Seeking Advice! Please & Thank Yous!

[fate616]

Hey guys!

I've been trying to get faster & better at Tetris, but it's a lot harder than it looks! I started playing tetrisfriends with it's default key with space being hard drop so i am so used to it, but i've read the control section of this forum and most people remove space bar from hard drop. i tried doing that, but my speed went down drastically. my question is, why does space bar slow you down? is it because of our thumb being slower? will it be as fast as our other fingers if we keep using it? lots of things i don't understand.

I want to be faster, but i don't know how T_T. i keep using 1 button to rotate my pieces and i think that may be what's slowing me down? tips and advices will be greatly appreciated! I also notice most people use the L pieces and have them facing upwards as oppose to laying down. why is that? i thought combinations such as LO, JO, LOJ, JSL, would be a good thing?

thank you lots & happy holidays! =)

[MarioThePhenom]

well im not the best or fastest players, but i know a decent amount of knolege:)

alot of pple have removed space from their keys, i have no clue why, i play with tetris friends default and my sprint is 39.02. you mentioned something about using thumbs for space bar? cause my layout is Left Hand: index finger on space, middle finger on "z" and ring finger on shift, Right Hand: arrow keys for my three fingers, the middle on being the rotate and soft drop keys, while my index and ring finger are for left to right movement, can i know how you have your hands positioned?(before and after the change)

and you changed your keybored layout, and you got drastically slower. that would only make sense, it takes time to get used to something new, i for one have not changed my layout ever, but people like Darthduck have and they had a slower sprint time, but it only got better the more he got used to his new controls.

and as soon as possible, learn to rotate both ways! its really important for almost everything in tetris, your sprint record and multi player, i suggest understanding how to double rotate the "t" piece, then learning for the L and J, its what i did, and i suggest this because you are most likely going to spin the T piece into awkward places then an L or a J, also it helps the speed of your t spins:)

and the only reason i could think of for why people do that( i place them flat as well) is because it takes one key press to get them facing that way while it takes two to get them flat, which slows them down by just that much, i wouldnt worry about it to much for now

happy holidays to you to:) i hope ive helped you out

[Paul676]

A spacebar is so much bulkier than a key - it's easier to play with a key, I guess. I only moved from spacebar to x because my spacebar was loud and was waking my mum up

But still, it feels really comfortable and quick now

[gif]

I only moved from spacebar to x because my spacebar was loud and was waking my mum up

lol ;d

[Rosti_LFC]

@OP - use two rotates. You could have the most retarded control setup ever for two rotates, and it'll still be faster than using just one.

Also I still used spacebar with my thumb for hold. It's not the button so much as just hard-drop being a bit of an odd option for spacebar in most people's minds, because hard-drop is usually assigned to up or down.

I think you'll find most people here use one hand for left/right/drop and the other for rotates/hold, either because they played Tetris games before the default controls started using up for rotate (games before and including Tetris DS, I think?) or they mostly played games like Blockbox (which used my control setup as the default  ) or Nullpomino, which have those sorts of controls set up.

Another thing to consider would be button conflicts if you don't have a fancy mechanical keyboard with N-key rollover. I have issues on my laptop keyboard with hold sometimes not registering because my spacebar input isn't registered if certain other keys in my control setup are held down. This can be really hard to diagnose and take into account though, so it's probably not worth worrying about.

Right Hand: arrow keys for my three fingers, the middle on being the rotate and soft drop keys, while my index and ring finger are for left to right movement, can i know how you have your hands positioned?(before and after the change)

It's a really minor thing, but I'd consider that rotating and soft drop being on the same finger would potentially conflict for t-spins and such, where you really want to be pressing rotate before you've necessarily lifted your finger off soft-drop for the most speed/accuracy.

I have hard and soft drop on the same finger, because (for obvious reasons) I'll never want to press them both simultaneously, and on the occasions when I want to use them in quick succession I also have the action of flicking my finger from soft to hard well-practised because it's used so much in TGM games.


I probably wouldn't consider switching because it's such a minor thing and probably doesn't make much difference to real speed to be worth the effort, but I'd dissuade someone from starting out with it, because in my opinion it's sub-optimal.

[oh7even]

In my experience it's much easier to improve your motor skills when your rotate keys are next to each other (z,x for me) and your movement keys are next to each other (i used arrow keys at first)


I, too, had to wean myself off of the space bar. I sucked at first, because I kept trying to press the space bar to hard drop or the up to rotate, but I got better. It didn't take very many games to get used to.