SRC Rules Feedback
4 years ago
Iowa, USA

@Komrade It's not feedback relating to the rules, I just said to move this discussion into another thread.

United States

Disclaimer: I'm not on staff any more, but I wrote most of the content on the pages linked in this thread.

I spent a substantial amount of time on the rules. I probably should've spent more time polishing the game request text. As a result there was at least one sentence where I should've chosen my words better. If someone had initially pointed out that wording was bad, I would've gladly changed it. That portion as a whole should probably be re-expressed as "evaluation criteria" as opposed to the current description. I specifically made this thread ahead of time for feedback on the pages because I know I didn't get it all right the first time.

There has been debate in the past over "Quality Control" versus "No Quality Control" with game requests. My opinion has always been quality control, and I think that's what the majority of the users want. A few people have voiced support for no quality control in the past, and if that's your opinion please feel free to speak up. If we agree that the majority of the users want quality control, we need to try to define quality control.

To indirectly address some points brought up:

1: This is not really any change from previous policy, it's just trying to articulate it more precisely. If the game has a reasonable amount of depth and quality, we typically want to add it.

2: This section of the rules specifically does not apply to console releases or PC releases by notable developers. The header is specifically worded for the things it applies to.

3: I guess "effort" wasn't really the intent of the guideline, the intent was "product quality". I'm sorry if "effort" sounds condescending. We're trying to put the right words to these concepts. How does one talk about a game lacking the qualities worth putting it on the site without saying or implying something mildly negative about it?

4: I agree with some of the things Dangerless pointed out. The tiny 30 second meme flash games frequently pop up, for the flavor of the week, and then no one plays them any more. Furthermore, the type of people participating in these 30 second meme flash games are much more likely than an average user to cause trouble and do stupid things with the board, which leaves staff cleaning up a mess. This is just an observation from experience. This is also part of my argument for quality control. The more games of the lower quality we add, the more problems staff have to handle on a weekly basis.

5: The focus of "played by people" was intended for exposure of the game to the general population rather than "runners" If the game has 30 plays on scratch.mit or whatever, is that a good criteria for adding to SRC? It could certainly be reworded. We're just looking for some metric to assist with quality control. These were intended to be soft guidelines to help evaluate whether to add the game or not.

6: Truth be told, I've spent hundreds of hours sorting through ambiguous requests for non-notable flash games. It's probably the biggest reason things take forever to get through the game request queue. Everyone on staff gets a little jaded to this topic, because it's a horrible gray area and no one can quite agree on where to draw the line. I've probably said some not nice things in reference to these sorts of games in the past. In layman's terms, they kinda suck to deal with. That's just the reality of it. I usually try not to say a game sucks, but try to picture a flash game that just sucks.

7: The "speedrun optimization" guideline was intended for "hold right to win", or "click a few things to win" type games. That criteria was intended for games where there's not much depth.

Honestly the constant Twitter dogpiling makes being a staff member a giant headache. I find it far more egregious than writing a bad sentence or two in a guideline. People always assume the worst thing a sentence could possibly mean and overreact. It works out a lot better when people talk and develop an understanding. We can ask to fix guidelines, bring up that guidelines seem condescending, or we can Twitter dogpile. That's a part of why I'm sitting over here as a regular user now.

Try to be decent to people, I don't think that's asking too much. The site isn't run by some terrible corporation, it's primarily people volunteering their free time.

Edited by the author 4 years ago
Otterstone_Gamer, dha and 10 others like this
Friesland, Netherlands

How do you guys plan on maintaining the integrity of the leaderboards, and therefore the website, if any emotionally unstable person could choose to destroy the leaderboards by removing vital information from it, simply because they're having a bad day?

zewing and Imaproshaman like this
New York, USA

Can I ask where that question comes from? This is kind of what moderators and community run leaderboards are meant to prevent.

Canada

[quote=S.]if any emotionally unstable person could choose to destroy the leaderboards[/quote]

This really isn't the right place to discuss this, but to briefly answer the question, there are regular (I believe daily?) backups of the database, and rogue (or otherwise troublesome) moderators can removed pretty easily, either by the games' supermods or by site staff if necessary.

