Puyo Puyo Tetris is a Terrible Game and I Hate It

[exchliore]

...

Hi Steelix100,

Welcome to Harddrop. I feel like ppt was made for casual gamers to have fun and that ppt succeeded at being very fun for the general masses. I also think we all generally agree that Puyo vs Tetris is not fair and I don't think it is something that can be easily balanced. However, I believe that the game of Puyo can evolve with hard drops and no piece delays and that the future of ppt can become very interesting once that happens (maybe ppt2).

I am not very good at Puyo and I cannot speak much to the game, but your insight on depth in Puyo (ie. watching other people's screens, planning your moves) is very much like depth in the early days of Tetris when we were all slow and did the same things. Not only that, I believe high level players still do all of these things when they play (I certainly pay attention to my opponents' fields).

I didn't read all of the words you wrote as there were too many and I only have so much room in my head to comprehend them all, but from what I gathered is that your view of Tetris isn't a very good representation of the game. More specifically, openings are only openings and good players will be good.

There's a lot of focus on openings in your discussions and I do not think it is fair to judge Tetris based on openings. You can spend all your time working on an opening, but openings in Tetris are simply vehicles to progress to the middle game. Against the average Tetris player, you will find that making no opening is equivalent to any generic standard opening (I will discuss 4wide later). You do not need to study all the openings in depth and I hope that Tetris isn't an exercise in rote memorization for you. It is perfectly fine to choose one standard opening that you think is the best or that you are most comfortable playing.

I did not see a lot of discussion on hard and soft skills and I want to implore you to work on your base Tetris skills (ie. downstack, stacking, tspin setups, kicks, efficiency, finesse, speed, etc.). Not only will you simply be better at Tetris, but I believe that you will find a little more depth in the game.

In terms of 4wide, I believe that the pc opening is a fair enough answer. I would be surprised at a 4wider trying to overtake a pc opening. If you cannot open with a pc, then you will need to improvise and I believe that is what Tetris is about. While 4wide is unbalanced, many of us find ways around it. Enough early pressure such as a fast stsd with followup can give you enough leeway to push off a 4wide.

If your opponent is overwhelmingly faster than you, there's probably nothing you can do about it. However, in that situation, you are not losing because your opponent is using a 4wide, you're losing because you're not fast enough. At that point, your opponent can use any opening and you are still likely to lose. In these situations, I would work on opening with enough speed and applying enough pressure to move into the mid game where you can maybe win the game (and remember to keep up the speed).

Yes, there's a lot of situations that will make you upset such as the rubberbanding and disatisfaction with combos. I've been there when someone busts out a huge combo a line away from topping out. I find that a lot of players struggle with these situations when they are not decisively better than their opponents. The games will have a lot of back and forth and you can and will get unlucky, a lot. Those situations present great opportunities for improvement. Play the next game a little faster, apply just a little more pressure, be a little more piece efficient, downstack better. And yes, it often doesn't seem worth it, but yet we all still play.

tl;dr - git gud.

[dragontamer]

However, I believe that the game of Puyo can evolve with hard drops and no piece delays and that the future of ppt can become very interesting once that happens (maybe ppt2).

Just an FYI: but PuyoPuyo's community has been active since the 90s. PuyoPuyo's original rules were some... crap, but Puyo Puyo 2's release in 1994 created a thriving arcade scene in Japan and the community has been refining strategies ever since. Puyo Puyo Tsu (the ruleset implemented in PPT) is OLDER than Tetris Multiplayer Guidelines (which as far as I know, have only been in place since 2001).

Here's a video from 1997 PuyoPuyo grand finals for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbf-Z2IgnVY

In any case, PuyoPuyo and Tetris have very old, proud communities of their games. Furthermore, because of this pride, its very unlikely for the core games to change very much. True, there are some minor changes (PuyoPuyo Sun rules), but major changes don't seem to stick very long (ie: Fever mode).

Tetris also has diverged from Guideline rules, with square-mode for example. But Guidelines is THE Tetris standard just as PuyoPuyo Tsu is the Puyo standard.

Case in point: the slightly faster drop speed in the balance patch has upset some Puyo players. The original, slower drop speed, of PPT was closer to the original Tsu rules which is considered canonical in the community.

--------------------------

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you said. I just want to make sure that you understand that PuyoPuyo's community is old as far as gaming goes. Its one of the oldest competitive video gaming communities still in existence.

