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Probably gonna be Bo3 Bo3

I really hope this doesn't turn off too many Tetris players from joining.

I think you're mixing up people that only knows Tetris and the Tetris players that wanna train Tetris. There's way less true Tetris players that wanna train Guideline on PPT than true Tsu players.

Now, guys, if you wanna make sure Puyo will be there, you'll have to move and show us. PPT will be the first game that could have a solid local competitive scene on both communities. We will have to learn what fighting games did 20 years ago: they did local tournaments all around the world. One tourney started in 2003, it was called "Evolution".

What I truly hope is that both communities could have their own big tourneys. I don't wanna do a tourney if I'm being forced to play Swap. What if I wanna focus on Guidelines? What about my Puyo friends that wanna focus on Tsu?

[I've decided to drop the mixed Versus bracket and will focus all my efforts on Swap.]

Okay, it's official, I've decided to drop the mixed Versus bracket and will focus all my efforts on Swap.

The format match? BO3 games of BO3 rounds? Just a BO5? Double Elimination? Small Round Robin groups? Seeds?

And to have my thoughts on it, I'm against it, but I'm glad PPT is at an EVO side tourney. It deserves its place and I hope the FGC on stream and at EVO will witness what high-level PPT looks like.

Honestly my worry is that since most people entering this are gonna be mid tier players, and Puyo players tend to beat Tetris players at this level really badly, this showcase is just gonna make the game look super unbalanced in Puyo's favor.

It will. The FGC has no idea how Tetris Guidelines games are played.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqHT...XSz8YaVobBlL3or

Maybe have the winners and runners up of each bracket participate in a PTvPT exhibition match afterwards?

Exactly what we did with Bayoen, the french Puyo community, during the tournament to celebrate the game's release. Exactly what the RedBull 5G did, because the Osaka and Tokyo qualifiers was PvP and TvT.

For stream purposes, if Kiyobi has the time to run a streamed top 8, he should run 2 Top 4s and do one PTvPT exhibition matchup.

TOs weren't scared to focus on Swap when this was a super-niche import-only title. Why the cold feet now? (I mean, I'm pretty sure that I know why, but I'll get to that in a minute.)

Because FGC TOs never knew we existed before this game. Here's a tweet from ElvenShadow, which I have a lot of respect, being a strong Faust player in the US, asking a very awkard and kinda vexing question, for me.

PPT is saw as a fun party game. Not as a deep and serious competitive game like the fighting game genre has. We're Bomberman-tier for them. "I mean, Tetris is serious stuff, I saw the Grand Master thing in a GDQ or something. But tournaments? Strategies? Commentaries? This ain't an eSport, man. C'mon!"

Of course, we're treated awfully. It's kinda like the small tournaments of fighting games, organized by big malls, runned by people that has no idea how to handle a tournament. Single elimination, BO1. They don't know how to seed, they don't know the rules of a competitive match format. I seriously went in a 2 rounds, 150% Handicap, BO1 tournament on Tekken 6. Not because those TOs wanted us to suffer. They just has no idea how to handle something like that. And nobody says it, because we're all fortunate to have a tournament of this game anyway. We can't grunt on the TOs for that kind of "details".

For me, doing Swap, BO5 and double elim maybe works with an all-beginner tourney, but it doesn't work at all on an High Level / High Quality tourney. And it's the best sign to show that you don't have a clue of what you're doing as a TO for this game.

Isn't that kind of the point, though? A Puyo Puyo Tetris tournament shouldn't necessarily crown the best Puyo player, or the best Tetris player, but the best Puyo Puyo Tetris player. And if there's one single game mode that encapsulates the most of PPT, it's Swap mode. But I do think it'd be kind of unfortunate to de-emphasize the very crossover nature of this game when that's the entire thing that makes it a uniquely great experience in the first place.

I think you've missed out the point of this game. PPT isn't a cross-over game, it's a compilation. This isn't Marvel or any cross-over fighting games, when every characters kept their lore abilities, but they were normalized to fit into the game. Like I said, Tsu and Guidelines were practically untouched in VS mode. On the same arguing, we should push Fusion as the main competitive scene of the game.

(Is that game still a dumpster fire, btw?)

Still is. As a french, I'm ashamed about what Ubisoft has done.

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[insanely long]

fighting games of EVO is too short, bo3 is just short, like street fighter

a lot of players say it's too short to tell if the winner of bo3 of street fighter is stronger or not.

about tetris, watch bo3 or bo5 of TvT games on youtube, they aren't that long. or maybe they are, but I don't think bo3 takes 20min, perhaps 10.

