Tetris Sport - summary of 3 first years

[Rosti_LFC]

I actually gave an interview a few days ago (to a friend who is an apprentice journalist) and I ended up talking a huge amount about Tetris and eSports stuff. I'll post the transcript once I get it, because it'd probably be easier than re-formulating my thoughts and posting them again here.

[Kitaru]

Yeah bigwig, but now that I think about it, it didn't really help Super Puzzle Fighter in the competitive tournament aspect.

Maybe because if you don't play Ken or Donovan, you're free. The send patterns create a pretty definite tier list -- picking any other character is accepting some form of disadvantage. The Xbox/PS3 update helped a bit, but Ken is still S Tier.

[Rosti_LFC]

Take note than none of real life sports were designed in speculating in mind.

Not entirely true. For the ones largely popular in Europe, sure, but my vague understanding is that most major US sports at least had some sort of regard for the spectator in the way they were structured and have evolved over the time.

And in the UK, Rugby League was basically created to provide a variant of Rugby Union that was more entertaining to watch. Plus darts has had a huge amount of revamp in the surrounding stuff to try and make it more appealing as a spectacle.

Maybe in terms of the core rules of the game traditional sports don't pay much heed to it, but given at a commercial level the bottom line for revenue is completely determined by how many people watch it, you'd be stupid to ignore spectators completely.

[caffeine]

Maybe in terms of the core rules of the game traditional sports don't pay much heed to it, but given at a commercial level the bottom line for revenue is completely determined by how many people watch it, you'd be stupid to ignore spectators completely.

Yeah, but I think what's important is that those games drew crowds in the first place. Focus on making a good game for players. If crowds consistently form to watch, then you think about making it more accessible to spectators.

Some of you are acting like TTC should be treating Tetris the same way as Blizzard is catering to Starcraft's competitive scene. Starcraft has a much larger scene that has had many, many more tournaments than Tetris. Third party companies started to get involved when Starcraft proved it could be profitable as a spectator sport. Only much later did Blizzard start adding features specifically for spectating.

Tetris has yet to reach that point. First there needs to be more tournaments, leagues, etc. I think it's possible we're headed in that direction. However, we have a long way to go before we should start expecting TTC to act like Blizzard has been towards Starcraft.

[Wojtek]

Yeah, but I think what's important is that those games drew crowds in the first place. Focus on making a good game for players. If crowds consistently form to watch, then you think about making it more accessible to spectators.

Some of you are acting like TTC should be treating Tetris the same way as Blizzard is catering to Starcraft's competitive scene. Starcraft has a much larger scene that has had many, many more tournaments than Tetris. Third party companies started to get involved when Starcraft proved it could be profitable as a spectator sport. Only much later did Blizzard start adding features specifically for spectating.

Tetris has yet to reach the point. First there needs to be more tournaments, leagues, etc. I think it's possible we're headed in that direction. However, I think we have a long way to go before we should start expecting TTC to act like Blizzard has been towards Starcraft.

I agree 100%

here is how it should go:
1. have good game
2. get lot of people who want to play the game competitively
3. get lot of tournaments for those competitive players
4. get lot of spectators for tournaments

Every step somehow depends on what you have in previous step, so I think it's not very useful to talk about 4 when we still don't have 1 (or we have 1 and don't yet have 2, depending on your point of view).

[Rosti_LFC]

Blizzard designed SC2 around making it a more accessible and spectator-friendly sport than Brood War, but they're still far from the best company when it comes to managing an eSport and doing as much as they can to help the competitive scene grow and stand up for itself (Riot Gaming easily win that category with League of Legends).

Games that make good eSports will have the successful competitive scene first and then see game design elements that help that, but that doesn't mean that solid game design around it being an eSport can't provide a huge kick-start in that direction. And games that don't naturally make good eSports (IMO Tetris is definitely one of these) need substantial game design to ever have a fighting chance in terms of developing a sustainable competitive model with decent viewing audiences.

If any of you think that Tetris can seriously ever be a proper eSport without huge intervention from TTC and substantial changes to game design (neither of which I ever see happening, by the way), then I frankly think that you either don't understand the competitive history of the game and scale of the competitive scene, or that you don't understand what makes eSports successful. If Tetris was ever going to have a decent competitive scene without specifically being designed with the broader scene in mind then it would have done so years ago.

And to use Wojtek's steps, if you don't have step 4, then it's not a sustainable eSport, in my opinion. Sure it can have a nice little microcosm of competitive tournaments but it'll never go anywhere financially and there'll never be any money in it without spectators.