I do realize that Tetris is also an old game, but that's really what makes PPT such a good game in my eyes. Its finally the crossover game where two exceptionally old communities can join together and play together. And yes, it feels like one side is playing American Football while the other side is playing Golf... but that's part of the joy IMO. For the most part, Puyo players are in fact playing Puyo, while Tetris players do in fact feel like they're playing Tetris. There are issues translating the damage but I respect the effort the devs have put into this game.

A game like PuyoPuyoTetris will probably never happen again, so we should enjoy this temporary bridge between our communities.

[Steelix100]

@exchilore:
Yes, I do have a lot to say about openers, but I don't really think that they're as big of a deal as I perhaps make them out to be. Openers aren't the worst Tetris has to offer, I just don't think they're healthy for the meta because, to summarize, you get a lot of reward for simply memorizing a lot of setups. As I've stated before, 7-bag is much more preferable to using an RNG like NES Tetris, but I think there may be a better RNG that is even more fair.

PC VS 4wide: There's just one problem with Perfect Clear as an answer to 4wide: it's a 100% luck based strategy (in Puyo Puyo Tetris, there's the additional problem of PC garbage being marvelously clean, so it's not as viable there as well). If you succeed, you're put at an advantage. If you don't, you're put at a massive disadvantage. In a regular Tetris vs Tetris battle you can make up for a failed PC with good downstacking and conversion, but vs 4wide if you don't somehow stuff 4wide, you won't be able to recover. The problem I have with 4wide is not just that it's broken, but how much more luck it adds to the game. I know 4wide isn't actually unbeatable. So much can go right or wrong against a 4wider. But just because something has counterplay doesn't mean that it's good for the meta. For example, in Pokemon, Smogon banned a lot of Pokemon and sets not because they were unbeatable, but because you must build your teams in a way that focuses on beating them if you want to have a chance at all, meaning your team will not be able to properly cope with other prominent threats in the meta. I understand that Pokemon has the difference of having to actually build a team while Tetris is purely a skill-based game, but the point is that 4wide does not bring anything interesting, enjoyable, or likable to the game while also being a very big threat. It does nothing but make the game less fun for everyone.

I don't know where the part about the faster opponent using 4wide came from. Obviously, the better player will almost always win regardless of if they choose 4wide or not. I tried to frame all my posts as if both players are the same level, which is why I never mentioned relative speed (as in, relative to your opponent). The only time I talk about speed is in the Puyo vs Tetris matchup.

I dislike rubberbanding in Tetris simply because it makes matches longer. Rubberbanding being a part of Tetris is fine, but I think the extent to which Tetris matches can seesaw is a bit too much. The fact that a Tetris can give the opponent a free Tetris in return is really stupid. As for combos, they don't have a lot of counterplay and naturally come just by having a screen full of resources, which includes garbage.

Also, thank you for all of your advice on improvement, however, I will not be returning to Tetris.

[owo]

...

Hi Steelix100,

Welcome to Harddrop. I feel like ppt was made for casual gamers to have fun and that ppt succeeded at being very fun for the general masses. I also think we all generally agree that Puyo vs Tetris is not fair and I don't think it is something that can be easily balanced. However, I believe that the game of Puyo can evolve with hard drops and no piece delays and that the future of ppt can become very interesting once that happens (maybe ppt2).

I am not very good at Puyo and I cannot speak much to the game, but your insight on depth in Puyo (ie. watching other people's screens, planning your moves) is very much like depth in the early days of Tetris when we were all slow and did the same things. Not only that, I believe high level players still do all of these things when they play (I certainly pay attention to my opponents' fields).

There's a rather infamous video where they hooked up eye tracking software on pro Puyo players, which you can see here (the red cursor belongs to the player on the left):
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm9901384

The amount of time spent observing the opponent as well as what on the opponent's field is being observed are quite different from what you seem to be describing - I imagine the realities of Guideline alter observational strategies in Tetris quite a bit.

I'm not really sure what adding quick drop and reducing piece delay adds to Puyo -- these mechanics have been experimented with in prior Puyo games with poor results, and the timing changes in PPT do warp existing strategies in an unhealthy way. If you're arguing for speeding up every aspect of the game to balance quick drop, you'd need to demonstrate how it "evolves" the game rather than negatively affecting the state of the art meta.