Why guideline Tetris is broken

[djackallstar]

KoS is the only Tetris that I still play because it's addicting and I'm not bored of it yet. I suppose KoS has gotten SOMETHING right, but I don't know what.

Hmm my guess is that KoS is more like a chess game, where players have enough time to think about different strategies, rather than rush through the patterns they are already quite familiar with, and hence is more interesting to play, especially for players like you who love trying different things in tetris.
On the other hand, TF/TOP/Nullpomino are kinda like fighting games (Street Fighter, or something like that) where the creativity of players is somewhat obstructed by the fast pace of the games. (the patterns used and the ways played are kinda limited)

EDIT 1:
Another reason might be that, in KoS you can play with real ppl instead of only bots, and by watching their screen you can try to figure out what they are planning to do, you can then come up with some strats to deal with that, and if your strats do work you feel fulfilled, and that's fun in a sense. In Misamino you can do the same thing, but since the way the AI stacks is intricate, most of the time the player does not have an idea what it is doing, or can't be bothered to figure out what it is doing (especially when against high-levlled AIs), and hence not that fun compared to KoS.

[Blitz]

All games are substantially to repeat similar things.
For example, in RPG, you do battle repeatedly.
What is the different between this and what you said?

Im not sure about RPGs but if you compare multiplayer Tetris with other strategy games like StarCraft or Chess there is one big difference.

Tetris have rules with constant power. They state that: A T-spin is always this powerful, a Tetris is always this powerful, garbage line clears are always this powerful etc... This is information that competent players can easily analyze. A game with this type of rules allow optimal ways of playing the game to be found.

StarCraft has more dynamic rules. The power of the objects in-game changes based upon the players decisions. In StarCraft, you cannot say that this unit is always this strong. You can put unit A vs unit B and calculate which will defeat the other first in that matchup, but it has little impact on the game because the true power of that unit depends on which other units are in your army, and which units are in your opponents' army and which upgrades and buildings you and your opponents have. The power of that unit depends on where that unit is positioned on the map. If it is in a strategic bad location on the map where it cannot contribute in a fight or scout any useful information then it has zero power. It may even have negative power because you spent resources and time building it. But if that unit is with your army or at the right place at the right time, that single unit might have massive power and win you the game or if it cannot attack air and it turns out your opponent has air, your unit once again has no power. In short the rules say that "you win if you build the right units at the right time and make sure they are at the right place at the right time and your opponent fails to do this". The right units, place and time are all variables that are constantly changing during a game. With rules like these it is hard, if not impossible to work out an optimal way to play the game. That is one of the reasons StarCraft is a popular game. The rules adds a lot of depth and gives variation in the ways that the game is played. If StarCraft was to use only rules where every object in the game always had constant power for a day, we could easily calculate what the optimal play is and the result would be like: both players can only build this type of unit, they must take exactly this route across the map and engage the enemy army at this exact position, whichever player executes this with the most precision wins. That would be a bad game.

Chess is also an interesting example. Its rules doesn't really define the power of any of the pieces. You cannot put Rook vs Bishop and calculate which one of them would defeat the other. The game rules does only define how the pieces can move, how to take out other pieces and the end game condition. and then it is up to the players to evaluate how much "power" their pieces have in any given situation. That is why Chess is still popular. Despite Chess being around for hundreds of years and countless books has been written about chess, nobody has found an optimal way to play.

What differs multiplayer Tetris from other good games is that in Tetris you must repeat the same play over and over again because that is the only viable way to win. In other good games you must learn a huge variety of different plays because repeating the same play all the time is not a viable way to win.

[Paul676]

What's the same play? If you've solved downstacking and downstack to midgame t-spins I'd like to see you beat the top players who've not yet done so...

I understand your feeling of disillusionment though.

[gerdhal]

Really interesting post.


Guideline version of tetris is mainstream stuff and certainly noone can say it wont get repetitive. However thats the beautiful and addictive factor in tetris - simplicity.

In guideline tetris seems that games repeat same patterns indeed.. Its likely designed to be NOOB friendly to the max, however it occupies your mind and stays addictive; for most of the players atleast. No way there is everything balanced.. combos for instance and many other aspects need tuneup.

