The post is becoming impossibly long so I'll break it into several...
So I've reread everything once again to understand what the community thinks (including the non-public chats that spawned these new questions), and it's hard to summarize it all because a ton of different things were used as arguments, and not enough effort has been put into stating problems, questions, and reasons in the clearest way possible. So if I miss or misinterpret some idea, please explain it again as clearly and logically as possible.
I should start with explaining the current direction of the site.
During the first years of TASVideos we were very restrictive in what ends up being represented as publications, because there was a ton of misconceptions in the outside world that had to be disproved, and this new hobby kinda had to prove itself by featuring the most awesome stuff first. The most entertaining movies were preferred, and the rules weren't super strict otherwise.
This was considered too restricting and the concept of tiers was introduced, so in addition to the most interesting movies we could have boring movies that accomplish some very standard and basic goal (initially the only allowed Vault goals were fastest completion and full completion). But since for every single submission we had to decide on a tier, it led to tons of borderline cases where simply based on feedback (or lack thereof) we were unsure how to judge something.
Since people like to be creative and they don't always aim to follow well-established paths, we also had to clarify more and more things in Movie Rules to make judgments more consistent and future-proof. Because old rules and wording would either not solve some new problem, or the solution was worded in a cloudy way that could be interpreted differently by different people.
Those trends would build up over the years and eventually turn into unmanageable mess that was the least future-proof, because it was impossible to keep maintaining. So we retired the tier system and switched to a class system that let us depend on feedback much less for goals that are well-established and standard, and only need feedback for goals that are inherently subjective.
That alone helped immensely, but then we realized there were other problematic trends that failed to make everyone's life better. The most problematic ones were
prosecutorial bias and
gatekeeping. We were so restrictive that we risked becoming irrelevant, because TASers could eventually abandon the ship that was purely viewer-focused and not creator-focused.
So we reevaluated the main goals of the site, and switched from being an exposition of cool things to being a service for the TAS community. Being too restrictive did result in parts of our community having to
go on their own for a bunch of years and currently
we're trying to fix that. And for authors in general, we switched from being judgmental about their works to being helpful for them, because that's how we get more people involved and educated, which leads to more content in general, and as a result to more awesome content that the site always wanted to have.
On the other hand, inclusivity on TASVideos is not an entirely new concept. It's the neatest way to have a compromise between conflicting camps if their opinions can't technically be implemented directly at once. We discuss opinions and boil them down to something objective, and then rely on things that are the most objective for all parties.
Allowing different things as different branches used to be the most harmless solution to any kind of disagreement about goals, because different crowds could have something they care about featured on the site and up-to-date. People spent the recent years fighting for acceptance of some goal that used to be rejected entirely, or only allowed under very strict conditions. So we started actually believing that giving creators more freedom benefits everyone long-term, because results of their hard work won't be considered "unnecessary" after the fact anymore, by judges who've never even played those games.
We can definitely afford some extra slots in Alternative for things that are not as stunning in terms of entertainment, unless questionable branches become a problem, which is when we start obsoleting the most mediocre ones. And in Standard, we can have extra slots for movies that shouldn't compete with the most basic and natural (literally standard) goals.
This is why I was surprised to realize that we may have missed something important during the initial discussion half a year ago, and that in fact savegame rules we established failed to solve
fighting games. And
racing games. And
non-fastest-completon movies. We've had a staff talk and couldn't agree on how obsoletion should work in those cases, so the most reasonable next step was bringing it up to the community.
And the result was quite interesting. It wasn't
a hard community split between 2 options that can't co-exist where an independent solution was necessary that could
work both ways depending on statistics (objective data settling the conflict of subjectivities). Instead it was a request to change the direction and goal of the site for
one particular case of fighting games ...
two particular cases of fighting and racing games ... three particular cases of fighting and racing games and also non-fastest-completion movies.
And it would have just been a new consensus if the community went "oh! right! yes!" and agreed that it makes sense to change the direction and goal of the site in those individual cases. Or if that extra clause clearly felt like it matches the direction and goal of the site and fulfills it more faithfully, and we simply missed it the first time around.
For example, that happens when some clause has all the traits of a workable solution:
- Overwhelming majority of the audience subjectively likes it or at least doesn't particularly mind it
- The logic is compelling to people who agree and even to those who don't enjoy it
- Even if logic and feelings don't cut it, it still looks like the most fair option given the situation at hand, one that's the most faithful to our top priorities
However that did not happen, and a lot of people were actively against savegame ever obsoleting clear save branches in Standard. I've read all this talk several times by now, and I still don't quite understand logically which problem exactly such obsoletion would solve without causing new problems. And it does seem to contradict the site's goals.
