An SDA Decline...

Caveberry

Edit history:

Caveberry: 2015-12-03 01:49:50 am

2015-12-03 01:04:30 am

trepidation

Alright, I will preface this by saying I have loved this site for over 13 years now, and try to frequent it everyday. It's a great resource for older games and their wikis, and was once a great place for general discussion of any game, via the forums. SDA has two of the very most successful charity campaigns in the entire gaming industry (we make the news guys), but there's a problem. The underlying site has become a bit of a ghost town.

I will fully admit, my main drag is the "newer consoles" board. I like to see how people have creatively broken the games that people are playing today. I presume that since "newer consoles" is the most popular board on the site (and a ghost town), that the rest of the boards are even worse. Speaking from my own experience, "newer consoles" is lucky if it sees five new posts a day, and they are usually for the same set of games. Off the top of my head, the games are: Tomb Raider: aSiB, Bioshock: Infinite...and that's it. Nothing else is reliably posted on. I've found newly uncovered glitches w/ videos, documented on other sites, but not SDA, and I'm stuck wondering why.

Now, keep in mind, I'm not s*** talking. I love this place just as much, or more than most do. I'm just wondering where the traffic/discussion went. How does a site that earns literal millions for charity have such dreadful discussion on the forums. You can make excuses about school being in secession or there being no runnable games out if you want, but I've been here a long time, and all I have to ask is, "Where has the discussion migrated to?"

My hypothesis is that streaming has eaten into a large part of forum usage. Rather than document things via a forum, they just talk about them live. I get that people love streams, but this leaves the conversation largely undocumented, and therefore unreplicable if you don't watch that runners' stream every day. Another thing is (and I realize I'm toeing some thin ice here), that maybe the forums aren't SDA's focus anymore. Maybe charities are now SDA's bread and butter. With millions of dollars floating around, there's little doubt that this piddly little forum is of much concern. Maybe this site went from a place where people discussed ways to break games, and metamorphosed into a charity organization.

Anyway, I just wanted to address, what to me, was an elephant in the living room. Does anyone share my concerns? Does anyone have any theories as to where the conversations migrated to? Does anyone have ideas to improve traffic that will add to discussion?

Thanks for reading.

Thread title:

Alright, I will preface this by saying I have loved this site for over 13 years now, and try to frequent it everyday. It's a great resource for older games and their wikis, and was once a great place for general discussion of any game, via the forums. SDA has two of the very most successful charity campaigns in the entire gaming industry (we make the news guys), but there's a problem. The underlying site has become a bit of a ghost town.

I will fully admit, my main drag is the "newer consoles" board. I like to see how people have creatively broken the games that people are playing today. I presume that since "newer consoles" is the most popular board on the site (and a ghost town), that the rest of the boards are even worse. Speaking from my own experience, "newer consoles" is lucky if it sees five new posts a day, and they are usually for the same set of games. Off the top of my head, the games are: Tomb Raider: aSiB, Bioshock: Infinite...and that's it. Nothing else is reliably posted on. I've found newly uncovered glitches w/ videos, documented on other sites, but not SDA, and I'm stuck wondering why.

Now, keep in mind, I'm not s*** talking. I love this place just as much, or more than most do. I'm just wondering where the traffic/discussion went. How does a site that earns literal millions for charity have such dreadful discussion on the forums. You can make excuses about school being in secession or there being no runnable games out if you want, but I've been here a long time, and all I have to ask is, "Where has the discussion migrated to?"

My hypothesis is that streaming has eaten into a large part of forum usage. Rather than document things via a forum, they just talk about them live. I get that people love streams, but this leaves the conversation largely undocumented, and therefore unreplicable if you don't watch that runners' stream every day. Another thing is (and I realize I'm toeing some thin ice here), that maybe the forums aren't SDA's focus anymore. Maybe charities are now SDA's bread and butter. With millions of dollars floating around, there's little doubt that this piddly little forum is of much concern. Maybe this site went from a place where people discussed ways to break games, and metamorphosed into a charity organization.

Anyway, I just wanted to address, what to me, was an elephant in the living room. Does anyone share my concerns? Does anyone have any theories as to where the conversations migrated to? Does anyone have ideas to improve traffic that will add to discussion?

Thanks for reading.

Arctice

Edit history:

Arctice: 2015-12-03 01:57:12 am

Arctice: 2015-12-03 01:56:55 am

Arctice: 2015-12-03 01:54:35 am

Arctice: 2015-12-03 01:52:56 am

Arctice: 2015-12-03 01:52:51 am

Arctice: 2015-12-03 01:52:20 am

2015-12-03 01:51:44 am

Uh, recently games are being documented through speedrun.com resources and forums, usually in pair with youtube videos.
A lot of discussion happens in discord/skype groups, twitch chats, twitter, occasionally IRC channels. A forum has gotten unwieldy.
(Also SDA hasn't been a "site that earns literal millions to charity" for a while, its forums are just used for some of GDQ organization, even though there is some staff overlap afaik)

If you want to see an actual example, here's a forum of a very recently released game at http://www.speedrun.com/Fallout_4/forum

Also, IMO, non-permanent communication like chats are fine as long as all the developments end up getting documented somewhere, even if not necessarily on SDA.

Caveberry

2015-12-03 02:51:34 am

trepidation

I really don't want to point fingers here, and would love to be educated on how the underpinnings are working nowadays, but frankly, traffic of this site has dropped off the map. You say that speedrun.com is now THE place where people have chosen to document their findings. I'm wondering why. Frankly, I find their format to be highly fragmented, and hard to discern what is happening in the larger community. You also go on to list at least four other communities where you should expect to keep up with news, a number of them being live/archive only. This only goes to prove the inherent problem. If you aren't following multiple games, in multiple ways (LIVE), you are going to miss out on any of the recent developments.

I realize that the running enthusiast group has probably moved on in some way, but I would like SDA to be a relevant force in all of that.

Lastly, SDA is the face of AGDQ and SGDQ. I don't see how they aren't at least somewhat responsible for its' success. It started with them, and I think it would be a discredit to the foundation's creators if you took the credit away, even though it seems things have been diversified.

All I really want to know is if there is any interest in bringing a discussion back to the SDA forums, or if runners should just move on to another site to discuss new and pertinent discoveries.

I really don't want to point fingers here, and would love to be educated on how the underpinnings are working nowadays, but frankly, traffic of this site has dropped off the map. You say that speedrun.com is now THE place where people have chosen to document their findings. I'm wondering why. Frankly, I find their format to be highly fragmented, and hard to discern what is happening in the larger community. You also go on to list at least four other communities where you should expect to keep up with news, a number of them being live/archive only. This only goes to prove the inherent problem. If you aren't following multiple games, in multiple ways (LIVE), you are going to miss out on any of the recent developments.

I realize that the running enthusiast group has probably moved on in some way, but I would like SDA to be a relevant force in all of that.

Lastly, SDA is the face of AGDQ and SGDQ. I don't see how they aren't at least somewhat responsible for its' success. It started with them, and I think it would be a discredit to the foundation's creators if you took the credit away, even though it seems things have been diversified.

All I really want to know is if there is any interest in bringing a discussion back to the SDA forums, or if runners should just move on to another site to discuss new and pertinent discoveries.

presjpolk

2015-12-03 06:55:54 am

HELLO!