Exactly my thoughts. I'd say even more. Technically, SF has 2 winning rounds on 2 winning games. In Tetris or Puyo Puyo, you don't have any meters per rounds or some things that makes you separate the rounds. So you can go FT5. Directly. Even allow FT7 on top 8 or just the finals, just like the FGC does in Street Fighter, when the matches are BO5 in finals.

But there's a thing that we don't count when we say this. Low/Mid level matches can be insanely long in Tetris. A simple BO3 can last way more than 10 min, when both players can't go for the kill as easily as high level players. This isn't a problem in most of the fighting games, because even if you don't combo, if you can touch your opponent like, what, 10 times with big hit? You'll kill him without having to learn combos, spacing, timing and everything you need to learn to do well in fighting games tourneys.

This is exactly why I keep saying "Tetris desperately needs a time-out mechanic". We need something to kill the players if the players can't kill eachother. This is also why I don't like the Margin Time as a time-out mechanic.

When evaluating 1v1 mixed VS from the perspective of a fighting game player (which is kind of relevant when we're talking about EVO), you can sort of treat the two selectable puzzle games as different "characters" with match-up specific strategies, where the proper tactics for a PvT match can be quite different from those of a TvT or PvP "mirror match," forcing you to play either game in different ways depending on which game that your opponent selected. Being a fighting game player myself, this is honestly kind of intriguing to me and not something that I dismiss outright; I do think there's some value in that concept. I just don't think it works well when there's only 2 different "characters" to pick from. Maybe if this game wasn't just Puyo Puyo and Tetris, but something with more selectable puzzle games where a true counterpick wheel could develop from multiple selectable games that each had their own strengths/weaknesses/counters, then the concept would be more appealing. But you don't really get that when there's just a binary choice, and there's not much strategic depth to be found through the game choice as a result. At low to mid level PvT, Puyo buries Tetris because a 5-chain stairs combo just obliterates someone whose only skill is slowly stacking for tetrises. At high to top level, Puyo can't keep up with Tetris's speed without some particularly favorable RNG.

That's exactly what was my thought process in 2014, when I saw the game. The real problem is that Sonic Team just keeped both games the same. Tsu is still Tsu, Guidelines are still Guidelines. Now, we know that the matchup Guidelines VS Tsu is hell for Tsu.

It's not like "nobody wanna fight against the matchup they don't know", it's more like how many changes players can accept to correctly balance the matchup? You're sure Tsu players will love having Hard Drop or some 3/4 puyo seed Fever-style? You're sure Guidelines players will love having another randomizer that the 7-bag or having bonus on all-spins?

The fighting game aspect works, but the real comparison of this situation would have to pick Ryu from SFV and Sol from GGXrd, them let them fight with the exact same gameplay they have in their own game. How fucked a Ryu main will be?

I don't think the "too early" argument holds much merit when both of these games are decades old and PPT brackets at every FGC tournament I've been to in the past 2 years that have featured the game in some capacity have run Swap mode as the tournament format.

Well, the age of those games still works for my arguing. Don't mix up the time of release with the time of international competition on both of those games. It's like saying SFV is 30yo. SF is, not the last game of the series. Same deal on Puyo and Tetris. By the way, even if the Tsu and Guidelines high-players has little to no adaptation to do from their original games, Swap is an entire other deal for the players that doesn't know one of the game. Especially in the western community of both games.

The age factor helps a lot my wish of putting mirror matches on top. Because neither Puyo nor Tetris has the exposition they have now with PPT. It's maybe their only chances to do true Guidelines/Tsu high level matchups on a main stage.

The 2/3, 2/3 ruleset is a bit of a remnant from all my time involved with tournaments in fighting games. That's the standard there, and it's what I just happened to default to. I'm quite set on this, as doing a FT5 (for example) would most likely cause confusion among players, TOs, and any streamers that will broadcast our game.

I know. I'm an active FGC member and I know your role in WNF. I was talking about an FT5, ONLY if the game allows it. On actual PPT, it's out of question. We need to see the "win/lose" clearly on stream. The most frustrating part for me is that Sonic Team, for their next game, Puyo Puyo Chronicles, allows the players to create local and online matches of FT100, if they want. FT30 is the usual format. And the game came after PPT, so they clearly saw they did a mistake and they know it. Nothing was made to fix this.

A number of people have suggested I do PvP and TvT brackets, but I really want to push the mashup part of Puyo Puyo Tetris a lot. I'm aware I'm biased.

