Some random tetris noob

[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

[spoiler]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:

[fumen]110@deD3ibH3gbD3pb2DWRAz+uQEs488AwW7rDS9jJEHBA?AALe4Gob6GCczWBMeNRnbNRCcRbBUeHYkbDAibGAibCApbA?wNqAU9sJEFb8KCFbEBElCKKEF388AwB+MEVP98AwnY9AjSc?eEsY0TASbAAA7eAuQPWAjSceEs488AwSGeEooo2ABG98AQ/?AAAWe5Gnb4Gob4Gvb6SPWAjSceEs488AwSGeEooo2ABG98A?QCBAAZepUoboUhbD3gbA3AAIwB3pbAwNjAU9sJEFbEcEoIy?rDFbMmEFMVTASYUDEhOpTASYKNEsY8CA7eAUOPTAPSNXEoC?ZyDFbMmEJ/bTASIzBAaexNobxNzbXMPTAPSNXEoCZyDFbMm?EJ/bTAS4CCA[/fumen]

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.
[/spoiler]

To be continued...

[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:

[fumen]110@ReI3gbI3hbH3gbB3pb9wj7eAtiBTeF3gbI3gbI3tba?9c7eAKiBTeF3gbH3hbH3gbD3pbM4c7eAshB[/fumen]

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)

[spoiler]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).[/spoiler]

[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.

[KeroKai]

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

Hell Yeah.
I don't remember getting that score till several months, at least on TF.

Anyhow keep up on the journal. Amusing read ^^

[randomtetrisnoob]

Hmm, I guess I should post the rest... so that the drafts I made won't go to waste.

Moving on...

Part 5. Fight!

[spoiler]So I jump into the fray.
I am totally amazed an astounded by how dismally bad the bronze players are (no offense to them, the ones who actually talked in chat were okay).

Everyone made holes everywhere, and I don't think anyone made a tetris for like 5 games.
Even with just plain tetris stacking, everyone suddenly just seemed to die, apparently, too fast for them that they would start leaving one by one.
If I tried and t-spinned every hole I could think of, a lot of the time, almost everyone would leave.

I felt bad doing this, so I just threw every game after everyone was near death by minociding... until I got bored (after a couple of hours ), realizing that this was almost no different from sprinting, minus the minocide. So I decided to level up to people who are my match.

I literally shot straight to gold ranking.
And then finally, I actually found myself being decently attacked (wow, garbage lines!)

It was then that I noticed something strange.
There are games that I would lose (felt like everyone was attacking me), despite me KOing a lot of people, and almost always sending the most lines in the game.

I was dumbfounded. I KNEW I was the strongest attacker, where did I go wrong?
(I was also starting to have suspicions that TF sent the lines to the strongest attacker i.e. the handicap system)

Soon I figured out a few things:
- I just keep attacking, which is wrong. Even halfway up the screen with garbage, I kept building tetrises and t-spins, only to realize the opponent has cleared his screen, and hurry-up garbage (or even a single decent attack) will kill me. I decided, I REALLY need to learn how to downstack. This is a completely separate skill from stacking that I never learned, which everyone else seems to be better at me than.
- For this, I again recalled some things I read on the forum: to play dig race and dig challenge. A LOT.


- Also, I realized that single attacks (at least, in TF) usually results in clean garbage the opponent can tetris straight back at me (and everyone sends it back to me). I decided that I needed to pack a bigger punch. I started building up more powerful attacks, like b2b tetris, or 5-4 tetris stack with a t-spin on top (I think this is common...? I'd try 6-3 but I still didn't have the stacking skills back then for a decent 3-width column).

With most of my attacks being massive spikes, this increased my KO rate by alot.
Although it also seemed to make the target stay on me more.

I realize that the above may not be applicable all of the time (or even most of the time) but it worked for me for the time being... especially since I sent single attacks (like a single tetris or a single t-spin) less often, which weakened the attacking power of most of my opponents (a lot of whom were just sending my lines straight back to me). I realize this may be a newbie strategy, which may only be applicable to non-expert rooms with handicap, and are not applicable to decent platinum games, but it seemed to work for getting me the win.

But I wanted to go further than such short term goals as gaining simple wins.

Thus, I quit TF for quite awhile, and focused on learning to downstack.[/spoiler]


On a separate note, I thought that I'd just post what my current skill level is, just for reference (mostly for me, later, when I look back and see how noobish I was )

[spoiler]I finally got sub-1 after TONS of near misses (I think my 1:01-1:02 games number in the hundreds already....most of the time caused by suddenly misdropping the last piece due to panic, and having to wait for 3+ more pieces to get that last line).
[!--ImageUrlBegin--][a href=\\\"http://i56.tinypic.com/2vju93s.png\\\" target=\\\"_new\\\"][!--ImageUrlEBegin--]

Funny thing though, once a level 19 comes into the room, he's guaranteed to almost always win (the only way I've managed to steal wins is from combo-starters, if I target them and send a DT cannon opener spike purely at them).

And that a level 20 is guaranteed to KO almost everyone in the room. :/
That's not even considering that level 20's have an entire tier ranking altogether.

What a long way to go...

And I don't think TF is the way to go if I ever want to be the same level as the sub-30 uber-pros that can obliterate legions of TF level 20 players...[/spoiler]

[coolmaninsano]

Gonna go read Twilight brb.

[randomtetrisnoob]

Don't you agree though? That's it's good to have something like this to look back at later?

What's it like, to have progressed quite far, and then look back to this video?
[spoiler]

[/spoiler]

I wish I could say the same for myself later (it'd suck if I actually got stuck at my current level  )

[ManOfMiracles]

Don't you agree though? That's it's good to have something like this to look back at later?

good times..

[Anonymous]

very interesting life story! keep it up c:

[XaeL]

rank 20 is easy. just vs level 15's and keep smashing them.

[randomtetrisnoob]

Hmm, since this has turned into somewhat of a tetris diary, I guess I should update it with my progress.

My current level is that, whenever I sprint, my first 3-5 games average 45-47. VERY consistently. THEN, it teeters wildly from 48 to 58, averaging at 55. Crazy.... Also, after 1 month since I broke sub 60, I broke sub55 and sub50 within the same week. And now its been another month with no progress (I blame playing tb lol.... None of my friends who play tb only are improving, some have been stuck at lvl 30 for months).

I'll try to post my thoughts on this later, if it could help anyone.

[XaeL]

Hmm, since this has turned into somewhat of a tetris diary, I guess I should update it with my progress.

My current level is that, whenever I sprint, my first 3-5 games average 45-47. VERY consistently. THEN, it teeters wildly from 48 to 58, averaging at 55. Crazy.... Also, after 1 month since I broke sub 60, I broke sub55 and sub50 within the same week. And now its been another month with no progress (I blame playing tb lol.... None of my friends who play tb only are improving, some have been stuck at lvl 30 for months).

I'll try to post my thoughts on this later, if it could help anyone.

bad kid.. break 30 already.

Warned by a moderator:  Do not attack other members.

Warnings should also go to private message.. i didnt even know i got this warning until someone told me like 24 hours later.

[belzebub]

I was wonder what your status was now randomtetrisnoob ?