Speedrunning has outgrown having everything being one or two unified communities.

That's *good* for the hobby.

Doesn't mean the end of SDA, but it does mean Radix and co. need a strategy for dealing with that.

Arctice

Edit history:

Arctice: 2015-12-03 11:17:15 am

2015-12-03 11:15:50 am

Centralizing information on one board perhaps would have been nice for keeping track of what's new in multiple games, but it's just a huge mess for anyone actually involved, and threads like this are a pretty horrifying testament to that.

Not sure why do you want SDA specifically to stay relevant, but the only way to do that would be some sort of a major reorganization of the forums; otherwise most runners will stick to more efficient forms of communication, it's as simple as that.

As far as I am concerned, SDA is still fine for archiving information on less known games. People still use this site's search feature when looking for information on older games no one actively runs.

zero shift

2015-12-03 04:33:13 pm

Recently I've been going through my huge pile of games and looking up the best runs for each. I usually have to ask around multiple places to get what the current WR is for each game. Not a huge issue, and it would be nice if it were all in one place, but I guess we can't realistically expect that.

Caveberry

Edit history:

Caveberry: 2015-12-04 12:23:52 am

2015-12-04 12:09:07 am

trepidation

Wow, I think it's really cool that other people see that there is, at the very least, an issue going on here at SDA, if not other places also.

Arctice, I actually understand everything you're saying, "the most convenient option will usually prevail." I also agree that this "streaming is easy" phenomena has happened, but it has been at the detriment of actual documentation of games knowledge. The only questiion is "how do we fix it?"

The people of SDA have been running this forum for well over a decade. I would think that they would know best how to counteract, or perhaps integrate these thousands of new streamers. As to why I would prefer SDA to remain relevant rather than most anyone else...I've followed this forum since I was 15, and I'm almost 30. I think that should speak for its'self.

I've been sitting on the idea of this thread for multiple years. I've put a lot of thought into whether I should even post or not. I finally did. I hope to see a response someday, because I think SDA is worth it.

Wow, I think it's really cool that other people see that there is, at the very least, an issue going on here at SDA, if not other places also.

Arctice, I actually understand everything you're saying, "the most convenient option will usually prevail." I also agree that this "streaming is easy" phenomena has happened, but it has been at the detriment of actual documentation of games knowledge. The only questiion is "how do we fix it?"

The people of SDA have been running this forum for well over a decade. I would think that they would know best how to counteract, or perhaps integrate these thousands of new streamers. As to why I would prefer SDA to remain relevant rather than most anyone else...I've followed this forum since I was 15, and I'm almost 30. I think that should speak for its'self.

I've been sitting on the idea of this thread for multiple years. I've put a lot of thought into whether I should even post or not. I finally did. I hope to see a response someday, because I think SDA is worth it.

Lag.Com

Edit history:

Lag.Com: 2015-12-04 02:08:08 am

2015-12-04 02:07:55 am

sda loyalist

The fragmentation has destroyed most of the enjoyment that speedrunning gave me, so, yeah, I've been affected by it pretty strongly.

I don't know how to counteract it, but as you can see, there are those that think that this is a good thing, so any such attempt would be doomed from the start.

Just let it go. In a world where people would rather see speedrun records with chats full of faces on screen and the author talking over them, instead of crisp visuals and game audio only, SDA remains as a curiosity. It had a good run, but it was never 100%.

presjpolk

2015-12-04 07:15:22 am

HELLO!

Quote from Caveberry:

Wow, I think it's really cool that other people see that there is, at the very least, an issue going on here at SDA, if not other places also.

Arctice, I actually understand everything you're saying, "the most convenient option will usually prevail." I also agree that this "streaming is easy" phenomena has happened, but it has been at the detriment of actual documentation of games knowledge. The only questiion is "how do we fix it?"

The people of SDA have been running this forum for well over a decade. I would think that they would know best how to counteract, or perhaps integrate these thousands of new streamers. As to why I would prefer SDA to remain relevant rather than most anyone else...I've followed this forum since I was 15, and I'm almost 30. I think that should speak for its'self.

I've been sitting on the idea of this thread for multiple years. I've put a lot of thought into whether I should even post or not. I finally did. I hope to see a response someday, because I think SDA is worth it.

Here's the thing. SDA during its growth period was run by Mike Uyama. He left to run GDQ.

SDA's daily operations have continued on, with fits and starts, since. But there's no strategy, no direction, no forward looking plans.

[quote="Caveberry"]Wow, I think it's really cool that other people see that there is, at the very least, an issue going on here at SDA, if not other places also.

Arctice, I actually understand everything you're saying, "the most convenient option will usually prevail." I also agree that this "streaming is easy" phenomena has happened, but it has been at the detriment of actual documentation of games knowledge. The only questiion is "how do we fix it?"

The people of SDA have been running this forum for well over a decade. I would think that they would know best how to counteract, or perhaps integrate these thousands of new streamers. As to why I would prefer SDA to remain relevant rather than most anyone else...I've followed this forum since I was 15, and I'm almost 30. I think that should speak for its'self.

I've been sitting on the idea of this thread for multiple years. I've put a lot of thought into whether I should even post or not. I finally did. I hope to see a response someday, because I think SDA is worth it.[/quote]

Here's the thing. SDA during its growth period was run by Mike Uyama.  He left to run GDQ.

SDA's daily operations have continued on, with fits and starts, since. But there's no strategy, no direction, no forward looking plans.

LotBlind

2015-12-07 03:10:39 pm

I agree that having JUST a forum is unwieldy. In my mind you need three layers: a real-time chat, a forum thread and a wiki (The SDA Knowledge Base is very logical for that). This site has 2/3 of them so I know I'm using Skype for a few games.

Streaming for sure has done a trick, it's kinda shifted the focus on the runners more than I'd prefer. For me it's about the games, not any stupid egos. Not saying all streamers are egotists, but the ones that don't bother documenting are certainly sacrificing the common good for their own.

Quote from presjpolk:

Speedrunning has outgrown having everything being one or two unified communities.

That's *good* for the hobby.

Well, every game series being isolated WAS the starting state if you recall. Care to in any way explain your sentiments why returning to that is the way or are you just going to leave it at that? Smiley

What happened in between to make the change?

That Fallout 4 board on speedrun.com has no advantages over chat + thread + wiki. I think it's just that the site has lots of visibility and possibly people feel it's easier to go there instead of having to read SDA's rules, or something. I think the less mature the players of a game are the more messy their threads are too.

Arctice: Having JUST a thread is bad ofc even if everyone stays on-topic. Having all three is perfectly adequate.

presjpolk: What there hasn't been is manpower. There have been tons of suggestions as to how to expand and rework the functionalities of the site. Who's going to do it though? To some extent it's true that the distance between SDA staff and regular users has probably grown from a point when you could expect an admin to check every thread and respond where necessary. In part this is CERTAINLY because of the marathons themselves. Have you noticed what a boatload of work SDA volunteers aside from Mr. Uyama have put into all of that. And was it just 5 years ago when it got started?

In the end, I don't mind if the riff-raff is busy elsewhere.

