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Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time


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Offline Thorn

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Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« on: January 14, 2013, 02:42:19 pm »
For those of you that missed the first marathon or just want to reminisce, watch this. I'll make sure that plays 15 minutes before our next marathon as a lead-in.

It's probably a good thing that our after-Christmas mini-marathon didn't happen, because Respawn Point ran a Sonic marathon that week and I'd completely forgotten about it. They raised $3250 for Child's Play, so kudos to them. We've been in talks about moving our marathon to Easter and making a full marathon like last year, and if I don't need to do as much hand-holding as last year, I'm all for it. I'm going to start fresh, being careful what I take from the Christmas marathon topic because I know that people's plans change; this means that I won't be taking anything volunteered in the old thread, so re-post anything that you personally wanted to do.

The trickiest thing about using Spring Break for the marathon is that some schools use the week leading up to Easter while other schools use the week after. My instinct is to aim for the week prior to Easter, but it's dependent on when our runners can show up as well. If people can comment on which week is better, that would be great.

A few people have volunteered for help with prizes for donation-based raffles. If you're helping with this, be sure that your prize can easily be sent to somebody without you having to manage the shipping. If you're unsure about this, consider digital prizes. We'll have a big focus on preplanned bonus streams for certain donation totals, as that was a huge donation driver last year. Karaoke was a donation driver as well. Our initial goal will of course be $1813.81, just over last year's goal, but I'd like to make a large stretch goal of $3250.01 -- not because I want to compete with Respawn Point, but because TSSZ declared $3250 a "community record", and I love proving TSSZ wrong.~

Given that the only new Sonic game since the last marathon is Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed (not counting the new version of Sonic Jump), we're going to have to repeat some games. We need to approach these repeats in different ways if possible, e.g., using a different character or a different set of courses. The audience participation was pretty slim last time -- about 20 or so for Puyopuyo, three for All Stars Racing, and one for Brawl -- and we can definitely afford to bump that up.

I'd like to see less personal advertising this time. That doesn't mean you can't plug your stream or YouTube channel at the start or the finish, but the extra space you're devoting to personal banners could be going towards a webcam shot of you playing and/or a chat box.

I'll leave people to comment on whatever they have in mind.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2013, 05:08:35 pm by Thorn »
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Offline GerbilSoft

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #1 on: January 14, 2013, 02:44:52 pm »
Also, we need ideas for prizes! Post your ideas here and provide Amazon links, if possible.

Offline DarkAura

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #2 on: January 14, 2013, 02:59:12 pm »
I have March 22nd to April 2 off. I can stream then and then only. I can do 06.
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Offline Parax

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #3 on: January 14, 2013, 03:00:46 pm »
Just throwing out that I'm of course up for running my AGDQ games (Sonic 06, Generations) as well as other ones I'm decent at. Optimally we'd have enough participation that each person only has 2 or 3 games each, because past that it gets really difficult to practice properly on each one, especially considering I have a tendency to procrastinate way too much :P

That aside, if we want to be the best Sonic marathon around, then we need to consider what makes a marathon successful. What's going to make people want to donate to us, or more importantly even tune in in the first place? What do we have going for us that will make us unique?

Being the best Sonic speedrunning and competition site around, the main appeal in my opinion is skilled gameplay. That kind of flies out the window when we have people inexperienced and unpracticed playing the games (of course no offense meant here, we didn't have much of a choice with limited participation - just stating the facts). So aside from that, what's going to make us successful?

To take a few pages from SDA, here's what they do right:

- It's constant entertainment. The stream runs 24/7 - you can just turn it on whenever you want and there'll be something going on. (I bring this up because I still really really think we should do a 24/7 marathon next time.)
- The gameplay is ridiculously skilled and the highest quality you'll find anywhere, and getting everybody together in one room creates a pretty great atmosphere.
- Donation incentives. Prizes, challenges, Best Final Fantasy... that sort of thing.
- Something else that comes to mind is the choice of charity combined with the reading of donation comments on air. Cancer is something that affects a lot of people, as evidenced by the number of personal stories that were read out on SDA's stream. That combined with the fact that we read donation comments on air probably helped people to feel a more personal connection with the marathon.
- This is all that comes to mind at the moment, though there's probably more that I'm missing.

I'm not sure what we can take from that, as SDA's model doesn't really work without a LOT of participation from a lot of different people, but I think it's a good starting point to look at how we can improve our marathon. There are lots of marathons that just casually play games with decent commentary. We can do what everyone else does, and we'll be moderately successful. But if we want to be REALLY successful, then we need to look at what we can do that will set our marathon apart and make us unique.

