The cools are very stupid..The rule about the 2 sec not lower than the previous section is...stupid !!! I often fail a cool because of a too fast precedent one, is it logical ?? Even if I do every section very fast ?? Pff..I should be m9, and I am only m8 because of section time 0,3 sec too much faster.. Do you have an idea about it ? There is not a lot of stupid rules in TGM, but this one is ..
Wow someone agrees with me. I have a streak going right now... the last 7 Special Ti games I played refused to give me the 3rd COOL...
So I should purposely slow down the first 2 sections to ensure I get a higher grade. I'll repeat what has been said: There is not a lot of stupid rules in TGM, but this one is .. As if Special Ti wasn't frustrating enough already...
I agree. This is a retarded rule. The difficulty increases the faster you get and there's seemingly no true compensation other than a faster completion time (which would still be encouraged without the rule). It would have made a lot more sense if the speed kept increasing, but instead, it remains static after 1200. If you're not extremely consistent, chances are you'll miss one or more of the last 3 cools. Trivial things like one missed tetris or one tetris too much in a section can really kill you. I think it's ridiculous to punish a player for playing extremely well in a previous section and only playing well in the next. It's basically telling you to play well in all sections, which isn't necessarily a bad thing...BUT...if you can't, play average for all of them. "If you're not good enough, don't try." That's not really my cup of tea. The true problem that I see here is that the game only punishes and doesn't reward you for playing consistently better. You play worse, you get punished with a missed cool. You play consistently average, you get rewarded with a cool. You play consistently better, you get rewarded with a cool. There should be an incentive to play consistently better other than to time attack, which could be done with or without the cools.
Really ?? You to ? What is the hell with this damn 3rd cool, the worst is that sometimes, I can get it in playing very crappy, on a keyboard and other time where I will do a perfect time attack, I will miss it..
Do you have a problem DIGITAL ?? You don't impress me with your "3.2 - 3.5 TPS (192 - 210 TPM) manual locking consistency" Be sure that one day I will make you cry..
Hmm? I wasn't replying to you. I was just fixing a line I said earlier. If anything, I'm agreeing with you. EDIT: And as for the 3.2-3.5 TPS consistency, that's what I'm training for, not what I can already do. I've hit 3.7 TPS before but even holding 3.3 TPS for multiple sections is mentally demanding in and of itself.
I don't know what you guys are complaining about other than you can't play fast enough. Seriously, section COOLs are exactly what TAP needed: - It replaces the convoluted m-roll conditions by making them a part of the grading system - It makes the game not so slow in the beginning (BIG plus) - Since the conditions are part of the grade system, there is increased granularity and a far more specific indicator of skill, especially concerning how far away the player is from Grand Master (missed a COOL? go faster! got all COOLs but didn't get the m-roll? stack better! got the m-roll but didn't clear it? invisible training time!). TAP does not really offer this. - The grades scale with the speed curve in a logical way (grade S1 is generally given around level 300, where 20G starts, and M1 is given around level 600, where the speed maxes out) - It checks your section time at *70 rather than at a section clear, so level stops generally will not fuck you up unless you're going slow enough to get a REGRET. - You get two effin' seconds of leeway! If you can't at least match your previous section time, do you really deserve a Master grade?
That is ok mushroom, but definitely, no for me.. Code: Kevin Birrell 000-100 : 1:08:55 0:51:13 COOL 100-200 : 1:10:00 0:49:05 COOL 200-300 : 1:10:61 0:48:40 COOL 300-400 : 0:57:68 0:40:20 COOL 400-500 : 0:59:05 0:38:73 COOL Amnesia 000-100 : 0:52:46 0:37:83 COOL 100-200 : 0:49:68 0:34:38 COOL 200-300 : 1:06:91 0:42:50 300-400 : 0:50:26 0:29:81 COOL 400-500 : 0:36:18 0:25:50 COOL
mushroom, we're not complaining about the inclusion of cools, only the 2 second rule. As for being strong enough to always match the previous x70 time or beat it, there's a flaw in that idea. It's counterintuitive for everyone who is not strong enough yet. Take this situation for example. Someone does not perform so well on the first section but still manages to get the cool. On that first section, the player had stacked really high but didn't get to clear anything down. On the second section, he now has some extra tetrises to start with. But wait, if he makes too many tetrises, he'll screw himself for the next section. So instead, he's artificially making only enough tetrises to not be screwed. The result is that the player performed a bad first section and now has to perform average for the second as well. There's no way to compensate for the bad first section by playing much better in the second section. If you do play much better, you're only screwing yourself in the third section. It's a nasty cycle really.
Firstly, that's why you don't do badly on the third section. Secondly, you're not supposed to compensate for a bad section. With as many grades as this game has, anything as big as a bad section is going to reflect in your final grade somehow. Doing really well after a bad section doesn't mean you're compensating; it means your game is uneven. It's the same principle as the grade point system. Sheer number of Tetrises doesn't determine your grade, what determines your grade is your ability to maintain a consistent number of Tetrises throughout the whole game. If you have any major slip-ups, it's extremely hard to recover due to the way the whole system is set up. Why shouldn't that extend to section times too? You probably stacked much better though, which is what the largest part of the grade system attempts to detect.
It's not as easy as it sounds. The better you perform, the harder you make the game for yourself. That's a concept that's counterintuitive. If you put in more effort, the game should become easier, not harder. If you perform 7 tetrises in section 2, and have a clear field, it's freaking hard to beat that in section 3 if not impossible. As for unevenness, are you telling me that if you screw up, you should just quit and start over? The consistency of tetrises is a good idea to encourage but to enforce it so that you can't even make up for one mistake? If you do, you'll have to hold yourself back in order to exploit the system? The message it's giving to players is not at all ideal for the player's improvement. I don't know anyone who can play perfect on their first try.
