I think the reason they institute piece delays and speed caps is to keep the game fun for the largest percentage of players. I know I'm good at Tetris, but not TGM good, and certainly not Shirase mode good. I'm probably part of the majority who have TDS and are thankful for those caps for at least giving me a chance. I guarantee you that if they had allowed 4 tetrominoes per second in TDS, at least half of the people who bought it to play online would have taken it back, saying it was impossible to even come close to winning against the speed players. If I were a game designer, I'd rather have 1,000,000 people of average skill playing my game rather than 2000 elite players. (Just throwing out numbers here) Don't get me wrong -- I like the idea of players just going faster and faster -- in single player mode, where it won't affect another player's gameplay experience. Being fast should provide an advantage, but not one where it's impossible for someone that can do 2 pieces per second in an unrestricted environment to come back against someone that can do 3. There's a reason that the games that can reach 3+ pps are either single-player or free online ones: The freebie game makers don't have to worry about keeping a certain audience, and the single-player ones don't have to worry about alienating an audience. Unless the 2,000 4 tetrominoes per second players are willing to each buy 500 copies of the game, EACH, to make up for the sales that would be lost by catering the game to them as opposed to the majority, gameplay at such high speeds won't be done on an online multiplayer level for a pay game.
But isn't that the point of the ELO style ranking system used by TDS Wi-Fi, to match people who play 60tpm vs. other people who play 60tpm?
i have an idea. the worst players play at what? about 30tpm? okay, so lets set the delay to about two seconds per tetromino. this game will now appeal to everyone! right? the bell-shaped skill distribution among players should stay symmetrical regardless of delay. in other words, some players will almost always lose, and some will almost always win. most will do about half and half. to tell you the truth, mewtwo, and i know this will sound kind of bad, but i think i have to say it. you tend to come of as a scrub. you don't want people to improve past a certain point? sorry, but i just can't stand casual tetris advocates. also, earlier i remember you often used "bad garbage" as an excuse for losing. what was the term you used? scrubs often blame the game for their own losses.
Like tepples said, the ELO ranking system prevents this from happening often if ever. I don't even remember the last time I faced a person in the 5k and below range. Allowing the game to have such speeds only makes the rankings more accurate. Obviously, the more accurate the system, the lower the chance a high rated player will play a very low rated player. By your logic, this will actually attract more players. Why should it not be an advantage? Logically, the better player wins. If a player had better stacking skills compared to another player who is horrible, should he not win? Speed falls into the same category as a skill.
I have no coherently structured opinion regarding this either for or against. But a couple of random thought fragments on some of the points put forth: -I agree with others that TDS's rating/match-up system works fairly well in preventing the better players from utterly owning the beginner players to the point of driving them away from the game. However it is also true that players with sub-5000 rating skills must suffer the initial mental strain of multiple consecutive losses until the rating drops to match the player's skill. -I believe it is also true that tuning the game towards experts and being brutal towards beginners will act against building the overall player base of the game. TGM is such a game, as it forces a faster minimum speed on players, and also happens to have a pretty limited player population compared to other games (even putting the mostly-arcade-only and Japan-only factors into consideration). -It's not entirely true that games that support >3 pieces/sec are always fanmade or single player; TGM3 has a Shirase vs mode, and in fact just a couple of days ago there was a tournament using that mode. Although obviously that mode is rarely played, as it requires both players to be of skill levels high enough to be able to process Shirase. TGM ACE, on the other hand, does not contain a >20G versus mode. (Whether the developer wanted to include it or not is unclear.) -I think one reason animations exist, aside from limiting the upper speed limit, is to make the game cognitively better comprehensible. In the real world, most objects usually move at speeds that the eye can track; They do not instantly blink into new locations, instead they usally leave residual-image trails in between the original and new. When such jumps in perception do happen they cause some cognitive dissonance (disorientation), however small, on the part of the observer. The places where animations and effects are applied in official games mostly look to me like places where the game breaks that general rule. Many games make visual trails when a piece is hard-dropped to compensate for the cognitive jump, for instance. I think the piece clear / top-of-stack fall animation, and per-pixel smooth falling in some games (though I dislike that one), exists in a similar vein. -Another reason for line-clear animations could probably be for the sense of accomplishment/reinforcement. The game has always had a layered learning structure, where one first learns to move the pieces, then to rotate, then to stack cleanly, learning to look at the preview, purposely aiming for 4-line clears, and so on. That line-clears take up some amount of time confirms to the user that they have achieved something, and reinforces the player to keep playing. Many games take that up a notch, to specifically recognize and visually or aurally declare Tetrises or T-spins when the player makes them (such as the Game Boy version's didudidum-wheeze Tetris noise), which I'm sure a lot of people got a great feeling out of at an early time when they were picking up the game. Eventually, making Tetrises become second nature and something not worth getting praised on, but at the beginning stages they certainly work as reinforcements to learn. -I can also see how such 'cognition/reinforcement sugar' inhibits high speed play. Perhaps the only solution to keep the experts happy while keeping the learning curve intact for beginners is to split the game off into different modes or a different game altogether. Then again, the rightsholders want players all playing by the same rules, at least for now when that versus-between-different-Tetrions concept hasn't been realized yet.
