STGT'12 planning thread

[moozooh]

Yep, pretty much, though the reasons unrelated to the thread were related to a post aimed directly at me.

I think eb's point is that, if you have so many reasons not to play, you shouldn't point fingers at something that had the least influence over your decision. The thread and whatever happened in it is just a scapegoat. You most likely had all the same reasons the previous year, and the year before that; don't tell me it was "the thread" every time that prevented you from joining.

[O. Van Bruce]

[Tigershark]

I assume there's no requirement for a recording of your run? That would ruin the comp for me. I tried to read throuhg a few of the pages about this and then got bored and began to feel depressed (no idea why).

And to comment upon an earlier post: my goal in this comp is not to come last and, amongst my team mates, to get into the top three scores so that my score counts. That's all the competition I need.

Bring it on.

[ShadowWraith]

come on guys we should be complaining about the games in the list being terrible like every previous stgt

don't make me post more recipes

i'll do it

Edit: @Tigershark, there's no requirement.

[Marc]

Yep, pretty much, though the reasons unrelated to the thread were related to a post aimed directly at me.

I think eb's point is that, if you have so many reasons not to play, you shouldn't point fingers at something that had the least influence over your decision. The thread and whatever happened in it is just a scapegoat. You most likely had all the same reasons the previous year, and the year before that; don't tell me it was "the thread" every time that prevented you from joining.

If you take a look, I took a long gap in posting from here, started to pist less reguarly about five years ago when I sold off my collectio , and pretty much not at all for roughly three years, as other stuff took over. I continued to game, but far less shmups for the simple reason that they do require a bit of dedication and practice, which I didn't have the time for. I've picked them back up since the 360 ports appearing over here awoke my interest, and have been wondering if I should get a little more serious, hence I clicked on this thread thinking it would be a start. It put me off, quite frankly. I think what sticks in my craw is the smell of suspicion and lack of trust in such a niche community, there isn't anything like the level of camaraderie I'd expect amongst fans of a dying genre. Anyhow, I certainly have no beef with any individual, I reacted to EB's slightly snarky response to my original, somewhat snarky post. Enjoy the comp all.

[O. Van Bruce]

Yep, pretty much, though the reasons unrelated to the thread were related to a post aimed directly at me.

I think eb's point is that, if you have so many reasons not to play, you shouldn't point fingers at something that had the least influence over your decision. The thread and whatever happened in it is just a scapegoat. You most likely had all the same reasons the previous year, and the year before that; don't tell me it was "the thread" every time that prevented you from joining.

If you take a look, I took a long gap in posting from here, started to pist less reguarly about five years ago when I sold off my collectio , and pretty much not at all for roughly three years, as other stuff took over. I continued to game, but far less shmups for the simple reason that they do require a bit of dedication and practice, which I didn't have the time for. I've picked them back up since the 360 ports appearing over here awoke my interest, and have been wondering if I should get a little more serious, hence I clicked on this thread thinking it would be a start. It put me off, quite frankly. I think what sticks in my craw is the smell of suspicion and lack of trust in such a niche community, there isn't anything like the level of camaraderie I'd expect amongst fans of a dying genre. Anyhow, I certainly have no beef with any individual, I reacted to EB's slightly snarky response to my original, somewhat snarky post. Enjoy the comp all.

There are still people who like shmups and shmup fans just for what they are. Myself included. We don't go bashing our acomplishments at other people's faces neither we try to negate every possible addition to the "elite club".

I've seen people on this thread that has become so entitled of their "shmup superiority" that they simply don't want anyone to surpass their dear score because they don't want to go trough all the hassle of learning the game in which they've been surpassed again.

Anyway, let then rot... because they want this rotting genere to die with then (and keep their crowns on their heads)

[Nifty]

come on guys we should be complaining about the games in the list being terrible like every previous stgt

I concur

Hope everyone's going to enjoy spending a week staring at Batsugun's stage 4 boss

[CptRansom]

Fuck Bakraid.

/complaint

[KAI]

I want to play.

[moozooh]

I want to play.

Go register then!

[dunpeal2064]

come on guys we should be complaining about the games in the list being terrible like every previous stgt

I concur

Hope everyone's going to enjoy spending a week staring at Batsugun's stage 4 boss

Hope no one is playing the Sat port or we may have our first STGT-related suicide (need more bombs)

Fuck Jupiter!

[dex]

Jesus. Can't even go on holiday for a week without drama breaking out. At least you guys picked a novel topic.

There will be no requirement to post replays. If you want to put it up, go right ahead, I'm sure everyone will enjoy it, but this is a friendly-spirited tourney and requiring draconian verification would run contrary to that.

Voting thread will be up today, all the captains info filled out within about 12 hours. Would be earlier but I want to catch some sleep first.

[Ed Oscuro]

I have read all the arguments in this thread (I think, I'm not counting giant macro images as arguments) and some good points have been raised on all sides. I find myself reconsidering why I was not excited about the possibility of posting a replay. I don't want the good points to be lost, so I will cover the "ethics" of this as quickly as possible, because I still think the word ought to get out there about what (in my personal view) the tournament does and what it does not do.

I also have a very short proposal about replays to please those who like them (which is all of us - I don't get why normally smart people continued to strawman this, as if people who are reluctant to back mandatory replays are against replays period), no matter your stance on the "should they be mandatory or voluntary" debate.

Here are what I think are the values of Shmups that people have sought to defend in this thread:
freedom
fun
learning
protection (and respect)
community

How many of these values can we accomodate (hypothetically speaking, because I wouldn't put it past us to raise this issue again next year!) at once?

