurdle is finding the time to properly judge/encode/publish a submission into a publication. Established community members for a given game-centric TASing community working as site staff would be an interesting idea to try, although there's the risk of whoever is picked as a given judge for those TASes being too harsh due to their expertise causing a large bias.
kierio04 wrote:
B. You could have game-specific submission->publication->encoding workflows, thereby lifting the weight off the more general staff (basically, TASVideos could make space for the communities, and the communities would have some amount of control over how they use that space)
I feel this is just an extension of A as above, so I don't think I need to talk about this more.
kierio04 wrote:
C. GameResources pages have the option to redirect to an external wiki, should one exist (e.g. Super Mario 64 would redirect to Ukikipedia)
Linking to dedicated sites would be incredibly helpful. Dedicated wikis and web sites with specialized knowledge for a game is generally really neat to have. I just wish more folks knew that the Game Resources section existed at all and that they could be the ones making pages for games. I know there's also dedicated Discord servers for some TASing communities without a proper site and personally I feel those are a bit too ephemeral compared to Just A Website. Of course, there's issues of things like web hosts, maintenance costs, and other website related costs that I get why dedicated game TASing sites aren't really all that common.
kierio04 wrote:
D. I've also been thinking of potential designs for an IL framework, since that directly affects so many games (my own game included), and I would love to see that worked out
There's the Playground class of movies that exists. I feel that individual level TASes are a perfect fit for those, but the problem is that rarely anyone just submits one level as a submission. Usually they keep their TAS until it's fully done, or just uploads their IL TAS as a User File. I feel that's kind of more of a problem of what Playground even is since I don't think a majority of the community even knows that's a thing at all.
Sorry for the huge post but I felt like I had to say my piece as part of site staff. However, my thoughts are ultimately my own and don't necessarily represent the community as a whole, let alone the opinions of staff since we all come from different backgrounds and all that.
Switch friend code: SW-2632-3851-3712
Bigbass
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Joined: 2/2/2021
Posts: 228
Location: Midwest
There's a lot to comment on here! Apologies in advance for my long post. The majority of this post will be my own personal opinions of what TASVideos is or should be, and I'll do my best to differentiate between my opinions and the current rules or policies of the site. If there's any need for clarification, please just ask! Additionally, while I'm a site moderator, my TASing background primarily revolves around console verification (replaying existing TASes on real hardware). However, I'm also involved in the emulation development community which sometimes overlaps with TASing efforts.
kierio04 wrote:
1. Does the TASVideos audience only like or care about TASes with flashier tricks vs. raw optimisation? Furthermore, where there are dead/boring periods in a TAS, is it expected for you to keep the audience entertained at the cost of time? Put simply, do you still value entertainment more than speed?
Personally, I'd say both. Tricks are always inherently going to be of interest since they very obviously showcase gameplay that casual gamers would never see and sometimes even speedrunners may not have seen before. However, optimization is still worthwhile, perhaps even entertaining in some cases and better exemplifies the usefulness of said tricks. Many TASes have boring periods. Though from what I've seen, often the boring periods are purely a result of the game itself and not something the TAS is necessarily responsible for. That said, I wish more TASes would use some combination of character movements and the music/sound effects to enhance segments that would otherwise be boring/ordinary. There are some examples of this in [4597] NES Rush'n Attack "2 players" by Randil, MESHUGGAH, aiqiyou & J.Y in 09:35.17 (1:01, 5:38) and [4438] NES Kiwi Kraze: A Bird-Brained Adventure! by J.Y in 02:10.93 (0:46, 1:55). I'm sure there's an example in one of the Super Mario games where fireball shots are synchronized with the beat of the music. From the site's judgement and curation standpoint, entertainment only matters if the goal of the TAS is to be entertaining. (Which is different than TASVideos used to be.)
kierio04 wrote:
2. Is TASVideos and the TASVideos audience only interested in a TAS which leads to ending screens or credits, rather than alternative game-modes? Especially those which are more popular or central to how the game is played?
I can't speak for other staff members, but I for one certainly want to see the site be capable of curating TASes with endings other than the final ending/credits of the game. The recent #9603: frKieran, mkdasher, SilentSlayers, snark, Krithalith, Crackhex, Manama, FeijoadaMolhada, ChouxZi3, Alexpalix1, Superdavo0001, tesserakt & IsaacA's N64 Super Mario 64 "all trees" in 08:25.18 is one such movie that comes to mind, which has sparked debate over how the TAS "should" end. I firmly believe that since the entire point of the TAS is to touch all trees as fast as possible, it's reasonable to end the TAS when that goal is accomplished. Such a goal doesn't necessarily involve reaching the originally intended end of the game (final bowser fight).
kierio04 wrote:
3. For TASes where speed is not a concern (i.e. where obsoletion has nothing to do with time), why are times included in publications and YouTube uploads? does this not confuse people into thinking all the superplays are meant to be speedruns?
I may be wrong, but currently I think this is more a technical challenge rather than a strict policy. For me though, even if a run is entertainment-focused, seeing how long the movie is can be useful information too. "Is this movie 10 seconds of entertainment or 2 hours?" I can see how including the time in the title may confuse some viewers though. Yet, in any case, the title is rarely going to convey the full context of a TAS' goal(s).
kierio04 wrote:
4. Assuming an established community already exists, where popular community figures or central channels would have the means to reach more users, what do you see as the benefit in allowing the TASVideosChannel to mirror TASes on YouTube?
The site does not prohibit people from uploading their own encode to their own channel. In fact, this is done quite regularly when authors submit their movies (they upload their own encode to their own channel). It's also done for live/recorded commentary and console verifications. I personally view TASVideosChannel as the channel the site uploads its own encodes to for its publications. As in, just as TASVideos has a publication page for each published movie, it also has its own encode for that publication. Providing an encode for each publication makes it incredibly simple for practically anyone to view/enjoy the TAS.
kierio04 wrote:
5. Will there be work done to connect with larger games' communities which have never associated with TASVideos and don't see "the point" of it (either due to bad reputation or not knowing it even exists)?
I'm curious, do you know of any particular communities that fit the subject of your question? I don't know the extent of the site's efforts to connect with other communities. I know there has been growing interest in getting a Celeste TAS published, and IIRC there have been some discussions of what would be needed to make that happen. I know Super Mario 64 has a big TASing scene, and they periodically submit some of their bigger works onto TASVideos. Connecting with other TASing communities can be mutually beneficial, but I don't feel like it's absolutely necessary in all cases. Or said another way, I think it's okay that other TAS-focused communities exist outside of TASVideos. While I see TASVideos as a wonderful repository of TASing information and history, I don't think it needs to be at the very center of all things TASing.
kierio04 wrote:
6. Will there be more work done to fully eliminate the negative reputation TASVideos built up years ago which, due to larger games' communities splintering and never interacting with it, are unaware of the changes that have undergone recently?
Similar to #5, I'd love to hear any insight you have on any negative reputation that still exists. Are there any specific issues you've recently seen others express that may be based on old policies or rules?
kierio04 wrote:
being viewed as being an overly authoritative site for all TASes
The idea that TASVideos is somehow the de-facto authority for all things TASing is a misunderstanding. TASVideos is no doubt a relatively large TASing community with a long history of curating TASes. However, it isn't the end all, be all, of TASing and I know staff members (myself included) have tried addressing this mentality whenever it surfaces. I suspect one source of the confusion is simply due to the site's process of judging submissions. Not to say that it's inherently bad/wrong, but I can see how it may give the impression that the site is asserting what is or isn't a valid TAS. Where instead the site is really just trying to evaluate and categorize submissions for its own curation goals.
kierio04 wrote:
7. Is TASVideos working towards accepting TASes of games with their own built-in tools? e.g. accepting PC games without having to go through alternate means such as libTAS, or accepting file formats that can only apply to a single game?
I believe so yes. There's an ongoing investigation into how or if #9406: PancakeTurtle & Migu's N64 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time "100% (No SRM)" in 3:07:24.17's use of a practice ROM (instead of an emulator) as the TAS creation tool is something that we can reasonably accept and process. Like I mentioned earlier, I believe I've seen some discussions around what would be needed to accept Celeste TASes on the site. (Celeste uses built-in tools to create TASes.) In this case, I believe the only limiting factor is implementing a parser for whatever movie format they use, but I may be mistaken.
kierio04 wrote:
8. Would TASVideos ever accept retroactive submissions to fill in missing record histories for splintered communities that have refrained from submitting TASes, or been left out due to not meeting standards as described above?
Hmm that's an interesting question. I don't recall discussing this anytime recently and it poses a unique logistical challenge. I think one difficulty would be reliably establishing when the movie was originally made. That matters because we'd need some way to differentiate between truly old TASes that are now obsolete vs new TASes that don't beat existing records. The site does allow revisiting previously rejected submissions to see if they are now acceptable due to rule changes over the years. But AFAIK even if they are now acceptable, they still need to beat known records in order to be rejudged.
kierio04 wrote:
A. Games with enough TASers that they have an established community are allowed one (or multiple) representatives in an official TASVideos position, to vouch for and accommodate the needs of their community.
I think the site already values any insight from individuals of other communities. How would offering an official position improve their ability to convey their knowledge or the needs of their community? If a person's credibility is in question, it's reasonably easy enough to determine if they are a credible source, which we'd need to do anyways if we were to offer official positions.
kierio04 wrote:
B. You could have game-specific submission->publication->encoding workflows, thereby lifting the weight off the more general staff
Ideas like this have been proposed and discussed before. It's still worth considering, but I'm not sure how it would actually work. Plus, there's the technical challenge to consider too; making fundamental changes to how the site functions would likely take quite a lot of time.
kierio04 wrote:
C. GameResources pages have the option to redirect to an external wiki, should one exist
That's probably doable. Though for consistency, I think I'd rather see it within the content of our own wiki page. That would certainly be the simplest solution too, without requiring any site changes. (The site currently depends on the existence of the wiki page to know whether it should be linked on the game's catalog page.)
kierio04 wrote:
D. I've also been thinking of potential designs for an IL framework, since that directly affects so many games (my own game included), and I would love to see that worked out
Please feel free to share any ideas or sketches of what you'd like to see or what might be useful in such a change. Getting started on entirely new features is always tough.