Imaproshaman, Quivico and 2 others like this
United States

Understood on the not wanting to turn the thread into an argument. šŸ‘

I've been trying to descalate by providing direct feedback, so hopefully I'm achieving some of that. Let me know if not though!

@Liv - I understand the guideline is not meant to come off as condescending, but it could read that way as you're making a determination over what you think is functional. Others might disagree on what constitutes a functional game as it could mean anything from simply able to run, to what actually makes up the bare basics of a game. And once you get into the philosophical side of what constitutes a game, that's where the dander tends to fly. I don't think inviting that type of discussion is what anyone wants, as it's just not productive.

In this case maybe a less exact term might do. I use the word "polished" for this usually, but it might not be the best term either in all honesty. To me a level of polish doesn't mean completeness, just that it has enough to be a recognized as a cohesive presentation. People tend not to be able to argue semantics around it, which I think is one of your goals. There's certainly other words too.

@kirkq - The guidelines and rules you drew up are great in general. I felt kind of bad even writing some of this down as it's really just the perception of change that looks to be what's concerning some folks, and I understand the intent. All of it makes sense, it's just the devil in the last 1% of the details. I apologize if I've made you feel like you had to come back and explain all of this, or even contributed to it - not my intention at all. I was actually slightly worried about this and disappointed to see you chime in. Thank you for doing so regardless.

I too really don't like to see all this weird uncomfortable... I don't know, infighting? ...about the rules, or perceptions of the rules... or whatnot. My goal is to reduce this kind of thing. Right now typing kinda hurts physically to be doing to be honest. I'd rather not be doing it. Just hope I'm being helpful is all.

Edited by the author 4 years ago
Greater London, England

(warning that this turned out to be a lot longer that i planned, so uh... yeah)

i have some thoughts about the game request rules as someone . i also discussed them with some indie-speedrunning friends of mine, seckswrecks and baldjared (secks later put the screenshot of the rules i made on twitter and got some more feedback from there). i'll try to organise these various thoughts. here's the screenshot of the rules i'm not really a fan of:

https://i.imgur.com/X0L1FVV.png

i'll try to go through them in order.

  1. the first sentence doesn't seem relevant to the actual quality of the game itself, and instead focuses on predetermined judgements of what is expected to come from different stores (e.g. itch) or platforms (e.g.) mobile. even steam, with a large monopoly, is included in this judgement for some reason. i think this is biased (for lack of a better word) against indie games: games that come from platforms that are perceived as being of "lower-quality" in some way don't really deserve to be judged based on that perception imo. i think there are plenty of quality games on itch, and in any case, a game being "good" or "bad" doesn't reflect its qualities as a speedgame necessarily. i think a game should be looked at based on its own merits as a speedgame rather than given extra scrutiny based on where it's sold - besides, what makes a good speedgame is also at least partly subjective. seckswrecks also pointed out that an assumption has been made that a game will at all be on one of these storefronts or a similar one in the first place, when it might not be on a store catalogue at all - that wouldn't make such a game better or worse as a speedgame, though.

  2. the first bullet point is again not something i feel has a bearing on whether something is a good speedgame or not. Sexy Hiking takes under a minute RTA and is still a speedgame with optimisation work put into it and different things to find. it's not a speedgame that's more or less "reasonable" because of its length; it's just... the length that it is, and it's not wrong for being that. Celeste Classic is another one that baldjared pointed out to me. it's a very optimised little game and one that a decent number of people have put time into, and the fact that it takes under 3 minutes to speedrun its 100% category doesn't change how good of a speedgame it is. it's still good, it's just short and good instead of long and good. it deserves to be respected on its own terms and merits rather than be subjected to an arbitrary standard of what should be "enough". even Super Mario Bros. has the Minus World Ending category, which takes a similar amount of time to Celeste (edit: Classic) 100%, but still has value and good qualities as a speedrun. i also feel this rule is biased against a lot of indie games - small game jam projects or deliberately shorter experiences could still be good speedgames, even if they don't take much time. those are the main themes here, really - i feel these rules hold games to standards that ultimately have no bearing on their speedrun value, and i also feel that they do a disservice to indie games, because a lot of indie games fall under at least one of these things and they don't deserve, in my opinion, to be judged more harshly than "larger" titles because of that.