[farter]

as ppl below said, a battle between world's top players can be kept interested in for a few minutes by a non-player (pure watcher) but very hard to continue for longer.
imo a big reason is about visual / sound effects.

for example, watching a live football match, you can hear how they kick the ball, how players shout, see how they run, jump, etc.
about eSport..
in CS you can hear the gunshots, explosions of grenades, see (just like experiencing) they walk, aim, fire, be killed...
in warcraft, starcraft, you can see how they operate, hear and watch how the war is going, etc.
in trackmania (Wojtek loves that -w-), the replay will look cool with simulating video recording like real race, with sounds, motions, etc...

then..
on TF, only frame-by-frame animations, a report on the end of each match. spectating broadcast seems not attractive at all, however if broadcaster him/herself plays, it seems a bit better.
on nullpo, also only animations, showing win and lose (frequency of updating seems to be higher sometimes, that's also better). spectating broadcast..... might be the (simplest) (and worst...) on looking.. and unluckily it'll cause lag if you play and stream at the same time...
on top/toj, frame-by-frame animations without current piece, but it has some effect when player you watch performs tetris, Tspin, etc., and you'll get more (or cooler?) sfx/gfx when playing. so one of the video of hebo and blink's battle got a lot more popular (hebo playing and streaming, here).
cultris(of course c2) does better on this side (but not many people streamed it?), the effects when single click one room in the room list (only this way to spectate?) is just fine. motions are smooth, with gfx of sending lines , sfx of "impressive", "perfect"... i believe if we stream this way, we may get more people watching.

and also the popular TGM3 video showing the hand.. it also has sfx, and strong motion (as mentioned above, 20G will look a lot cooler)
maybe we could show the motion better, in this way or some other ways, i.e, showing key states (joystick like DTET/heboris) ...

it needs to be exciting, of course with players' skill, but also the "skin".

so... yes, developing them needs time, also i can't "require" developer of any game except myself (also i don't have time (← ←|||)) to add those effects which looks useless at all (on we programmers'/advanced players' aspect)...
i just hope..

not engrish, that's YingGeLiShi

[Paradox]

[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]
1. have good game
2. get lot of people who want to play the game competitively
3. get lot of tournaments for those competitive players
4. get lot of spectators for tournaments
[/quote]

I agree that is the order that things will fall. Thatls pretty much in the hands of TTC and capable programmers. We can't even get the ball rolling with our current games.

[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]some of you are acting like TTC should be treating Tetris the same way as Blizzard is catering to Starcraft's competitive scene.[/quote]

they are definitely aware that there is a competitive scene for tetris. They themselves said they want it to be an olympic sport right?

If you look at how starcraft 1 started out it was terrible for competitive players. As soon as the community showed some interest they started patching and fixing their game. Why? because it helps both casual and competitive players to fix their game. The fact that they gave the community a chance is the reason why starcraft spiraled into arguably the most successful eSport.

TTC needs to recognize that Tetris as an eSport is a seed of a very large tree.

[Yokipi]

An ambitious enough topic that I felt compelled even as a long-time lurker to contribute.

First, being familiar enough with the Starcraft scene from day one, and as most other people on this thread have already stated, I think nationally-recognized professional Tetris at this point is a pipedream. It's not just that it makes a difficult spectator sport. At the moment, it is simply too small.

But this has been something that has always confused me about it. Not many (outside this community) fawn over Tetris, unlike RTS or FPS games, but yet it has an addicting universal appeal to almost everyone. I like to view this as potential for growth.

Judging by this thread, the opinion is unanimous though. Above all else, we simply need more tournaments and competitions. To break down this isolated step even further, the things we need for a tournament are:

1) A game
2) Players
3) A fanbase
4) A social hub

Starting with #1, unsurprisingly enough, the sheer diversity of Tetris games hinders its competitive development. Tournaments can't be held across multiple platforms, and the barrier of having to learn a new medium discourages any amateurs from participating, resulting in Tetris tournaments generally seeing the same faces repeatedly, existing only at the pro level, and being unwelcoming to newcomers. This is probably the largest problem, and one that games such as Starcraft II handled very well: The difference between casual and competitive is enormous.

In the case of Tetris, this naturally leads to a lack of #3. Casual players are simply not encouraged to spend the time practicing and mastering finesse, watching professional matches to pick up on strategy, and memorizing heaps of T-spin patterns to improve their skill. They would rather stay casual. For one, the practice:growth curve is too steep for most.