Im totally playing tetris for fun and Im all about enjoying the game without trying to be pro (tons tons of speed required). So I focus on patterns and setups even if Im slow. For some extra spice might try no SRS and no bag system?^^ KoS looks really like a chess game indeed! I love classic tetris modes alot too. (remember ive started tetris less than a year ago)


Interesting you mentioned StarCraft  I can tell you I was very good in Starcraft: BroodWar years ago^^ On iccup.com played with korean high rankers^^ And im easy master rank terran player now too in SC2 (still casual). I really came to tetris because it looked so lovely and simplistic yet unbeatable game. Needed some fresh take.. and definately played sc way too much haha..

I think its all about philosophy. Many gamers face similar questions. Where does the routine kick in too much and the fun end.. how to be and get into flow state. Brain just works that way; you have to get your spoils at some point or you get way too unsatisfied to press on improving. I personally think many people ruin theyr motivation and flow state with pushing too unrealistic goals in too short period of time.

I think SC2 would suit for you Blitz  If you seek more ways/strategies to win.. RTS is the way to go^^ Cant remember which japanese tetris pro it was who said something like this: whatever you do - have fun. If fun factor dies.. find quickly something fresh.

[Rosti_LFC]

Blitz I agree with what you're saying, but I kind of feel like there are very few things in the world that have the depth and complexity to sustain someone's dedication for a long period of time.

In my early teens I played a lot of Unreal Tournament. I got into clans, played it competitively for a few years, and I might have continued to do so had the community stayed big and active and most of my clan not left to play WC3 DotA instead.

Then I got into Tetris, first Tetris DS until the leaderboards stopped working, and then I got into the TGM series and to a slightly lesser extent SRS multiplayer. Multiplayer didn't really pull me because there wasn't really any proper competitive scene with regular tournaments and competition - at least not to the extent I was used to from UT99. TGM held my attention for a long time (and I would still maintain they're easily the best incarnation of single-player Tetris) because of the high difficulty, and the addictive and enthralling set of modes and grade systems within them. That said, after about four or five years of playing it very seriously I felt like I'd achieved a lot of the goals I originally set out to get, and I couldn't really justify the amount of my free time that it would take to get the remaining high-level grades I'd yet to master.

Since then I've moved on to SC2 and spent a couple of years on that before chucking a load of hours into DotA 2 instead. Not because I necessarily think they're *better*, but because I just wanted a change and some new challenges. It seems like plenty of other people who were very active members of the scene back in 2010-2012 have kind of drifted away as well.

Like, I think there are a lot of aspects of the guideline that are shit. I think the gameplay is not very well thought through, I don't think aspects like combos and t-spins are balanced, and I think really the games are just pooped out and they are what they are, rather than carefully designed to make them as challenging and fun as possible for high-level players.

That said, if you're complaining that Tetris isn't good enough for you to sink more than three years of your life into, what are you really after? The community is fragmented so that casual and hardcore players are on different games. It's small, there are no big competitive aspects to it, and the ones that do exist are won by the same handful of players every time. The point where you start to have *almost* mastered the game and things become incredibly tedious, more of a grind and less fun, that's the point where you need the community or wider world to offer you more, and for Tetris that doesn't happen.

For SC2, unless you're right at the top there's always a higher bracket to aim for. That's got nothing to do with SC2 being a better game in terms of complexity or balance of strategy. That's just because it has a ladder system, and once you're at the top of that there's WCS and the rest of the professional tournament scene. Bronze players strive to be Silver. Master strive to be Grand Master. Grand Masters strive to be at the same level as Taeja or Jaedong. No matter where you are, there's always someone a bit better than you and that next rung of the ladder to try and climb to. But importantly that next rung is always visible and seems within reach if you just practice a bit more.

With Tetris you're either smashing noobs on TF, or you're trying to beat Hebo-Mai and Blink on TOP/Nullpo/whatever and there's no solid transition in between. That's not entirely the game's fault, that's just the community and that not enough people play Tetris to a hardcore level and organise that kind of shit to sustain it. gerdhal mentioned iccup for SC:BW - that's the exact kind of thing that needs to exist and be strongly supported for Tetris to be fun for people in the lower half of the hardcore bracket. And it doesn't exist.