  3. the second bullet point is again a question of a game's "casual" qualities vs. its speedrunning qualities. i believe a "bad" or poorly-made game can still be an excellent speedgame, and that it should be judged on the latter. to go back to Sexy Hiking, it's a B-game looks like it was drawn in MS Paint, has no soundtrack and makes a really loud "well done" sound when you beat one of its levels, but people still speedrun it, enjoy it and gather some worth from it. things that might make it conventionally "bad" or "low-effort" don't affect how good of a speedgame it can be, as these are different qualities. the game Brilliant Bob is ostensibly shovelware that uses default Unity assets, the devs of which got banned from the Steam store for asset-flipping, but through an extended jump glitch, it was able to become a fun, interesting speedgame that had some serious optimisation put into it. Miner Ultra Adventures was made in Blender, an engine never designed to run full games, and goes so far in its lack of effort as to use unlicensed, default-instrument MIDIs of at least one Green Day song in its soundtrack, but serious work was put into it, and it even made it into a GDQ! the fact that it was poorly-made by conventional standards didn't change the fact that at least a few people found it fun to play, put time into, and optimise. it's still a perfectly legitimate speedgame. these examples and all others like them (imo) shouldn't be cast off as speedgames because of casual standards.

  4. the last bullet point is the one i like the least. i'm the only person on a few leaderboards on this site, but i still put time and effort into developing the games i run, and i still think they're good speedgames that should have equal standing to any other. it might not be as efficient as a team effort but i work on optimising those games, and i care about making my runs of them "good" (not that that's how a game with a small player-base should be judged). the number of people playing a game doesn't change its quality as a speedgame. again, i feel this disproportionately impacts indie games (which typically have smaller audiences, and in some cases have very little audience at all).

i drafted most of this a few hours ago so some discussion has gone on since i started writing it. i appreciate the clarifications that have been offered. that being said i still think what i have to say here is relevant. i always want to look out for indie games, since they're what got me speedrunning and what keep me speedrunning, and i want the site to be a home for any game that has a place as a speedgame, regardless of its other qualities. i recognise the right of the staff to curate the site how they want, but the rules to me seemed like they were an attempt to make the site seem "official" and/or "legitimate" in some capacity by having a chosen selection of games that are "up to standard." (this is also an observation that baldjared made.) i don't think that's necessary - if a game can be run and someone is, i feel like it can have a spot here, no matter how much of a "fad" it may be. it's ok to let people enjoy what they want to and then move on. not every game's gotta be a bustling hub of players forever. putting a little time into a smaller project can be fun, and there's nothing wrong with that in my view. i appreciate that more game submissions means more work for the site staff and pre-vetting them with rules would alleviate that, but in the interests of fairness for every speedgame i think each one should get a chance on its own "speedrunnability". i hope that makes sense.

thanks for reading and considering what i have to say. i appreciate that you're taking community feedback, and i appreciate what you all do for the site, its members, and the speedrunning community. i mean no personal judgement by what i'm saying. thanks again. :)

Edited by the author 4 years ago
dha, Imaproshaman, and Quivico like this

It has been brought up before that sometimes, a verified run video is accidentally deleted or lost. It was previously verified, but now the proof no longer exists. What happens to the run on the leaderboard?

If staff is of the opinion that the run should stay, the rules should say so. Conversely, if staff is of the opinion that the run should be removed if the proof is no longer valid, the rules should say so. Like with a lot of the rules, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think staff would prefer to leave this to the discretion of the mods. Is that right?

