Game Request Rejections 101
Deleted
3 years ago
United States

Can this be a sticky?

MinecraftGaming likes this
Netherlands

Thanks but most of this info is on the game request intro page so. You should also know that a lot of users who ask questions in the forum don't read that page. And even if they would read that, other users wouldn't read a stickied post.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Reverse, Ivory and 3 others like this
Netherlands

I don't really think it will. Also a handful of your explanations are simply doubling up on what the words themselves actually mean:

[quote=Ruby]Generic Puzzle/Typing Games -> refers to puzzle webgames eg. Snoring, or a type speed race site, eg. Typeracer. Geography games -> explains itself. Vocabulary/Math and other Educational games -> games primarily designed to provide educational assistance. Quiz games -> games that just ask questions, eg. Higher or Lower. Generic Sudoku Solvers/Minesweeper Remakes/Rubik's Cube Solvers, etc. -> explains itself. Non Video Game Activities -> Requesting anything that does not involve a video game. [/quote]

Some of the implications are already pretty self-explanatory. See, even if you would list things a hundred times or try and break down every word that extensively, we still can't make people read or even think about anything that is actually listed there unfortunately.

Reverse and Walgrey like this
Sweden

Hey.

I feel like this is a rather weird rule:

  • Short/Trivial Games -> this refers to games of an unreasonable length such as 5 minutes or below, or games that are not well known or of little importance. <-- posted by Ruby creator of this thread

I'm only addressing "short/trivial games" and their "definition" as provided by Ruby nothing else

"Short" is well undefined so short can be either 1minute, 10minutes or 1hour depending on situation etc... As it doesn't directly say below 5minutes counts as "short" on the rules page I'm gonna assume you used "5 minutes" as an estimate. But having a rule that say a game won't be accepted if it is under a certain time, is well... wrong(?) since the point of speedrunning is to go as fast as possible by the rules defined by the category no? To say that a game won't be accepted if it has been optimized before being submitted is odd to me, you're indirectly asking people to record themselves playing the game casually as their submission, because maybe JUST maybe if they start trying to optimize the game they will find a glitch/skip that will take the game below 5 minutes. If they were to submit after having found that skip they would just be instantly rejected because the game became, well "fast/short". BUT if they don't optimize the game in anyway and just play it casually you'll be hit with a "it's not interesting rejection", so this is rather confusing. Or are you saying games below a certain time can't be speedran/competitive?

"Trivial" well Super Mario 64 is trivial to me... why is it here? (yes this is a joke but not really...) There are PLENTY of games out there that are practically unknown and will remain that forever since there is no place for them to grow, to build a community out of thin hair is really hard especially when the place to grow a community ABOUT speedruns is rejecting them saying it is insignificant. To have "your" game on speedrun.com isn't life or death, but it DEFINETLY will help the community for "your" game to grow. why? More people become aware and interested in speedruns everyday and do you know what the first thing that pops up when you search "speedrun" on google? Yes this site. This has become the GO TO place for speedruns and if someone is searching for speedruns of a game this is the best place for it, because if you search for a game here and you find it, it is ONLY about speedruns and not filtered among perhaps hundreds of other videos on youtube (example) that gets shown before the speedrun video and people assume there is no speedruns for that game and ultimately lose interest. ultimately Speedrun.com is the BEST way to create and grow a community for a game that is being speedran.. of course you can speedrun a game without it being on this site. But for growing a community around a game being speedran this site is the best place for it.

As site mods you can't possibly know or understand each and every game here, what goes into optimizing them, finding glitches etc because every game is significantly different from one another... To just straight up say to people who work hard to make their game faster: This isn't notable so we're going to reject it. Is nothing but a punch in the gut from the people who is supposed to help the speedrun community grow.

The rules need clarification otherwise posts wondering why a game got rejected will keep appearing. The rejection messages need to explain in greater detail as to why it was rejected. To just say it wasn't notable. doesn't say anything and doesn't mean anything to the person who requested the game.

I am now speaking outside any area I'm somewhat familiar with and this is pure speculation: If the purpose of these rules were to ultimately keep the site from overflowing with games to keep the site "stable" aka from crashing. Wouldn't that issue be solved with the backing of the new (owners?) Seeing as the site have definitely become more stable since ELO(?) took over a couple weeks ago.

Ultimately the decisions are up the the site mods/owners of this site, however I can see no harm in actually defining what you mean with "short" to some degree.

Symystery, Bob-chicken and 3 others like this

While there's an active thread on the subject, I have a question regarding the short/trivial rule + additional information box. A game I recently submitted got rejected for being short/trivial (a possibility I was aware of). The game came to my attention through a casual/let's play kind of video in which the player took 15 minutes to beat the game on its lowest difficulty level (any%, not 100%).

So what I'm wondering is—should I have included that video in my submission, given that I knew the game was borderline wrt length? i.e. "Here's what a casual playthrough looks like." Is that something that'd be considered helpful?

ckellyspeedruns likes this
Sweden

Ruby: I fail to understand why you would limit a speedruns access to this site defined by the length of its casual playthrough. Our goal here is to speedrun the game not play it casually? Sure some people don't read the rules, yet some do and still do not fully understand them because they are so vague that you can pretty much interpret "short/trivial" however you want and you will never know which is true. Because it is never truly explained even after your game request is rejected and this leads to continuous posts asking why that's the case, so not updating the game request page or adding information to the game rejection messages are part of the reason these posts keep happening.. The fact it says in the rules "Short/trivial GAMES" doesn't really mean they care how long the game is casually and not its length when speedran. because if they wanted to know how long the game is casually well, they'd ask us to submit a casual playthrough and not a speedrun when we request the game no?

