United States[quote=mobiusman]For example, on dragonfangs' profile, his MZM any% time would show up as 3rd. Now, it shows up as 19th, which is technically more accurate to the leaderboard in question, but misleading as far as the quality of the run goes.[/quote]
Would it be okay to just have times without the primary timer listed as "??" place? (I don't know how feasible this is, I'm just looking at alternatives.)
I think having two runs show up as the same placing for the same category for different users is somewhat confusing, although I wouldn't be entirely opposed to going back to the IGT ranking in this case as described if no better solution is available.
Maybe for now if the number of platforms is exactly one that column shouldn't display. I'm guessing that's not too difficult, but there could be some integration issues.
[ quote ] [ /quote ]
http://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/4tvn8#ch4Text_blocks
The series mod idea is:
1: Series moderators have control of all boards where series moderation is not disabled 2: Add series moderators individually on each of the boards they actively moderate. 3: Select this theoretical "and series moderators" option to not list the series moderators on games unless they are also a game moderator. It's a way of being more clear about who is actively doing things.
[quote] It would be disingenuous to put that run on an RTA leaderboard with 60Hz times [/quote]
I think this just comes down to perception. If you sorted to 60 Hz by default it wouldn't show up. If people switched to "50 Hz" or "50 and 60 Hz" it would show up. In the "50 and 60 Hz" case it isn't an even competition spectrum, but the difference is noted. Many games already do this with platform/emulator: http://www.speedrun.com/oot The platforms and emulators aren't precisely on the same competition spectrum, that's why they are sortable.
I think in order to use the sort mechanisms efficiently you have to assume people can do some level of discernment on the circumstances of the data instead of doing things purely to make sure they don't perceive it wrong.
Again that's all my opinion, at least everyone seems to be getting along. FrankerZ
It's usually not more than 3 days. I think it's been kept under 5 days for the past few months.
You should get a notification on accepting or declining. I'll make a note to add a line about the notifications and expected timeline to the page.
Moderation:
Would it be helpful if we created an option for the board that would allow the moderator listing to say "and series moderators" instead of naming them individually? In this way the series moderators can have control and help with boards and category discussions when necessary, but then primary people for games are listed as game moderators and show up by name on the game itself. It might give a better understanding of how things are working. It wouldn't be too hard to implement, but priority for the coders would be to be determined.
Are you guys helping approve runs for the other games in the series or just not involved at all? It's not a problem, I just want to think if there's other ways to clarify that.
[quote] if your only issue with the series moderators is that none of us have runs on the MKDD leaderboard, I can amend that [/quote]
I'm not saying it's a major concern to me. I was saying that I used it to rush to judgement, and users can easily go through that same thought process. In that sense, you and I know it isn't inherently a problem, but it can be a perception issue to users as we've already seen.
Category Stuff:
I might be repeating myself a bit, sorry in advance.
[quote] IGT vs RTA: My understanding of this topic is that if IGT is chosen, RTA would not be tracked at all. From your points, it seems like you think that both times would be displayed regardless.[/quote]
The choices are "RTA only", "IGT only", and "IGT default and RTA" and "RTA default and ITG"
I tend to think that tracking both is good because it lets users get to the information they want. Along this line of thought there's really no need for a requirement for a run to have both times listed. (I think the site correctly handles lack of a primary timer now? Let me know if I'm wrong.)
[quote]I think the choice of which is default is actually relevant, because it implicitly promotes that timer as the one to be considered foremost. [/quote]
The default timer is the one you're "recommending" as foremost. Moderators essentially pick which timing scheme will be used to show top placings by default. Users still get the option to sort by IGT assuming it is there. (I guess I'm just saying this to lead into the next section.)
[quote] IGT (breaks): While breaks for optimizing IGT will always be an issue, if RTA is made default, any time with breaks will be penalized by default. As I mentioned in the previous thread, making a rule relative to breaks dives into subjective territory that I would rather avoid, especially when promoting RTA is an efficient solution. [/quote]
I think that sorting by RTA by default does not mitigate the concern that someone could do this and their run could be sorted to the top when sorted by IGT. Promoting RTA lessens the concern, but it's still a concern in my opinion assuming both are tracked. I agree with subjectivity being a valid concern.
[quote]50Hz vs 60Hz: I think that discouraging 50Hz is something that should be done (be it implicitly or explicitly), because historically there has always been a (Time Trials-centric) debate on the legitimacy of 50Hz, and this can be avoided completely in a reasonable manner here. [/quote]
Just adding this here for context to lead into my next thought.
Thought:
If we could give you guys the ability to set default search parameters for all fields (variables), would this help address your concerns while allowing to track more modes. (Ideally if you had sorted by one mode it wouldn't expand the table with that column, but I'm not sure how realistic super smart searches are in the short term.) Default search assignment is likely not a huge hurdle for the coders and helps with these perception issues.