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kierio04
He/Him
Joined: 12/25/2018
Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
InputEvelution wrote:
A. I think that could be a good idea. Though, there is a question of exactly how one determines how big is "enough" for a community to get this kind of representation. Should there be an objective measurement used (monthly active TASers? Total members?), or should things be analysed on a case-by-case basis? Also keep in mind that TASVideos Staff are already a relatively small team, and we don't necessarily want our own voices to get drowned out by ambassadors from too many communities.
The way I see it, as long as there's a group of people who TAS a certain game, that should classify as a "community". For the vast majority of submissions that come through TASVideos, it's by a single person who has picked up a game explicitly, rather than a member of a group of people who actively TAS a game. I would say the best way to decide is case-by-case - I've found that boiling any complex decision down to purely metrics will always cause some issue down the line. All that really matters is; if there's so many people in a community that you need a central figure to act as an intermediary between the community and TASVideos, that's when you would look to assign an ambassador. I wouldn't be surprised if most small communities (say, 3-5 active members) even want/need official ambassadors, so this would only really apply to the larger communities, such as Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 64, etc.
Samsara
She/They
Site Admin, Expert player (2366)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2858
Location: Northern California
Just to be clear in advance, my answers here only accurately reflect my own thoughts and views on the situation. I'm aware of how it's all going to sound with my current administrative position, but none of this is intended to be taken as TASVideos' full and official opinion at this moment. Even when I say "we" as if I'm speaking for staff as a whole, I'm just presenting my interpretation of how we all feel. I could be wrong!
kierio04 wrote:
1. Does the TASVideos audience only like or care about TASes with flashier tricks vs. raw optimisation? Furthermore, where there are dead/boring periods in a TAS, is it expected for you to keep the audience entertained at the cost of time? Put simply, do you still value entertainment more than speed?
In the past, yeah, TASVideos was cultivating an audience that only wanted big, flashy runs with lots of entertainment value, but that's something we've explicitly been trying to move away from in recent years. Nowadays, especially with TAS and RTA being more tightly intertwined, I'd say we as staff don't really value either speed or entertainment more than the other. They work very nicely together, of course, but it's no longer a strict necessity to focus on both at the same time. You can just aim for one and it'll fly with us. There's always going to be people that want to see the flashy stuff, of course, and I'm not going to try and change them. but I don't want those people to reflect us. Fixing that sort of perception is going to be difficult, though, especially when there's a decade and a half of it to correct.
2. Is TASVideos and the TASVideos audience only interested in a TAS which leads to ending screens or credits, rather than alternative game-modes? Especially those which are more popular or central to how the game is played? Why does TASVideos not have a framework for IL TASes yet? Additionally, why is there not a more serious effort to do so, seeing as it leaves many games out?
We've definitely opened the doors to allowing more alternative game modes over the past few years, although I get the feeling that even the first part of this question is directed specifically at ILs so I'll just get into that. Implementing things on TASVideos is, essentially, a two step process: Step one is figuring out a plan for implementation, step two is developing it. ILs, in particular, have a really difficult step one. It's something we've discussed before, it's something I've been personally thinking about a lot since I also want IL support, the only problem is that TASVideos is currently not built for them. This will come up again as an answer to other questions, so I'll start hammering it in now: A lot of the issues people have with TASVideos are matters of perspective. There's the perspective of staff members, the perspective of community members, and the perspective of those looking in from outside. From that last perspective, people think it should be very easy for us to do something, or to support something, and if we don't then they assume we're completely against it. It tends to be the same from the community, though the community is much more aware of what we've been doing lately and how our processes go. From a staff perspective, though, something that SOUNDS easy to others is often a huge headache for us. ILs sound easy to support, but if we tried with our current systems and standards, we'd be absolutely clowned on for it, and rightfully so. Our current standards require runs to start from a power-on state: We don't normally allow savestates, only making very rare exceptions for runs that are otherwise impossible without them, such as the recently improved Super Mario Land "hard mode" TAS. Imagine a list of IL publications that are all timed from power-on. That'd be silly, wouldn't it? Yet, that's the core of the site. That's how everything on the site is timed and verified. Times are parsed automatically from framecount, and nearly all of our verification simply comes from seeing that the input file starts from a known legitimate state. This straight up does not work for ILs, meaning we'd have to, at the very least, come up with an entirely new set of rules and standards for ILs, draft a new verification workflow so we don't have to do anything silly like require power-on/SaveRAM starts, and then write an entirely separate submission system that supports those changes and whatever else ILs may need. During this process, we'd need to talk with communities for games that specialize in ILs to see how they want us to support things. We'd likely also want to implement an SRC-style leaderboard system instead of the current obsoletion system because that just makes more sense for ILs, especially for games that might be hotly contested. Publication would need to be talked about, as the potential volume of IL submissions could flood the YouTube channel in a nasty way. Even after all of that... We're extremely limited on site development. TASVideos isn't a paying job, it's fully nonprofit and every aspect of the site is something that is maintained in the staff's free time, site development being the most notable thing in this situation. Even if we come up with a full plan, we would need time (or, ideally, extra help) to get it all implemented and working correctly. Again, we WANT to support ILs, but it's not as simple as it sounds. It's not that we haven't tried, it's not that we don't want to put in the effort or that we're avoiding it. For me, at least, it's just that I don't know where to begin with it. That outside perspective thing I mentioned earlier also plays a lot into that hesitance, which I'll bring up again in the later questions that ask about it in more detail.
3. For TASes where speed is not a concern (i.e. where obsoletion has nothing to do with time), why are times included in publications and YouTube uploads? does this not confuse people into thinking all the superplays are meant to be speedruns?
Honestly, I don't know if it confuses people! I haven't personally heard any confusion over it. Heck, this is the first time I've even considered that as a possibility. I guess we don't actually have a reason to include the times on playarounds, other than it just happens automatically.
4. Assuming an established community already exists, where popular community figures or central channels would have the means to reach more users, what do you see as the benefit in allowing the TASVideosChannel to mirror TASes on YouTube?
I don't have a good answer for this, because I don't really see TVC as being that kind of benefit. The benefits I see TASVideos giving to outside communities don't revolve around the YouTube channel at all, because said benefits are fairly minor at best. We can ensure runs will stay up and watchable in high quality, and we can ensure consistent, daily activity along with that, but otherwise TVC is really just an easy access point to watch runs that people give us. I have a few questions of my own in response to this, actually: What benefits would an established community want TVC to give them? Do people see us as trying to push TVC as a benefit? If so, what's giving off that impression and how can we change it?
5. Will there be work done to connect with larger games' communities which have never associated with TASVideos and don't see "the point" of it (either due to bad reputation or not knowing it even exists)? 6. Will there be more work done to fully eliminate the negative reputation TASVideos built up years ago which, due to larger games' communities splintering and never interacting with it, are unaware of the changes that have undergone recently? Additionally, would you address common hesitations or doubts, such as; strict timing standards, unfair emulator restrictions, being viewed as being an overly authoritative site for all TASes, or gatekeeping what can and can't be published?
I'll answer these together since they have pretty much the same answer for me: The reason we seemingly haven't done much work on this is because of the bad reputation we still have around the gaming sphere. We're not quiet out of apathy, we're quiet mainly out of guilt. A lot of our negative reputation comes from, as you said, us being viewed as overly authoritative and gatekeeping. We've worked past a lot of that, and we're continuing to work past it, but when you know for a fact that people see you in that way, it makes reaching out to people a lot harder as a result. If we look for people speaking ill of us and try to correct the record, that can easily be seen in a number of negative ways. We could come off as intentionally seeking things out and stubbornly starting fights, we could be seen as desperately trying to get people to come back and like us again, we could be seen as trying to force other communities to do things our way again. I don't think we can afford that, and I wouldn't want to try my hand even if I thought we could. I don't want TASVideos to be considered the ONLY TAS community, because it definitely isn't and DEFINITELY shouldn't be. I don't want to come off like I think people NEED to be here or that they NEED to listen to absolutely everything we say. What I want is for TASVideos to be a database, a resource center, an archive and a complete source of information for the hobby, and also we have thousands of runs and a close community of people that you can talk to if you want. This is also why I don't see TVC as being a benefit by itself: I want TASVideos as a whole to be the benefit, in the same way that SRC is for the RTA community. We've been pretty forward about addressing our mistakes and changing them, though since all of it has been localized to TASVideos (and often buried in forum posts in an age where forums are close to obsolete and in Discord conversations where you'd specifically have to join us and look to be able to find them) I'm not surprised that it's not reaching outside communities. That being said, though, I think that's actually a good thing for now. I want us to keep improving before we really go back out there in the world and try to make a name for ourselves again. I don't want to go around singing our virtues as long as the general perception of us is still that we're elitist gatekeepers. The best thing I think we can do right now is just let things play out naturally. Of course, I'd be very, very happy to see people in our community helping to fix the bridges we burned, but I can't in good conscience ask for that outright, because it would make our improvement arc seem disingenuous. All that being said... Being invited to talk to outside communities would be amazing! That alone would bypass pretty much every single reservation I have about trying to make amends with people, just on the virtue of knowing that we're welcome there and that said community is interested in talking to us or working with us. If there are specific things that people outside of TASVideos would like us to address, whether it be a set of great questions like this or if they're seeking an explanation or even an apology for something we've done in the past, please let us know about it. Let me know in particular: I'm definitely on the front lines of "Man, we really fricked it in the past, huh? I want us to take accountability for that".
7. Is TASVideos working towards accepting TASes of games with their own built-in tools? e.g. accepting PC games without having to go through alternate means such as libTAS, or accepting file formats that can only apply to a single game?