kind of interesting read, and i think you kind of touched on why designers add these animations in the first place. i'm not saying i don't like animations, though-- just delay. i wouldn't mind seeing the rows animate after a tetris-- if i can still immediately move my next tetromino. it's kind of a neat effect. cultris implements this solution, but i think i remember another one somewhere.
This happens in Vs. CPU as well. There are a lot of players who can't beat level 1. Cultris being the obvious example. The ideal game would run these animations significantly faster once they notice the player doing a lot of hard dropping. Which has also been characterized as a "pause" sound followed by a "mount Yoshi" sound. What about level 0 vs. level 9 in Tetris & Dr. Mario on Super NES? Something like that, combined with the reduction of entry delay and line delay in later levels of TAP and later TGM games, is a start. Unofficially, the versus-between-different-Tetrions concept is also the way Lockjaw is headed eventually. Each LJField corresponds to one tetrion, and each LJControl and LJView correspond to how the player interacts with it. So what would happen if you choose to hard drop before the animation has completed?
Yeah, and that does block a fair bit of the detrimental part that would come with reducing or eliminating speedcaps. What I'm getting at, I'll post below, as I have one answer that responds to more than one person's question/response. First off, you're exaggerating re: the delay. You actually made my point for me -- the bell curve of player skill...the speedcaps currently favor the majority; those who are going about 50/50 in online play are the ones who like the speed just the way it is. If you limit speed further, the game becomes too slow for the majority of players, and they'll get fed up with it and quit. Likewise, if you reduce the limits too much, the game becomes too fast for the majority of players, and the same thing will happen. Call me a scrub if you want; I'll be glad to get back onto TDS -JUST- for you. I don't want people to gain TOO much of an advantage, regardless of skill level. Basically, I want the competitive environment to be like poker, as opposed to basketball. Tetris with the speedcaps completely eliminated, and a tournament setting where someone who can throw down 3 tps is going against someone who can only do 1.5 is like throwing a random scrub off the street against Shaquille O'Neal in his prime. There's absolutely no way the random is going to win (and before you start saying "that's how it should be", let me get to the other half of this.) Tetris with speedcaps currently like they are is like tournament poker, where the person who can throw down the maximum tps the game allows is like Phil Hellmuth, and the person who can get close to that but not 100% is like a random -- but in this case, the random actually has a chance of winning if the garbage lines up, they can send stuff back, smart downstacking to compensate for the lower speed, etc. Tetris on your own, fine, kill the speedcaps and brag through your leaderboards and time to full-clear of Shirase and your GM rankings and whatnot. But as soon as any kind of Vs. or tournament aspect is brought into it, there needs to be some kind of way for a mid-tier player to have a remote chance against an upper-tier player. I'm not questioning that it should be an advantage -- just how MUCH of one. To relent a bit, even if they took TDS as it was currently, and loosened the speedcaps a bit, that'd be fine -- there's no current tournament "pay X money or enter for free, winner of the online tournament gets $xx,xxx" going on now. But what if that DOES happen with the Nintendo Wii, or the next portable Tetris incarnation? People play the game, you have your scrubs, your okay people, your average people, your great people, and your elites (trying to cover a bit of each part of the bell curve here), there's a series of online tournaments, and an elite wins every single one without anyone else even having had a chance. That's where I think the caps are most necessary -- leveling the playing field in that kind of situation.
