Quality Standards?
6 years ago
United States

Hello, I recently submitted a run of Blues Birthday Adventure. And it was rejected. Reason: "This does not meet our quality standards". Whats even weirder is that there is a Blues Clues game on the site. Not to be rude. But what makes this game different from the speed games that meet standards?

ResolutionSSB likes this

Maybe your video has frame loss, bad sound, pixelated image, etc. That's what I think by quality standard (Video Quality).

Ireland

There are a lot of games on the site that were added before there were standards introduced. Again nothing stopping you from making a google doc and forming your own community for the game.

blueYOSHI likes this
United States

heres the video to see for yourself. the game was on emulator and was developed by Humongous Entertainment. They have lots of games on the site. And some runs are on emulator. I just don't understand what makes this game stand out.

Ireland

It looks like a poorly made flash game, it probably plays the same. Totally justified not adding it.

blueYOSHI likes this
United States

its a licensed game btw

United States

what are the standards and where can I find them?

Switzerland

A licensed game doesn't change anything about the fact thats it's not a good game

Red5rainbow likes this
United States

I really thought Id run it because when I heard about the series revival, I got really nostalgic and wanted to run it.

Scotland

You can still run it ^^ if you want ur own leaderboard use google sheets or something :) its a good solution ^^

Red5rainbow likes this
Netherlands

I understand it looks weird because Blues Clues is added to the site and your Blue Clues game got rejected. They want to reduce the poor quality games aka flash games, not licensed games, (visual novels) etc.

Esperanto

EDIT: Nvm, I can't read.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
United Kingdom

Who gets to decide what is and isn't a good game?

Surely, if mans wants to speedrun a shitty flash game, das, coo'. Right? I mean, the community is dedicated to playing games fast, not exclusively playing nebulously defined 'good' games fast.

'Quality Standards' and 'Good game' are so ridiculously nebulous, and literally undefined. If there was some definition for it that the site had decided upon, no matter how arbitrary, at least then the guy could've looked at them and figured out whether or not his game met those standards.

I mean, I don't think Super Mario 64 is a fun game, I think the controls feel like dogshit and controls are probably the most important thing I personally judge a game on. But I wouldn't stop somebody from posting runs of it. It's not up to me if somebody (thousands of people, in fact) think it is a game worth devoting their time to.

This seems like it should either be a flat, globally applied decision (no flash games, at all, no exceptions) or whatever constitutes 'quality standards' needs to be published so that people can have some idea of what is and isn't likely to be accepted.

Currently the game request rules don't even mention quality standards. The word quality literally doesn't appear.

edit: My bad, there is a vague reference to what won't be added.

"At this time, we are not adding the following: Visual novels, short/trivial flash games, non-video game activities."

This works, but is still pretty nebulous. Again, what somebody considers trivial is a pretty wide variety of opinions. Pokemon could be considered trivial given that its glitched run is literally 0 seconds. What defines a non-trivial flash game?

To clarify, I'm not arguing it should be added. Just that I don't blame the guy for thinking it might be added, and being confused when it wasn't.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
ResolutionSSB, Red5rainbow and 4 others like this

If I understand well, a shit game could be popular, and a good game could go unnoticed ?

Red5rainbow and The_A_Drain like this
Russia

shit game can be popular shit game can be forgotten good game can be popular good game can be forgotten

idk, its obvious.

Red5rainbow and blueYOSHI like this
United States

This looks like any other children's point and click game, like Putt-Putt or Pajama Sam. I don't see a problem with speedrunning it if you want to. I'm with The_A_Drain, it's unclear now if those types of games are no longer acceptable, or just this one. Maybe update the line about quality to "short/trivial flash/mobile/PC games."

I don't think it's fair to use Flash game as a derogatory term. There are plenty of reasonable Flash games that allow for competitive speedrunning. Also, this Blue's Birthday Adventure is not a Flash game.

This site operates under Administrators that decide which games get accepted, and they've decided not to include every game under the sun that any two-bit programmer managed to piece together in an afternoon. Where that line is drawn is hard to define once you start drawing in the details, but it seems to boil down to:

  1. video games only
  2. trivial games banned (seems a lot like the SDA rule that to be accepted as a speedrun, it must be objectively faster than normal play or a run a new player might match within a day)

The blanket ban on VNs reminds me of the ban on rhythm and full auto-scrollers SDA has. Whether that's good for the community, or just easier on the mods, it's difficult to say. What quality are these rules here to protect? I agree most VNs are simply path/choice simulators you would click through as fast as possible, but if a VN also had boss/mini-games every once in a while, I wonder if that would be different enough to warrant a leaderboard here.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Antarctica

The main point to rejecting VNs and short games that can be completed in a couple minutes is to prevent clutter mostly.

VNs aren’t speedrun-able because it boils down to who can click the fastest. There’s really not much routing or competition in games like that since it’s an incredibly simple type of gameplay.

Short runs that are barely a couple minutes are rejected for a similar reason that they become uncompetitive fast since there isn’t much gameplay or routing involved in them. Plus, games like this are often obscure games that very very few people will ever know about and as a result those games never get more than 1 maybe 2 runners.

The idea behind being more strict on quality of games was to prevent this clutter and to prevent games getting LBs where only 1 person ever does a run. This stems from the fact that there were users in the passed who spammed requests for these short, obscure games just so they could claim a WR.

This site can’t host every game (and it already moves slow sometimes) so they have been trying to move towards these standards for games being added. I don’t know if these standards are published anywhere (if not, they should be), but it’s basically determined at the discretion of the admin approving it if they feel like it meets one of those criteria.

EDIT: also, the reasons some types of games like this are already on the site is because they were added long before these standards were put in place.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Quivico, Red5rainbow and 5 others like this
Chicago, IL, USA

Nothing will stop you from running what you want and publishing it in other places. Stricter quality standards reduces a ) janky leaderboards b ) pointless leaderboards c ) the flood of countless flash and shovelware found on the internet. I've actually played Blue's Clues HE games when I was a kid, and frankly they aren't terribly different from Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, etc.

The reason there are so many flash/web runners is they are easy to access, easy to record, and generally easy to run. It is to the staff's discretion whether any of these games are significant enough to be added to the site going forward.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Red5rainbow and blueYOSHI like this
United Kingdom

Yeah that's true. But that's only the case now because the category was pushed literally to completion. Glitched any% Pokemon is a problem that's been solved, and the community has since moved on from it.

Until that happened, it was fiercely competitive. I was just drawing the comparison that a short run doesn't necessarily correlate to an unpopular or noncompetitive game, or a low quality, 'unworthy' one. Pokemon Any% glitches was still very competitive when it was around 2-3 minutes.

I'm basically saying, whatever rules the people in charge want are fine. But they need to spell them out, clearly. The whole "It's at the mods discretion" thing is at best going to be a pain in their own ass because they'll have to keep clarifying it every time somebody is confused about why a game was rejected.

Even if the submission page said "We might reject your submission, for no reason whatsoever, all decisions are final. Deal with it." that would be clearer than what's there now :P

Edited by the author 6 years ago
ResolutionSSB likes this