SFX Decision

The results of the SFX poll were extremely close to 50/50. Since it was pretty much inconclusive I decided to just make my own choice and keep SFX on in the Crash 3 Any% (no major skips) TAS. I apologize for ignoring the slight preference towards no SFX but the following reasons should hopefully explain my choice.

I personally would prefer no SFX. It makes very little difference to the entertainment and I am usually very against speed entertainment tradeoffs. But the thing is, if I wanted to go as fast as possible I would be using item glitch and gate clip and just doing the any% category. Any% (no major skips) already contains arbitrary restrictions put in place for entertainment. Since this category itself is already focused on entertainment over speed it makes sense to keep SFX on. While there are some people that like SFX off purely for entertainment (being able to hear music and faster level transistions) I have to assume that most of the votes for it off were based on speed.

If I keep it on it makes literally no difference to the route. As a result I can calculate the exact time that is would be with SFX off.

I also feel that the people that the poll reached caused some bias. The main traffic on the poll came from the Crash speedrunning community. While they all have valid opinions and intelligent reasoning, generally there will be a preference among speedrunners to have the TAS resemble the non tool-assisted speedrun as much as possible (no SFX).

Lastly, the majority of non-anonymous votes for keeping SFX on came from the TASvideos community and staff. Unfortunately I do have to consider these more strongly since pleasing the TASvideos staff could lead to the TAS entering a better tier and reaching more viewers.

I apologize to those who were disappointed with the outcome and I wish I could have turned it off with less backlash but hopefully keeping it on will lead to the TAS being more successful and exposing more people to speedrunning.