Side suggestion:

The moderation rules have introduced a solution for when a user wants their video removed from the site, that being the new Anonymous rule, quoted as follows: [quote]-If a player does not want their top time listed, it is acceptable to just not list the top time. It is also acceptable to list a top time with the username "Anonymous" and no video linked.[/quote] I think this is great. This compromise option wasn't really on the table before and I'm glad the site is taking privacy seriously. [small][small]RIP the inactive squatter holding the "anonymous" username. [/small][/small]

But now that we have the "Anonymous" option for purposely deleted proof, is this an appropriate course of action for accidentally deleted proof? Basically, if this option was taken, the run would stand on the boards as a time that was once obtained; yet since the user can no longer provide proof of the run, the user can no longer claim full credit.

If this compromise is acceptable, should the rules mention it? If so, it would be something like [quote]-Similarly, if a player accidentally loses proof of their top time listed, it is acceptable to remove the top time in question. It is also acceptable to list a top time with the username "Anonymous" and no video linked.[/quote]

Edited by the author 4 years ago
Imaproshaman likes this
United States

A new user coming to a board and seeing "Anonymous" with a video is kinda weird, but basically understandable. They can watch the video and see that a speedrun was in fact done with that time by someone.

But seeing "Anonymous" and NO video leaves you with absolutely nothing to go on, and would be very confusing. How can you search for more information about the history or legitimacy of the time if there's literally no information beyond the time itself? I think this would be very offputting and not worth it.

I'm personally fine with previously-verified runs being kept when proof is lost. One mitigation strategy that could possibly be considered is trying to get backups of videos hosted on other sitesĀ ā€”Ā TASVideos has everything on the Internet Archive as well as YouTube, for instance. I don't know that that's a viable option here, but thinking about how to encourage or automate the process of getting video onto more than just twitch/YT could be valuable.

Imaproshaman and diggity like this
European Union

Keeping the run as is if a video is lost is imo the better choice, youtube shows you an error if a video is no longer available (e.g. "Video was deleted by uploader") but you know the video has existed.

Imaproshaman and diggity like this
Friesland, Netherlands

I'm sorry, I phrased my question poorly

How do you guys plan on maintaining the integrity of the leaderboards, and therefore the website, if any emotionally unstable person is allowed to destroy the leaderboards by removing vital information from it, simply because they're having a bad day?

Edited by the author 4 years ago
zewing and Imaproshaman like this

@S. See above; Shiken's reply to you... There's nothing more to it.

Edited by the author 4 years ago
Imaproshaman, Quivico and 3 others like this
Canada

May be worth adding something in the "Submitting a Run" section of the general rules that indicates that submitted videos should be permanent links (i.e. not raw Twitch VODs, which expire after two weeks for most users).

Quivico, Imaproshaman and 2 others like this
Friesland, Netherlands

@6oliath What good are regular backups though if destroying leaderboards is not actually against the rules?

Iowa, USA

@S. What does "Abuse of moderator privileges, such as vandalizing game pages" mean to you?

On this page - https://www.speedrun.com/rules

Under "Site Bans"

Yes, it is against the rules. People will get banned for it, and those leaderboards can be restored.

Edited by the author 4 years ago
6oliath, Quivico and 4 others like this
Friesland, Netherlands

Where did you see me talk about abusing moderator privileges?

You don't need mod privileges to do enormous damage. I could go and fuck shit up severely on at least 3 full-game leaderboards right now without using any of my moderator rights. Obviously I'm not going to, but what if I WAS that emotionally unstable person, what then?

Iowa, USA

@S. I'm quite sure you haven't read any of the links in Kirkq's first post or anything else anyone has told you.

You have to be trolling at this point, what part of "ban" do you not seem to understand or rolling back a leaderboard after the damage is done if its that excessive?

What, did you think regular users who go around submitting fake runs and using alts is okay or something? Because its on the same stage for a ban and restoration if its needed.

Edited by the author 4 years ago
Canada

Curious about this line from the moderation rules (regarding user permissions): [quote]Can edit their own runs. This may require the run to be re-verified by a moderator[/quote]

I was under the impression that any edit would always require a re-verification. Is that not the case, or should this say that it will require re-verification?

United States

As far as I know (and someone else might correct me on this), any edit would require a re-verification, but an edit by a moderator can keep its verification status via moderator privileges.