I agree that having JUST a forum is unwieldy. In my mind you need three layers: a real-time chat, a forum thread and a wiki (The SDA Knowledge Base is very logical for that). This site has 2/3 of them so I know I'm using Skype for a few games.

Streaming for sure has done a trick, it's kinda shifted the focus on the runners more than I'd prefer. For me it's about the games, not any stupid egos. Not saying all streamers are egotists, but the ones that don't bother documenting are certainly sacrificing the common good for their own.

[quote="presjpolk"]Speedrunning has outgrown having everything being one or two unified communities.

That's *good* for the hobby.[/quote]

Well, every game series being isolated WAS the starting state if you recall. Care to in any way explain your sentiments why returning to that is the way or are you just going to leave it at that? :) What happened in between to make the change?

That Fallout 4 board on speedrun.com has no advantages over chat + thread + wiki. I think it's just that the site has lots of visibility and possibly people feel it's easier to go there instead of having to read SDA's rules, or something. I think the less mature the players of a game are the more messy their threads are too.

Arctice: Having JUST a thread is bad ofc even if everyone stays on-topic. Having all three is perfectly adequate.

presjpolk: What there hasn't been is manpower. There have been tons of suggestions as to how to expand and rework the functionalities of the site. Who's going to do it though? To some extent it's true that the distance between SDA staff and regular users has probably grown from a point when you could expect an admin to check every thread and respond where necessary. In part this is CERTAINLY because of the marathons themselves. Have you noticed what a boatload of work SDA volunteers aside from Mr. Uyama have put into all of that. And was it just 5 years ago when it got started?

In the end, I don't mind if the riff-raff is busy elsewhere.

presjpolk

2015-12-08 09:46:50 am

HELLO!

Re: communities. No, every game series being isolated wasn't the starting state. The starting state was basically... nothing. There wasn't a "speedrunning" as a thing. The number of people doing it as a systematic thing was very few, and the people who did it would take on a game for a while as a 'project', get a time, and move on to another game. You see that in the very early dates on sites like SDA and Twin Galaxies.

That could happen only *because* there were so few people. Statistically we weren't getting the talents applied that were hitting the fringes of the bell curve. But the more players we get running games, the more talent outliers we get for any given game. So you can no longer put up competitive times as casually as you could before.

So you get specialization. Runners who run only one game, for months or years at a time, is something that just didn't happen before. So you get single-game communities in a way that didn't exist before, to the degree we have now.

So if you're Radix, and you want SDA to keep/regain its place as a premier speedrunning resource, you need to do a few things.

1. Make it responsive to runners. Taking 6 months to publish a dang video online is *embarrassing*. Runs get taken apart and rebuilt in that amount of time. While SDA is still managing to pull in submissions from top runners, and while SDA has never been a "WR" site, it's *telling* that SDA gets a lot fewer WRs than it used to. It's just not appealing to the runners anymore. Few want to put in a run only to have it published in 6 months, when it's long since obsolete.

2. Make it responsive to volunteers. Every single time there's a thread about the future of SDA, people come out of the woodwork to volunteer. Don't give me this lack of manpower jazz. There's manpower. There's simply no leadership to take advantage of it, and there hasn't been since Uyama moved on. There are people willing to put in many hours for this site. Find the next ktwo, and the next, and the next, and you'll work wonders for SDA.

Heck, remember when SDA got a whole dang team together to refresh the Knowledge Base, give it strategy, and attract a ton of new content? That was great. Then the site did nothing to promote it, continuing just to have one tiny, unadorned link on the home page that did nothing to tell visitors what it was, or what amazing wealth of information was there for people who visited. So guess what? The KB drive petered out.

People in the past have cried out, begging to help with SDA's site. Putting together a CMS for runs is not a hard thing in the year 2015. Just DO IT. The site leader needs to decide what he wants done, and let people DO it, or appoint someone to decide what's done, and empower that person to delegate. Every other bit of SDA code is open source these days except the dang website. Open it up. Let people wander in and contribute. They're hungry to, if they think their contributions will help.

SDA is rapidly burning good will with every month that nothing improves. The forums are stagnant, the website is stagnant, the *verification and publication process* has been stagnant for some time now, too. Nobody sees improvement.

SDA used to be the gold standard for speedrunning, while TG was the punch line. Now SDA is becoming a punch line too. Radix has to care enough to take concrete action.

Re: communities. No, every game series being isolated wasn't the starting state. The starting state was basically... nothing.  There wasn't a "speedrunning" as a thing.  The number of people doing it as a systematic thing was very few, and the people who did it would take on a game for a while as a 'project', get a time, and move on to another game.  You see that in the very early dates on sites like SDA and Twin Galaxies.

That could happen only *because* there were so few people.  Statistically we weren't getting the talents applied that were hitting the fringes of the bell curve.  But the more players we get running games, the more talent outliers we get for any given game.  So you can no longer put up competitive times as casually as you could before.

So you get specialization.  Runners who run only one game, for months or years at a time, is something that just didn't happen before. So you get single-game communities in a way that didn't exist before, to the degree we have now.

So if you're Radix, and you want SDA to keep/regain its place as a premier speedrunning resource, you need to do a few things.

1. Make it responsive to runners.  Taking 6 months to publish a dang video online is *embarrassing*.  Runs get taken apart and rebuilt in that amount of time.  While SDA is still managing to pull in submissions from top runners, and while SDA has never been a "WR" site, it's *telling* that SDA gets a lot fewer WRs than it used to.  It's just not appealing to the runners anymore.  Few want to put in a run only to have it published in 6 months, when it's long since obsolete.

2. Make it responsive to volunteers. Every single time there's a thread about the future of SDA, people come out of the woodwork to volunteer. Don't give me this lack of manpower jazz. There's manpower. There's simply no leadership to take advantage of it, and there hasn't been since Uyama moved on.  There are people willing to put in many hours for this site.  Find the next ktwo, and the next, and the next, and you'll work wonders for SDA.

Heck, remember when SDA got a whole dang team together to refresh the Knowledge Base, give it strategy, and attract a ton of new content?  That was great. Then the site did nothing to promote it, continuing just to have one tiny, unadorned link on the home page that did nothing to tell visitors what it was, or what amazing wealth of information was there for people who visited. So guess what?  The KB drive petered out.

People in the past have cried out, begging to help with SDA's site. Putting together a CMS for runs is not a hard thing in the year 2015.  Just DO IT.  The site leader needs to decide what he wants done, and let people DO it, or appoint someone to decide what's done, and empower that person to delegate.  Every other bit of SDA code is open source these days except the dang website. Open it up. Let people wander in and contribute. They're hungry to, if they think their contributions will help.

SDA is rapidly burning good will with every month that nothing improves.  The forums are stagnant, the website is stagnant, the *verification and publication process* has been stagnant for some time now, too.  Nobody sees improvement.

SDA used to be the gold standard for speedrunning, while TG was the punch line.  Now SDA is becoming a punch line too.  Radix has to care enough to take concrete action.

TheMG2

2015-12-08 09:57:13 am

One quick thing, Lotblind isn't wrong about early game communities being isolated. Metroid2002 (originally started out on gamefaqs) had a relatively dedicated community to a small group of games. SDA itself was a quake site initially. I know doom had some form of site as well. When sda opened the doors to non-Quake games, it wasn't like speedrunning hadn't existed prior.

