Re: [NES] A-Type and on an unrelated note: what is the longest drought you have ever seen? i started some level 19 play today and saw this: a 48 piece drought to start off. anybody seen a longer one? i wonder the probability (or improbability) of this happening. it has to be rare.
Re: [NES] A-Type The most vicious drought I know of is Matt's 81 piece wait (and who knows, it could have gone on for longer if he had lived!) It is very rare, but I forget the exact stats. I'll have to work them out again later.
Re: [NES] A-Type I forgot to take a picture of it before it filled up but I saw it was at 179 lines. 314,377 Starting Level: 9 Ending Level: 17 Lines: 179 Points/line: 1,756 NES Tetris on NES hardware. The irony is that I was intentionally NOT trying to get a good score. My goal was to start at level 9 and just focus on good play - avoiding mistakes and cleaning them up quickly when they occurred.
Re: [NES] A-Type @don- keep em coming! that is the first 300k game i have seen you post. kudos, and 400k is just around the corner. you had also mentioned you'd be streaming your games on your blog is that still gonna happen? if so, i not only want to watch, but would like help figuring out how to do so myself. @kitaru- holy god that was a painful video to watch. matt does quite a job of weathering quite a storm though. the best part was the barely audible "that's ridiculous" he mutters at the end. priceless. puts my pain (i.e. drought) to shame. i will complain no more forever.
Re: [NES] A-Type @Don: Out of curiosity, do you remember how you used to move pieces back in the day (i.e. rapid tapping or using the game's move speed)? How do you move pieces now by comparison? I guess I'm wondering what your old methods were and if you're trying to get up to speed (heh) with how you used to play or if there has been any change as a result of being introduced to how everyone else is playing. @wmdg: Definitely. Matt has accrued quite a collection of painful droughts. I should hope not to face such dire challenges in routine play, but I would aspire to resist as admirably as Matt has in the face of true cruelty.
Re: [NES] A-Type @wasmachstdugern I've been avoiding streaming because my play has been so sad. I can help you get set up though if you like. Do you have a webcam? We can do a Skype session. What operating system do you use? @Kitaru I actually don't remember what I used to use. To be honest - I'm not sure what I'm using now! I'll have to pay attention at the higher levels. Once the action gets fast I might switch to tapping - not sure. I'm hoping to crack 400K this weekend. I'm pretty sure I can do it. My real goal though currently is just to play well and make good decisions every time. I'll get my stream up after I eat some lunch.
Re: [NES] A-Type @don- thanks! i actually emailed a friend who is gonna help me set it up this weekend but your offer is very kind. i hate trying to get things done through skype anyway. also, once you start beginning your games in 18 you'll find your scores drastically increase. the tetrises are basically worth twice what they are on the lower ones. good luck sir.
Re: [NES] A-Type I fell well-short of 400K this weekend - I was a little too ambitious. I did set a new personal record though and developed a solid level 15 game I think. I had a lot of games at 4,000 points/line but I just couldn't maintain that pace more than 30 lines or so. Score: 326,764 Starting Level: 15 (I think? Maybe 12.) Ending Level: 16 Lines: 134 Points/line: 2,438 NES Tetris on NES hardware.
Re: [NES] A-Type here is the link to my max out game....Thanks!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCobptwlR6s
Re: [NES] A-Type As I said elsewhere, well played! You responded very well to some tough situations. Congrats again on the max!
Re: [NES] A-Type hey alex....not a big deal, but this is the new link for my maxout game....its the same game...just a different url......thanks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzwjLTtcn5c&feature=youtu.be
Re: [NES] A-Type So I was talking to Victor Sandberg (think "Missile Command") today he had an interesting idea. Instead of recording the highest line count after maxing out - why not just calculate the points that would be achieved after 999,999? We know the formula. This method has the following benefits: 1. A higher score just looks cooler. 1,000,110 instead of "999,999 29+2.13" which takes a bit of translation. 2. For lines achieved beyond 999,999 the type becomes important - a double vs. a single, etc. This also makes a level 29 single more valuable than a level 26 single - which kind of makes sense. Anyway, just something for discussion.