Despite all that though, you can complain that it sucks, that it lacks depth, whatever, but it's still apparently got enough substance to it for you to have spent years and literally thousands of hours playing it. How many other things could you name where you'd be able to show that sort of devotion to it?

tl;dr - If you've played the same game over and over for literally thousands of hours, what else do you really think could be done with just the game itself for it to not feel repetitive, and for it to stay fun, without a wider structure around the game to keep it interesting?

[Alexandra]

I understand your feeling of disillusionment though.

Me too.

You should play microblizz or mattyabar on top. Those two are fun. At least to me.

[Shuey]

I honestly have to say that I'm really surprised that this thread 1. Started, and 2. That so many people have replied to it.  But, of all the things people have said, Rosti's reply really hit home for me and was a breath of fresh air.

ONE guy in the community had some feelings about the game of Tetris and what it means to him.

Blitz, I don't blame you for the way you feel, and I certainly don't judge it either.  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion based on their own experience.

Whatever happens, I hope you'll be able to find a path makes you happy.

[Aaron]

Go play League of Legends if you've mastered Tetris then, Lord.

[Alexsweden]

As many others here I am curious about what style of play you are talking about. Are you only doing PC into 4-wide mid or something like that?

Or is it more like a set of rules, for example - never do combos unless at least 5, strive to keep back-to-back always and blah blah blah? That sounds impossible to me.

I mean the best way to play to you, is it a general way or do you have some detailed "formula" or is it somewhere in between?

[farter]

if it's only about guideline multiplayer game of tetris, there are more variations you may try.
if it's about tetris, the following could be skipped.

i'm not sure if you'd like to try others when you got bored by one (like now).

you may try TGM series when you're bored of playing against an opponent.

you may try TOP item channel when you're bored of tspins and tetrises.
well also sega arcade tetris 1vs1 mode, it needs some strategy too.

you may try huopin tetris when you're only bored of tspins.

you may try globallink tetris when you're even bored of triples.

also you may try the two above if you're bored of SRS, bag7 and Hold and even DAS, wallkick, lockdelay.

and you may try surviving with pentominoes, they're a lot harder to deal with.

it's also fun to play MPH-less 40L, even MPHCS-less battle.

tetris players' interest varies also their level skills. oldschool versions turn more interesting again no matter how broken they are, depending on how strong you are, if only you gotta have a try.
but also there are japanese players who kept playing TGM1 for so many years. how will you consider the complexity and fun of this game and guideline battle?

you may even have fun playing the default script of this guy's work (like i did).

well and at last, become a programmer and implement whatever crap ideas you want tetris to be, and furthermore, share it with all monsters in this community

[S2PID]

Blitz, based on your issues maybe you should try playing Puyo Puyo.

it's been 24 years but no one's found a spammable formula for that yet! lol

[zaphod77]

I suspect that the simple change to a history based randomizer will take a lot of the predictaability out of multiplayer tetris.

It's really challenging to put a rock paper scissor's metagame into multiplayer tetris.  If one existed, woudl that make it more interesting?  how can we do that?

[bluesphere]

I agree that guideline multiplayer Tetris has flaws in its design and game balance.
I am one of the players who lost his motivation the last few years because winning became more or less routine work
and losing was just frustrating with no room left for challenges.
In my case, I haven't had the luck yet to find a good Tetris game with good opponents for me to play with, since the end of TOJ.

But there are few other reasons, like the community being too small with no noticable growth,
(despite the probably huge number of people who have played at least hours of Tetris in their lives)
or the lack of good official (!) software to compete in.

I  actually think that the current guideline offers a somewhat solid rule to play with.
At least it's not simply about luck and/or speed to win a game, although speed still is an important factor of course.
It has some room for strategies like garbage countering/not-countering and different T-spin setups.
I personally like the idea of T-spins btw, because it alters the gameplay from simply stacking up and down
to strategically making use of any Tetrimino you get in order to maintain a high APM value.
At least I for myself haven't found a method to constantly win with one strategy.

With some fine adjustments outside the actual guideline i.e. in overall game speed, combo power, garbage messiness,
and stressless gameplay including a larger community for better matchmaking, guideline multiplayer Tetris can still be fun imho.