In #4 however, the fanbase has been making good headway recently, especially with fansites like HardDrop showing potential, should they be advertised correctly. I think that if we want public recognition, that's what it'll have to come down to, advertising, through way of regular, large tournaments. The more public attention the better, but first of all, we just need more tournaments at all skill levels, pro, amateur, novice... As a related example, the US competitive puzzling/sudoku base has grown enormously this past year thanks to monthly puzzle competitions held by an unaffiliated site. It gives people an inlet into the community, by building up their thirst for Tetris first.

I haven't probed around Korean fansites much, but I could start looking if need be. We have #2. Tetris possibly has more of #2 than any other game. We just need to entice everyone with candy and shiny prizes, and bring out the burning sense of competitiveness in the horde of people we have at our disposal. I really think it can be done.

MORE TOURNAMENTS.

[caffeine]

Judging by the last few posts, I think we're agreed in that at this point in time we need to focus on two areas:

• Continue to encourage/petition Tetris game developers to work towards a higher quality game. We want a fair and balanced game that lends better to the depth and strategy necessary to keep players interested long enough to become more competitive.
• Continue to host and stream as many competitions as possible.

[Paradox]

Judging by the last few posts, I think we're agreed in that at this point in time we need to focus on two areas:

• Continue to encourage/petition Tetris game developers to work towards a higher quality game. We want a fair and balanced game that lends better to the depth and strategy necessary to keep players interested long enough to become more competitive.
• Continue to host and stream as many competitions as possible.

i can do the 2nd part, I don't know who would be willing/capable of doing the development part.

[SmokesCement]

i can do the 2nd part, I don't know who would be willing/capable of doing the development part.

It really depends on the scope of the game you want. Looking at the platform, I could program a Tetris game for Windows or Xbox using XNA, but I'm not sure that would be able to entice enough players?

Instead I think it would probably want to be extremely accessible, something like Java (to run on many OS), or better yet using HTML5, Flash or similar so it can be played in a browser. Could that work?

Regarding the actual gameplay on the other hand, I feel that is even more complicated. In my opinion you should not change the core system too dramatically. However something probably needs to be added to provide more depth and strategy to versus games.

[EnFuego]

Didn't WCG have a poll a couple years ago asking what new games people want to see in the future? Maybe I don't understand how these types of tournaments work but, can't TTC just sponsor a tournament like WCG to hold a worldwide tetris tournament? If they have global scale tournaments more people would have an incentive to start playing tetris competitively.


Too bad TTC won't ever make a non-casual game or actually care about a competitive scene

[Rosti_LFC]

I don't see how streaming or hosting more tournaments is really going to help anything besides supporting the current scene. Like really, I feel that if we were onto something in terms of Tetris being a game that could support a reasonable competitive community then we'd already have far more people than we currently have.

I'd say the entire "competitive community" for Tetris in the west (because I have no idea about the western market, and in reality it's not practically relevant to us anyway) is maybe 100 players big, and I feel that's being pretty generous. And that's 100 players somewhat split across maybe four or five different games too. I feel some people are perhaps being naive and aren't quite understanding just how absolutely incredibly unpopular Tetris is as a competitive game.

In terms of tournaments we have F***-all too. Hardly anyone is bothering to host them these days (with good reason) and when people do participation is hardly big (with the exception of the TTO).

It's easy to point at Tetris as being a game that is the best-selling franchise of all time, but that's a stupid figure because those sales are almost entirely based on single-player gameplay, which is almost a whole different game from the competitive VS style of Tetris, and there's absolutely nothing to suggest people who like single player Tetris will like the multiplayer aspect (just look at the TGM community). Saying that we have a huge potential competitive base because everyone plays Tetris isn't much different to saying that competitive cooking has the potential to be a massive sport because everyone does cooking. You're ignoring a key motivator in there between the casual and the competitive demographics.

With some decent advertising channels TTC could help in this respect - currently most people are only going to find the competitive scene if they're looking for it, and it's obvious from the number of people here that most people aren't bothering to look.

Oh, and don't forget the aspect that any time anyone comes here from TF/TB because they've really enjoyed playing VS we tell them that they should switch over to Nullpomino/Cultris and stop having fun for a bit instead.