This, too, ties into the reputation and outreach thing: We absolutely are working towards that, but it requires those communities to work with us. We need to understand their TAS tool and replay format, and we need to make sure that we're providing everything that they would need or want from us as a host. I make it a point to say this every time single game TAS tools come up, sorry if you've heard it a thousand times before: The reason we don't currently accept these tools is simply because the site won't recognize them, and for the site to recognize them, someone needs to develop a parser for the replay format. Thus, that developer needs to understand the replay format, which means either we need the tool developer themselves to help us write the parser, or we need to work closely with them in order to write that parser. This means we need to be in good standing with that community, something which is not exactly common, especially if that community is convinced we want nothing to do with them because we're unable to support their community replay format.
8. Would TASVideos ever accept retroactive submissions to fill in missing record histories for splintered communities that have refrained from submitting TASes, or been left out due to not meeting standards as described above?
Admittedly, I may be parsing this question in an unintended way, but I absolutely love how I'm reading it and I want to talk about that even if it's not the intention. First off, yes, we are actively revisiting old submissions and rejudging them based on how much our standards are changed. We balance this alongside judging current submissions, so it may not too quick, but we will eventually get to everything. What helps with rejected submissions is having them pointed out to us. The way I'm reading the rest of this question is whether or not we would consider accepting a certain category's entire record history at once, which would include obsoleted submissions, just so we could have the entire record history on the site... And I would absolutely love that. That is exactly in line with my personal vision for TASVideos. We're already a record history for runs that we've received personally, it makes total sense for us to... "import", for lack of a better word, entire record histories for categories that hadn't had any showcase on TASVideos prior. I've actually flirted with similar ideas in the past, particularly with "sniped" submissions, i.e submissions that were improved while they were still on the workbench, occasionally even after they were accepted and ready to be published. The main issue I can see with this, though, is workload. Any game with a large community separated from us (Super Mario 64 comes to mind, and I still can't apologize enough to them for the things we did that made it that way ._.) is bound to have quite the backlog of record histories, and... With us only having four active Publishers that need to keep up with hundreds of yearly publications, the thought of overworking them is a constant worry of mine. I'd want to come up with a solution that doesn't hurt them, and by extension the rest of TASVideos, while not sacrificing the original idea in any way. ...Perspectives, again. Publishing is such a well-oiled machine despite being so understaffed that it's easy to overlook just how much they're working.
Before posting this here, I discussed a few ideas of my own to make the site more open to established communities: A. Games with enough TASers that they have an established community are allowed one (or multiple) representatives in an official TASVideos position, to vouch for and accommodate the needs of their community.
Oh, I like this idea a lot! We've had ideas for more generalized staff-level positions in the past, this sounds like a wonderful way of opening those talks back up and seeing what we can do with it. I do think it slightly runs the risk of us asking people to do things on "our terms", though I'd wager that risk is counteracted entirely by them being directly able to influence and control "our terms" by literally being a part of the "our".
B. You could have game-specific submission->publication->encoding workflows, thereby lifting the weight off the more general staff (basically, TASVideos could make space for the communities, and the communities would have some amount of control over how they use that space)
This is also something we've discussed! It runs into the same issue of needing to talk to individual communities to find out what they want, and then needing to develop it, but it's not exactly out of the realm of possibility entirely. It may just take some time if we ever decide to go that path. Actually, and again I'd like to stress this is a personal thought and not an indication of anything official, we wouldn't have to turn to site dev at all for encoding... Assuming we can come to a consensus with the game's community over encode quality, if people are willing to help out in that way then we could pretty much start doing that as soon as there's a majority staff/community agreement on it. Could still take some time to discuss, of course.
C. GameResources pages have the option to redirect to an external wiki, should one exist (e.g. Super Mario 64 would redirect to Ukikipedia)
I don't think there's actually any rule in place that prevents people from doing that, and if there is then there honestly shouldn't be. The only barrier I can think of is just needing the ability to edit game resources pages, which all published authors and editors have, and we're pretty lenient with giving out the Editor role.
D. I've also been thinking of potential designs for an IL framework, since that directly affects so many games (my own game included), and I would love to see that worked out
Save those ideas! We're absolutely going to have a bigger discussion on IL implementation in the future. I can't promise it'll be soon, but as long as I'm around, I can absolutely promise it will happen. My heart sings for Trackmania TASes.
To get this out of the way, I am aware that a lot of potential features are bottlenecked by site development. I get that! After this many years though, I haven't seen this sentiment change, especially for more major things (for example, ILs), so I really want to help push the planning process.
Site development has been a bottleneck for so long because there have been very different reasons for it over the years. I won't go into detail on the old site's issues, as a lot of them don't really apply to this situation, but I will say the closed source and the code complexity were major technical reasons for the lack of new features back then. On this current iteration of the site, though, the primary limitation is just not having enough people interested in development. The site code is open source now, everything was rebuilt from the ground up as a replacement to the old site and anyone can contribute at any time, but over the three and a half years it's been live, there's only ever been two active, dedicated site devs. Naturally, they have other obligations and realities that take precedence over our fun video game website. They're not the only two people working on site development, of course, but pretty much every other contributor also works on emulator development, primarily BizHawk, and that's their main focus. I haven't seen much, if any, outside interest in site dev work. It's pretty much always been people who have had a consistent involvement with the site and the community. I would absolutely love to see more interest, and in a lot of ways I think it would even be required for bigger features like IL implementation, but that means having to reach outside of TASVideos, which if my thoughts on earlier questions are any indication, it's a bit of a catch-22 for me: I think we need these features for our community to grow, but I think our community needs to grow to give us the people we need to help us implement those features.
All this being said... I grew up with TASVideos, and as such I'm enthusiastic in seeing a future where its legacy remains untarnished. I would love for an opportunity to help work through issues such as the ones outlined above. I have ties to a considerable number of established TASing communities (through endeavours such as the Multi-Game TAS Competition), and have the means to make a difference, should an offer come up to do so. Simply put, this is also me expressing my interest in a potential ambassador-like role, to help aid this process, if it goes through!
Just posting this thread and opening up the discussion is a huge help for us, so thank you!
TASvideos' Third Strongest Site Admin 🩵 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
kierio04
He/Him
Joined: 12/25/2018
Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
CoolHandMike wrote:
Tasvideos has been more oriented towards speedruns that complete the game for Standard class, being speedruns. It is not always extremely clear cut though. However there is the Alternative goals playarounds, or Playground which accepts a lot of tases which cannot be accepted into anything else. Are you talking more about the Mario 64 "all trees" submission here for example? As far as IL tases go that is something that has been talked about internally, but needs more discussion, and it is probably more on the admin/dev side of things.
Ironically, although I was the one who submitted that, that wasn't where this came from, although it definitely applies! It simply stems from several users I've seen who believe standard goals are the only submissions the TASVideos community receive positively or care about. Take, for example, the publications from the Mario Kart series: [1126] SNES Super Mario Kart by cstrakm in 21:27.02, [3243] N64 Mario Kart 64 by Weatherton in 20:33.32, and [6218] GBA Mario Kart: Super Circuit by iMathII & cstrakm in 22:56.80. Each of these are TASes of the main (Grand Prix) game mode, which lead to credits, i.e. complete the game. Historically, Mario Kart games have very dedicated time trial scenes, as evident by Mario Kart World Records. This, of course, ties into the ILs issue, which I know to be the true cause of the lack of other publications. However, as a result of this, many people do genuinely believe side-modes are not cared about. This is a classic case of lack of representation fueling lack of interest, so there isn't much that can be done other than increased awareness. This isn't a question I personally needed answered, but I just wanted to see how it would be answered, as it is something that always comes up when mentioning TASVideos to those opposed to the idea of the site.
CoolHandMike wrote:
Playarounds probably fit this category, but having the time in the title is just the standard title format afaik. Do you have an example of where someone thought this was confusing?
Admittedly, I only found one instance of this, but I would imagine more exist. Several years ago, someone complained at the suboptimality of a TAS published to TASVideosChannel, only to realise it was a playaround. Having been confused by the time in the title, they criticised the fact that it was there in the first place. I saw this, and found the criticism valid, so thought I'd include it here.
CoolHandMike wrote:
Could you give one or two examples?
The two examples are simple. 1) TASes created between two publications, and 2) TASes created before the first publication. (Both of which were never submitted prior to being beaten) 1) You have games where there wasn't a push to fill the complete history, nor any system add them in later. Super Mario 64, for example, had several major any% improvements between 2012 and 2016, they were uploaded to YouTube, but not submitted to TASVideos (it's actually my plan to eventually go back and make a full history, since one only exists tracking minor improvements from 2016 to present, but that's beside the point). When people look back to see the full any% history, it's inaccurate because it's missing TASes that were never submitted, but might be recoverable and inserted now (I can't actually confirm how possible this is; it's likely too late to do anything other than have a publication with no input file). 2) You have games which have been unable to submit anything either due to technical limitations (e.g. ILs, unsupported file format) or not knowing TASVideos is even a possibility (e.g. assuming it wouldn't accept their TAS, not knowing it exists). Should that change, and they wish to begin submitting, it would be nice if the history prior to the first submission could be retroactively inserted, to make it more accurate. Using Super Mario 64 as an example again, an improvement to the 16 star category was rejected once 1 star (and then 0 star) existed, so the category wasn't even worked on within the SM64 TAS community itself. When interest finally did come back, and major improvements were made, they were uploaded to YouTube, but not submitted to TASVideos. After I made them aware last year that 16 star would be an acceptable category now, they will be working on a new improvement and submitting that, but the history from 2007 to present would be incomplete.
CoolHandMike wrote:
What needs would they accommodate?
Defending game-specific rulesets, timing standards, or file formats are just a handful of examples. Basically, they would be there to make the general TASVideos staff aware of the other ways different communities actually TAS. Since its inception, the site has more or less kept the assumption that almost all TASes are made in the same way, with a narrow band of types of TASes being widened over the years. The progress in the past few years has been brilliant, but I believe so many more steps can still be taken. Having organised an event where I travel to many TASing communities, I'm fairly certain most TASVideos members would be shocked at how different the methodologies, priorities, and mindsets are in other TASing communities.
CoolHandMike wrote:
Editors could add those links currently if they want within the page for more info.