Mattrick_

2015-12-08 10:01:56 am

#TeamBeardedFlex

TheMG2 youre thinking of the Doomworld forums.

authorblues

Edit history:

authorblues: 2015-12-08 10:10:53 am

authorblues: 2015-12-08 10:10:38 am

2015-12-08 10:10:26 am

Quote from presjpolk:

While SDA is still managing to pull in submissions from top runners, and while SDA has never been a "WR" site, it's *telling* that SDA gets a lot fewer WRs than it used to. It's just not appealing to the runners anymore. Few want to put in a run only to have it published in 6 months, when it's long since obsolete.

I just want to second this and highlight it as the most important point in this whole damn thread. I personally have SDA quality encodes of about ten games worth of world records sitting on my hard drive, but I am less than indifferent with regards to submitting them to SDA (that is to say, I am not just unmotivated, I am specifically demotivated to submit), because I don't want to have to wait almost a year for something to be done with them and have to "babysit" them in the meantime. From what I understand, the verification process has become a lot more streamlined over the past few years, at least in the time since I've started this hobby, and that is great, but the verification SHOULD be the hard part here. It is 2015. "Publication" is a glorified term for "copy and paste the author's text to the website and upload videos". The mismanagement in this regard makes the relevance of SDA as a source of video evidence of speedruns diminish continually.

[quote="presjpolk"]While SDA is still managing to pull in submissions from top runners, and while SDA has never been a "WR" site, it's *telling* that SDA gets a lot fewer WRs than it used to.  It's just not appealing to the runners anymore.  Few want to put in a run only to have it published in 6 months, when it's long since obsolete.[/quote]

I just want to second this and highlight it as the most important point in this whole damn thread. I personally have SDA quality encodes of about ten games worth of world records sitting on my hard drive, but I am less than indifferent with regards to submitting them to SDA (that is to say, I am not just unmotivated, I am specifically demotivated to submit), because I don't want to have to wait almost a year for something to be done with them and have to "babysit" them in the meantime. From what I understand, the verification process has become a lot more streamlined over the past few years, at least in the time since I've started this hobby, and that is great, but the verification SHOULD be the hard part here. It is 2015. "Publication" is a glorified term for "copy and paste the author's text to the website and upload videos". The mismanagement in this regard makes the relevance of SDA as a source of video evidence of speedruns diminish continually.

mrprmiller

Edit history:

mrprmiller: 2015-12-08 12:21:05 pm

2015-12-08 12:20:59 pm

Everyday is puppies and sunshine...

Just a thought, though: SDA has a bit more of a face to it than many other sites. Now that might sound as if it isn't true, but thinking about what the world outside of gaming sees, they see or hear about the extra exposure of GDQ, realize speedrunning is a thing, go on Google, type in "speedrun" and get speedrun.com and SDA right at the very top of the list. Even with the problems in the SDA forums, I don't see that changing anytime soon. SDA (albeit, not the forums) has visibility outside of the gaming community that manages to keep it with a base level of credibility that I don't see elsewhere. Granted, most of that is because of GDQ, but that alone is a testament to its legacy.

LotBlind

2015-12-08 12:32:00 pm

prejspolk: (as it seems TheMG2 pointed out) I was talking about communities that were quickly formed around a few notable games, such as Metroid games, Golden Eye/Perfect Dark, Quake, Doom and something else. When SDA was formed it was the central repository for Quake at first as we know, then Radix included his own Metroid Prime run (IIRC) and since then other games were allowed. SDA hasn't exactly unified those communities seeing as most of them still exist as independent entities but for games without communities, having SDA or something like it is certainly a boon. As you say.

I think you're overplaying the fact that speedruns are more competitive these days: there's still a ton of games out there that it doesn't require years, sometimes not even months to get done and dusted esp. if you have some existing experience. What you say applies to the most popular titles only, and those, obviously, constitute but a fraction of all games. Such titles also tend to be the ones that break their ties (if any) with SDA the easiest. But it's true that the longer speedrunning has been around, the more some runners could be seen as specialists.

Again, what you say about responsiveness mostly concerns the fraction of games that have a great amount of competition. No, you can't use SDA for WR-tracking, but you can use it for hosting a somewhat representative effort that still makes a good piece of entertainment for the less hardcore audience who won't want to (or think of) going out of their way to a different site for finding each different game's runs. The constant improvements thing is not an entirely new phenomenon even though, as you say, the number of runners has grown a lot. As pointed out, for truly competitive games, it NEVER was about SDA (except Quake after SDA was formed) to begin with, they ALWAYS had their own sites. So that hasn't changed.

Responsiveness to volunteers: Well, I can't really comment on that, but if those volunteers are around, why do we get congestion in even such a basic thing as verifications from time to time? I can't imagine people don't eventually notice those. It's not just random volunteers either. If there really so many people who have skills like UA or nate so they could work on the back-end and they've been knocking on the doors, then yes, it would be strange not to pay them heed. With all respect to ktwo, what he does doesn't require any special skills at all, just time.

I agree that certain features of the site easily go unnoticed including the KB and perhaps also verification. There might be a post promoting it later actually. I'm actively bringing both up from time to time, which has resulted in a few more strategy guides having been started but most of the time it's really just if the runners can be arsed or not. And a lot of them can't be. That has f***nuggets to do with SDA. The wiki mark-up is about as simple as it could be.

Besides, what have you volunteered for? Why do I feel like a lot of the time you're just being negative? :/ Maybe I'm confusing you with someone else though.

Just as a reminder, a lot of the delays involved in the process of publishing runs are due to reasons that have nothing to do with anyone on SDA. So whatever the average delay is, that's not all because SDA is clunky. SDA's mission statement (if you will) does result in some delays ofc. I don't wanna say anything more about this because I don't know how much owes to what part of it.

prejspolk: (as it seems TheMG2 pointed out) I was talking about communities that were quickly formed around a few notable games, such as Metroid games, Golden Eye/Perfect Dark, Quake, Doom and something else. When SDA was formed it was the central repository for Quake at first as we know, then Radix included his own Metroid Prime run (IIRC) and since then other games were allowed. SDA hasn't exactly unified those communities seeing as most of them still exist as independent entities but for games without communities, having SDA or something like it is certainly a boon. As you say.

I think you're overplaying the fact that speedruns are more competitive these days: there's still a ton of games out there that it doesn't require years, sometimes not even months to get done and dusted esp. if you have some existing experience. What you say applies to the most popular titles only, and those, obviously, constitute but a fraction of all games. Such titles also tend to be the ones that break their ties (if any) with SDA the easiest. But it's true that the longer speedrunning has been around, the more some runners could be seen as specialists.

Again, what you say about responsiveness mostly concerns the fraction of games that have a great amount of competition. No, you can't use SDA for WR-tracking, but you can use it for hosting a somewhat representative effort that still makes a good piece of entertainment for the less hardcore audience who won't want to (or think of) going out of their way to a different site for finding each different game's runs. The constant improvements thing is not an entirely new phenomenon even though, as you say, the number of runners has grown a lot. As pointed out, for truly competitive games, it NEVER was about SDA (except Quake after SDA was formed) to begin with, they ALWAYS had their own sites. So that hasn't changed.