Random idea that came to mind while I was typing this - what if instead of having a marathon lasting a week or however long, we just had one burst lasting a day or so with as much Sonic speedrunning as we can fit, and then held those "marathons" more often until we gained enough traction to make them longer? It's a somewhat unappealing idea on the surface, but if we cut out the crap and stick to the games where we can provide the highest gameplay quality, then we can provide a better viewing experience.

Or we can do everything the way we did before, and hope that the prizes are enough to carry us to success. Just my two cents. :P

Offline Thorn

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #4 on: January 14, 2013, 05:08:48 pm »
I've added a bit about advertising to the first post; go back and read it.

- The gameplay is ridiculously skilled and the highest quality you'll find anywhere, and getting everybody together in one room creates a pretty great atmosphere.

The odds of us getting into one room are about as high as the odds of SonicAD missing a Pokémon match to join us, i.e., really low. inb4 I'm banned. From what I saw, I'm not entirely sure I want any of us sleeping sprawled across chairs with a pizza box over our faces as a curtain anyway. :P That said, I encourage people to get on webcam this year and to act out a bit -- I felt like I had to force too much commentary last time not because there was nothing to say, but because people were extremely quiet. Talk about the game, the level, related topics... hell, talk about what you ate for dinner if there's that much of a dearth. Anybody can watch a YouTube video of a game if they don't want the human element, so we need to bring that element into it.

- Donation incentives. Prizes, challenges, Best Final Fantasy... that sort of thing.

We're already planning to try such incentives this year, as has been stated. We did this in a limited capacity last year, with attempts to garner audience participation and a Sonic CD soundtrack battle, but we're definitely doing it much more this year.

- Something else that comes to mind is the choice of charity combined with the reading of donation comments on air. Cancer is something that affects a lot of people, as evidenced by the number of personal stories that were read out on SDA's stream. That combined with the fact that we read donation comments on air probably helped people to feel a more personal connection with the marathon.

Before the first marathon, TimpZ raised concern about the choice of charity, and several people spoke up to support Child's Play. It's true that fighting cancer or disease directly in the hopes of a future cure creates a bigger response from people than comforting those already ill, but that does little for people that are currently afflicted. When I asked in the Christmas marathon topic about overall plans, there were three replies out of the first seven that addressed the concerns about using Child's Play, and all of them supported it. We also made a point last marathon to read every donation comment.

...if we cut out the crap and stick to the games where we can provide the highest gameplay quality, then we can provide a better viewing experience.

I'm not sure if I entirely agree with you here. I'd say that many of the better moments of the marathon are from when things went off the rails. Skypatrol certainly wasn't practiced, Chaotix co-op was the farthest thing from practiced (even playing it in the practice room at AGDQ with Skullboy was a mess), Sonic Shuffle is impossible to play at high quality, Megamix was done blind, your Sonic 1 Special Stage 1 attempt was hilarious, etc. Let's not forget that half of the Sonic fanbase throws a bitch fit if you treat a speedrunning glitch as serious business. That doesn't mean that streaming good quality runs is wrong, of course -- in fact, it's great -- but creating an enjoyable stream runs deeper than the quality of the runs.

- It's constant entertainment. The stream runs 24/7 - you can just turn it on whenever you want and there'll be something going on. (I bring this up because I still really really think we should do a 24/7 marathon next time.)
...
Random idea that came to mind while I was typing this - what if instead of having a marathon lasting a week or however long, we just had one burst lasting a day or so with as much Sonic speedrunning as we can fit, and then held those "marathons" more often until we gained enough traction to make them longer? It's a somewhat unappealing idea on the surface, but if we cut out the crap and stick to the games where we can provide the highest gameplay quality, then we can provide a better viewing experience.

The problem here is how often the same games are played. One reason I pushed for the Christmas marathon to be shorter is because our game pool is limited -- we've streamed some random stuff on TSC_Streams outside of the marathon, but if we're going to plug a Sonic Marathon for Charity (tm), we need to stay close to that. Frequent 24 hour streams would get very repetitive very fast, unless we build our channel like some of the more famous speedrunners and aim to stream similar content repeatedly; I'm not sure if we could organize ourselves to stream like that constantly. Even if all of this came together, all of the content from the previous marathon added together only adds up to about three straight days, and keeping only the quality content would make that even shorter.

