Yeah well, don't take my word for it, but it's merely an observation I have. When I started playing Tetris DS on wifi, the garbage columns were in a pretty orderly fashion. Then as I rose in the ranks, the garbage columns became more randomized. There have been quite a few me-7000 versus them-7000 matches where most of my garbage blocks in a given chunk of time were almost completely randomized with no empty columns. At least, that's what I've observed.
Random observation about garbage- you ALWAYS get random garbage in Mission Marathon when you run out of time, so it's obviously coded in there somewhere. I wonder if there's any way that this complete randomness could be also worked into multiplayer?
Something I thought of just now. Maybe this has been repeated and if it has then I'm sorry. Look at it this way. When you compete a tetris, you're sending the 4 lines over to your opponent. Since you used an I block, the holes are going to be in the same place for those 4 lines. If you do bTb tetrises in the same spot (for example, the left edge), then you have 8 lines with the holes lined up perfectly. So maybe a way to get around that would be to do Tetrises in different places? Eh, hopefully that made sense. I'm a little out of it right now.
Except in DuelTris (for Apple IIGS), the position of holes in garbage is independent of the position of the tetromino that created the garbage. When you send a triple using L or J, it doesn't leave a hole 2 blocks wide, does it?
The garbage behavior in TGM does that, actually. So clearing with the I will send clean lines, while with other pieces the garbage becomes messier. Erasing multiple doubles/triples with Z/S/L/J will send some pretty hard-to-clear garbage into the other player's field.
aww man i wish i'd read this thread again before doing what i just did well, at least my testing was done a little differently... i played against the level 5 cpu in TDS to see what kind of garbage i would get (specifically how often the holes would change) if the cpu started the game with a tetris. of course it's possible there are different algorithms handling randomness of garbage received vs garbage sent when playing the computer, but i couldn't find any evidence of this. i simply waited to observe the garbage i received if the first garbage attack came from a tetris, otherwise i restarted. i only recorded the number of times the hole changed out of a possible 3 (with 4 lines sent for a tetris, there are 3 chances for the hole to change), because this was my only interest. after 100 successful attempts this is what i found: no hole change x 34 1 hole change x 41 2 hole changes x 24 3 hole changes x 1 total hole changes: 92/300 = 30.7% it's generally assumed at this point that in TDS the garbage hole changes 30% of time, which gives these odds when there are 3 chances for the hole to change (assuming i did my math correctly): no hole change: 34.3% 1 hole change: 44.1% 2 hole changes: 18.9% 3 hole changes: 2.7% so nothing really interesting. if there'd never been 3 hole changes with 4 lines received during my testing it would've left open the possibility that it's impossible under the circumstances i tested in, but nope. anyway, here's something that is kind of interesting: Bob witnessed the hole changing 4 times consecutively. if it's supposed to change 30% of the time, there's a 0.8% chance that will happen (correct me if i'm wrong). it's possible some of us here have never seen it. well, if you haven't played a ton.