Responsiveness to volunteers: Well, I can't really comment on that, but if those volunteers are around, why do we get congestion in even such a basic thing as verifications from time to time? I can't imagine people don't eventually notice those. It's not just random volunteers either. If there really so many people who have skills like UA or nate so they could work on the back-end and they've been knocking on the doors, then yes, it would be strange not to pay them heed. With all respect to ktwo, what he does doesn't require any special skills at all, just time.

I agree that certain features of the site easily go unnoticed including the KB and perhaps also verification. There might be a post promoting it later actually. I'm actively bringing both up from time to time, which has resulted in a few more strategy guides having been started but most of the time it's really just if the runners can be arsed or not. And a lot of them can't be. That has f***nuggets to do with SDA. The wiki mark-up is about as simple as it could be.

Besides, what have you volunteered for? Why do I feel like a lot of the time you're just being negative? :/ Maybe I'm confusing you with someone else though.

Just as a reminder, a lot of the delays involved in the process of publishing runs are due to reasons that have nothing to do with anyone on SDA. So whatever the average delay is, that's not all because SDA is clunky. SDA's mission statement (if you will) does result in some delays ofc. I don't wanna say anything more about this because I don't know how much owes to what part of it.

LotBlind

2015-12-08 01:13:58 pm

Quote from authorblues:

Quote from presjpolk:

While SDA is still managing to pull in submissions from top runners, and while SDA has never been a "WR" site, it's *telling* that SDA gets a lot fewer WRs than it used to. It's just not appealing to the runners anymore. Few want to put in a run only to have it published in 6 months, when it's long since obsolete.

I just want to second this and highlight it as the most important point in this whole damn thread. I personally have SDA quality encodes of about ten games worth of world records sitting on my hard drive, but I am less than indifferent with regards to submitting them to SDA (that is to say, I am not just unmotivated, I am specifically demotivated to submit), because I don't want to have to wait almost a year for something to be done with them and have to "babysit" them in the meantime. From what I understand, the verification process has become a lot more streamlined over the past few years, at least in the time since I've started this hobby, and that is great, but the verification SHOULD be the hard part here. It is 2015. "Publication" is a glorified term for "copy and paste the author's text to the website and upload videos". The mismanagement in this regard makes the relevance of SDA as a source of video evidence of speedruns diminish continually.

The turnover is more like 6 months these days (and that's including non-SDA-related delays). If your WRs have been sitting on your hard drive for so long and they're still WRs what's the problem exactly? Or did you mean ex-WRs? Also if you had the time to learn and run 10 games to get records in them but not the little extra effort SDA is asking for... seriously? Do you think you're entitled to a service here? What exactly makes you think so? You're getting more attention (if that's why you speedrun) from going through the publication process and getting on the front page so it's not just you providing WRs to SDA to make SDA better somehow. Besides WR doesn't mean that much depending on the game.

If you really did it for the love of the games, you'd be running them regardless of any records you hold (it's you who decided to bring up they're specifically WRs), and you wouldn't be complaining about the relatively small effort, no matter if it could be further streamlined, of submitting. Because you want to share the game and its quirks with whoever else played it.

Furthermore "copy the author's text and upload videos" is only true whenever the runner himself provided the various encodes SDA requires instead of just the raws. Furthermore someone has to watch the runs no matter what to check the encodes are good. Then someone has to write something about the game for both the game page and the front page update. Those steps are optional from one point of view, but they do provide you, the runner (if egos need to get involved) with some free advertisement. And I've forgotten to mention IsraeliRD will time your run with the most precise methods available so you don't have to do it yourself (it gets complicated with PC gaming specifically). That's the part I know about but I think there might be something else going on behind the curtains that may or may not be possible to optimize.

Next time at least try to take a less arrogant tone.

[quote="authorblues"][quote="presjpolk"]While SDA is still managing to pull in submissions from top runners, and while SDA has never been a "WR" site, it's *telling* that SDA gets a lot fewer WRs than it used to.  It's just not appealing to the runners anymore.  Few want to put in a run only to have it published in 6 months, when it's long since obsolete.[/quote]

I just want to second this and highlight it as the most important point in this whole damn thread. I personally have SDA quality encodes of about ten games worth of world records sitting on my hard drive, but I am less than indifferent with regards to submitting them to SDA (that is to say, I am not just unmotivated, I am specifically demotivated to submit), because I don't want to have to wait almost a year for something to be done with them and have to "babysit" them in the meantime. From what I understand, the verification process has become a lot more streamlined over the past few years, at least in the time since I've started this hobby, and that is great, but the verification SHOULD be the hard part here. It is 2015. "Publication" is a glorified term for "copy and paste the author's text to the website and upload videos". The mismanagement in this regard makes the relevance of SDA as a source of video evidence of speedruns diminish continually.[/quote]

The turnover is more like 6 months these days (and that's including non-SDA-related delays). If your WRs have been sitting on your hard drive for so long and they're still WRs what's the problem exactly? Or did you mean ex-WRs? Also if you had the time to learn and run 10 games to get records in them but not the little extra effort SDA is asking for... seriously? Do you think you're entitled to a service here? What exactly makes you think so? You're getting more attention (if that's why you speedrun) from going through the publication process and getting on the front page so it's not just you providing WRs to SDA to make SDA better somehow. Besides WR doesn't mean that much depending on the game.

If you really did it for the love of the games, you'd be running them regardless of any records you hold (it's you who decided to bring up they're specifically WRs), and you wouldn't be complaining about the relatively small effort, no matter if it could be further streamlined, of submitting. Because you want to share the game and its quirks with whoever else played it.

Furthermore "copy the author's text and upload videos" is only true whenever the runner himself provided the various encodes SDA requires instead of just the raws. Furthermore someone has to watch the runs no matter what to check the encodes are good. Then someone has to write something about the game for both the game page and the front page update. Those steps are optional from one point of view, but they do provide you, the runner (if egos need to get involved) with some free advertisement. And I've forgotten to mention IsraeliRD will time your run with the most precise methods available so you don't have to do it yourself (it gets complicated with PC gaming specifically). That's the part I know about but I think there might be something else going on behind the curtains that may or may not be possible to optimize.

Next time at least try to take a less arrogant tone.

authorblues

2015-12-08 01:41:28 pm

My apologies for the tone. The rant did take a bit of a turn at some point that wasn't intended. I'll do my best to address each thing you said that I feel warrants a response.

Quote from LotBlind:

The turnover is more like 6 months these days (and that's including non-SDA-related delays). If your WRs have been sitting on your hard drive for so long and they're still WRs what's the problem exactly? Or did you mean ex-WRs? Also if you had the time to learn and run 10 games to get records in them but not the little extra effort SDA is asking for... seriously? Do you think you're entitled to a service here? What exactly makes you think so? You're getting more attention (if that's why you speedrun) from going through the publication process and getting on the front page so it's not just you providing WRs to SDA to make SDA better somehow. Besides WR doesn't mean that much depending on the game.

I only mentioned that they were world records to say that they are either faster than a run present on SDA or are a run of an unrepresented game on SDA, not to flex my muscles or something. Many are still records, many are not, who knows or cares? I do think "entitled to a service" is a bit disingenuous. Providing a run to SDA is the runner providing a service to SDA by giving them content. I can't speak for others, but I don't really feel terribly concerned about the attention(?) that SDA would provide to me as a runner. I am more interested in SDA continuing to feature the best and fastest runs of games available.