My impression is the point of our disagreement is primarily that I think things should be "tracked" and you (mostly talking towards Lafungo) don't want everything "featured", and I think additional site functionality could help get the best of both worlds.
Please keep it civil.
I don't think anyone has said anything particularly out of line, but I think everyone will have a better day if we aren't sour with each other.
We also need to discuss moderators. I think it would be good to get a couple people who have runs of this game added as moderators in addition to the series moderators.
I'm going to bed and have work in the morning, I'll be around more after Friday night.
- Kirk
This discussion basically boils down to "If I was a user and I want to track Mirror Mode, should I be able to do it on this site?" There are a couple other topics for discussion as well.
The site has one Mario Kart Double Dash board. The board generally needs to serve both public and community concerns.
This post contains some of my opinions. For context I have played time trial in this game quite a bit in the past, so I'm a speedrunner, no? :)
In Game Time vs Real Time: 1: A user can currently choose to sort by in game time or real time, moderators only choose the default. It's a discretionary choice about which one you think is the better representation. 2: I have zero preference over which is default, because users can still get to the information they want to see.
In Game Time (break restriction): 1: Regardless of which time you choose for the default, it is still an issue that people could take breaks to optimize the in-game time. It's simply a perception change when you change the default, but the problem still exists. A rule preventing unreasonable breaks between tracks might be reasonable. (Also would braking to last place during a bad time let you retry and reset the in game time? I can't remember the specifics.)
Whether or not to require both in game time and real time is a discretionary choice. They are both discernible from a video.
Regarding 50 vs 60 Hz: 1: A user can easily play in 50 Hz and have a bad real time and a reasonably in game time that will be shown when the user sorts by IGT. Shifting the layout to shift perception to encourage one over the other doesn't make any sense. (I'm not sure if that actually was a thought at any point)
I tend to think that arbitrary restriction of how people run for the sole purpose of narrowing category differences is not necessarily a good thing. This game has an extremely narrow scope of how people could want to run it.
Emu/Console 4 Cups and All Cup (Category) 50 vs 60 Hz (Variable) 50cc/100cc/150cc/Mirror (Variable)
In my opinion allowing tracking of all of these isn't going to suddenly make everyone play 50cc. It would look a little weird in the same table, but if we had the ability to add a default filter search criteria for the page I think it would make much more sense.
People will play what they want to play, and I think being able to utilize a difference between what is "tracked" and what is "featured" would address many of the community concerns. Tracking more information provides better information to viewers who want to see alternative styles of play and users who want to play alternative styles of play.
It is my opinion that the site currently has some limitations that may lead people to rule out very reasonable and viable options. One of my long term ideas with a leaderboards site was to simply track things with tags and let users get to the information they want to see with filters and let moderators feature information they want to feature. Unfortunately the ideas of featured and tracked are tied together a bit more closely and seem to give the perception that everything listed is featured, and I hope we can improve the layout and options to help mitigate that over time.
Is the goal of this board to force a narrow competition spectrum, or to track the reasonable ways people may want to play this game?
If we can add features to the site to help mitigate these issues, let us know.
(I may edit this for clarity later but I think I got most of my thoughts down.)
Relevant things Lafungo said in the other thread:
[quote] There's no reason to do a speedrun in 50Hz, unless you're going for IGT (which ties in with the leaderboard using RTA). [/quote]
[quote] Before these leaderboards were made, a few top MKDD players did All-Cup Tour runs, notably Andreas Rudmarker (Druvan7) and Richard Karlsson (LyftarN). Even though they are mainly Time Trialers, where 50Hz is used, their All-Cup Tour runs have always been in 60Hz. Adopting RTA on the leaderboards ensures that everyone does runs in 60Hz. [/quote]
[quote] That being said, you could argue stopping people from using 50Hz isn't a good enough reason to ditch IGT. However, even aside from 60/50Hz issues, IGT has its problems. For example, what's to stop someone from taking a breather between tracks? If track transitions don't factor into your time, then it doesn't matter how long you take to move on to the next one. You could attempt to restrict this by imposing some kind of time limit to track transitions, but then you enter the realm of subjective criteria, when the issue is avoided entirely through RTA.
Just because more categories can be added doesn't mean they should. The current system allows for all players to directly compare their times without unnecessarily fragmenting competition into categories with no substantial differences between them. [/quote]
Discussion in the other thread didn't really resolve.
King said this to me in a PM:
[quote] I can definitely understand wanting to add as many categories via parameters as possible, but with Mario Kart it's difficult. Maybe it's just me, but (in most cases) if you add a Mirror Mode category for one MK game, then that means you have to do it for the 7 others, and only because a couple of people wanted it for one game. It just kind of makes a mess of things. Plus, people might not even run the category. For another example, there was a pretty large demand to add 40 Tracks as a category, which I did. To this day, only two runs of it have been submitted. [/quote]
Note: Please don't make any radical changes to the layout until we get this sorted out.
