But that's exactly what our side of the discussion has been all along. The first 100% Map Completion submission was one huge string of misunderstandings, where we were arguing that the category's not suitable for us and you were arguing that the category is suitable for you. The low% category discussion was the same thing, where we were arguing that we can't publish the same run twice and you were arguing that you guys treat them as different categories, and thus that's how we should do it as well.
My concerns are for the site, not the game. That's what my concerns have been for all along. We understand how categories work for you guys, we understand what they mean and what you all decide for them. We understand how the game works, in fact I would argue that some of the people in our community are far more understanding of the game than some of the people in your community, even, and I mean that less as "we're better than you" and more "we have long-time members that have TASed the hell out of this game and know what's up".
The thing that doesn't seem to be getting through is what categories actually mean in our respective communities, because there is a clear divide on what you guys treat as categories and what we treat as categories. That's where we're reaching a misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding is what's been fueling this fire for so long. We don't need to understand how the game works, you all need to understand how the site works, and the only way that can happen is if you all stick around and actually make an effort to understand the way that we personally run things.
A category to us is a unique goal, something that shows off a wide variety of things that other runs don't show off. Our baseline criteria for a run is any% and 100%, because they're the most drastically different/unique categories for a game. Fastest completion, full completion. One shows off the game in full, the other speeds through with reckless abandon.
When we have separate branches, they're there because the audience agrees that they should be published, and this is usually due to the amount of different content they provide. Playarounds are a really good example of this: They can show off a huge variety of glitches and weird quirks about the game that would never have been shown off in a fastest completion run. Things like "all bosses" are good examples as well, especially when any% runs end up skipping them to save time.
And we have to limit these categories on our site because each one sets a precedent for the others. Each "glitchless any%" publication opens up a new avenue for another "glitchless any%" run of a different, more boring game, and that opens up complaints where we'll accept one but not another. We have to avoid extraneous publications as an all-around site, or else we'd have to accept every weird, esoteric category that comes our way because we allowed a couple strange ones to get through and people started complaining that we're being inconsistent.
A category to you guys, and I mean no offense by this, is "let's come up with a new way to beat Super Metroid". And that's okay for your community, because you're a Super Metroid community, and finding new ways to beat Super Metroid is something that you guys do. You don't host thousands of runs for hundreds of games. That's where the difference comes in. You guys don't have to have rules on what you allow to be done there. You can have a speedrun record for Super Metroid "no hands, only feet" and no one would bat an eyelash at how esoteric of a goal it is, but we can't have things like that.
When we discuss categories here, we discuss them on our terms, not yours, so telling us that we need to learn your terms is ultimately a pointless argument. Arguing that there's no difference between our categories and your categories is doing us a complete disservice as well, it almost shows that you see no point in learning how we do things while simultaneously asking us to learn about how you do things, when the latter is obvious and the former actually needs some more work put into it.
Yes, I've been fairly harsh this entire thread, and I apologize for any offense anyone has taken from my words, but I just really need to get the point across that we operate differently than you all think we do, or even want us to from the looks of things. From my perspective (specifically mine, I'm not at all claiming to speak for the site in general), and this is admittedly an exaggerated and harsh perspective, you're all a bunch of starry-eyed fanboys who treat Super Metroid as a godlike video game, and any dissenters are just flat-out wrong no matter how they present their opinions. And it looks like from your perspective, we're the opposite: People so filled with hate for Super Metroid that we refuse to let it on our site, actively shutting down every Super Metroid-related avenue with harsh words and drawn-out arguments.
Obviously, neither side is like that in reality, so how about we stop proving our misconstrued opinions of each other right and start learning to accept what the other side thinks? On those words: We won't automatically reject EVERY run that falls outside of the 5 categories I mentioned in a previous post, and that's been true since the beginning. But in return, we at least expect your community to understand what runs we wouldn't accept and more importantly why we wouldn't accept them.
I'd love to lay this category business to rest, so hopefully we can all come to a mutual understanding sooner rather than later.