Quote from LotBlind:

If you really did it for the love of the games, you'd be running them regardless of any records you hold (it's you who decided to bring up they're specifically WRs), and you wouldn't be complaining about the relatively small effort, no matter if it could be further streamlined, of submitting. Because you want to share the game and its quirks with whoever else played it.

I think that other websites are taking this burden off of SDA, and doing so happily. Bringing attention to speedruns is much easier on a website that has a turnover time of hours/days/weeks rather than months. If SDA could get this turnover time down to a month, I'd happily send dozens of videos and writeups over. Not because I need the attention, but because it would be nice to have this sort of high quality information catalogued on a site like SDA. Currently, it doesn't seem to be possible to provide this information before it would potentially become irrelevant.

Quote from LotBlind:

Furthermore "copy the author's text and upload videos" is only true whenever the runner himself provided the various encodes SDA requires instead of just the raws. Furthermore someone has to watch the runs no matter what to check the encodes are good. Then someone has to write something about the game for both the game page and the front page update. Those steps are optional from one point of view, but they do provide you, the runner (if egos need to get involved) with some free advertisement.

Yes, I'm sure that "copy the author's text and upload videos" minimizes the work it takes, and I knew that writing it (and slightly regret using that wording). I think most runners are happy to provide encodes if that would simplify the process. In general, I don't know if it is even necessary to have a front page update for every new game submission. Just keeping the general games list and pages up-to-date would be a welcome change. I don't believe I've given any indication that "ego" is the motivating factor here. My post was specifically about the delay in publication.

Quote from LotBlind:

Next time at least try to take a less arrogant tone.

Noted.

My apologies for the tone. The rant did take a bit of a turn at some point that wasn't intended. I'll do my best to address each thing you said that I feel warrants a response.

[quote="LotBlind"]The turnover is more like 6 months these days (and that's including non-SDA-related delays). If your WRs have been sitting on your hard drive for so long and they're still WRs what's the problem exactly? Or did you mean ex-WRs? Also if you had the time to learn and run 10 games to get records in them but not the little extra effort SDA is asking for... seriously? Do you think you're entitled to a service here? What exactly makes you think so? You're getting more attention (if that's why you speedrun) from going through the publication process and getting on the front page so it's not just you providing WRs to SDA to make SDA better somehow. Besides WR doesn't mean that much depending on the game.[/quote]

I only mentioned that they were world records to say that they are either faster than a run present on SDA or are a run of an unrepresented game on SDA, not to flex my muscles or something. Many are still records, many are not, who knows or cares? I do think "entitled to a service" is a bit disingenuous. Providing a run to SDA is the runner providing a service to SDA by giving them content. I can't speak for others, but I don't really feel terribly concerned about the attention(?) that SDA would provide to me as a runner. I am more interested in SDA continuing to feature the best and fastest runs of games available.

[quote="LotBlind"]If you really did it for the love of the games, you'd be running them regardless of any records you hold (it's you who decided to bring up they're specifically WRs), and you wouldn't be complaining about the relatively small effort, no matter if it could be further streamlined, of submitting. Because you want to share the game and its quirks with whoever else played it.[/quote]

I think that other websites are taking this burden off of SDA, and doing so happily. Bringing attention to speedruns is much easier on a website that has a turnover time of hours/days/weeks rather than months. If SDA could get this turnover time down to a month, I'd happily send dozens of videos and writeups over. Not because I need the attention, but because it would be nice to have this sort of high quality information catalogued on a site like SDA. Currently, it doesn't seem to be possible to provide this information before it would potentially become irrelevant.

[quote="LotBlind"]Furthermore "copy the author's text and upload videos" is only true whenever the runner himself provided the various encodes SDA requires instead of just the raws. Furthermore someone has to watch the runs no matter what to check the encodes are good. Then someone has to write something about the game for both the game page and the front page update. Those steps are optional from one point of view, but they do provide you, the runner (if egos need to get involved) with some free advertisement.[/quote]

Yes, I'm sure that "copy the author's text and upload videos" minimizes the work it takes, and I knew that writing it (and slightly regret using that wording). I think most runners are happy to provide encodes if that would simplify the process. In general, I don't know if it is even necessary to have a front page update for every new game submission. Just keeping the general games list and pages up-to-date would be a welcome change. I don't believe I've given any indication that "ego" is the motivating factor here. My post was specifically about the delay in publication.

[quote="LotBlind"]Next time at least try to take a less arrogant tone.[/quote]

Noted.

Sonikkustar

2015-12-08 03:13:03 pm

The Great Farming Empire

Quote from presjpolk:

1. Make it responsive to runners. Taking 6 months to publish a dang video online is *embarrassing*. Runs get taken apart and rebuilt in that amount of time. While SDA is still managing to pull in submissions from top runners, and while SDA has never been a "WR" site, it's *telling* that SDA gets a lot fewer WRs than it used to. It's just not appealing to the runners anymore. Few want to put in a run only to have it published in 6 months, when it's long since obsolete.

2. Make it responsive to volunteers. Every single time there's a thread about the future of SDA, people come out of the woodwork to volunteer. Don't give me this lack of manpower jazz. There's manpower. There's simply no leadership to take advantage of it, and there hasn't been since Uyama moved on. There are people willing to put in many hours for this site. Find the next ktwo, and the next, and the next, and you'll work wonders for SDA.

Quote from authorblues:

I just want to second this and highlight it as the most important point in this whole damn thread. I personally have SDA quality encodes of about ten games worth of world records sitting on my hard drive, but I am less than indifferent with regards to submitting them to SDA (that is to say, I am not just unmotivated, I am specifically demotivated to submit), because I don't want to have to wait almost a year for something to be done with them and have to "babysit" them in the meantime. From what I understand, the verification process has become a lot more streamlined over the past few years, at least in the time since I've started this hobby, and that is great, but the verification SHOULD be the hard part here. It is 2015. "Publication" is a glorified term for "copy and paste the author's text to the website and upload videos". The mismanagement in this regard makes the relevance of SDA as a source of video evidence of speedruns diminish continually.

I'm just gonna say this right now. If these two problems are things about SDA I've noticed are fixed, all of these problems about SDA becoming a relic would disappear. I know there was an effort to fix Verification/Publication a while back, but now it seems to have stopped because most of the people behind that improvement are now working on getting AGDQ together. What's worse is that as said before, there ARE people that are willing to help. However, their was either no backing by the site itself or they were shooed away saying that they'll look into it.

That's the problem. It isn't that there is stuff that needs to be changed or that we need more manpower, its that the community as a whole needs to be encouraged to work together to facilitate these changes.

I know i'm beating a dead horse here at this point, but take for instance the Site Redesign that had been debated over and over again. Many people talked about how the front page looks outdated and should be redesigned to better fit today. Sooner or later, people started complaining that the front page would be too complex and we were back to square one. Eventually, someone came up with a mock-up that people seemed to agree on and stepped up to do the redesign. What happened? It was never implemented and never spoken of again. Again, You have something that would help improve the site just dropped off to rot in the depths of the forums. If things like this really are important, then why wasn't it encouraged to continue being implemented to the site?

