Just discrimination - SMW Hacking Discussion

We all know that SMWCP has some bugs glitches cutoffs. It wasn't rejected. But if anyone single user other that S.N.N. upload a hack with some bugs, glitches or cutoffs it will be rejected. What do you think about it?

I'm no hack moderator, nor do I pay attention to the moderation process, but I'd like to think that all hacks are judged as a sum of their parts...that is, a hack isn't rejected JUST because it has cut-off or JUST because it has a few glitches, or even a mild combination of both.

Also, SMWCP wasn't rejected because it was kinda' a site-wide effort, y'know? Sure, it could have been better, but it's not actually a bad hack. There are far worse out there.

*Agrees with what Mineyl said*

Also I played through that whole hack pretty much; I didn't really find any glitches or bugs. Cut off sure; but it was very, very minor..not anything worth rejecting IMO.

My Youtube Channel for Hacking and Gaming.

If I made an uber awesome fantastic marvelous great level for SMWCP, and suddenly the hack got rejected because someone else's level had a little cut-off, I'll be RAEGING. >insert rage face here<

Originally posted by Mineyl

Also, SMWCP wasn't rejected because it was kinda' a site-wide effort, y'know? Sure, it could have been better, but it's not actually a bad hack. There are far worse out there.

Still, but there were at least 2 ROM-crashing glitches (in Wild Wet Castle alone). I'm no hack moderator, but from my understanding even one is instant grounds for removal, site-wide hack or no.

Originally posted by TRS

Still, but there were at least 2 ROM-crashing glitches (2 in Wild Wet Castle alone). I'm no hack moderator, but I think even one is instant grounds for removal, site-wide hack or no.

Weren't those glitches corrected? I'm no hack moderator, but I could have sworn they were.

Originally posted by Mineyl

Weren't those glitches corrected? I'm no hack moderator, but I could have sworn they were.

IIRC, those glitches were corrected after the hack was accepted.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, here.

Originally posted by TRS

Originally posted by Mineyl

Weren't those glitches corrected? I'm no hack moderator, but I could have sworn they were.

IIRC, those glitches were corrected after the hack was accepted.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, here.

Nope, not wrong at all. I do agree with you, and maybe there is some discrimination that goes on around here, but...eh, it's not frequent enough for anyone to really care. The glitches were fixed, and they occurred late enough in the hack that the people who needed to know about them knew about them before others stumbled upon them so that they could be corrected, so I don't see the problem here.

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A general rule of thumb I've seen with hack mods is that the longer (and/or "better") a hack is, the more leniency they have towards errors/flaws. Of course, you'll also need to factor in the individual mods' personal thresholds on certain situations. A larger hack can get away with a few instances of glitched graphics, bad palettes, or cutoff, but a (very) short one will have it work against it in the long run.

I find there certainly is some discrimination and/or favoritism going on with hack acception. A good example would be The Adventures of Mario. The hack had a lot of poor design choices which made it feel quite stale in my opinion. Overuse of the same music, lack of tileset diversity/palette usage, chaining very similar levels together (please, nobody wants to play four or five underwater levels back-to-back!), and a few boring level ideas (one level was nothing but going right while avoiding lava and hurt blocks, no enemies). I was usually fed up with each world by the third level.

Yet somehow, the hack was not only accepted, it even got featured for a week! Was it because the hack was actually full length? Was it because there were some custom blocks and enemies? The ability to actually use the HDMA effects? I often ask myself these questions whenever I play hacks that I feel are less-than-stellar, especially if it also happens to be "Featured".

Originally posted by GeminiRage

in my opinion.

As you said, that's just your opinion, and a lot of other people seem to like it quite a lot, so uh, yeah!

Your layout has been removed.

Originally posted by GeminiRage

I find there certainly is some discrimination and/or favoritism going on with hack acception.

I can whole heartedly agree with it, only change the acception to "being played". I can submit a nice looking, customized hack with original splattered all over it. Sure, it'll get rejected once or twice (obviously a game crashing error I didn't notice developing in an earlier level; Fellow hackers, you know what I'm talking about), but people will not play it because it is a part of or even related to the Devious Four Chronicles. This statement is in total disregard to those who are just die-hard fans for D4 as are some with TSRP. ~~Hard to believe we got some~~. Just so happens people love originallity sometimes

Speaking as someone who has been moderating hacks here for quite a while now, I really can honestly say that I've not seen any discrimination in terms of accepting staff members' hacks versus general members' hacks.