This is true, and has already been done in the case of SM64, but it would be a lot more convenient for users of the site to be able to click on a GameResource page and find themselves in the place they need to be, not a page telling them where else to go for more resources. This also brings up an issue I left out in my initial post, in that you currently need a publication in order to create/edit a GameResources page, and for games with active communities but no publication, this seems like a major hindrance (in fact, it is for me, as my main game is in this exact position). It would be nice for there to be an alternative method in which you manually request for access.
kierio04
He/Him
Joined: 12/25/2018
Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
moozooh wrote:
This remains up to the author. However, to my knowledge, in a situation where an improvement to a run is only made possible if it doesn't contain a speed/entertainment trade-off the previous author knowingly made, it's not considered an improvement. That being said, you're conflating two different things here: if the entertainment effort happens in the "dead/boring period", then having it in the run by no definition "values entertainment over speed".
Apologies for this being a little confusing. I'll start by saying I'm more than aware TASVideos is well beyond caring about entertainment above all else. It's just there's people out there who still think that's the case. and this question was basically "assume you have some segment in a TAS which is boring, and assume making it more entertaining loses time, would you force people to make it more entertaining anyway?" to prove that the answer was no (and has been for a long time now).
moozooh wrote:
Definitely not only; I'm curious where this perception came from. Although, what are the examples of game modes that don't have any sort of ending screens? Is this a common thing I'm not aware of?
I'm basically saying "does TASVideos only accept TASes which complete the game? (i.e. they reach end screens/credits)". Once again, I'm more than aware the answer here is no, it's just there are people who don't know that. To be clear, I'm not talking about games without end screens, just alternate goals within a game where the end-point isn't "the end of the game". The most obvious examples for me are in racing games, such as Mario Kart. The game mode which "completes" the game is Grand Prix, as completing one of the final cups gives you the end credits. However, there are still Time Trials, VS, Battle, Missions, and other arbitrary goals within each. I could easily see at least 3-5 publishable categories in each Mario Kart game. I recommend reading what I said in this reply to CoolHandMike, as I went over this in more detail.
moozooh wrote:
I do agree this should reflect the goals properly, or at least not confuse them with speed.
This does bring up an interesting question - for submissions where time is the secondary goal (e.g. max/min), would it would make sense to more clearly state the score alongside the length of the TAS? I imagine implementing this for every submission with a non-speed goal would be very difficult, as not only are there so many TASes that fall under this banner, but it would require manual checking of each and every one to verify the scores. I doubt this will ever work, but it's something to think about at least.
moozooh wrote:
We spent several minutes just figuring out the wording behind this question, lol; it's very confusing ("allowing" TVC to mirror TASes?). The interpretation we settled on is that you're asking whether we should use TVC YouTube uploads where an author's own upload would suffice for the wide reach and could be used instead. Notably, regardless of whether we do a TVC upload or whether the author even submits their work to TASVideos at all, their audience will still see their upload, so these users are still reached with or without our help. The issue that was brought up was that some authors prefer not to submit high-profile TASes to TASVideos at all so that TVC doesn't "leech" their views, so we implicitly miss out on these submissions because they never reach us anyway. (This also made me think whether such authors would consider submitting their work here under the CC BY 2.0 license problematic, given how much redistribution freedom it entails.)
Apologies for the poorly-worded question. You landed on the right interpretation though. While the "I don't like TVC leeching views" crowd exists, that's not what this question is for. Basically, while most people will be happy with there being two encodes (on their own channel and TVC), or even just one (on TVC), there are those who are used to just having one (on their own channel). Where I come from, we have a large community of TASers, and when a collaborative project is completed, we have to come to a decision on who gets to upload it to YouTube. It usually goes to the person who kickstarted it or made the biggest contributions. When this kind of routine suddenly has the option of "submit to TASVideos and get a bonus upload on TVC!", it no longer makes complete sense to have an upload on TVC. Suppose you say "TVC gives more views!", well so does uploading every single TAS to the channel of the TASer with the biggest following, which we don't do. You said a TVC upload wouldn't change the fact that the intended audience would be reached, and to that one could say "well then, what's the point of a TVC upload at all? I'll just save the effort of submitting to TASVideos at all!". Obviously, TASVideos has so much more to offer than its own encodes. That's not what I'm saying here, in fact I don't believe any of what I'm saying here, they're just arguments I've heard, but this is what I'm trying to get into. There are people out there who don't see the point, and I'm just trying to ask "well, I don't know, what is the point?"
moozooh wrote:
We need people with wider reach.
I know just the person ...
moozooh wrote:
Rather than "ambassador-like", why not an actual ambassador? :D The admins have taken note of your interest, we will most definitely get back to you on this.
... :D Looking forward to hearing from you!
Emulator Coder, Judge, Skilled player (1080)
Joined: 2/26/2020
Posts: 847
Location: California
(Note: this is more a personal response, not one representing the opinion of staff)
kierio04 wrote:
1. Does the TASVideos audience only like or care about TASes with flashier tricks vs. raw optimisation? Furthermore, where there are dead/boring periods in a TAS, is it expected for you to keep the audience entertained at the cost of time? Put simply, do you still value entertainment more than speed?
This is tricky to answer. It should be prefaced that in most cases (outside of explicit playarounds) the audience response (or lack thereof) does not matter towards reaching publication. My own person view of TASes is I generally just don't watch many TASes, and even the ones that I do "watch" half the time I just leave in the background, leaving audio only. My own view is probably an outlier if anything. For how I make my TASes, I don't particularly favor flashy tricks, preferring raw optimization. From what I see, not many people actually appear to view TASes on here in the first place anymore, given how many TASes are left with little to no comments, most of who would watch will just be YouTube viewers on TASVideosChannel upon a publication. What the YouTube audience wants in this regard is a complete wildcard if anything (but probably more favors big game names if anything rather than the contents of the TAS, and this is probably the same for what TAS viewers remain on TASVideos itself).
kierio04 wrote:
2. Is TASVideos and the TASVideos audience only interested in a TAS which leads to ending screens or credits, rather than alternative game-modes? Especially those which are more popular or central to how the game is played?
The TASVideos audience I would assume wouldn't particular care too much about whether the TAS ends up in the ending screen or credits (and even if many don't like it, why should that even matter towards what TASVideos accepts?). For what TASVideos accepts, alternative game modes which don't end on some credits screen can have any ending that fits some logical or artistic stopping point (see the rules on this matter, this is explicitly outlined).
kierio04 wrote:
Why does TASVideos not have a framework for IL TASes yet? Additionally, why is there not a more serious effort to do so, seeing as it leaves many games out?
TASVideos currently only really has a framework for full publication. This is fairly problematic when that framework doesn't really accommodate IL TASes, from the most basic timing problems (although this more or less is somewhat a general issue given we allow TASes in general to go by IGT and IL TASes could just start from a savestate, and this problem kind of affects Events publications too, but the available fixes here are pretty much just a hacky workaround and starting from a savestate in theory has the same verification movie requirements like SRAM so this would be very undesirable) to the fact we have a publication have a nice encode on TASVideosChannels (it's possibly debatable whether that should be the case for ILs, IMO we should just go have ILs have equivalent bells and whistles afforded to publications regardless, but this isn't neccessarily going to be the opinion of staff nor even the community in general). We do have Playground, but that itself has various issues (mainly as it has never been really fleshed out and its implementation is considered one undesirable to reach for when submitting a TAS, as it functions as just a fancy rejection) and would more be a really lazy bandaid (if not practically offensive) to use in this case. Of course, besides figuring out what the framework should be at a conceptual level (there have been many internal discussions on this, all of which have had more vague concepts produced, nothing particularly concrete), there's just the problem of it takes time for site developers to implement anything major on the site. All of the site developers are volunteers here and already work on maintaining the site and addressing many other problems. At a point we even have a solid conceptual idea on how to handle ILs (which we do not have) it will be some time before site developers can implement such, and no guarantee what is implemented will actually produce the desired results.
kierio04 wrote:
4. Assuming an established community already exists, where popular community figures or central channels would have the means to reach more users, what do you see as the benefit in allowing the TASVideosChannel to mirror TASes on YouTube?
This is a bit tricky to answer. This seems to be going into the general idea of having an established community operate fairly independently, like speedrun.com has with leaderboards managed by community moderators. There's been many internal (and external) discussions about this kind of idea, although the bottom line is this needs communication from both parties, and such communication would be deciding on what should really be done here. Such internal and external discussions haven't really bred any fruit in this regard. For the exact question, I'm not quite sure if the premise of the question is even sound. It implies that TASVideos would somehow "benefit" from having TASVideosChannel mirror TASes from other TAS communities. We already do this for TASes which end up getting submitted like any other TAS, so I would assume this is limited towards TASes which cannot be submitted for whatever reason (not including being unaware of TASVideos or not wanting to associate with TASVideos, since mirroring TASes implicitly means the author wants the mirror to take place as we obviously aren't just going to be taking TASes off YouTube and reposting them without the author wanting such). TASVideosChannel operates as a public viewing archive of all TASes published on the site, like a museum with infinite space. Our own site also operates like such for the movie files themselves, YouTube encodes simply being a part of such an exhibit that's offsite. We do not have any "benefit" if more TASes are on TASVideosChannel, as there is no ad revenue (any ads you might see on videos are just forced on by Google, without any revenue of such going to TASVideos, because they changed their stupid ad policies and you probably should go use an adblocker), and we do not even accept donations: the site has absolutely minimal costs to host (the only cost as of now is the domain name, all staff are volunteers (including site developers as said before), and the servers are provided for free by DeHackEd), able to be entirely paid by adelikat himself. TASVideosChannel can be more seen as a perk of being published onto TASVideos, a benefit solely to authors who wish to submit to TASVideos. A place by and for the TASVideos community. That said, there is some "benefit" towards us in the form of goodwill to other communities, but this effort frankly would be better suited towards making such TASes submittable to TASVideos in the first place, or have some other site process towards TASVideos integration, thus allow those TASes to be able to be published (or granted equivalent perks to being published). If anything, the main "benefit" to having a TASVideosChannel video is solely upon author, not TASVideos, which in my view is unfair to ask of us to provide without such TASes actually being submitted nor go through some process within our site to properly archive such a TAS within our own database.
kierio04 wrote:
5. Will there be work done to connect with larger games' communities which have never associated with TASVideos and don't see "the point" of it (either due to bad reputation or not knowing it even exists)?