Let me bring another example. In the topic of publishing runs, It was brought up that the way the run pages were being coded using a format that was hard to edit and update. Someone then proposed to look into a different format that would make pages much easier to edit, which could possibly lead to faster publishing times. What ever happened to that? A big problem that people keep repeating is that publication takes ridiculously long. If there was something that could help shorten that time even by a little bit, how come people aren't willing to look into it and actually try to cut down this time?

This attitude of "No I don't need your help! I swear, I can do it on my own!" and "Oh they're already working on it, I guess it's not an issue anymore." i'm seeing from the site isn't going to help anybody. I understand that you guys don't want to rely on lots of people to get things done, but the least you can do is make it a more "community" effort because it seems as though we have become too reliant on certain people to implement changes that we specifically want. If this is a community issue, then shouldn't we at least try to solve things as a community and actually get something done rather then just complaining "Oh SDA is dead...", "SDA is just a joke" over and over again? I feel like this attitude is only making the issue worse since there doesn't seem to be anybody willing to actually take up the plate and start trying to do these changes people supposedly want, and threads like this that keep popping up aren't any doing any favors either.

I apologize if this sounds too harsh. I'ts just something I've noticed that is really starting to get irritating.

[quote="presjpolk"]
1. Make it responsive to runners.  Taking 6 months to publish a dang video online is *embarrassing*.  Runs get taken apart and rebuilt in that amount of time.  While SDA is still managing to pull in submissions from top runners, and while SDA has never been a "WR" site, it's *telling* that SDA gets a lot fewer WRs than it used to.  It's just not appealing to the runners anymore.  Few want to put in a run only to have it published in 6 months, when it's long since obsolete.

2. Make it responsive to volunteers. Every single time there's a thread about the future of SDA, people come out of the woodwork to volunteer. Don't give me this lack of manpower jazz. There's manpower. There's simply no leadership to take advantage of it, and there hasn't been since Uyama moved on.  There are people willing to put in many hours for this site.  Find the next ktwo, and the next, and the next, and you'll work wonders for SDA.
[/quote]

[quote="authorblues"]I just want to second this and highlight it as the most important point in this whole damn thread. I personally have SDA quality encodes of about ten games worth of world records sitting on my hard drive, but I am less than indifferent with regards to submitting them to SDA (that is to say, I am not just unmotivated, I am specifically demotivated to submit), because I don't want to have to wait almost a year for something to be done with them and have to "babysit" them in the meantime. From what I understand, the verification process has become a lot more streamlined over the past few years, at least in the time since I've started this hobby, and that is great, but the verification SHOULD be the hard part here. It is 2015. "Publication" is a glorified term for "copy and paste the author's text to the website and upload videos". The mismanagement in this regard makes the relevance of SDA as a source of video evidence of speedruns diminish continually.[/quote]

I'm just gonna say this right now. If these two problems are things about SDA I've noticed are fixed, all of these problems about SDA becoming a relic would disappear. I know there was an effort to fix Verification/Publication a while back, but now it seems to have stopped because most of the people behind that improvement are now working on getting AGDQ together. What's worse is that as said before, there ARE people that are willing to help. However, their was either no backing by the site itself or they were shooed away saying that they'll look into it.

That's the problem. It isn't that there is stuff that needs to be changed or that we need more manpower, its that [b]the community as a whole needs to be encouraged to work together to facilitate these changes.[/b]

I know i'm beating a dead horse here at this point, but take for instance the Site Redesign that had been debated over and over again. Many people talked about how the front page looks outdated and should be redesigned to better fit today. Sooner or later, people started complaining that the front page would be too complex and we were back to square one. Eventually, someone came up with a mock-up that people seemed to agree on and stepped up to do the redesign. What happened? It was never implemented and never spoken of again. Again, You have something that would help improve the site just dropped off to rot in the depths of the forums. If things like this really are important, then why wasn't it encouraged to continue being implemented to the site?

Let me bring another example. In the topic of publishing runs, It was brought up that the way the run pages were being coded using a format that was hard to edit and update. Someone then proposed to look into a different format that would make pages much easier to edit, which could possibly lead to faster publishing times. What ever happened to that? A big problem that people keep repeating is that publication takes ridiculously long. If there was something that could help shorten that time even by a little bit, how come people aren't willing to look into it and actually try to cut down this time?

This attitude of "No I don't need your help! I swear, I can do it on my own!" and "Oh they're already working on it, I guess it's not an issue anymore." i'm seeing from the site isn't going to help anybody. I understand that you guys don't want to rely on lots of people to get things done, but the least you can do is make it a more "community" effort because it seems as though we have become too reliant on certain people to implement changes that [i]we[/i] specifically want. If this is a community issue, then shouldn't we at least try to solve things as a community and actually get something done rather then just complaining "Oh SDA is dead...", "SDA is just a joke" over and over again? I feel like this attitude is only making the issue worse since there doesn't seem to be anybody willing to actually take up the plate and start trying to do these changes people supposedly [i]want[/i], and threads like this that keep popping up aren't any doing any favors either.

I apologize if this sounds too harsh. I'ts just something I've noticed that is really starting to get irritating.

Elipsis

2015-12-08 08:20:44 pm

The only way that I know how to help right now is verifications.

But I agree with the point that there is a large community of people that definitely would do more if they knew how. For example, I'm pretty into A/v stuff now (although I'm not sure into if it's the right skillset for dealing with the particular encodes on this site), as well as precisely timing things. These are the kinds of things that I myself and others could contribute if there was an easy way for SDA members to help with postverification tasks.

Judgy

2015-12-09 06:15:30 am

Borderlands 2 Glitch Hunter/ router.

Quote from Elipsis:

The only way that I know how to help right now is verifications.

But I agree with the point that there is a large community of people that definitely would do more if they knew how. For example, I'm pretty into A/v stuff now (although I'm not sure into if it's the right skillset for dealing with the particular encodes on this site), as well as precisely timing things. These are the kinds of things that I myself and others could contribute if there was an easy way for SDA members to help with postverification tasks.

Yes this is the issue, Public verification was implemented to speed up the verification of the runs themselves, however, public verification has not really increased the amount of repeat verifiers more than maybe 3 or 4 people who for whatever reason may have breaks in when they can verify.

In addition to this there are many "background" things which need to happen before videos are hosted, such as pages being created, news articles being written, synopsis' for each game that was not present and added to the games, Timing.

And yes we do need a few more people doing some stuff because currently people have multiple job roles.

IsraeliRD: Timing, Organization of front page news, writing of Front page news, Writing of Game Sysnopsis'
Ktwo: Public Verifying, Organization of Public Verification, Pre-Release A/V check.
Lotblind: Public Verifying, Pre-release A/V check, Writing of Front Page News, Writing of Game Sysnopsis'
Me: Public Verifying, Pre-release A/V check, Writing of Front Page News, Writing of Game Sysnopsis'

Now consider that depending on work load (and the length of an individual run) any of these could take up to many 4 or 5 hours PER STEP, PER RUN .... and this is done during our free time.