Did anyone have any examples besides SMWCP? I mean, honestly, there aren't even very many hacks hosted here that were created by staff members. The ones that are here are usually top-notch.

Originally posted by MrDeePay

A general rule of thumb I've seen with hack mods is that the longer (and/or "better") a hack is, the more leniency they have towards errors/flaws. Of course, you'll also need to factor in the individual mods' personal thresholds on certain situations. A larger hack can get away with a few instances of glitched graphics, bad palettes, or cutoff, but a (very) short one will have it work against it in the long run.

I would agree that this is true. A few errors over the course of 80+ levels is much more palatable than the same number errors over eight or less levels.

As far as hacks that are just "not fun to play," to some extent that just comes down to people's opinions. The hack that GeminiRage described, if it really is like that, is probably one that I would not personally enjoy either...but I still might accept it if I were forced to moderate it. One of the things I try to do when I moderate hacks is to give people advice on their level design if it is lacking. And level design is sometimes a hard thing to judge -- some of it is so bad that a hack can be outright declined because the level design is so uninspired and boring. However, just generally bad level design sometimes gets accepted simply because it's not "horrible enough" for the hack to be declined.

Luckily, you have us around to weed out most of the really bad hacks -- I recently organized my entire hack moderation history and I found that I only accept one hack for every 10 that I moderate. Of the ones I have accepted, only a fraction of those would I actually recommend for featuring.

Unfortunately, a hack can be technically more or less perfect but just not be all that much fun to play. But again, that is largely the player's opinion, so how do we judge that?

[?] Miscellaneous Helpful Hints
If I moderated your hack, there was apparently a 90 percent chance it was rejected.

I can't really add much more to what andy just put, but, ultimately when you do anything creative, you're always going to have die-hard fans and people who want you dead; the ratio of the two depends on the quality and what people's general opinions are. Usually hacks would be removed for the more drastic reasons (bad glitches, boring design, or things just not working), I imagine little nitpicks within the removal logs themselves are not to be really whiny, but to be generally helpful and to help tip the ratio in the designer's favour if they were to decide to continue and not walk off sulking into the sunset.

Not blue.

Originally posted by andy_k_250

Did anyone have any examples besides SMWCP? I mean, honestly, there aren't even very many hacks hosted here that were created by staff members. The ones that are here are usually top-notch.

I did say my hacks, and as far as I'm aware; not very many people like them. You also have a lot of the newer hacks that are being accepted. In majority, it's really just the hacks that are being played, not what's accepted. Everything I've seen that's rejected, there are very valid reasons behind those rejections, in my opinion that is.

As far as player opinion goes, you've got to remember the the definition for the word.

Originally posted by Dictionary.com

noun
1.a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.
2.a personal view, attitude, or appraisal.
3.the formal expressionof a professional judgment: to ask for a second medical opinion.
4.Law. the formal statement by a judge or court of the reasoning and the principles of law used in reaching a decisionof a case.
5.a judgment or estimate of a person or thing with respect to character, merit, etc.: to forfeit someone's good opinion.

Remember, people vote because in their opinion, the object they are referencing is worth their vote. This whole time we've (and by we've, I mean all you hack mods) been judging on players' opinions. Perfect, as it stands in our community, is just an opinion. As far as Christians believe, the only perfect thing in the history of time is Jesus Christ himself, and the good God Almighty. Otherwise, nothing else on this planet is perfect because the efficiency of it is not 100%. More or less, human beings are not perfect, so how can anything we make be perfect; there is bound to be a flaw somewhere. As Murphy's law states: "If something can go wrong, chances are it will go wrong."

Did someone notice SMWCP is SMWC's first big collaboration which was created by bunch of users? If yes, you'd probably know that they worked hard to keep it working. There were some major glitches which caused ie. graphical issues. It wasn't the best hack but it wasn't bad at all. The cutoff was very minor and almost nobody cares about it. Yes, there are a few issues but they aren't the most important. Level design is key and you should know that. Sometimes hacks with lots of cutoff would look great with it's design (but they'll be rejected, though).

Originally posted by Sniggerb0bble

ultimately when you do anything creative, you're always going to have die-hard fans and people who want you dead

This is just so true, and all should deal with it.

And on the topic, I haven't really seen any of this discrimination. The only thing thats hard is to... Judge hacks, really. Like, if a kid comes to you with a new drawing every 30 sec and say he/ she made it for you, but the drawing could be so much more improved in your opinion, what do you say to the kid? Well, I think I would focus on the positive sides first, then started to give the constructive feedback that's needed. And this is the only thing the mods lack imo, the positive feedback, its too much focus on whats bad about a hack.