I said this before in the previous point, but this is a tricky thing to actually cover. Some larger game community having autonomy within TASVideos is something that needs communication from both parties, and discussions haven't really bred fruit in this regard. For the idea of just getting them to submit to the site, that's not really something that can be solved with simple communication from staff in a day or so (as it's not like we'd even know where to look for such people). If it's due to reputation, then that's not really easily fixable without changing what caused such a reputation, and after that those changes need to reach them by seeing examples of such change (already quite difficult if they do not wish to interact with us). For not knowing TASVideos exists, this seems a bit laughable, especially for a "larger" game community. If you have a TASing group, a group doing something that ends up using emulators and tools often directly or indirectly associated with TASVideos, and doing any research on (or even casually browsing for, e.g. literally every TASVideos publication encode) will often directly lead you to TASVideos, it would be very shocking to have a community which has absolutely no knowledge of TASVideos. If anything the closest to that is simply disinterest towards interacting with TASVideos, not necessarily coming from any negative reputation of TASVideos but just one which does not care for interacting with TASVideos regardless of what TASVideos does.
kierio04 wrote:
6. Will there be more work done to fully eliminate the negative reputation TASVideos built up years ago which, due to larger games' communities splintering and never interacting with it, are unaware of the changes that have undergone recently? Additionally, would you address common hesitations or doubts, such as; strict timing standards, unfair emulator restrictions, being viewed as being an overly authoritative site for all TASes, or gatekeeping what can and can't be published?
I don't think there really is too much work to be done directly by TASVideos here in terms of eliminating the negative repuation due to simply being unaware of TASVideos changes. Those are going to have to be seen by example and notified by word of mouth. For those common hesitations, I think that comes down to misunderstanding really what this site does. It's simply an archive of TASes. Strict timing standards can more only be seen really towards the movie time that appears within directly in the database, as it is all automated and uniform across movie files. However, we are not that strict in terms of actual improvements, or more, we go by a different standard than the raw database time. We look at gameplay improvements. For example, simply changing the emulator to get some faster load times will not be considered an improvement thus alone will not grant an obsoletion. As another example, swapping away known speed/entertainment tradeoffs with "optimal" play is not an improvement. Additionally, we do allow for a TAS to aim for IGT rather than real time, which for Standard categories is limited to when such is more representive of gameplay (for example, Sonic TASes). In terms of "unfair" emulator restrictions, I'm not sure what restrictions we really put in place that are particularly unfair. The most "unfair" I can really see is the verification movie requirement for SRAM/savestate (which I can understand especially such in the context of IL movies). Which emulators are actually accepted is also not something that is really particularly unfair. The current limitations mainly cover emulators which we can actually parse movie files towards (something which we can't really fix without even being notified of such an emulator existing and needing support). Outside of such an issue, under the current publication framework we still need an emulator which can actually produce an encode without too much pain (i.e. no severe A/V desync'ing) and where there are not alternatives available. This was the reason for mupen64-rr to be disallowed for example, and also the reason it was re-allowed, as such issues were fixed. For being an overly authoritative site for all TASes, well that's perhaps just a natural view if we end up simply becoming an archive of all these TASes. That said, the site has changed a lot in terms of accepting more and more and more and more TASes, to the point entertainment is effectively a non-factor towards acceptance for nearly every single TAS, and Alternative is able to fit many many many kinds of goals. Ditto towards gatekeeping what can and can't be published, a lot can be published here, and I wouldn't doubt the site will change even more to allow more things to be published. This is still probably a natural view regardless when so many TASes end up being published here, whatever potentially miniscule requirements towards publication (which get further and further to just being optimization sake) can be seen as a gatekeeping measure.
kierio04 wrote:
7. Is TASVideos working towards accepting TASes of games with their own built-in tools? e.g. accepting PC games without having to go through alternate means such as libTAS, or accepting file formats that can only apply to a single game?
The limitations here are like emulators, such a tool has to produce a movie file which can be parsed, and a parser needs to be written up. Such of course needs to be actually notified to us, and we'd of course need information about the file format (or have the authors or tool creators just write the parser for us, after all, the site is open source). Encoding would also be a tricky situation if the tool cannot provide such to TASVideos, there was some discussion on even just letting OBS be an encode, although such of course would be quite a severe downgrade in quality normally given to publications. Of course too, there are methods for PC games to be recorded loselessly, such as KKapture, or perhaps if the example here just a Windows game, just using libTAS with Wine, which can function for encoding purposes.
kierio04 wrote:
8. Would TASVideos ever accept retroactive submissions to fill in missing record histories for splintered communities that have refrained from submitting TASes, or been left out due to not meeting standards as described above?
If you mean submitting TASes which no longer beat current records, the answer is probably no. A submission has to beat all records (or at least match for offsite records) upon submission. Maybe some explicit exception could be made for the purpose of filling in record histories, although this seems probably unnecessary given publication history is not necessarily the best place towards viewing that, even besides whatever community splintering. There's many cases where there will be "missing gaps" regardless due to a movie being completed, then improvements being made before or during submission.
kierio04 wrote:
Before posting this here, I discussed a few ideas of my own to make the site more open to established communities: A. Games with enough TASers that they have an established community are allowed one (or multiple) representatives in an official TASVideos position, to vouch for and accommodate the needs of their community.
This idea in particular probably wouldn't be too hard to have, although I'm not entirely sure how well this would work in practice. Would these representives be given direct access to staff chats (and effectively be seen as TASVideos staff, with all the responsibilities that come with such)? With such would mean we'd need to put work into vetting people who are even being proposed, and if such people end up misbehaving such would extremely sour relationships and hurt TASVideos. On the other hand, if they are not really given any front facing role and are not given any kind of direct staff access, such sounds like more a designated "please respond to our public threads" role or a "we should end up bringing you into a special channel for this conversation which probably will end up just happen naturally in staff chat so there's no time to actually do that so you'll miss the conversation-". Not strictly a reason for not doing such but something to consider in terms of how such would be approached and its actual effectiveness.
kierio04 wrote:
B. You could have game-specific submission->publication->encoding workflows, thereby lifting the weight off the more general staff (basically, TASVideos could make space for the communities, and the communities would have some amount of control over how they use that space)
Personally, I do not see this actually being particularly effective (except maybe just for ILs, but that's potentially questionable). We would not actually have that much weight lifted off of us if "communities" ended up managing this stuff on their own (unless you reduce "community" down to a very few people, if not just 1 person), as such there would be few communities would would actually be able to pull off being a "large" community wanting such treatment. If publications here are going to end up touching TASVideosChannel, then there would likely be some serious vetting on who's going to be allowed to touch that (and serious consequences on both sides if that trust is abused), not to mention such people would end up needing to coordinate with our publishers on publication windows, effectively just acting as publishers themselves (and probably more useful just being publishers in the first place considering the position they're being given is equivalent in the trust and work required for such), compared to if such a community just ends up effectively getting a glorified wiki page that links to their own YouTube channel (probably making something more similar to speedrun.com, although if TASVideosChannel is wanted in this then this wouldn't be desirable).
kierio04 wrote:
C. GameResources pages have the option to redirect to an external wiki, should one exist (e.g. Super Mario 64 would redirect to Ukikipedia)
You kind of can just do that regardless? You can just put in a link to such an external wiki. TASVideos probably shouldn't be making a game resources link just immediately redirect you to an external site (and I'm not sure if that's really technically possible), that should be up to the user to decide to visit upon going to game resources.
DrD2k9
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Editor, Judge, Expert player (2331)
Joined: 8/21/2016
Posts: 1137
Location: US
kierio04 wrote:
moozooh wrote:
We spent several minutes just figuring out the wording behind this question, lol; it's very confusing ("allowing" TVC to mirror TASes?). The interpretation we settled on is that you're asking whether we should use TVC YouTube uploads where an author's own upload would suffice for the wide reach and could be used instead. Notably, regardless of whether we do a TVC upload or whether the author even submits their work to TASVideos at all, their audience will still see their upload, so these users are still reached with or without our help. The issue that was brought up was that some authors prefer not to submit high-profile TASes to TASVideos at all so that TVC doesn't "leech" their views, so we implicitly miss out on these submissions because they never reach us anyway. (This also made me think whether such authors would consider submitting their work here under the CC BY 2.0 license problematic, given how much redistribution freedom it entails.)
Apologies for the poorly-worded question. You landed on the right interpretation though. While the "I don't like TVC leeching views" crowd exists, that's not what this question is for. Basically, while most people will be happy with there being two encodes (on their own channel and TVC), or even just one (on TVC), there are those who are used to just having one (on their own channel). Where I come from, we have a large community of TASers, and when a collaborative project is completed, we have to come to a decision on who gets to upload it to YouTube. It usually goes to the person who kickstarted it or made the biggest contributions. When this kind of routine suddenly has the option of "submit to TASVideos and get a bonus upload on TVC!", it no longer makes complete sense to have an upload on TVC. Suppose you say "TVC gives more views!", well so does uploading every single TAS to the channel of the TASer with the biggest following, which we don't do. You said a TVC upload wouldn't change the fact that the intended audience would be reached, and to that one could say "well then, what's the point of a TVC upload at all? I'll just save the effort of submitting to TASVideos at all!". Obviously, TASVideos has so much more to offer than its own encodes. That's not what I'm saying here, in fact I don't believe any of what I'm saying here, they're just arguments I've heard, but this is what I'm trying to get into. There are people out there who don't see the point, and I'm just trying to ask "well, I don't know, what is the point?"