Yes we do need help and if people are upset that it takes "so long" then they themselves should be good enough to try help out a bit more and maybe send IsraeliRD or Ktwo a message, or even just sit around and watch a few runs posted in Public Verification.

[quote="Elipsis"]The only way that I know how to help right now is verifications.

But I agree with the point that there is a large community of people that definitely would do more if they knew how.  For example, I'm pretty into A/v stuff now (although I'm not sure into if it's the right skillset for dealing with the particular encodes on this site), as well as precisely timing things.  These are the kinds of things that I myself and others could contribute if there was an easy way for SDA members to help with postverification tasks.[/quote]

Yes this is the issue, Public verification was implemented to speed up the verification of the runs themselves, however, public verification has not really increased the amount of repeat verifiers more than maybe 3 or 4 people who for whatever reason may have breaks in when they can verify.

In addition to this there are many "background" things which need to happen before videos are hosted, such as pages being created, news articles being written, synopsis' for each game that was not present and added to the games, Timing.

And yes we do need a few more people doing some stuff because currently people have multiple job roles.

IsraeliRD: Timing, Organization of front page news, writing of Front page news, Writing of Game Sysnopsis'
Ktwo: Public Verifying, Organization of Public Verification, Pre-Release A/V check.
Lotblind: Public Verifying, Pre-release A/V check, Writing of Front Page News, Writing of Game Sysnopsis'
Me: Public Verifying, Pre-release A/V check, Writing of Front Page News, Writing of Game Sysnopsis'

Now consider that depending on work load (and the length of an individual run) any of these could take up to many 4 or 5 hours PER STEP, PER RUN .... and this is done during our free time.

Yes we do need help and if people are upset that it takes "so long" then they themselves should be good enough to try help out a bit more and maybe send IsraeliRD or Ktwo a message, or even just sit around and watch a few runs posted in Public Verification.

Caveberry

2015-12-09 08:29:19 am

trepidation

Alright,

From what I'm seeing here, I see one glaring problem. Incentive. Volunteer work can only get you so far. Things get in the way, school, work, family obligations, etc. Without incentive there can be no consistent progress. I assume *ahem* that almost no one is getting paid? I mean, SDA is add free as far as I can see... If anything, SDA might be COSTING someone to host.

I realize that I'm being ambitious, and probably way ahead of myself, but if SDA is to continue, and flourish, the people in control might want to take steps to monetize the site.

I realize that "monetize" is sort of a dirty word nowadays, but I think it could be done in a way that is completely invisible to the end user. I mean, can anyone really argue that SDA wouldn't benefit from one or two people being nine to five employees? It seems that any leadership we have had in recent years has fizzled out, due to the command of the site not being anyone's' JOB. Sorry to say, but money talks.

Just off the top of my head, we need to capitalize on SDA's brand recognition while it still exists. Hear me out: A ton of people want to be celebrated Youtube/twitch runners nowadays. SDA should reach out to all of the top runners on the site, and offer to put them under an SDA sponsorship, creating an SDA (or AGDQ, if that would be more popular) "team" of elite runners. Now that you have that team in place, you would (hopefully) generate a ton of traffic to all of their WR/glitch videos and, therefore, revenue. Now that you have an established brand in place, a large number of hungry runners will be clamoring to get under the SDA umbrella, so that they can get exposure in the ever increasingly hard-to-get-noticed Youtube/twitch market.

Of course, profits would be shared, with larger dividends paid to starting team members, and yes, this would probably require an investment from an outside (or inside?) party. It's an idea though, and if done right, it could make SDA a premier name in all things speed running. With added revenue to the site we could alleviate all the woes we have been having with the forums and redesign, and with the added traffic the SDA team brings in we can improve overall discussion and documentation of games.

I'm not saying the site needs to make a lot of money, but if one or two people could make an actual LIVING off of running the site, I think it could go a long way to incentivize some much needed changes.

Alright,

From what I'm seeing here, I see one glaring problem. Incentive. Volunteer work can only get you so far. Things get in the way, school, work, family obligations, etc. Without incentive there can be no consistent progress. I assume *ahem* that almost no one is getting paid? I mean, SDA is add free as far as I can see... If anything, SDA might be COSTING someone to host.

I realize that I'm being ambitious, and probably way ahead of myself, but if SDA is to continue, and flourish, the people in control might want to take steps to monetize the site.

I realize that "monetize" is sort of a dirty word nowadays, but I think it could be done in a way that is completely invisible to the end user. I mean, can anyone really argue that SDA wouldn't benefit from one or two people being nine to five employees? It seems that any leadership we have had in recent years has fizzled out, due to the command of the site not being anyone's' JOB. Sorry to say, but money talks.

Just off the top of my head, we need to capitalize on SDA's brand recognition while it still exists. Hear me out: A ton of people want to be celebrated Youtube/twitch runners nowadays. SDA should reach out to all of the top runners on the site, and offer to put them under an SDA sponsorship, creating an SDA (or AGDQ, if that would be more popular) "team" of elite runners. Now that you have that team in place, you would (hopefully) generate a ton of traffic to all of their WR/glitch videos and, therefore, revenue. Now that you have an established brand in place, a large number of hungry runners will be clamoring to get under the SDA umbrella, so that they can get exposure in the ever increasingly hard-to-get-noticed Youtube/twitch market.

Of course, profits would be shared, with larger dividends paid to starting team members, and yes, this would probably require an investment from an outside (or inside?) party. It's an idea though, and if done right, it could make SDA a premier name in all things speed running. With added revenue to the site we could alleviate all the woes we have been having with the forums and redesign, and with the added traffic the SDA team brings in we can improve overall discussion and documentation of games.

I'm not saying the site needs to make a lot of money, but if one or two people could make an actual LIVING off of running the site, I think it could go a long way to incentivize some much needed changes.

authorblues

2015-12-09 08:37:58 am

The point of the thread so far, in my opinion, has been that incentivism isn't the problem. There are people willing to help. It just isn't being taken advantage of.

Caveberry

Edit history:

Caveberry: 2015-12-09 08:47:50 am

2015-12-09 08:47:22 am

trepidation

Sure, volunteer work should always be a thing, but are you going to rely on a volunteer to coordinate all the volunteers? I mean, if it's not your JOB, then other things of (perceived) importance are always going to take precedent, and then things all fall apart. One or two employees that require adequate performance, for their livelihood, could improve things drastically.

I have a job, and I do everything I can to excel so that I can retain employment and support my family. You can sure bet (as much as I love it) that SDA will take the back burner every once in a while if I get too busy.

presjpolk

2015-12-09 08:50:50 am

HELLO!

Quote from authorblues:

The point of the thread so far, in my opinion, has been that incentivism isn't the problem. There are people willing to help. It just isn't being taken advantage of.

This this this.

Quote from Caveberry:

Sure, volunteer work should always be a thing, but are you going to rely on a volunteer to coordinate all the volunteers? I mean, if it's not your JOB, then other things of (perceived) importance are always going to take precedent, and then things all fall apart. One or two employees that require adequate performance, for their livelihood, could improve things drastically.

I have a job, and I do everything I can to excel so that I can retain employment and support my family. You can sure bet (as much as I love it) that SDA will take the back burner every once in a while if I get too busy.

That's why it comes down to Radix. He owns the site. It's on him, ultimately, to decide SDA's future.