I feel the core mechanics behind competitive VS at the moment are just bad. It is fundamentally just a 40L race, with the only added extra strategy being in mechanics that are unintuitive and I would expect to most people seem a bit arbitrary and stupid. Games end too quickly to be tense and exciting, and the pool of top players is so small that there's not enough depth in skill. Rooting for the underdog is stupid because our games work in a way that means the underdog is basically never going to win (this, by the way, is the easiest thing to change in having games that are bo3/bo5 instead of bo19/bo29).

Like, personally I don't enjoy watching current Tetris modes at all unless it's someone I know on personal terms playing, and I say that as someone who watches a lot of both traditional sports and eSports and can also read Tetris fast enough to follow top-level games. I don't find the games exciting at all except for the rare occasions where the score runs extremely close.

Now I know that if I don't like something that doesn't automatically make most people not like something, but I don't really see how your average Tetris player could watch competitive Tetris and enjoy it or be inspired by it. Obviously people here have but that doesn't mean we should just circlejerk ourselves into thinking that everyone else thinks that way. I also don't think adding snazzier graphics will help for the spectator at the moment (though it would make the games themselves more appealing) because the graphics aren't the core problem.


I don't think it's a great idea to look to TTC either. Sure, they could sit down and make a Tetris game that is well-rounded, and with a multiplayer mode that is both fun to play and sits well from a competitive aspect, but in reality why would they bother? Even if they absolutely nail it and somehow manage to craft a decent eSport using Tetris gameplay as a base, what do they gain? They're already making f***tons of money on stuff like Tetris Battle. People already know about Tetris. Sure, they'll make the 0.1% of customers that makes up the competitive community happy, but other than that I don't think they'd actually be increasing the profitability of the game a great deal.

There's actually potential risk in increasing the exposure of the competitive scene, as their entire business model revolves around casual players, and I'd say a reasonable factor to the enjoyment of casual players is them thinking they're better at Tetris than they actually are, and expanding the competitive scene suddenly takes away the "man I was so good at Tetris when I was a kid" aspect.

I feel creating a good Tetris game that could actually support a sizeable Tetris community past weirdos such as ourselves would be incredibly hard to do right, and it's foolhardy to wait for a company to do something difficult when they have no motivation and perceivable benefit for doing so.

If a decent competitive Tetris game ever gets made then it will probably have to come from the community (and take a lot of seriously solid design and programming work), and then it's up to the hands of TTC to take it in rather than shut it down.

[caffeine]

Even if they absolutely nail it and somehow manage to craft a decent eSport using Tetris gameplay as a base, what do they gain? They're already making f***tons of money on stuff like Tetris Battle.

They have to gain the intangible rewards of knowing they've accomplished something great. I say this because both Pajitnov and Rogers have expressed interest in seeing Tetris "go the distance," so to speak. I believe Pajitnov might've said it was his dream at one point.

I feel the core mechanics behind competitive VS at the moment are just bad.

The core mechanics of multiplayer Tetris are mainly that of Tetris in general. Players must strive to keep their playfield stable in order to avoid making holes. In order to do this, they must place their pieces in a logical way. They must avoid creating towers and trenches, which tend to make the player more dependent on certain pieces.

Players must combine line clears when possible to send garbage to their opponents. Often, the safest route is to stabilize one's field by way of singles and doubles. Therefore, this adds a layer of depth since a player must weigh the risks of clearing a Tetris with the safety of clearing singles and doubles. With practice, a player might learn to see ways of building up a Tetris without jeopardizing their field's stability. Learning to do this fluently is challenging and interesting.

Another layer of depth is the bonuses given for T-Spins and Combos. As with Tetrises, these force the player to weigh the rewards of topping out his opponent with the risks of trying to keep his own field stable.

Another layer of depth is that of handling garbage. A player must find novel placements in order to downstack efficiently. However, trying not to stack over holes might cause the field to become instable. Finding the right balance and doing this well is extremely interesting, and the game rewards it heavily.

Once a player becomes decent at all of that, he can prove himself even further by trying to do it faster. Juggling all of these considerations without hesitating is extremely challenging. The game rewards those who manage this the same as most other games: the speed advantage. When I play fast, I tend to get "in the zone." It's fun, and it's like I'm trying to push myself past my limits. I can't say that about many other games.

It is fundamentally just a 40L race, with the only added extra strategy being in mechanics that are unintuitive and I would expect to most people seem a bit arbitrary and stupid.

To put it plainly, this is not true.

Lastly, wouldn't it be more useful to offer suggestions for what we can do about these problems than to simply complain? Or, are you saying there's nothing to be done, and all this time we've been playing a flawed game that can never be good?