The point of submitting to TASVideos is to be published on TASVideos as a recognized publication on our website. While the TVC Youtube Channel is part of that because we provide our own encodes of the runs we publish, getting a run on TVC isn't (or shouldn't be) the primary purpose of submitting to the site. If an outside gaming community doesn't specifically care about having a TASVideos.org site-based publication, then I wouldn't expect them to care about whether or not they have a TVC Youtube video either. Perhaps that's is another aspect that outside communities do not understand with our site. While we publish encodes to TVC as part of our publications, TVC isn't all publications are; nor is it the primary purpose of our publication endeavors. EDIT: Conversely, if an outside gaming community's only goal in being involved with us is getting a TVC video on YouTube and they don't care about a site publication, then they misunderstand our main site publication purpose to begin with. We aren't necessary to get a YouTube video of any given TAS, anyone in their community can upload one for themselves.
TiKevin83
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Ambassador, Moderator, Site Developer, Player (158)
Joined: 3/17/2018
Posts: 360
Location: Holland, MI
There's a balance of a few things here that I would want to call out: For RTA runs even already, conflicting standards on emulation and console usage already result in smaller communities having leaderboards with misleading records due to less understanding of console variation or emulator timing differences. In TAS where every frame could matter even for something as small as an intentional lag reduction strategy, it simply doesn't make sense to have a completely community driven record keeping system where those issues could be missed. When I do conventions and exhibit TASing, most of the general gaming community doesn't know what a speedrun is let alone tas or tas verification. To a certain extent the centralization of TAS record keeping is necessary to avoid even further confusion among the lay audience. For another example, it is extremely common for laypeople to post "TASes" on r/TAS that are generic gameplay of a fast-looking game like Sonic or f-zero, or with unmentioned mods, or also especially rhythm games like the geometry dash TAS community where as far as I understand there is little to no technical achievement possible between the levels being user generated and the levels being completeable in fixed times. This is also the huge value of TASVideosChannel - a random post labeled "TAS" on youtube has no way of being verified as such, but one on TVC you know is actually real behavior of the game. Perhaps there is room for some reconsideration in those areas in terms of that entertainment perspective, but we would definitely need a different approach with community oversight to be able to handle that. That being said, I have suggested before some ideas for trying to bring community oversight of judging, and it's brought up a lot of complexities. Maybe there's more room for that now than in the past.
Walgrey
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Joined: 10/27/2022
Posts: 34
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TiKevin83 wrote:
…or also especially rhythm games like the geometry dash TAS community where as far as I understand there is little to no technical achievement possible between the levels being user generated and the levels being completeable in fixed times.
Hate to but in and be pedantic, but there are ways to save time in Geometry Dash levels, they’re just not immediately obvious.
Memory
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Site Admin, Skilled player (1588)
Joined: 3/20/2014
Posts: 1792
Location: Dumpster
Samsara wrote:
A lot of words because she loves to write a lot
OK now take everything Samsara said and pretend I said them because that's more or less my take as well. I am also happy to talk to anyone about basically anything tasvideos related. In fact it's probably hard to get me to shut up about TASVideos once I get started. I might come up with a longer response later, but I'm currently quite tired.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
kierio04
He/Him
Joined: 12/25/2018
Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
Darkman425 wrote:
Established community members for a given game-centric TASing community working as site staff would be an interesting idea to try, although there's the risk of whoever is picked as a given judge for those TASes being too harsh due to their expertise causing a large bias.
Perhaps having submissions from established communities requiring both a game-specific and general TASVideos judge, to give some balance on knowledge and strictness?
kierio04
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Joined: 12/25/2018
Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
Bigbass wrote:
I'm curious, do you know of any particular communities that fit the subject of your question? I don't know the extent of the site's efforts to connect with other communities. I know there has been growing interest in getting a Celeste TAS published, and IIRC there have been some discussions of what would be needed to make that happen. I know Super Mario 64 has a big TASing scene, and they periodically submit some of their bigger works onto TASVideos.
I've been trying to find the best place to answer this, and I think this is the perfect message to reply to. Below is every external TASing community I know has its own place outside TASVideos (in Discord):
Community ServerCommunity SizeAwareness of TASVideosView of TASVideos
Mario Kart WiiMKWii TASLargeModerateMixed
Super Mario 64SM64 TASing and ABCLargeHighNegative
Mario Kart 7MK7 TASMediumLowN/A
MinecraftMinecraft TASVery largeLowN/A
Trackmania (2 games)Trackmania Tool-AssistedVery largeVery lowN/A
Super Mario OdysseySuper Mario Odyssey TASVery largeLowMixed
Sonic GC (3 games)Sonic GC TASingModerateHighPositive
Red Ball (10 games)Red Ball SpeedrunningLargeModeratePositive
Battle for Bikini BottomBattle for Bikini BottomMediumModerateMixed
CelesteMt. Celeste Climbing AssociationVery largeHighPositive
Super Mario 64 DSSM64DS TASing and ChallengesMediumHighPositive
Zelda (3 games)Zelda TASSmallHighPositive
Super Mario WorldSuper Mario WorldMediumHighPositive
Mario Kart 64Mario Kart 64SmallModeratePositive
Mario Kart DSMKDS TASMediumModeratePositive
Super Mario GalaxySMG TASingMediumModerateMixed
Super Mario 8-bit (4 games)Super Mario Speedrunning (8-bit)LargeVery highPositive
New Super Mario Bros. WiiNSMBW SpeedrunningMediumHighPositive
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year DoorPaper Mario: TTYD SpeedrunningSmallHighPositive
Banjo (2 games)Banjo SpeedrunningMediumModerateMixed
Super MetroidSuper Metroid SpeedrunningMediumHighPositive
Hollow KnightHollow Knight TASLargeModerateMixed
Most of the games which have high awareness of TASVideos existing are those games which have been published on TASVideos. Those which haven't are communities that either drifted away from TASVideos, or started entirely independent of it. Members of these communities typically have never heard of TASVideos, and exceptions are few and far between (often coming from members who are from a separate community which is more aware of TASVideos). You can see that all games with mixed views on TASVideos are those which are out of touch with it, so making ties to them would likely not be much of an issue. The biggest exception to this is Super Mario 64, which is the only community I know of in which the majority of users dislike TASVideos. This makes sense as well; it's the most (only?) infamous example of a community with ties to TASVideos being completely alienated. I don't really have any central point to make here; this is purely informational. Take this in how you please.
Memory
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...Do you have the server right for Super Mario Galaxy? Feels weird that they would share a server with Celeste...
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
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For what it's worth, I think much of the issue may be that speedrunning communities in general have become much more fragmented than they used to be (and primarily blame the existence of Discord for this). It used to be that speedrunning communities would often work together on a small number of webforums – I could get a fairly good view of what was going on in speedrunning just by monitoring TASvideos' forum and SDA's forum (and just following TASvideos' IRC channel would get you discussions about a big range of different games). Some large games had their own forums, but even those were publicly accessible. Nowadays, though, it's common for speedrunning communities to be much smaller and more specific, and that means that people are gaining less visibility of what's going on elsewhere. In my case, I've mostly stopped following speedrunning and TASing in general, partly because it feels futile to try; there are so many places that I might have to look, and many of them are hidden from public view unless you make an active effort to see what's going on. (For example, if a community makes a big discovery, nowdays the "default" is probably to post it on their own Discord, but then there's nowhere that people from outside the community can look to see what happens until someone goes to the trouble of doing a serious writeup that can be hosted on a website or video sharing site – and that puts a big delay in the whole process, making it old news by the time that people outside the community find out.) So the problem nowadays is that the current structure of speedrunning communities strongly pushes players towards following only one or two games in detail, rather than taking in the breadth of what speedrunning in general has to offer. And a side effect of all that is that it reduces the potential audience for any given TAS, because there's likely to be less crossover interest from people who cared primarily about other games.
kierio04
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Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
Memory wrote:
...Do you have the server right for Super Mario Galaxy? Feels weird that they would share a server with Celeste...
That was a mistake, fixed!
kierio04
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Joined: 12/25/2018
Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
Okay, I've been looking forward to replying to this one since I read it - let's get started!
Samsara wrote:
We'd likely also want to implement an SRC-style leaderboard system instead of the current obsoletion system because that just makes more sense for ILs, especially for games that might be hotly contested.
This stuck out to me quite a lot when I first read it, and there's several things I want to talk about just in this one sentence. I'm going to overanalyse this on purpose, and I don't believe you meant everything I'll be assuming, but I want to do so in order to make sure you understand why I'm pointing it out. First, having leaderboards tends to bring out the wrong mindset in newer TASers, as they can come to believe that TASing is all about getting cheap improvements, and having the most number-ones, rather than working together to achieve the most optimised times. In the most extreme cases, this self-centered thinking can lead to gatekeeping, hoarding, and elitism. Second, your line of thinking may come from the fact that a vast majority of publications are made by a single author, and thus those TASing ILs would be doing so by themselves, with the aim to achieve the best time on their own. When you have a community of lots of active TASers, it's a large waste of time and effort to only keep your improvements to yourself, and so it absolutely still makes sense to have an equivalent of a publication history for ILs.
Samsara wrote:
Publication would need to be talked about, as the potential volume of IL submissions could flood the YouTube channel in a nasty way.
This problem of scale is actually exactly the issue I'm stuck on with thinking about designs for an IL framework. One solution I came up with is to perhaps have a second YouTube channel specifically for IL TASes. This would not only prevent a flood of videos on the main channel, but also serve a different audience who are interested in shorter-length TAS videos.
Samsara wrote:
I have a few questions of my own in response to this, actually: What benefits would an established community want TVC to give them? Do people see us as trying to push TVC as a benefit? If so, what's giving off that impression and how can we change it?
I don't really know how to answer this, as I personally don't see any issue with TVC encodes. However, what I've seen is that people want to keep their upload on YouTube as the central one, and don't see the point of there being a second one for a completely unrelated audience. I went over this in more detail in this reply to moozooh, so I'd recommend you read that (if you haven't already). Lastly, I don't think there's any explicit opinions that TVC is the selling point of TASVideos, so you don't need to worry about that. The general point I'm trying to get across is that there are a lot of people out there saying "why bother with TASVideos" and TVC uploads are just one of many gripes.