After reading both of these again: https://www.speedrun.com/requestgame?series= and https://www.speedrun.com/gamerequestrules I believe you got the 5 minute length from the second link under the category "Request Processing Details", but once again it is not specified if its the length of the speedrun or a casual playthrough.

Canada

[quote=hotshotwire]I fail to understand why you would limit a speedruns access to this site defined by the length of its casual playthrough[/quote]

For various reasons that have been discussed to death elsewhere, we have decided that we do not want to attempt to track every single video game in existence (or everything that is arguably a video game), so we've drawn the line on a couple things. Length/amount of content is one of the things we've drawn the line on.

[quote=hotshotwire]it is not specified if its the length of the speedrun or a casual playthrough[/quote]

Uh, it kinda is: [quote]The game [not the speedrun, the game] should have a reasonable length such as 5 minutes or longer[/quote]

There are definitely things we can do to make the rules clearer, but we also can't account for every way they can be willfully misunderstood.

Hako, Daravae and 2 others like this
Sweden

Saying "The game should have..." doesn't specify if its the game being played casually or if it being speedran. Since we are on a site for SPEEDRUNS, I would argue you would immediately think of the length of the speedrun not the casual playthrough.

However if you put it as you did in the quote (I have no idea on how to quote)

"The game [not the speedrun, the game] should have a reasonable length such as 5 minutes or longer"

it instantly become way clearer and easier to understand exactly what the "length" is referring towards.

and if you wanted to make it just a little more clear I think this is the best:

"The game casually [not the speedrun, the game being played casually] should have a reasonable length such as 5 minutes or longer"

((Could possibly remove the part in between [ ] ))

I personally think either of those works and SHOULD replace what is already on the "game request rules page". This also allow you to give a clearer answer when you reject games if they are too short by literally just copy pasting that line (if that is the reason the game is being rejected of course), it doesn't solve everything of course but I would consider it a step in the right direction on better communicating what the rules actually mean (for those who can be defined like this) since you would be updating the actual rule page instead of having to type out a comment every time someone misunderstands the current vague description like I apparently have done

I am curious on weather or not you guys watch the video that is required when submitting a game request (the SPEEDRUN) and then go to YouTube and type in the "title of the game" + playthrough to find out the length of a casual playthrough, because how else would you know if a game casually is longer or shorter than 5 minutes?

Since you only responded to my latest post and not the larger on I made. I am also curious if you have any input on what I wrote in the larger post.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
dripping likes this

@Ruby No offense, but I'd rather hear an answer from a mod to my question. They're the ones who know what they want, no?

French Southern Territories

Idea: Add “no Among Us” to submission rules

MinecraftGaming, Hako and 2 others like this
California, USA

The stubbornness to actually make some of the rules clearer for those people who actually take the time to read the rules is quite disappointing, seeing as the main reason they don't wish to change/update them is because "a lot of users [...] don't read."

Hako, FireStriker and 2 others like this
Scotland

The "short/trivial" rule is probably the only one that gets challenged and is, in my opinion, an outdated rule used to err on the side of rejecting games rather than accepting them.

I think the rule should be made more robust ie:

If the game can be completed in under 5 minutes, provide examples of X number of people speedrunning it before it will be considered.

If the game can be completed in under 3 minutes, provide examples of 2X number of people speedrunning it before it will be considered.

I understand the original idea behind the rule - to stop the website being overrun with shovelware purely so someone can claim a "world record" - but I believe with every fibre of my being that it is fundamentally disingenuous to have a blanket ban on short games on a website dedicated to tracking as many games as possible being completed as quickly as possible.

Surely we can have more finesse than "someone has decided this game is trivial in their opinion and that could mean because a casual player once completed it in under 5 minutes or it could mean something else I dunno". Just having some agreed upon barriers, such as a minimum number of runs to prove it has a community, would be a lot better than people submitting legitimate games in good faith and being left to roll the dice on whether the reviewer thinks in their personal opinion that it is "trivial" to them.

Hako, Solderq35 and 6 others like this

@ckellyedits Are you sure your proposal wouldn't end up reducing the number of games accepted? Right now, I'm 2 for 4 in game requests, but with your suggestion, I'd probably be only 1 for 4. (Or rather, 1 for 1.) And the game that wouldn't have made the cut has attracted more runners than the game that would...

Another potential issue is that putting a specific number of players to get any game accepted would encourage multi-accounting—not necessarily just on this site, but also creating spoof accounts on twitch/youtube/etc. to inflate the apparent number of runners out there—and I don't think the mods will want to have to check for that with every short game that gets submitted.

(In either the current ruleset or your proposed change, there's an incentive to sandbag the time of the initial run submitted with the game request. I suspect some people do this already.)

As someone who's exclusively run short webgames so far, I'd be happy if the rules were clearer and more generous to the games I like to play. But I would not be interested in submitting games if the expectation was that I first have to build a community for every single game I choose to run.

6oliath and Oreo321 like this
Scotland

I can understand, and my suggestion is not robust by any means - it is just what it is, a suggestion.

I don't really see any other way to balance the "actually, despite being short this game has speedrunning potential" side of the argument with the "we don't want the forum to be overrun with nonsense 'games' submitted purely so one person can claim they have a world record" side.

Having a minimum number of runners for games with a short casual completion time is one way that could be achieved. Is it the best way? Not for me to decide. But I personally believe to be fairer for both sides (and much easier to objectively and consistently manage) than relying on the site acceptance team's subjective interpretation of what makes a game "trivial" on a case-by-case basis.

It is not without its flaws however and as you rightly point out, some kind of alt-account weeding out process may be required if it was to be adopted.

United States

The "specific number of players" requirement could be amended so that these players have to submit runs, to show proof of an active community.

Antarctica

what is a "Notable" Game?

United States

Check out the last post in this thread:

https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/hes7r/1#14zq6

MinecraftGaming likes this