You put in enough effort to have the game assume you're skilled enough to handle higher speeds and keep roughly the same pace with a small margin of error for balance. Depending on how fast you can finish a section, keeping up with the speed always remains a challenge even when you're absolutely solid in 1200 speed, and it doesn't expect slower but still efficient players to reach such lofty heights; the only penalty is a slower clear time if the player can make at least the baseline requirements, which aren't demanding at all. You don't have to beat it. You don't even have to match it; you have two extra seconds for chrissakes. Accomplishing this doesn't require you to get seven Tetrises per section, it just requires that you make no large mistakes and the upped speed curve takes care of the rest. One really big mistake, or many, many small mistakes. The grade point system doesn't punish you for making mistakes, it punishes you for not taking care of those mistakes quickly and efficiently. Of course not. Otherwise grades would have no purpose. You should play to get better, and the grades are there to help reflect any noticeable shortcomings. Getting Grand Master is difficult; it's supposed to be. The higher the grades get, the more the game will demand of you. That's just how it works.
The issue is that if you clear the second section with 7 tetrises, it's because your stack was high going into it, and when you come out of it, you are likely to have a very LOW stack, and it will becoem physically impossible to get within 2 seconds of your section 2 performance, because it was a sub-par performance in section 1 (or major stacking at the level sto) that allowed you to do it in the first place. The correct thing to do is to abuse the level stop in section 2 if this happens, to get yourself a high stack to repeat the performance.
Amusing that Amnesia chooses to surpass me while I'm away at a festival. Personally I don't mind the COOL system and the two second rule. Maybe the notion that playing slower could yield a higher grade seems stupid, but Master for me has always been far more about rewarding consistency and high numbers of Tetrises over rewarding speed. For the speed freaks, there is Shirase. I don't play slower but instead just make sure my stack is around the same height at x70 each time and try not to fuck up a section too much. I will miss the 3rd and 4th COOLs with annoying frequency, but I can make them often enough. I wouldn't say I was that skilled as a player, but I've managed to make every single section COOL before now (aside from the last one because I think I died around 960) just by giving the criteria a little attention and altering my play accordingly.
I don't agree with putting in enough effort. The player should be encouraged to put in maximum effort at all times. The player should never have to sacrifice effort for consistency. That's the thing. The difficulty scales with your speed improvement. The grade, excluding the cools, does not scale at all. With grades, you can expect to get better grades the more tetrises you perform. You know that with enough tetrises, you can beat the grade system. With speed, you can't say the same. After a certain point, playing faster does not give you any advantage over the 2 second rule. Again, I stress that this is easier said than done, given I'd say 5 is the average number of tetrises per section. The funny thing is that if you hadn't made 6-7 tetrises in the previous section, you wouldn't have to push yourself that much harder in the next section. In the very beginning, the speed curve growth is too slow to compensate for this (stacking for 1-2 tetrises is by no means quick) and in the end, it doesn't even increase at all (1200+). Two seconds is not that big of a window to fix a mistake. It might seem insignificant to already elite players, but to an improving player, it's quite discouraging. It doesn't matter whether the system punishes you for making a mistake or for not fixing it quickly enough. It's still punishing you for not playing perfectly, perfect in the sense that you're playing like an elite player from the start. Anyhow, the point I'm trying to make is that given only a 2 second error window, maintaining consistency is harder than it seems. Not if the game is telling me otherwise. Consistency will often trump playing better. Consistency does not equate to playing better. A player can play consistently poor, consistently average, consistently excellent, or consistently whatever. What's bad about this is that the game will punish the player for the journey and only reward the end result. Here's a fictitious example. Let's say a player performs average for sections 1-5 and gets a grade of 10 (made up grade). Section 1: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 2: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 3: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 4: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 5: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Total: +10 grades Now let's have the same player improve on section 1. Aww, too bad, the player gets the same grade even though he played better. Section 1: Excellent = +2 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 2: Average = +1 for tetrises Section 3: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 4: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 5: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Total: +10 grades Let's make it more extreme. Damn, the player still gets the same grade because he got better at the wrong sections. Section 1: Excellent = +2 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 2: Average = +1 for tetrises Section 3: Excellent = +2 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Section 4: Average = +1 for tetrises Section 5: Average = +1 for tetrises, +1 for section cool Total: +10 grades It will only reward you after you have become better in all sections or better in consecutive sections. The former is discouraging and the latter is arbitrary at best, Getting GM should of course be hard, no question. But the steps getting there should not be hard because of retarded rules.
Here are two alternatives that I would propose. Both do not care about having a consistent number of tetrises per section. If you don't make enough tetrises in one section, that's already enough punishment because you'll have wasted precious levels and also have to make up for it in the sections after. So a player doesn't spread 10 tetrises equally across two equally hard sections, big deal. The total amount of tetrises the player makes across those two sections more or less indicates consistent skill. Here's my first idea. For the current system, remove the 2 second rule and just decrease the section cool times to make it harder. Weaker players will not reap the benefits of the cool. Stronger players will always get the cools because they're strong enough. That's the mild approach. For a future system, here's my radical approach: add section cool tiers. For example, let's say section 1 requires you reach x70 in 50 seconds to get the cool. If you can reach x70 in 45 seconds, you'll get 1.5 cools and then perhaps 2 cools if you reach it in 40 seconds. You can make it so that every 5 seconds shaved is worth .5 cools. The worth and time can change across the sections for balance. This would encourage maximum effort regardless of previous section mistakes or previous overexertion. And one last thing, this approach requires more grades than what we have now.