Samsara wrote:
All that being said... Being invited to talk to outside communities would be amazing! That alone would bypass pretty much every single reservation I have about trying to make amends with people, just on the virtue of knowing that we're welcome there and that said community is interested in talking to us or working with us.
I get where you're coming from, but I believe TASVideos is beginning to reach the point where this opportunity is going away. Many communities now have no awareness that TASVideos exists so the issue comes less from them not wanting to interact with TASVideos, but not knowing it's even a possibility. Even beyond that, if they find out it is a possibility, because they've never interacted with it, they don't have the drive to reach out, talk with staff, and figure out how rules can be modified to incorporate their community. As I said in this reply to Bigbass, the only community which is truly alienated from TASVideos is Super Mario 64. All others I feel are a byproduct of lack of involvement with TASVideos, and not places you should be worrying about reaching out to with open arms. If you don't reach out to these communities, it's entirely likely you may never have them reaching out to you.
Samsara wrote:
We absolutely are working towards that, but it requires those communities to work with us. We need to understand their TAS tool and replay format, and we need to make sure that we're providing everything that they would need or want from us as a host.
At the very least, I think working with communities to try and make tools and files compatible would not be seen as overstepping. This also ties in with the community ambassador thing I talk about later, because that's exactly how you can stay in touch with these things.
Samsara wrote:
The way I'm reading the rest of this question is whether or not we would consider accepting a certain category's entire record history at once, which would include obsoleted submissions, just so we could have the entire record history on the site... And I would absolutely love that. That is exactly in line with my personal vision for TASVideos. We're already a record history for runs that we've received personally, it makes total sense for us to... "import", for lack of a better word, entire record histories for categories that hadn't had any showcase on TASVideos prior. I've actually flirted with similar ideas in the past, particularly with "sniped" submissions, i.e submissions that were improved while they were still on the workbench, occasionally even after they were accepted and ready to be published. The main issue I can see with this, though, is workload. Any game with a large community separated from us (Super Mario 64 comes to mind, and I still can't apologize enough to them for the things we did that made it that way ._.) is bound to have quite the backlog of record histories, and... With us only having four active Publishers that need to keep up with hundreds of yearly publications, the thought of overworking them is a constant worry of mine. I'd want to come up with a solution that doesn't hurt them, and by extension the rest of TASVideos, while not sacrificing the original idea in any way.
This is exactly in line with what I'm meaning yeah. See this reply for more detail on this question, since I don't want to retrace the same points. This thread contains long-enough messages as it is lol.
DrD2k9
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Posts: 1137
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kierio04 wrote:
Samsara wrote:
I have a few questions of my own in response to this, actually: What benefits would an established community want TVC to give them? Do people see us as trying to push TVC as a benefit? If so, what's giving off that impression and how can we change it?
I don't really know how to answer this, as I personally don't see any issue with TVC encodes. However, what I've seen is that people want to keep their upload on YouTube as the central one, and don't see the point of there being a second one for a completely unrelated audience. I went over this in more detail in this reply to moozooh, so I'd recommend you read that (if you haven't already). Lastly, I don't think there's any explicit opinions that TVC is the selling point of TASVideos, so you don't need to worry about that. The general point I'm trying to get across is that there are a lot of people out there saying "why bother with TASVideos" and TVC uploads are just one of many gripes.
I don't mean to sound uncaring, but if someone or a community, who knows what our site actually is, still has the opinion of "why bother?"; I don't think we should really worry about that individual/community. They aren't a target audience or community member for us (by their own choice) regardless of whether or not they a part of a separate gaming commnuity (which may or may not do TASing itself).
kierio04 wrote:
Many communities now have no awareness that TASVideos exists so the issue comes less from them not wanting to interact with TASVideos, but not knowing it's even a possibility. Even beyond that, if they find out it is a possibility, because they've never interacted with it, they don't have the drive to reach out, talk with staff, and figure out how rules can be modified to incorporate their community.
While it's always nice when awareness of our site is expanded, you almost make it sound like it's a massive problem for any gaming/TASing community to be unaware of us. It's not. It would be nice for as many gaming TASing/commnunities as possible to be aware of us (and accurately know what we are/aren't in order to best interact with us), but we can't look at commnuities who have no desire to interact with us as problem. It's ok for any given community to choose not to interact with us. In fact, acting like it is a problem when another gaming/TASing community isn't aware of us actually makes the impetus to create connections between us and that community come accross a bit like gatekeeping (which you've already mentioned as a concern among some). I can see such an approach to those communities as coming across like "oh hey, you do TASing?! You need to be aware and connected to us somehow." That sure seems close to gatekeeping. Similarly, trying to force interaction with other groups who DO know what we are and still have generally chosen not to interact also seems a bit like gatekeeping (or potentially desperation on our part). "But...but...but.. we need you to connect with us." Look, I'm all for trying to improve/restore relations with commnuities (i.e. SM64) with whom we've had issues with in the past. I'm also for promoting greater awareness. But I think it's dangerous to present the idea of a commnuity NOT knowing about us (or interacting with us due to their own choice) as an inherent problem that we have to solve. We need to be okay with others NOT wanting to interact with us. We don't have to be liked by everyone. Frankly, I'm curious why we should be worried about general gaming comunities who have never heard of us? Even if that community is one centered around TASing a particular game, we don't have a monopoly on TASing; so it's okay that they exist oblivious of our own existence. Again, I'm not suggesting that making a connection with such a group is a bad thing. I'm only suggesting that the fact that they are unaware of us is itself NOT inherently a problem, so we shouldn't make it one. EDIT: Think about things the other way around. If another TASing community existed which we were oblivious of; it's not inherently a problem for them that we don't know about them.
kierio04
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Joined: 12/25/2018
Posts: 25
Location: New Zealand
DrD2k9 wrote:
Look, I'm all for trying to improve/restore relations with commnuities (i.e. SM64) with whom we've had issues with in the past. I'm also for promoting greater awareness. But I think it's dangerous to present the idea of a commnuity NOT knowing about us (or interacting with us due to their own choice) as an inherent problem that we have to solve. We need to be okay with others NOT wanting to interact with us. We don't have to be liked by everyone. Frankly, I'm curious why we should be worried about general gaming comunities who have never heard of us? Even if that community is one centered around TASing a particular game, we don't have a monopoly on TASing; so it's okay that they exist oblivious of our own existence.
You make several really good points and I agree with pretty much all of them. Those are really important concerns, and those are good things to talk about as a precursor to whatever steps are taken in the future. I suppose my choice of wording wasn't entirely appropriate, so I'll try to reframe what I was trying to say. It's unfortunate that all these communities have gone without being a part of the TASVideos community at some point in their community's history. TASVideos is awesome, so I feel like they've missed out. For whatever reasons it may be, these satellite communities formed (in and of itself this is fine). It could be the fragmentation that came with Discord, a dilution of TASVideosChannel among modern TASing content (which rarely mentions tasvideos.org), or the negative reputation of TASVideos's past turning older communities away. The problem is in the loss of a sense of community among TASing games that used to exist, not that other TASing games have strayed too far and need to be "put right". To give a personal example of "mending" a fragmented community - creating the Multi-Game TAS Competition brought together so many different TASing games to common ground (that being, TAS competitions). TAS competitions were popularised by SM64 back in 2008, and other games followed suit, but never was there a single place where these people, who enjoyed the same thing, could interact. Any time a new game would start a competition, it would be through inspiration by another game (e.g. MKWii, SMG, Red Ball, and SM64DS were all inspired by SM64; NSMBWii and MKDS were both inspired by MKWii). However, in 2023, I invited every currently active competition to one central place, and all these communities finally had a chance to interact with one another. I feel that TASVideos has fallen back into the fragmented stage, and now has the opportunity to bring together so many healthy communities to interact once again. While TASVideos certainly shouldn't be a central authority on TASing, what's the harm in it being a central place for TASers alike? What's the harm in inviting these communities to take part in that? You say "we don't have to be liked by everyone". That's true, but what if the reason we aren't liked by certain people is that there are still issues with TASVideos. Can't we strive for more inclusion? If a community actively dislikes the idea of TASVideos, and doesn't wish to be a part of it... the fault isn't in the community for not wanting that, but in TASVideos itself for not accommodating what they want. If anyone does end up going out to other communities to heal broken bonds, the sentiment would need to be that TASVideos is striving for universal accommodation - a place for all TASing. That instead of aimlessly patching issues, we need their help to make big changes. As for why I think it's important this happens - if kept unchecked, fragmentation will only continue to keep happening. Like I said right at the beginning, over the years I've observed this keep happening, more and more. TASVideos may continue on, but it will never have a chance to grow without bringing in other communities, and eventually, those people TASing those games will stop, and it will die. Ok, maybe a little bit pessimistic there at the end, but I hope I got my point across :D
Samsara
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kierio04 wrote:
Samsara wrote:
We'd likely also want to implement an SRC-style leaderboard system instead of the current obsoletion system because that just makes more sense for ILs, especially for games that might be hotly contested.
This stuck out to me quite a lot when I first read it, and there's several things I want to talk about just in this one sentence. I'm going to overanalyse this on purpose, and I don't believe you meant everything I'll be assuming, but I want to do so in order to make sure you understand why I'm pointing it out. First, having leaderboards tends to bring out the wrong mindset in newer TASers, as they can come to believe that TASing is all about getting cheap improvements, and having the most number-ones, rather than working together to achieve the most optimised times. In the most extreme cases, this self-centered thinking can lead to gatekeeping, hoarding, and elitism. Second, your line of thinking may come from the fact that a vast majority of publications are made by a single author, and thus those TASing ILs would be doing so by themselves, with the aim to achieve the best time on their own. When you have a community of lots of active TASers, it's a large waste of time and effort to only keep your improvements to yourself, and so it absolutely still makes sense to have an equivalent of a publication history for ILs.
