Some random tetris noob, Chronicles on my journey to (hopefully) being a pro Options

[xenoslash]

Wow an O2 jam player too?
I can pass v3 hard with full health bar, but never a perfect score.
Solve rubik's cube with average of 25 secs.

Dammit, I can only beat you in tetris.

[XaeL]

Wow an O2 jam player too?
I can pass v3 hard with full health bar, but never a perfect score.
Solve rubik's cube with average of 25 secs.

Dammit, I can only beat you in tetris.

Whats the difference between O2 Jam and IIDX

[Alexsweden]

very good posts, the parts about how to improve are very good, I think i will try to not use ghost too as practice

[kevincentius]

hmm 1:15 after a few days is really good.

Try playing some music in the background. since you are at 1:15 your next viable target is about 1:10.
This has a tpm of 85. Go find some music with 80-100 bpm. ALternatively you could be hardcore and just play dragonforce in the background that also works. Turning off sound and only listening to your keyboard also lets you set a good pace.

iz great idea . will try!

[Paul676]

hmm 1:15 after a few days is really good.

Try playing some music in the background. since you are at 1:15 your next viable target is about 1:10.
This has a tpm of 85. Go find some music with 80-100 bpm. ALternatively you could be hardcore and just play dragonforce in the background that also works. Turning off sound and only listening to your keyboard also lets you set a good pace.

[randomtetrisnoob]

Thanks to everyone for the great replies.

@Xael: The difference is that O2Jam is complete crap. I would not consider it to be a rhythm game, due to the fact that it will allow you to hit a note 1/2 second early or late, and still register. Mashing actually works in this game.

I know of many players who can survive on the hardest songs, but never learned the sense of "beat", and can't play even the easiest songs on any bemani game to save their life, since they are used to timing the notes by reaction, and not by beat.

I still played O2Jam though .

Anyway, moving on...

Part 4. Preparing for the fight

At the time, I felt like I had already hit the ceiling. I had always been used to having fast progress, but here, it was already quite a bit of time since I had even felt any sort of progress at all.

So I decided that it was almost time to test my skills against real players.
But first, I decided to first learn what I have been reading everywhere as the prime weapon for multiplayer-tetris, the t-spin.

This time though, I threw all good habits and training regimens out the window. I wanted to get online ASAP, so I wanted to do this quickly.

I remembered reading somewhere that you can t-spin (TSD, to be exact) simply by having an overhang over a t-shaped hole. So off I went, played freeform sprint (without tetris-stacking), and tried to do so. Along the way, I discovered a few ways to do this:



What is funny is that all of this (plus more) are detailed in the t-spin guide on the forum, but I just went and "discovered" how to t-spin on my own.

And then, there's also the part where I remembered reading somewhere that you can always open with a t-spin (within the first bag or some more extra pieces). So I tried this. Luckily, standard-zero does not have an SZO opening, so about 20-ish games later, I was fooled into thinking that I could almost always do a t-spin opener.

And so, after a couple of hours with discovering and messing with t-spins for the first time, I created my tetrisfriends account.

[Ravendarksky]

no hold, and no ghost... along with zero gravity...

I've also been doing this recently. My best sprint time is 36.xx, like this though it is 41.XX.. I don't have perfect finesse clearly

I don't advise playing like that forever though. Once you are comfortable with all the piece placements I would suggest switching back to a ruleset more like what is used in VS games. Just because you SHOULDN't hold in general doesn't mean you should never hold. You really will be limiting yourself by never using it. (Holding a piece may allow you to place the next four or five pieces without rotating and thus be worth the extra delay/keystroke)

Also maybe I missed it in your posts but you don't mention Das Delay in your posts. Do you have it set to Auto? (I recommend 0).

Are you using 180 rotate key?

Also I would not suggest Tetris Friends, it will limit your growth due to the badly programmed lag mistakes, line clear delay, lack of zero drop, no 180 spins, less professional playerbase, strange vs targeting rules. I would play only on Nullpo, TOJ or Blockbox. Obviously this makes finding an opponent to get good against more difficult though due to smaller playerbases.

Nice posts so far I'll be checking back in for more installments

[randomtetrisnoob]

Yeah, I just use that to practice finesse.
But when I want to see how fast I currently am, I switch back to standard-zero.

About DAS delay, I never touched the tuning in the options, I instead set the DAS before the game starts (after picking a mode) to 6. I tried setting it to zero but it feels the same? ...or am I not fast enough yet to notice?

I also always use 180 on nullpo, I actually abused it back when my tetris stacking was still really bad, usually doing something like:



But then playing a bit of TF knocked that habit right out of me.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of updates.
I actually had most parts of this "story" already written out, but suddenly, I'm having some radical changes that is totally changing the way I play, and it's making me rethink a lot of the stuff I've already planned out to write.

e.g. (wall-of-text, I tried this around the time Xael recommended high BPM songs)

I tried to memorize a game's bag just to feel how being pro at 40L would be, and to check my current physical limitation (by factoring out the mental limitation part, i.e. thinking). While the idea was ripped off from the thread about becoming korean sub-25, I usually do this to level up quickly (i.e. back in DDR 3rd mix days, I memorized the first part of Afronova SSR, and my note-reading skill jumped from slow songs like AM-3P and Wonderland, to being able to read any song in that game [I couldn't read fast songs at the time]).

And the feeling was insane. It made me feel that I just had to drop a piece ASAP (or else I would lose precious time). The parts that had very quick drops (e.g. hard-drop x3 quickly, or hold DAS to one side and multiple hard-drops) felt awesome. I started to feel why you would need IRS in such situations (whereas I never even though about needing it myself in the past) rotate-then-drop 3x is sooo much slower than hold rotate, DROPDropdrop.

So I tried doing that in a normal 40L run (drop ASAP, if I can't think about where to place the piece, just put it anywhere good enough, even if I make a hole), and my stacking turned to absolute crap. Especially since I sometimes couldn't even get a decent glance at the previews since I was focusing at the matrix so much (probably due to lack of experience).

I made tons of holes. And I used 118 pieces (instead of my usual 103-105).
And my record jumped to 1:04 from 1:15.
It's insane... I feel like I'm learning bad habits in exchange for speed, I know I should stop but it's just too awesome to play like this. Gives quite an adrenaline rush. And it exhausts my brain very quickly (I blank out after about 5-6 games, can't even think where to place a piece, it gets quite bad).

[Pikiwedia]

DAS delay isn't the same as DAS though ^^ And Standard-Zero uses 0 DAS delay already, so yeah.

[randomtetrisnoob]

Oh, DAS delay is ARR.
Yeah, I set that to 0(instant) on my BB account, as well as on Lockjaw on my DS, since it makes DAS-to-the-wall finesse faster.