Skill gap - desired or not?

[perfectclear]

I think there are a lot of skills that are present in Tetris that just arent practiced because of their subtlety. we dont necessarily need to add new elements so much as expound upon the elements that we dont use (timing, transitioning of playstyles midgame such as when to send doubles and when to combo and when to tspin+tetris, stuff like that)

[VladtheImpala]

I'm not sure exactly what this is asking, but I'll try to answer it. Nullpomino has a very small player base, and is somewhat (putting it mildly) user unfriendly, so it tends to attract people who are more invested in the game. Therefore, it makes it so that someone trying to pick up nullpomino (i.e. me 2 years ago) will have a bit of a hard time competing with most people. so in that way the skill gap is larger in nullpo, as it's elitist, in a sense.

In TF, which has a large player base, a newcomer won't be clearly outclassed, just because there's such a huge player base, but because there are so many players the gap between the best and worst players is much higher. Also because TF is in general much more casual, it can be more difficult for the better players to find adequate opponents (I.e. hahaha just chillin in a 1v1 unranked room).

As to whether or not i want there to be a skill gap, I say that there are 2 things i want out of the game: a high skill cap and a large player base. Together these 2 create the best community. a high skill cap lets people who are already good still strive to be better, and a large player base makes it so most people don't have to be frustrated playing someone who is way to good or way too bad (unless they want to). A huge skill gap doesn't matter if there are enough players such that you always have someone around your level to play.

[Integration]

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.
....
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.

Nice talk about challenge range. However, I don't see how you want to increase the number of required skills in Tetris. The one player might be a little bit better in downstacking, the other a little bit better in stacking setups. But at the end multiplayer Tetris is all about speed, experience and imagining what you can do with your previews. People who are good in one game, are also good in any other game with enough training.

I could imagine Tetris going more in the direction of mana and spells as in Tetris Battle Gaiden (ideas for further spells can be found in Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura). IMO this would be a funny way to make Tetris more random. There're some characters you can choose between. Every character has unique spells. So character A could be good against B but bad against C. Every roughly 10 seconds you get a piece with a mana crystal inside. You collect the mana crystal by clearing the corresponding line. If you have enough crystals, you can choose which spell you want to execute. Some spells are more powerful than others (every spell requires a certain amount of crystals), some spells are offensive, others defensive.

[Integration]

I've sorted the results of HDO7 and this is what I got:

[!--ImageUrlBegin--][a href=\\\"http://i.imgur.com/fDIEh7Z.png\\\" target=\\\"_new\\\"][!--ImageUrlEBegin--][img width=\\\"400\\\" class=\\\"attach\\\" src=\\\"http://i.imgur.com/fDIEh7Z.png\\\" border=\\\'0\\\' alt=\\\"IPB Image\\\" /][!--ImageUrlEnd--][/a][!--ImageUrlEEnd--]

So far it can be completed to a partial equivalence relation (if A > B and B>C then A>C or A & C haven't played yet). If it was complete and the lines were properly sorted, you would perhaps have 4 or 5 loses in the upper triangle. Compare it to sports leagues; the outcomes are much more random there. And that's important, it's boring if you would know the winner in advance. For example in soccer 3 or 4 goals decide a game. Maybe team A wins against team B, although team B had more scoring chances. People would call team A unlucky, but nobody would complain that the result was unfair. This was also my experience with Cultris 1. Cultris 1 had the most unfair garbage distribution I've seen so far, but at the end nobody really complained.

[Anonymous]

On the topic of random elements, the important thing about "random" elements is that players should have a good amount of control of these "random" elements. They should not be truly random (when I say true randomness, I mean that something occurs for no seemingly apparent reason).

In League of Legends, each player has complete control over their hero, and there are pretty much no random elements in the game. Everything is based on timers. Minions spawn at 1:15, jungle monsters spawn at 1:55; even skills are based on timers/cooldowns. There are only minor variations that change from true randomness/chance from game to game. Most of the changes (that seemingly add randomness to the game) are made by the players. Pushing minion waves, last hitting, and other actions all affect the game (even if they only cause minor effects), but they all change the game slightly, which can have long term effects.

Likewise, in Starcraft, there are very few truly random elements. You have complete control over your units and resources and what you do with them. The part that adds "randomness" and change in each game is the players individual controls and actions.

This applies to pretty much all real life games too; for example, a soccer game. If someone just happens to be in a good position to get a pass and score a goal, he didn't happen to be there by chance. He purposely moved there, and just happened to be in good position to score.

I'm not saying there can't be any randomness. I think the randomly placed garbage lines when you receive an attack are a good thing. But these random elements should be directly caused by the players.