Besides, this still is just Tetris.
If you got sick of Tetris how it is today, you're not the only one.
If there's no fun, there's no point pushing yourself (like someone said already).
Maybe someday things will change and competitive Tetris will be cool again among us.

Sorry if I'm off topic in any aspect, but at least this is what I was thinking after reading this.

[caffeine]

I agree that flow is the key to making multiplayer Tetris fun. I disagree about what the broken parts are. For review:

[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]Flow theory postulates three conditions that have to be met to achieve a flow state:

• One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task.
• The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows them to adjust their performance to maintain the flow state.
• One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and their own perceived skills. One must have confidence in one's ability to complete the task at hand.

[/quote]

For #1, change-on-attack (CoA) garbage, overly clean garbage, and targeting garbage in FFA play are problems. The goals are very obfuscated in these conditions, for new and seasoned players alike. The better your attack, the cleaner the garbage it sends, the easier it is for your opponent to return volley. With FFA targeting, it's not uncommon for to send many times more garbage than your opponent and still lose. (To clarify, this can happen regardless, but the difference is that the reason is due to luck-dependent consequences of the targeting mechanism, instead of sloppy downstacking for example). The point is that these three things make the player's goal confusing.

For #2, CoA and overly clean garbage are a problem. I've said it before and I'll say it again. There's no slippery slope with clean, "see saw" garbage. Play goes back and forth because clean garbage can be so easily returned. There's less feedback about a player's performance because good attacks are poorly rewarded (clean garbage and counterintuitive CoA). Moreover, mistakes aren't really punished well because it's so easy to send a bunch of clean garbage right back.

For #3, bigger player pools and more accurate ratings and matchmaking are the way to go.

Edit: I'm not asking for perfectly random, 90% hole change garbage. That was OK in the past, but T-Spins send a 2-to-1 ratio nowadays. Too messy a garbage might create a perverse incentive for players to only attack and pay no mind to defense/downstacking. That would be terrible. However, it definitely needs to be messier than, say, Tetris DS, which was about 30% hole change iirc. Therefore, probably somewhere between 50% to 70% hole change would work.

[gerdhal]

I agree that flow is the key to making multiplayer Tetris fun. I disagree about what the broken parts are. For review:

[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]Flow theory postulates three conditions that have to be met to achieve a flow state:

• One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task.
• The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows them to adjust their performance to maintain the flow state.
• One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and their own perceived skills. One must have confidence in one's ability to complete the task at hand.

For #1, change-on-attack (CoA) garbage, overly clean garbage, and targeting garbage in FFA play are problems. The goals are very obfuscated in these conditions, for new and seasoned players alike. The better your attack, the cleaner the garbage it sends, the easier it is for your opponent to return volley. With FFA targeting, it's not uncommon for to send many times more garbage than your opponent and still lose. (To clarify, this can happen regardless, but the difference is that the reason is due to luck-dependent consequences of the targeting mechanism, instead of sloppy downstacking for example). The point is that these three things make the player's goal confusing.

For #2, CoA and overly clean garbage are a problem. I've said it before and I'll say it again. There's no slippery slope with clean, "see saw" garbage. Play goes back and forth because clean garbage can be so easily returned. There's less feedback about a player's performance because good attacks are poorly rewarded (clean garbage and counterintuitive CoA). Moreover, mistakes aren't really punished well because it's so easy to send a bunch of clean garbage right back.

For #3, bigger player pools and more accurate ratings and matchmaking are the way to go.

Edit: I'm not asking for perfectly random, 90% hole change garbage. That was OK in the past, but T-Spins send a 2-to-1 ratio nowadays. Too messy a garbage might create a perverse incentive for players to only attack and pay no mind to defense/downstacking. That would be terrible. However, it definitely needs to be messier than, say, Tetris DS, which was about 30% hole change iirc. Therefore, probably somewhere between 50% to 70% hole change would work.
[/quote]


I agree.. tbh 6player is so random stuff with FFA targeting.. its not even funny sometimes  literally... but well i think that goes what i thought before.. this stuff is likely just desgined to be noob friendly to the max.. so new players figure "hey i might have a chance here"