The flaw with this logic is that it exaggerates speed as the only skill needed to win, which is not the case. Let me repeat, speed is NOT the only skill needed to win. I don't believe anyone here specifically wants speed to be the determining factor of a game (No one has been very clear, including myself). Speed is included in a set of other necessary skills. If I use your logic, any skill can be put into the same situation. Is there any limit (one that can be reached) to the mind? The main issue here, that I can see, is actually that certain skills are being discriminated against. I extremely disagree with this stance. In a balanced environment, do you understand why the better players win? They have more mastery of all the necessary skills, NOT one skill that beats all. EVERY single game in existence presents you with a set of skills needed for a chance to win. The more skills one can manage, the higher one's probability of winning. What you are stating here is that someone with less mastery in all or some of the necessary skills should have a chance of winning. That idea alone kills off the point of competition.
Off topic here, but how on earth is your blockstats gif pulling up those figures? The rank and rating don't match up at all.
Mewtwo, are you talking about TDS/Worlds-style games or TGM style games? The former usually plays with a slow default fall speed, permitting the player to play very slowly. The player can also make it go very fast by his own will, by utilizing hard drops and the lack of a spawn delay. But the decision whether to play slow or fast is left entirely up to the player. OTOH, the latter plays with a fast, often instantaneous default fall speed, which effectively prohibits the player from playing slower than a certain speed. Lockdown reset behavior and initial piece stances in TGM make it even harder to play slow. (Not saying TDS/Worlds-style versus in 20G isn't possible - it does exist at TDS friend games at handicap 5, but at the moment, there is no worldwide online environment where players can fight at immediate 20G in TDS/Worlds-style rules. Also, the description of the styles above discuss only minimum allowed speed and not the maximum.) I would somewhat agree with your sentiments if the latter was the majority system in online versus, as beginner players would not even be able to properly stack. However I have trouble understanding your problem, as the most popular online versus games - both official and unofficial - seem to take the former's style.
I am not so sure myself as I haven't played TDS for quite awhile. I've devoted my time exclusively to TGM 1, Heboris, and LJ at the moment. The rating is really supposed to be stuck at 7637.
ugh, please don't compare tetris to poker. expert poker is extremely passive-- way passive. there's a certain thrill in speed play. i like tetris because it's so active. i can't help but compare this with games like starcraft or counter-strike (hugely competitive multiplayer games). what would happen if blizzard released a patch for starcraft which was made to suit an average player's skill level. say it put a cap somehow on anything over 80 apm (actions per minute). top players maintain over <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gH7bqP4iqk">300apm</a>, but hey, now you're giving those average skill guys a shot, right? not really. apm isn't the only (by a long shot) factor in expert play. sure, it correlates with expertise, but correlation doesn't necessarily indicate causation.
I don't get what the OP is complaining about. I see no reason an average player should have a decent chance of beating a master. Tetris is a game of skill, not chance. If you want to play poker go play poker. I personally have no need to maintain the "I'm one of the best players" delusion. It's very common among (strictly) decent players. Take <a href="http://www.tetrisconcept.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=151">this</a> guy for example. If I had to describe that encounter, from his perspective, I'd choose the words "clash of titans". From my perspective it felt like I was playing someone who had stopped improving his skill, being sufficiently convinced of his own amazingness long ago. Many people just like him are all over the place, including this very forum (not pointing any fingers ). To use a phrase that will no doubt be <a href="http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPart1.htm">extremely confusing</a> to some, I play to lose. To elaborate, I don't need my shortcomings sugar coated. I like to know exactly how good I am, and if this means I lose repeatedly to better players than so be it. It's just a game and I'm still having fun.
Well, I just think that the moment you think you're good you will stop improving. In that sense it's important to think of yourself as a loser, even if you truly are the best. Recognizing you weaknesses and strengthening them is a never ending journey. I think an "everybody has a chance against a master" Tetris would simply lull people into a comfort zone and they will stop trying to improve.