Feel free to rebut anything I've said, by the way. If I'm wrong and these are good, practical ways to increase our scale, I can accept that.
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Offline GerbilSoft

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #5 on: January 14, 2013, 05:21:11 pm »
Idea for an in-person game: Sonic's Gameworld. (I have a Sega Pico and a copy of the game.) Supposedly, there's an objective to the game (you're supposed to get all the Chaos Emeralds), but I haven't seen any Chaos Emeralds at all. (Then again, I haven't played it that much...)

Offline Parax

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #6 on: January 14, 2013, 05:28:11 pm »
Yeah, I was kinda just listing all the things that I think made the SDA marathons such a success. I realize a lot of that is either stuff we're already going to do or stuff that's infeasible for us for one reason or another.

I'm not sure if I entirely agree with you here. I'd say that many of the better moments of the marathon are from when things went off the rails. Skypatrol certainly wasn't practiced, Chaotix co-op was the farthest thing from practiced (even playing it in the practice room at AGDQ with Skullboy was a mess), Sonic Shuffle is impossible to play at high quality, Megamix was done blind, your Sonic 1 Special Stage 1 attempt was hilarious, etc. Let's not forget that half of the Sonic fanbase throws a bitch fit if you treat a speedrunning glitch as serious business. That doesn't mean that streaming good quality runs is wrong, of course -- in fact, it's great -- but creating an enjoyable stream runs deeper than the quality of the runs.

This is true, but the point I was trying to raise was about how we could stick out. This is the kind of thing that every gaming marathon out there does. What makes us different? I think being able to set ourselves apart would be good for us. Maybe removing all the less skilled/casual type play isn't the way to go for us, but it's something to think about for me at least.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2013, 08:37:44 pm by Umbreon »

Offline Werey

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #7 on: January 14, 2013, 07:09:19 pm »
I agree with Thorn, although High quality streaming is good, I think the failures and laughs we had last year was more than enough to keep people entertained. And everyone has to sing Karaoke this year okay?

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #8 on: January 14, 2013, 10:35:24 pm »
i can totally play pso, it would take forever and is probably not realistic to speedrun, but i can totally play it

Offline Xr0s-up

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #9 on: January 14, 2013, 10:39:35 pm »
When and where could we watch the TSC marathon?
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Offline Werey

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #10 on: January 14, 2013, 10:42:08 pm »
http://www.twitch.tv/tsc_streams - This will be the twitch account we'll be using to stream on. As of WHEN, All I know so far is that it's either the week before, during or after easter.

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Offline Taillow

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #11 on: January 14, 2013, 10:43:17 pm »
I'm still up for commentary as long as nothing gets in the way.  As for actually running something?  Uh, I'll get back to you on that.

In all seriousness I want to actually try Advance 3 this year but I need to focus on other stuff this month.
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Offline flying fox

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #12 on: January 15, 2013, 03:36:24 am »
This time no PC issues so I can help out. I'll run Episode Metal and Sonic CD as Tails, since we had Sonic last time. Donation war again for which soundtrack.

Offline SB737

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #13 on: January 15, 2013, 02:19:47 pm »
I'm free 29th March - 14th April, and I'm also available 22nd March Evening, 23rd, and 24th, thats school holidays and weekend before. It would help to know in advance if I'm streaming so then I can arrange around those dates, as I'm sure that is the case for others.
I can stream Sonic 1, 2, and Sonic Generations (But I assume Paraxade will be doing that because he's a bit better) I can also do Colours but I'm probably not the best.
I think high quality is important but as well as a bit of fun, like people have said.
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Offline TimpZ

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #14 on: January 15, 2013, 03:00:28 pm »
Thorn, my main concern about the choice of charity was that there might be better causes to donate for. Child's play is a legit charity but first of all there's already a lot of marathons that donate to them and secondly, there might be other places where money is needed more. SDA is pretty niche with PCF and I think they're better off for it, escpecially considering how many have been affected by cancer specifically. Therefore I'd be open to other suggestions since I wouldn't want to choose CP just so we can raise money for -something-. Something like cancer research is global and timeless while entertainment for hospitalised kids, 90% of them in the USA (and the rest still in privileged parts of the world), is more of an government and parental issue and also affected by wear. But that's just my 2 cents and if the community agrees then I'm of course up for it.

Regarding the marathon itself, I definitely see quality being the priority. Considering the competition levels of games like Sonic 2, SA2 and Generations, there definitely should be a high standard for the games played given that people sign up for it (which I'm sure won't be much of a problem). But then there's mid-level games like Advance 3, Secret Rings or even Ristar and low-level ones like everyones favourite Tails Skypatrol. The quality should definitely be as high as possible but with considerations for games that are on the schedule because of popularity, curiosity and comedy accordingly. A "community choice" of a hacked game might be cool too like co-op Robo Blast 2 or something.

