This thread is entirely about multiplayer. Please consider just 2 player rooms in the poll (otherwise I wouldn't know how to arrange C2 and TF, because you can target people in TF). Tetris Friends means expert+ ruleset, no maps, no items.

A year ago I made a similar thread, but I failed to include a poll. So here we go again. I'd like to know: Do you think it is too difficult to find sparring partners, where you don't know in advance, who will take home more victories if you played first to 10? Or do you rather think, minimizing the skill gap will just make Tetris blunt (hello party items)? In my opinion there are certain mechanisms that make the skill gap pretty big in Cultris 2: fast DAS, no delays, time based combos, messy garbage, garbage canceling, same piece sequence, same garbage sequence. However it's pretty small in comparison to other popular games. Let's take NullpoMino for example: fast DAS, no delays, multiple previews, hold, bag randomizer, garbage blocking and countering. You'll barely see somebody playing it, but you still hear many people saying it's the best multiplayer client out there (most likely people who are at the top of the food chain). So are those statements representive?

Here a small statistic to illustrate my problem. I've taken all results from HDO7 so far and counted how often certain results occured. In average, the loser of a match achieved only 2.64 wins.

10-0: 56 times
10-1: 36 times
10-2: 26 times
10-3: 21 times
10-4: 22 times
10-5: 16 times
10-6: 11 times
10-7: 8 times
10-8: 7 times
10-9: 6 times

That's a pretty fair set of stats, I was expecting it to be worse. You can't expect to have tight matches all the time - otherwise they wouldn't be so exciting! And fact is, people who are twice as fast or far more skilful than you will beat you quite easily - 10-0/1 and there shouldn't be much you can do about it. I've never had problems finding sparring partners, both when I was newer on the scene or now.

too big in general

I think the tier system in Tetris Friends somewhat alleviates the problem on that client. You know that a rank 20 is going to be within a certain range of skill and a rank 15 is going to be in an all together different range. I actually think it's a pretty effective system, although TF isn't the best client by a long shot.

your poll doesnt offer the option I wanted. I think its too big in TF and not too big in Nullpo. I have WAY more close games on nullpo than on TF, just because the rating on TF is too easy to cap so I cant determine without playing somebody if they are worth playing against.

Quote from: unpronuncyashun2I think the tier system in Tetris Friends somewhat alleviates the problem on that client. You know that a rank 20 is going to be within a certain range of skill and a rank 15 is going to be in an all together different range. I actually think it's a pretty effective system, although TF isn't the best client by a long shot.

The TF tier system is good. The only problem is that the range of skill is pretty wide for rank 20. IMO there should be ranks 21 to 25; players in those ranks shouldn't be allowed to play in gold rooms. But note that a tier system will not entirely solve the skill gap problem. Firstly you'll need a big user base such that a tier system works out. The user base of non-official games isn't big enough. Secondly, what about playing friends? It's hard to find a friend on your level.

Quote from: perfectclearyour poll doesnt offer the option I wanted. I think its too big in TF and not too big in Nullpo. I have WAY more close games on nullpo than on TF, just because the rating on TF is too easy to cap so I cant determine without playing somebody if they are worth playing against.

I tried to classify the range of skill gap in games as good as I can. NullpoMino is way faster than Tetris Friends. It's really hard to play really fast and smart at the same time. So I think it's more likely that players can dominate their opponents on NullpoMino than on Tetris Friends.

NullpoMino League regular season's average loser score was 1.4498, with σ = 1.3501 (598 matches). The playoffs were a little better, with the average loser score of 2.2051 and σ = 1.3993 (39 matches).

Remember that games were first to five and some (most) sets were played in groups of 2, 4, or 8.