Reason for this discussion: Skull asked via the appropriate channel to make him a moderator because he wants to track mirror mode and the game's moderators shot him down. I was a little quick in making the decision to add him to let him implement the changes, so let's chat.
I added the series moderators to this game and we'll consider any changes to the way moderation currently sits after some general consensus.
[quote]I am also concerned, although to a lesser degree, by how kirkq handled this request. From the information available to me in this thread, it doesn’t seem that kirkq was aware of the thread in the MKDD forum, and, as far as I can tell, made no attempt at finding any information about this situation other than what was provided by Skull64’s posts. Please correct me if I am mistaken. [/quote]
I handle a fair amount of these requests in a given week, so I probably did not give this issue the level of attention necessary.
I do not commonly check the game forums, as most of the time people aren't using them, so I have not developed a habit of doing so. In reviewing moderation requests I commonly reference whether or not the moderators have a run in the game. None of the previous moderators for this game currently have a run for this game. The person requesting moderator status actively runs this game.
Due to the way things are oriented in series on the site, many times users get control of a game they don't play because it happens to be in a series with a game they do play, and they do not give it the level of attention necessary.
I am not saying these things apply directly here, but it's the general thought process I go through when people request changes.
[quote]I think it’s necessary for me to bring this up here, because this is the second time that an admin grants MKDD moderator status with seemingly minimal thought to someone whose immediate response is to rescind series moderators’ access to MKDD in order to impose their vision of an improved leaderboard (said vision was different in the first case). [/quote]
I am either unaware of or do not recall the first time this happened.
We'll continue the MKDD discussion on the game-specific forum over the next couple of days. King had contacted me yesterday to handle this, but I haven't had time until now.
I added all the series moderators to the game itself for now. There's no reason to use the remove series moderator option in this case. (We'll discuss moderators going forward as well.) Please don't mess with anything else until we agree on something.
EDIT: Also Twitch messages seem to be down at the moment.
- Kirk
There's certainly some room for improvement on the site end with regards to variables; I think it makes more sense to abstract variables to "optional tags" and "required tags"
Right now, unfortunately category is pretty much coded to mean "Keep this separate from other categories"
I think it would be an improvement to just apply various "tags" to runs and have some of them be required. You could then have "any% (required)", "no esc" and "jumpless" on the same run. The leaderboard listings would then have to be sets of filters applied over all the tags.
It's substantially more complicated than what's currently implemented, but I hope we can work in that direction over time.
Done.
(I think super moderators can remove themselves, but ideally all moderators should be able to. Although I'm not sure if it warns or lets you if there's only one moderator left.)
You had two blank individual level categories, I'm not sure how exactly. I changed it to one with a name. I'm kind of afraid to delete the single category as I'm not sure what happens if I do that. My quick test worked, if there's any more issue let us know.
Ideally the site should catch the error. Although this might be left over from some of the past changes and the game just never got updated.
MKDD:
I added you. I tend to think tracking more things is better than less if it's all good information that doesn't add clutter.
Metroid Prime:
If that's what the community actually wants I guess that's fine. It looks strange to me personally putting all the times in both tables when the single segment runs are just suboptimal segmented runs. A 100% run is an any% run but people don't put it in both categories. I guess I'm just rambling at this point, I don't have a preference if that's what the community wants.
1: What changes do you want to make to MK:DD?
I've played the game quite a bit, so feel free to explain it like I know what's going on :P Skips, no skips? Timing starts where, lack of cc option, etc?
The Mario Kart series moderators have times in the other games, so I think maybe just Double Dash might not be their main thing.
2: Metroid Prime:
Just mentioning this while we're here. Separate from the MKDD discussion.
Having all times listed as both SS and Non-SS seems really weird to me. I assume segmented allows me to reload as many times as I want to optimize the in-game timer. The single-segment runs do not utilize this option, so I think it is misleading to put them in the same table.
The line of thought would be similar to saying a generic 100% run completes any%, but shouldn't be listed in the any% table because the criteria is radically different.
krisu, I agree that's an issue that needs addressed.
King: We may not be accounting for DST I'd speculate. I'll note it.
This might have to do with the fact that his Twitch video url has a /v/ and all the others in that thread seem to have a /c/ I don't really know enough about Twitch embedding to comment any further. That difference could just be pure coincidence.
This is still something I'm pushing for; it's not being worked on directly at the moment.
Timer modularity update and private messages are a higher concern at the moment I think. Timer modularity is probably a step towards this more modular implementation though.
We've been dealing with a lot of smaller quality of life issues more recently, they usually get updated in the changelog: http://www.speedrun.com/changelog
Notification system can possibly handle this later on, but this probably fits into a larger set of "subscribing to things" like boards, forums, etc. It may need some extra thought to be implemented in a more modular way.