Personally I think the marathon should be split into parts. Perhaps there could be 2D and 3D days to reflect the races we hold and if we feel pressed for time I don't really see the problem with having different categories in the same game being run as long as there's enough of a difference such as Sonic 100% glitchless vs Knuckles any% in Sonic 3 or Hero/Dark story in SA2 but not Sonic vs Knuckles in Sonic 2. Something like a mega-race where as many people involved possible race a single game, perhaps Sonic 1 might be a consideration, just like the SMW race in the SMW marathon.

If you want I could do Sonic 2 and/or 3, but I'd want to know the category a good while before the marathon for practise in that case. But I feel that planning and signing up should be in split threads to make things less clutty.

Offline Parax

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #15 on: January 15, 2013, 03:31:22 pm »
Yeah, I think I agree with TimpZ. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Child's Play, but it's kind of the default gaming charity, and I can't imagine most of our participants or viewers have any sort of personal connection to it. I think it'd be good to take a look at some other charities and see whether there are any causes that have any meaning personally to anyone here. Here's a link with a list:

http://www.charitywatch.org/toprated.html

And the list of causes supported by the charities on the page:

  • Abortion & Family Planning
  • African-American
  • AIDS
  • American Indian
  • Animal & Animal Protection
  • Asia & Asian-American
  • Blind & Visually-Impaired
  • Cancer
  • Child Protection
  • Child Sponsorship
  • Civil Rights & Advocacy
  • Consumer Protection & Legal Aid
  • Crime & Fire Prevention
  • Disabled
  • Drug & Alcohol Abuse
  • Environment
  • Gun Control
  • Health
  • Hispanic
  • Homelessness & Housing
  • Human Rights
  • Human Services
  • Hunger
  • International Relief & Development
  • Jewish & Israel
  • Literacy
  • Mental Health & Disabilities
  • Peace & International Relations
  • Population Planning
  • Public Policy
  • Senior Citizens
  • Terminally or Chronically Ill
  • Veterans & Military
  • Women's Rights
  • Youth Development
  • Youth - Residential Care

We're not limited to the ones on the list, of course, if anyone's got anything else in mind. But thoughts?

Personally I can see an animal protection or environmental charity working well as it sorta reflects the Sonic franchise.

Offline DarkAura

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #16 on: January 15, 2013, 03:40:58 pm »
lol Women's Rights. Put me down for that one.

And also I would like to point out that "high quality" is overrated. What's more fun than watching hilarious outtakes?
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Offline SB737

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #17 on: January 15, 2013, 03:48:42 pm »
I reckon something to do with animals is a good charity, and I'd say if I'm watching a stream I like to see good quality, admittedly the fails are funny, but for some of the games that are most popular need good quality, maybe some of the more unpopular games like Ristar or something can be good with a blind run, but thats just my opinion
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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #18 on: January 15, 2013, 05:11:30 pm »
my vote goes to AIDS or Cancer.

Offline Werey

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #19 on: January 16, 2013, 05:21:00 am »
In all seriousness, SRB2 is a must. The only problem is we've streamed it on our channel multiple times since the marathon and it might get a bit boring to the followers who watched us play.
Although, there are level packs out there we could play, and this game is good because no matter how much we play, Hyper still fails.

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Offline Thorn

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #20 on: January 16, 2013, 01:55:44 pm »
^ Werey, there are ten people (tops) who have watched us play. I don't think that's a big deal. There also aren't any level packs larger than the ones we've played, so I think we've found the ones we would use for a marathon run.
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Offline Antronach

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #21 on: January 16, 2013, 03:04:59 pm »
If I can get settled down by then I can do Sonic Riders (singing included) and All Stars racing Transformed. You can throw me in on All Stars Racing too if you need some community effort.
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Offline Combo

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #22 on: January 16, 2013, 06:22:11 pm »
I can do Sonic Advance 2 again, bidding war for characters, or maybe even a set donation goal for an all emerald run with Sonic.  Would have to find the route for the SP rings though if we do.
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Offline CosmicFalcon

Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #23 on: January 20, 2013, 11:21:56 am »
I can provide witty and sarcastic remarks.
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Offline Shadow Jacky

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Re: Marathon 2013 -- For Real This Time
« Reply #24 on: January 21, 2013, 06:30:36 am »
I don't know playing a game this time around, but If my schedule stays the same or I don't find another job by then, I'll be available for more of the marathon this time.
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