No, you're not. You're just paying respects to the entire concept of the game. I'm the first to be truly sad about how the matchup turned crap. I wanted PvT action in tourney. I wanted the fact that Puyo had to play differently, as well as Tetris. That's how matchup works, right? Turns out that Tetris can just play Tetris while Puyo will drown in ojamas. And I hate that. PPT is a ballzy idea, but poorly made. The more I see Hosoyamada (the Producer of Puyo) talking about the game, the more I think he has the same score in my give-a-crap-o-meter as Ono.

- "We have contacted top notch Puyo pro players to help us balance the game between Puyo and Tetris."
- "Have you contacted actual Tetris Guidelines players as well ?"
- "Hm..."
https://twitter.com/hebo_MAI/status/382484998319640578

As for your opinion about Quick Drop, I'm aware that it breaks traditional Tsu play. Consider that this is going to be mostly a Western audience, who is very likely to know about Tetris over Puyo, and in turn, familiar with hard dropping. Even though this change would be a convention breaker, I feel it would not be one that would feel negligibly foreign.

Weird arguing. It's like I'm TOing GGXrd in an anime convention when players don't know fighting games that well and I go: "Stylish only, guys. Well, yeah. You're all newbies, so everyone has to play the newbie mode."

What about the "authenticity"? What about the Tsu players? I'm agree to let them the choice and only on PvT matchup, but HD shouldn't be in Tsu, IMO. Puyo 7 rules has HD and it didn't turn out well.

[would you still enter if I dropped Versus and ran only Swap for AnimEVO?]

Once again, I thank Kiyobi to host PPT at AnimEVO. It'll be important for both Puyo and Tetris scene. I also thank him to take his time to talk directly with the community. More TOs should do this.

This topic is very interesting. I wanna be TO too and this topic already helped me on how should we handle tourneys in PPT. I'm still sure, this game will be the true start of local competitive greatness in both communities. S2, Kiyobi and Blink already described a big chunk of the topic.

The match format Kiyobi described, FT2 matches of FT2 rounds, isn't optimal, but it's the best solution we could've found to make a true tourney match format in PPT. The game still doesn't let us set more than 3 winning rounds on one match which is both dumb and unjustified. Can we agree right now that FT5 (FT7 for Puyo high-level matches) is the best match format a PPT tourney could have?

On all the matchup concerns, the biggest problem is easy to see. In this game, Puyo VS Tetris is Tsu VS Guidelines. Add anything more on Tsu, like Hard Drop, and it's not Tsu anymore. Remove anyfing from Guidelines, like Hold, and it's not Guidelines anymore. I'm not against, but I don't wanna throw off Puyo players on a rule they're not used to, just because I think it'll "fix the matchup".

So, I'd like to ask you guys, would you still enter if I dropped Versus and ran only Swap for AnimEVO? Is being forced to play Puyo Puyo enough of a deterrent to keep you from entering?

Like I said on Reddit, Swap restricts and intimidate the players.
For me, if you wanna do 2 tourneys, the best choice is to do PvP and TvT. Maybe some exhibition matches with PTvPT. Swap is totally and at 100% a competitive mode and it shouldn't be banned. But while the game has 3 years in Japan, here, it will begin its 4th week. It's way too soon to eforcee both Guidelines and Tsu players to learn Tsu and Guidelines. Maybe later, but even later, Swap should not be the main competitive rule in PPT. PvP and TvT, should. Then Swap and Doubles.

4. Puyo Puyo Tetris has its own issues with Tetris vs Tetris

To this day, I don't know a single Tetris game, especially a Guideline one, that doesn't have any flaws in its multiplayer gameplay. To go even beyond that, I don't know a single competitive puzzle game rule that matches Tsu's balance and depth.
It's really hard to argue with this statement, because to this day, Tetris VS Tetris in PPT is the best 1v1 Tetris game we have.
- Its limited game speed in general (longer line clears, ARE...), that makes high-level play way more strategy and timing based than Tetris Friends or Tetris Online Poland, that are 2 super speedy games.
- The "Puyo-like" ways of giving damage, that stops to 8 lines instead of dumping everything the player has on its buffer.
- All the audio-cues, with spells and SFX, that helps players knowing what's going on precisely, without wasting time looking too much at what the opponent is doing.

If we point out the flaws, what else do we have? Should we ban Tetris? Go full Tsu? It's far from being faultless, but you can't point out a particular (and fun) thing and claim that "high-level meta looks like that, now". Or else, everybody would have stopped playing Guidelines after that sort of nonsense in Tetris Battle.
You are the head of the western Puyo community. Easily the most known western Puyo player out there, with maybe Shiro. Of course you wanna protect it and sublime it. But if we could have TTOs with the best of the best at a game as flawed on the direct competitive side that TF, just imagine what the Guidelines community can do with PPT.