I picked the third option. (why - tl;dr spoiler)
[spoiler]I think Cultris 2 handles the skill gap problem nicely - you can practice all day long in FFA room, team rooms which can be balanced to the host's liking, challenges, cheese mode, occasionally beating players that are generally better than you. In 1vs1 game the more skillful player will still win most of the time, however, you get to learn something from any game, because the spectating is well-made and you get a chance in every round, which keeps motivation to play against a better opponent.

This is different from Tetris Friends, where if you play 1vs1 and your enemy is better, he/she will try to use the bag randomizer to his/her advantage. This leads to very fast TKI-3's, 4-widing, DT Cannons/C-spins made in 5 seconds each, PC's, etc. which are hard to observe due to small opponent field. The difference in APM really matters. If you're slower, you need to downstack, sending very clear garbage back to your enemy. That sort of game doesn't teach people much strategy. Not to mention I simply cannot effectively get a good rank there (compared to c2), no matter how I try. I have rank 16 now. FFA's are out of the question, as they're very random. But when I try to create 1vs1 room, everyone either completely wrecks me or quits after the very first match (when they see I have higher APM than them in that particular match).

I see NullpoMino as a highly competitive game, but it's not intended for casual gamers. You can easily determine the better player, so the 10-0 scores are OK for this game (I agree with Paul). People who play Nullpo are usually genuinely interested in Tetris multiplayer (exception - people who play 40L only). Even though I've lost a lot of games in HDO with the score of 10-0, it's perfectly fine, because I've learned quite a bit from these matches. I would recommend to try every other multiplayer game beforehand to have a skill reserve (and desire to improve) to play NullpoMino competitively.
[/spoiler]

What I'd really like to see from the Tetris game is a better spectating ability. Nullpo 7.5 and C2 can be watched pretty well, but we need "tools" to reveal how much depth these games really have for the casual observer. The speed of both of these games can be preserved, but when watching matches, people don't get things as fast as players do. Something like an in-game slow-motion replay or fumen. IMO if Tetris manages to successfully show its incredible depth to people, it will become popular enough to be featured on Twitch, for example.

I don't really get the premise here..
The skill gap is what it is. If you pick your opponent, you can pick someone you will destroy, someone you'll almost always draw against, or you can try to find hebo. The results will follow pretty logically from that step on. The difference in how they measure player vs player comes from ways for people to throw or come back, or ways to overcome the odds. I'll suggest that the nature of C2 will let most lesser players take a frame or two off of the pros (I'll just say that I very rarely win 11-0, most severe asskickings end up 11-1) due to the random nature of the bag and combo timing vs what you get after you start it.

Depending on where you are in the food chain, it will be harder or easier to find someone to play evenly against, that's also just natural. There are fewer in the top and more people below that level. I have never seen a game where that wasn't the case.

Too long?
There are skill gaps, the games show them, if they didn't they would suck! Be happy if you find a worthy rival / sparring partner

Quote from: Agamemnon
There are skill gaps, the games show them, if they didn't they would suck! Be happy if you find a worthy rival / sparring partner

I'm also skeptical about the idea that we can/should design a game that narrows the skill gap. For example, slowing down a game doesn't achieve this (KOS, PSN, Tnet1, James Clewett's). What does narrow the skill gap is to either simplify the game so that optimal play can be memorized (e.g. tic-tac-toe) or increase the chance element so that people can win just by getting lucky (e.g. Candyland). Neither of those options are desirable in competitive Tetris because they take away what makes  the game interesting and rewarding to play.

You can have a handicap system, but I believe the best option is a skill-tracking and auto pairing system like StarCraft 2. Of course, you have to have a large pool of players for that to work, though. This was accomplished for a time on 1v1 mode in TDS, and I think that was in part a reason why so many people liked it.

I don't think any of the statements in the poll is accurate because the skill gaps between the players are always there regardless of which game the matches are played on.
The difference between NullpoMino and tetrisfriends is that NullpoMino allows players with a high skill level to show what they are really capable of, while the bad quality and nature of tetrisfriends can cause the same highly skilled players to lagg and misdrop more so that the skillgap appears to be smaller than what it really is.