Re: [NES] A-Type Yeah, I was discussing this with Thor the other day as well. There are several different ways you could slice it. Continuing to run the score total is also pretty logical -- if the game tracked past a million, we wouldn't even be having this discussion! Personally I like the efficiency/earliest category -- the goal in everyone's mind is 999,999 since the score counter stops there, so it also makes a lot of sense to use level/lines progress when "crossing the finish line" as the metric for sorting out the ties. The line efficiency goal has also historically been used for other scoreboards with max-outs such as the ones for Sega Tetris, so this NES leaderboard follows the same methodology. The way we present things here gets a bit funny given that we measure progress in terms of level+lines as to not unnecessarily penalize games starting from Level 9, but I think this is a relatively minor drawback. (Would people prefer that it be notated as 29.213 levels instead of level 29+2.13 lines? Fractional lines are still a useful tiebreaker, but we could just notate things purely in terms of the level progress to avoid the messy notation.) Whichever way you slice it however, it's by no means perfect. The metric was just sort of selected as a means to avoid a big run of 1st place at the top. Even if we change the sorting metric, I don't even have everyone's best data -- I'm positive Harry, Jonas, and Thor are underrated on my current listing, but I don't have better videos from them to work from. If we switched to the score method, we also don't currently have any post-max footage from Matt Buco's game. When talking with Thor, we both kind of agreed that both "best victory lap" and "earliest completion" both sort of hinge on rolling an "easy" game in terms of I-piece frequency. Jonas and Thor have both said that they prefer the hard-won victories where the game is a bit mean with the pieces, which is part of why I think we haven't seen "better" videos from them. Let's use that "hardest max-out" idea as a jumping point: why not use the number of I-pieces as our metric for breaking ties? I think whether we take that number directly or sample it indirectly (as in the "best victory lap" or "earliest finish" metrics, since more I's means better/faster scoring), I think the problem is that the player can't very well opt to have an easier or harder game thrown at them. So, I don't think it'll ever be a perfect measure once you get up there. Whatever metric is used to sort out the maxes, I think it's best not to read into it too much. Anyway, back to the originally proposed point, I think the score method and the progress method are both pretty similar in that good scoring means an early completion, which gives you more room to make the most of your post-max victory lap. What I like about the progress method is that it can be done with just the numbers on the screen. Also, it's a a somewhat frivolous argument, but there isn't any way to tell if drop points should be added from video. Even if there were, it's obnoxious to count drop score due to the math bugs. Like I said, it's kind of a silly argument, but single points could potentially break ties in a scoring method. In a world where the counter continued past 1 million, one could imagine we might have top rankers milking 19-28 for drop points and then getting whatever small increases possible once their post-29 game falls apart to get that slight edge on their records.
Re: [NES] A-Type I-beam count is an interesting idea but I think it ultimately gets into dangerous territory. While fewer I-beams does make for a harder game, it's possible to get a ton of I-beams and get them all at terrible times, or get other terrible drops like 4 O-blocks in a row or alternating S and Z (and nothing else - happened to me tonight! ). TL;DR: It doesn't necessarily follow that a game with fewer I-beams is harder than a game with more I-beams (though it is likely). My other thought is: Why avoid a big race to the top? I think it was Ben who said that he thought no one could beat him and that he would forever be on top until Harry Hong came along. I think it's the competition that drives us to greater heights. (I say this knowing that most of you will always be better than me.)
Re: [NES] A-Type Yeah, easy/hard game definitely gets into difficult to quantify territory. I proposed I-piece quantity for the sake of argument since is very easily quantifiable. Also, the player will likely have the resources to quickly max or overdrive the score given a surplus of I's and may not be able to accomplish either given a dearth. I think it's less "avoid a big race to the top" and more "what is the top?" There are a lot of different ways to challenge yourself outside "getting all of the points" within the game. So, I guess what I'm saying is that not everyone is currently aiming for the same goal beyond the max, and as such it doesn't follow that "X is better than Y because he's higher on Kitaru's leaderboard!" For example, Thor's only available video is his "collections game" (start 19, max it, end 30 -- a collection of many notable achievements) -- it could have ranked better on this board if he spent less time prepping for 29->30 and just shot for the max, but that obviously wasn't his goal. I also think people are more prone to shoot for the Level 19 max as a follow-up than focus a lot of effort on upgrading a "normal" max. Beyond that, you have goals that exist outside the scope of a single game, like the repeat/back-to-back and the threepeat/b2b2b. Anyway, I digress. I guess at the end of the day, I'm not going to be in the business of equating disparate goals and I can only very reasonably pick one metric (or perhaps two, with sufficient justification) for a text-based ranking. This is the one that people thought made sense at the time, so I'm going to keep rolling with it for now, despite some of the top players not pursuing it closely. For the time being, I think more of the core competitive aspect past max will likely reside with the Classic Tetris World Championships, other smaller live live tournaments such as the one held at the Midwest Gaming Classic, and various online streaming competitions. Speaking of the Skype/Google Hangout/streaming competitions, I think we're due for some more of those some time soon. Hopefully we can get the ball rolling on that one in the coming weeks.
Re: [NES] A-Type Fair enough. Speaking of which - who's going to Portland in October? (Scratch that - I'll open another thread as not to derail this one!)