Kiyobi's concerns about "the very unpredictable length of the Tetris mirror in PPT." my only and major concern about TvT. It's super hard, because during online tourneys, you don't care. Both players have all the time of the world, it's FT15. In a tourney, that's totally another story. I'm upset about a lot of things in PPT, but the fact that it doesn't have any ways to time-limit a match... ugh...

I have major doubts about this, as much as I hate to admit it.

Sega never patched Puyo Tetris Vanilla with balance changes. The balance changes only came with the release of the PS4/XB1 versions, and that weren't even announced, just stealthily inserted into the release. (Unless I totally missed that news.)

I will nuance it.
- PPT was made with the western public in mind. Tetris would help reintroducing Puyo with the western world. The 'True' begining is here, not 3 years ago.
- The PS4 version was patched, to match the changes they did in the Switch version. So they can patch it again.
- When there's major problems in a game, it's not like the japanese people are the first to yell about it. We, on the other hand, LOVE to yell. Maybe, with enough yelling and thanks to the extra money the port will give to SEGA, they'll hear us. My hopes are super high, and it's a long shot, but it's still possible.
https://twitter.com/ARC_Chaf/status/819875349836296193

There is another Discord server for Tetris that I made. The Tetris Chatroom. It got already some guys from r/Tetris/.
I created this room when I didn't know HD already got one. This one isn't related to any site or communities. Not even r/Tetris/.

the option to play a fixed time multiplayer so that players don't have to wait after they topped out in FFA rooms

I completely forgot that. Thanks to remind me. But the 2 minutes after an hold-up + ...

I'd also like to see hurry-up-garbage to have garbage holes (instead of literally decreasing playfield height).

... isn't compatible. You have to down the time if you wanna hurry ups being regular garbage. 90s seems fair.

An "arcade-style" lobby could be great. You have different queues, you wait until it's your turn to play, FT3/BO5. The loser gets out, the winner stays on the "cabinet".

I'd also liked to see some slowed down versus mode, either by making it turn-based (a player has 5 seconds time to execute a move) or by limiting playspeed (either 150 BPM threshold or limited left/right/softdrop speed).

Sounds like a really cool idea. Just like you play Chess instead of Tetris. Also, limiting the speed could add more strategies. I really wanna see how that'll work out.

As a competitive puzzle game fan and after games like Anode, Raining Blobs and Heroes Lose, I'm very glad to see more and more games like that on Steam.

Keep it up.

I will definitely have source code available for people to continue the project if I am not around.

That's not exactly what I meant by "opensource". If people finds bugs, better ways to code this part or add things, you could add that in an update.

I want an extremely strong alternative to TF for browser multiplayer. Yes I am definitely interested in creating unique styles, and have thought of a few in the past concerning both single and multi player. Something I'd like to make is dynamic team play and a good format for it. Anything goes at this stage, really.

Glad to hear that. I also think the first step is to clone TF. But by "new style", I meant "new rules". Means new rotation system, new garbage system, new randomizer... Maybe more focused on reading your opponent than sending garbage. You should talk to Kitaru about it. He got some interesting ideas that could work well, I think.

But, for online play, you wanna build something solid or just a very good matchmaking? Open lobbies? Real-time watching (unlike TF)? Ranks (I don't like ranks, but why not)? If this client got different styles and rules, could we all play them online?

I really wanna see that happen. Just some propositions:
- Open-source and easily moddable. So we can add more rules and modes ourselves.
- A site or a data-base that could have the community mods. So it will be easily found.
- Full controller support, please. Especially if the game let us map the menu buttons and the game buttons independently, just like Nullpo, who does it only for keyboards.
- A local play. Up to 4 players. Clients are too focused on online.
- If you wanna do online, I suggest you to look at GGPO, FightCade or any online with a rollback system. At least, for the 1-on-1 games.

Basically, I just want a better NullpoMino. Maybe with the time, your client will have as much content as Nullpo. Especially if we can have more multiplayer modes.
Running on browser seems cool, but does it mean that you'll need a constant internet connection to play it?
And you seems like you just wanna replace TF. Aren't you interested by creating a new style? With new rules, maybe?

I don't know if this project is dead or not.
But, if I have request, it will be adding other Tetris Worlds modes, like Sticky or Avalanche.

Either way, I'd like more to se an entire new code, being an actual replacement of Nullpo than a fork. Like, the same idea of being basically an arcade puzzle engine, but with tons of customizations, inspired by powerful engines like StepMania.