Okay, yeah, I was absolutely approaching this from the wrong angle. That part about most publications coming from a single author is dead on, I was very much thinking about this as people working on their own instead of being full-on community efforts. Leaderboards really only make sense from an individual perspective. Just to harp on this a bit more, we've talked about leaderboard implementation for TASVideos as a whole in the past, and the idea always gets universally dismantled and rejected. Leaderboards really only make sense from an RTA perspective. I've thought for a while that TAS leaderboards could potentially be viable as a way of incentivizing people to start TASing and submitting here without feeling like they need to be the best in order to be seen, and admittedly that still sounds like a good idea to me in theory (and is why I was thinking about it for ILs since we'd already be handling them in a different way from the rest of our runs), but even there it really wouldn't work out in practice. Leaderboards can't work in general TASing because we don't have a skill floor, or at least ours is much, much lower than RTA. Almost anyone can pick up TASing and start producing records. As much as the publication and obsoletion system can often feel like gatekeeping, the truth is that there's no logical reason why any TAS of a game should have slower gameplay than any previous one in that category. I think I was caught up in the idea that not everyone wants to be the best, some people just want to try their hand at something and have fun with it, and to me ILs have always felt like the perfect avenue for having fun with TASing, so it felt sort of natural to combine the two in my head. We get a good few newcomers submitting non-record TASes because they assume we work like SRC, and I think that's stuck with me a bit too much. I'm always looking for ways to make TASing and TASVideos more accessible to newcomers, but that doesn't mean I'm good at locking in on the right ways to do so. ...What we really should be working on is more collaborative approaches like community-based TASing, but that's a different topic.
Samsara wrote:
Publication would need to be talked about, as the potential volume of IL submissions could flood the YouTube channel in a nasty way.
This problem of scale is actually exactly the issue I'm stuck on with thinking about designs for an IL framework. One solution I came up with is to perhaps have a second YouTube channel specifically for IL TASes. This would not only prevent a flood of videos on the main channel, but also serve a different audience who are interested in shorter-length TAS videos.
While that would solve the TVC flooding, it wouldn't solve the workload problem. The solutions I would be leaning towards would involve lessening our workload as much as possible while still giving communities everything they would want. Granted, I don't think publication should be a concern until we figure out the earlier steps, first. For all we know at the moment, we could end up figuring out a brand new system for publication altogether. That is, actually, a small part of why I suggested leaderboards, but I think it's safe to fully drop that idea altogether at this point.
Samsara wrote:
I have a few questions of my own in response to this, actually: What benefits would an established community want TVC to give them? Do people see us as trying to push TVC as a benefit? If so, what's giving off that impression and how can we change it?
I don't really know how to answer this, as I personally don't see any issue with TVC encodes. However, what I've seen is that people want to keep their upload on YouTube as the central one, and don't see the point of there being a second one for a completely unrelated audience. I went over this in more detail in this reply to moozooh, so I'd recommend you read that (if you haven't already). Lastly, I don't think there's any explicit opinions that TVC is the selling point of TASVideos, so you don't need to worry about that. The general point I'm trying to get across is that there are a lot of people out there saying "why bother with TASVideos" and TVC uploads are just one of many gripes.
I... am not sure what we can do about this, really. TVC is not meant to be a benefit to outside communities. We started encoding runs because it was much easier for people in our community to watch them that way, and TVC was just a natural extension of that philosophy. These "gripes" people seem to have are... pretty much entirely valid. There isn't a point to having us mirror a run if they don't want it, and we understand that: Whenever someone asks for their publication encode to be hosted on their channel, we honor that request, and we don't mirror it.
Samsara wrote:
All that being said... Being invited to talk to outside communities would be amazing! That alone would bypass pretty much every single reservation I have about trying to make amends with people, just on the virtue of knowing that we're welcome there and that said community is interested in talking to us or working with us.
I get where you're coming from, but I believe TASVideos is beginning to reach the point where this opportunity is going away. Many communities now have no awareness that TASVideos exists so the issue comes less from them not wanting to interact with TASVideos, but not knowing it's even a possibility. Even beyond that, if they find out it is a possibility, because they've never interacted with it, they don't have the drive to reach out, talk with staff, and figure out how rules can be modified to incorporate their community. As I said in this reply to Bigbass, the only community which is truly alienated from TASVideos is Super Mario 64. All others I feel are a byproduct of lack of involvement with TASVideos, and not places you should be worrying about reaching out to with open arms. If you don't reach out to these communities, it's entirely likely you may never have them reaching out to you.
Therein lies the problem, though. We've traditionally been seen as elitists, gatekeepers, people trying to control what TASing is and what TASers need to do. Reaching out to communities, to me, feels like it could very easily be seen as us doing that once again. Even if it's specifically reaching out to say "Hey, we love what you do, how can we change ourselves to accommodate you?", that could possibly come off the wrong way to a community that wouldn't otherwise be interested in us. That's not to say I don't think we should try at all, of course, because we definitely should, but I still personally believe it'd be better for us to do it more gradually, or for us to set it up in a way where our outreach is being done through people like yourself who have active ties to both those communities and us. Something I should absolutely go on record with: My hesitance is almost certainly all me recognizing that my own reputation in regards to TASVideos has been far from the best due to my past behavior, and that I shouldn't be the one trying to reach out to a significant number of communities based on the ways I've personally interacted with them in the past. Out of everything I've said in this thread regarding TASVideos and how we treat things, this is by far the most "personal opinion, not official".
Samsara wrote:
We absolutely are working towards that, but it requires those communities to work with us. We need to understand their TAS tool and replay format, and we need to make sure that we're providing everything that they would need or want from us as a host.
At the very least, I think working with communities to try and make tools and files compatible would not be seen as overstepping. This also ties in with the community ambassador thing I talk about later, because that's exactly how you can stay in touch with these things.
The community ambassador thing is 100% the answer to this issue. I really need to embrace that concept more. Actually, on that note, I think that's really what I meant when I said I'd love to be invited to talk to communities: I wasn't necessarily saying that communities need to hear of us and explicitly reach out to us themselves, I wanted what I said to be more along the lines of people who are active both here and in an outside community mediating and seeing if they're willing to talk to us, passing along the message to us if they are. We're definitely always up for it over here, even if some of us (read: Samsara) don't have as much time as they would like to have for that. ...Also, not really related to the response but just to be clear about it here, I think active collaboration should be the bare minimum for us to support a new tool. Trying to implement something entirely on our own would be outright disrespectful. We've been working on that with the Celeste community for a while, now, and I want that level of communication to be a standard for us for everything else we want to support as well.
TASvideos' Third Strongest Site Admin 🩵 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
DrD2k9
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kierio04 wrote:
It's unfortunate that all these communities have gone without being a part of the TASVideos community at some point in their community's history. TASVideos is awesome, so I feel like they've missed out. For whatever reasons it may be, these satellite communities formed (in and of itself this is fine). It could be the fragmentation that came with Discord, a dilution of TASVideosChannel among modern TASing content (which rarely mentions tasvideos.org), or the negative reputation of TASVideos's past turning older communities away.
This paragraph is exactly where you and I seem to have fundamentally different views. No matter how much we love our own site and hobby; I don’t agree that it’s “unfortunate that all these communities have gone without being a part of the TASVideos community.” To believe this, in my opinion, is to adopt an unhealthy complex of self-importance or superiority that we (as a site) must have our awareness made to any given gaming/TASing community, and if not, then that community has somehow missed out. We are awesome!!! But an individual or community who is unaware of us cannot feel like they have missed out on anything, because they aren’t aware of what they’re potentially missing. So there’s no need to feel they’ve missed out for them. Likewise, someone or a community that has chosen not to engage has chosen to miss out on us. I’m not going to bring myself down by feeling bad for them.
kierio04 wrote:
The problem is in the loss of a sense of community among TASing games that used to exist, not that other TASing games have strayed too far and need to be "put right".
Again i disagree that this is inherently a problem, and I feel even more strongly against the idea that it is a problem that needs fixing. Even if the majority of TASing was once generally centralized, to suggest that it’s somehow wrong that it’s no longer centralized is not a healthy perspective. There’s nothing wrong with things or multiple communities evolving away from what they once were as part of a generally centralized community. Heck, if TASVideos changed enough away from what i enjoy about being here, I’d leave; and i might even consider starting a new TASing website that was more along the lines of what i wanted. This would potentially cause a branching away of some in our current community who might leave with me, but even that wouldn’t be a problem if in the long run it enabled more people to engage with TASing the way they desired for themselves. I wouldn’t want this new theoretical site community to harbor any ill will toward TASVideos at all (and I’d promote being as friendly as possible between the communities), but I don’t think direct interaction would be necessary for either community to thrive. In fact, the differences between the communities might be exactly what allows them to thrive. I’m all for expanding our awareness. I’m all for growing our community. I’m all for rebuilding bridges with communities that may have less than stellar views of our site, but we can only do so much. If those communities aren’t willing to help build the bridge, we can’t beat ourselves up over it. All that said we need to be very cautious against adopting the idea that it’s a problem for things/communities to change and evolve naturally, especially when those evolutions allow people to do what they love the way they love. Sometimes a community that branches in multiple directions allows more people to do what they enjoy about a topic without major issues arising from trying to force everything about that topic to fit into one central place. See the TASBot community as an example. There are plenty of people there who could care less about what we do as a site, but they still love what can be done with video games via scripted input especially on actual consoles. Likewise, there are individuals in our community that could care less about the TASBot side of things. While the split between the groups was less than amicable, the resulting two communities have offered a greater exposure/opportunity for TASing in general. Thankfully, relations between us and them have improved. But even if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t change the fact that the split minimized a degree of internal conflict within our community by allowing those with differing perspectives to go their own way and grow their own way. We can’t please everyone. We can’t constantly be changing who we are to try and accommodate every other TASing group out there. If that’s what we endeavored to do, who we are is in danger of become diluted to the point that no one should care that we exist at all, because we’d become so many things that there’d be nothing unique about us. We can reach out to other communities (if we do so carefully). But if their response is “eh, we’re not interested,” then we have to be able to let go and accept that we may no longer be that centralized home for the world of TASing. And that’s okay.