there's something a little weird about the leaderboard rankings in battle 2p mode. it seems like it goes first by rank (or level) and then by winning percentage. the number of stars you have doesn't seem to matter. the problem is that if you keep playing and can't reach the next level (you need to reach 5 stars at your current level to advance) then you're only hurting your leaderboard rank because your winning percentage is approaching 50%. as far as i can tell, the optimal strategy is to reach a level you don't think you can surpass and then...stop playing? boo not that i'm going to stop playing edit: well now i'm confused because Shawn is ahead of rapsnoj despite having a lower winning percentage. but if you go to someone's profile and then view details for battle 2p it says that the "most skilled" category is "based on rank and 1st place ratio". maybe the most recent players to reach a rank are higher on the leaderboard? that would be better than placing them based on win %, but however it works people might be tempted to create new accounts every so often to get back near the top.
I tried opening up a fresh browser, and all the sudden I stopped getting so much lag and shaved around 20 seconds off my sprint time, so I think maybe my browser was just bogged down from being up for too long. Anyway, that might be a good thing to try if you're getting lots of pauses.
Man, there's some punks cheating on sprint. How could someone do 40 lines in 34 seconds while wasting a few seconds to do 2 soft drops, and the person in 2nd place is from the same state, so they're probably buddies using the same cheat. It doesn't even make sense if you look at how slow they are on average in the sprint 5P. Oh, and 1137 is just so llet -- I can tell the kid has real skills with the keyboard.
it wouldn't be hard to track their actual playing time with it being a web based game. they would just need to get rid of the pause feature in short modes like sprint, sprint 5p, battle 2p, and ultra, where the games last no more than 2-3 minutes. if you don't have 3 minutes to play then why are you playing? you can just restart the game if you get a phone call. it's not like you can pick up where you left off without losing time anyway. if the actual playing time and the time reported from the player's computer were off by more than a couple seconds you'd know the game was slowed down. i'm sure the developers have thought of this but they still give players the option to pause the game. cheating wouldn't do any good in marathon or survival. your time doesn't matter, and slowing the game down won't help you improve your score much if you don't know how to T-spin or at least tetris consistently with back-to-back. if the devs left the pause feature in those modes and ignored actual play time it wouldn't really matter. of course if someone reports a false score it's easy to tell by checking the replay.
From what I understand, it already records data that can be used to identify cheated games. However, the removal process is either not automated or only run periodically.
Well, let's hope they catch and remove those people's times eventually then. I agree pausing is pretty dumb for sprint, although there are some people that could take ages to clear 40 lines if they're new to Tetris.
is it pausing that does it? http://vlixter.com/2008/03/28/tutorial- ... ok-tetris/ doesn't look like fun to me :/
Turner Classic Movies! The channel I love to zap past and never actually watch cause the movies are shit.
yeah i guess some people take 10 minutes or more. but like Kitaru said there's apparently a system in place to stop cheaters, so maybe it doesn't matter if people can pause and take a break. there's no way to cheat with pausing at tetrisfriends because the pause screen hides the playing field. the issue is that pausing extends the playing time from start to finish making it harder to match the game clock with real time. it's therefore harder to distinguish between people who pause and people who intentionally slow the game down (like the awesome person in your link), but maybe the game tracks the duration of a pause accurately (in a way that doesn't rely on the system clock on the player's pc).
Well, both times have disappeared now, so the cheaters don't last long on the leaderboard at least. Yay!
My 32" Vizio monitor has a freeze button. If I press freeze just before I pause the game, the picture remains on screen, and I can plan my next several moves.
Or you could just make a screenshot. Personally, I think NDS_TGM handled pausing most elegantly: if you pause, your high score doesn't get saved. So you can practice, but don't expect to set any new records. I plan to replicate this behaviour in GMO.
well the ideal scenario for something like this wold really be a program that records the field throughout the game and waits for the key you have set to lock a piece, then pauses the game and displays the last image of the field over the field, unpausing on the next input. you could take that a step further, and have it not unpause on input, but instead stay paused and record the inputs up until the next piece drop, at which point it unpauses, plays out the recorded sequence and then pauses again. you could do this blind, which would occasionally lead to mistakes, or you could incorporate another clone that tracks the piece sequence and gives you a correct visual the whole way through. meh.