I don't know where I'm going with this already, hope you get a point of what I said.

The only "discrimination" I've seen is mods letting pet-peeves get in the way of fair judgement. Floating munchers are no worse than any other sort of cutoff, yet it is (was?) instant rejection.

Not a huge deal regardless.

Originally posted by Sniggerb0bble

I imagine little nitpicks within the removal logs themselves are not to be really whiny, but to be generally helpful and to help tip the ratio in the designer's favour if they were to decide to continue and not walk off sulking into the sunset.

This is exactly it. A lot of the time, there are only one or two really awful things keep that "SUPER MARIO WORLD HACK #20,323" from getting accepted -- we just point out other things that can be improved along the way. Honestly, if more people actually took advantage of the Playtesters For Hire thread that we have, it would make our jobs 1,000 percent easier.

Originally posted by Kaijyuu

The only "discrimination" I've seen is mods letting pet-peeves get in the way of fair judgement. Floating munchers are no worse than any other sort of cutoff, yet it is (was?) instant rejection. Not a huge deal regardless.

I think we can all agree that there are degrees of cutoffness and graphical errors (a bit of pipe cutoff on the bottom where it meets a ledge corner is very different from rows and columns of Munchers). If we get a hack that has screenshits that are so outright shitty as to let us know a hack will be rejected when we play it, we can just delete the hack and direct the user to the submission rules, which they clearly did not follow.

Originally posted by S.C.O.R.P.I.O.N.

Originally posted by andy_k_250

Originally posted by Luigi370

We all know that SMWCP has some bugs glitches cutoffs. It wasn't rejected. But if anyone single user other that S.N.N. upload a hack with some bugs, glitches or cutoffs it will be rejected. What do you think about it?

Did anyone have any examples besides SMWCP? I mean, honestly, there aren't even very many hacks hosted here that were created by staff members. The ones that are here are usually top-notch.

I did say my hacks, and as far as I'm aware; not very many people like them. You also have a lot of the newer hacks that are being accepted. In majority, it's really just the hacks that are being played, not what's accepted. Everything I've seen that's rejected, there are very valid reasons behind those rejections, in my opinion that is.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but I thought Luigi370 was claiming that the moderation process is discriminatory since we allowed a "bug-ridden" hack like SMWCP to be accepted when we reject other projects for similar bugs. I'm guessing the implication here is that there are just some hacks we have never accepted (i.e. "discriminated against") because of the "problems" we found with them.

@S.C.O.R.P.I.O.N. -- Are you saying that you feel like your projects have been held to an unfair standard while being moderated? Or are you saying that you feel like the userbase judges your hacks differently/unfairly because of how unique they are? Those are two separate things, and right now I'm not really sure which is concerning you.

I guess my point is, we might reject a hack once or twice, but if it is good enough, it usually eventually makes it onto the site. I'm hoping anyone who has had their hack rejected feels like the changes they made to get it accepted only made their projects better and weren't just arbitrary guidelines to meet.

Last but not least, SMWCP arguably has some problems. But it's also a somewhat unique case, in that it was the first massive project by the site members. As far as I know, anything majorly game-breaking has been fixed. It might still have some issues with difficulty and minor cutoffness and so one, but is any of it what would merit removal by a moderator? Would people just rather not see SMWCP on the site at all?

Maybe I'm missing the point. But since I'm a hack moderator, I do take this seriously and I find it nice to get valid criticisms and feedback on any area where we can improve.

[?] Miscellaneous Helpful Hints
If I moderated your hack, there was apparently a 90 percent chance it was rejected.

Originally posted by andy_k_250

Did anyone have any examples besides SMWCP? I mean, honestly, there aren't even very many hacks hosted here that were created by staff members. The ones that are here are usually top-notch.

The only two I can think of are SMWCP and ASMT, which were uploaded by outstanding higher-ups of the site and bypassed the moderation phase. But again, anything game-breaking that was found in them was corrected, so...not really a problem in my eyes.

VIP2 might be another hack that remains here out of favoritism, though I'd personally delete it just because it actually -requires- glitch abuse to complete (and more than once, too). However, it has nostalgic value for some people (I'm sure, probably a lot of people), and this is most likely the easiest place to find it on the English-speaking end of the internet, so I wouldn't actually press to have it removed.