If I speak about skill, I mean the chances that you win a game against a good player combined with the chances that you lose against a bad player. And this may vary from game to game. There's no universal Tetris skill, you might beat one player on one platform but lose on another platform. There're platforms were the results are in average closer than on other platforms. Let's introduce the term 'performance' which stands for (lines sent + lines downstacked)/time. If you want to narrow skill gap, you have to make sure that

1. people's average performances are relatively close, e.g. by limiting speed, limiting previews
2. people's performances (from match to match) vary much from their average performance, e.g. by making rounds short (Hangame) , adding randomness

IMO randomness is very important. It's important that you get punished for making misdrops (not like in Cultris 2). It's important that there're certain piece sequences that are hard to deal with with your current stack. And it is important that garbage is also a bit randomized. For example if you send 10 lines in Tetris DS, it may happen, that the garbage hole changes 0 times but also let's say 6 times (independent from which line clears you make).

I have to agree with unpronouncyachun2 and also Caffeine on this one. Nullpomino's skill gap is far bigger then you think as well. We are just comparing the skill gaps according to HDO's standings right. I have seen people who couldn't set up tetrises and didn't know how to hard drop on Nullpomino. Then some random no name will come on and get 90+ apm every game. So yes, I think the skill gap is enormous.

Quote from: caffeine
I'm also skeptical about the idea that we can/should design a game that narrows the skill gap. For example, slowing down a game doesn't achieve this (KOS, PSN, Tnet1, James Clewett's). What does narrow the skill gap is to either simplify the game so that optimal play can be memorized (e.g. tic-tac-toe) or increase the chance element so that people can win just by getting lucky (e.g. Candyland). Neither of those options are desirable in competitive Tetris because they take away what makes  the game interesting and rewarding to play.

I think when you talk about narrowing the skill gap (assuming you mean increasing the chance of winning), you are thinking more in terms of how can I decrease the skill gap between the lower level players with the higher level players.

I understand that simplifying the game will make it easier for everyone to play, which will make everyone become high level players faster (although the result is a much less fun game). And, adding chance elements to the game won't make low level players play better, but it will give the lower level players a better chance of winning vs higher level players (also, I agree that adding random elements are bad for trying to improve competitive games). These things give lower level players a better chance of beating higher level players.

However, I think "narrowing the skill gap" should mean widening the range of skill of the players that will challenge you. I'm not sure if this makes sense, but maybe this metaphor might be better:

Imagine that each player can have a skill range from 0-100 (by skill, I mean how strong of a player they are).

Players also have a challenge range that determines whether an opposing player will be a challenge. Someone might have a skill level of 40 and challenge range of 10, so they would have fun/be challenged by other players that have a range between 30-50.

Narrowing the skill gap should mean widening the range of skill that a player can play against. For instance, if the player has a challenge range of 20, they can play anyone with a skill range between 20 and 60. This will allow the player to play with more people and be challenged.

We always talk about how Tetris would be better if there were more players so everyone would have more players to play against, but another way to have more people to play against is to widen the challenge range.

So how might we go about increasing the challenge range? One way is by adding new elements to the game. This increases the number of skills a player must master to become good. (note that these shouldn't just be elements to add for the sake of increasing the number of skills to learn; they should also increase how fun the game is)

Some players are good at some things. Other players are good at other things. Increasing the number of skills to master will widen the challenge range of players. For instance:

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The way Tetris is right now, there are only a few fundamental skills, and only players who happen to be good at (or be able to master) these few skills will be the best. How many times have we seen Blink vs Hebo (although other players are rising up as well) play in the finals? Adding a higher skill ceiling to the game means opening up the game to more top tier players as well as increasing players' challenge ranges.

It's amazing how I could 10-0 player A, player B can 10-0 me, player C can 10-0 B, and D can 10-0 C and you're still not at the top tier of players.