The short correct answer is: To at least some degree, all of them.
The longer correct answer:

It is wrong to say that fraudulent scores degrade protection of your scores or respect for scores and the competition (argument given below in a couple forms), at all. At the same time, mandatory replays (which do give a good protection against fraudulent scores, at least with a week's preparation) can inflict real harms to freedom, fun, and even learning and community, for some people - not everybody. For the purposes of freedom, fun, learning, and community enhancement, voluntary replays will certainly enhance those values' representation at STGT. They will even give you brownie points (or the equivalent if you are not a Girl Scout) for going the extra mile!

As sloppy as I dare: For no forced replays I see no to very few and manageable harms (we are not precluding the possibility for snark and and pointed questioning of scores), no overwhelming positives for mandatory replays over voluntary replays, and at least possible benefits of a streamlined (i.e. voluntary replays) STGT experience if replays are voluntary.

More about that list of values: Many people have written while holding the assumption that you must sacrifice one of these values to get another. So freedom is seen in almost direct opposition to protection and respect of other people's achievements and of the respect for the game. I don't agree with this view. We have some casual referees to take care of some of the obvious cases of screwing around, but past that, most of these supposed problems are private matters - dysfunctions of pride in both the abuser and the person who lets themselves feel abused. You will note that "maximizing verifiability of scores" does not count as a value on my list, partly because it's not a value like the others, and partly because other sites and tournaments offer this verifiability quite well.

Respect for the tournament and for others is something that must be given (out of love, you might say), and must be voluntary. Talking of forcing this would be like talking of forcing somebody to love devil cake and Santa Claus. If somebody is unwilling to give this respect, that doesn't hurt you or me in any way we have cause to force this respect; we are still playing the game for hopefully the right reasons and in the right way. One bad score is just statistical noise. Somebody can "take" your #2 spot with a fraudulent score, but that isn't a reflection of you. No, really and truly; it isn't. A fraudster is confused, has degraded respect for themselves, or perhaps are just fed up with the bad news about casuals (I could almost believe it!). They also place themselves at risk of great (justifiable) ridicule!

If you need to think of fraudulent scores like a carrot tied to a stick - go for it! For many people, any score (or split times) helps them set a pace. Don't worry about "the truth" of somebody else's unpreventable and unverifiable actions - worry about you. I do see the purpose in getting bent out of shape about a fraudulent score, but I also see that in this case it is a matter of little consequence (FIL gave a nice boiled-down version of what I wrote earlier about mutual trust). Your performance will not be "stolen" unless you allow somebody else to hypnotize or demoralize you, but you're not fighting them (I didn't see CAG in the list of games this year; regardless, replays would not solve that problem). It is like complaining about your 400m splits because your coach put them just a second out of reach (and if he told you to run the 400 in one second you would just laugh). No: Your job, should you accept it, is to beat the score that you have chosen, regardless of what it is.
Have you been degraded for choosing to peg yourself to a fraudulent score? Has the tournament or the game? No, absolutely not. I have great respect for people who choose to go through a rigorous process in good faith and get results. This respect is only deepened by how much a person is willing to share in order to bring everybody else along to their level and beyond, in the way that self-sacrifice is universally adored. That it could be an illusion - well, that's a problem the philosophers haven't solved, either (see: Justified True Beliefs and Gettier Cases). Some people do not want or need adoration, and just want to blow shit up after a hard day of work.

You still have (or should have) a reasonable expectation of getting a sense of how you performed compared to your potential, and also how you placed relative to the pack (putting aside differences in personal experience).

To be absolutely clear: Telling people that they have a thin skin because they don't want to reveal their play is in direct opposition to freedom, not "absolute" freedom, but a reasonable freedom. Obviously, none of us thinks bad scores have any right to hijack the tournament, but as I explained above, this is no problem for reasonable-at-a-glance scores, and wildly outrageous scores like 90%+ of the WR fifty minutes into the first day of play are going to be put in the score* column (like the Home Runs* column, or Tours De France* if you know baseball and competitive cycling at all) - fraudsters do not rob us of our common sense or of the value of the competition which goes beyond just posting a number.

So, what's good about letting people just play without worrying about recording and uploading anything anywhere? It reduces the requirements to play to the absolute barest minimum, as free of stress and as inclusive as possible. For a welcoming tournament, I can't think of anything better to get people engaged. It would be like a gateway drug, except the player must be predisposed to want to play in that competitive style to suddenly see the light about replays. It cannot be forced upon them.

The assumption that these preferences should be forced appears most often when people start assuming others ought to play games only for score, or loops, or counterstops, or max chain, or survival time, and not for any other reason than getting the "best" performance. Games are as much about experience as about performance (which is why Ebert is wrong about games). When people decide not to play a game because of the demands of the game for high-level scoring play, too many other people seem to discount the joy a casual player can feel at experiencing a totally new game for the first time, or even revisiting an old favorite again. Anybody who wants to engage the games on a long-term basis and can make that committment is certainly free to advocate what they think is the yardstick for success, but that doesn't make it the best one for you or me, regardless of even what the developers did or didn't want (Daioh, P-47 Aces, need I say more?). If you really want to prove to the world that you have the right stuff, you can't do much better than go straight to the already established sources for reliably checked competitive play.

(Parenthetical: I think there is some rose-tinted glasses stuff going on; I can't believe Billy Mitchell and the other aces in Ding of Dong really spent a lot of time sharing secrets with each other, but they probably shared plenty of sharp elbows. I'm not out to defend secrecy in that context; I don't like it, but if you've worked hard on something, it's reasonable to expect to make bank on it, even if it's "just" knowing a secret gaming trick. Sikraiken has been very patient explaining some finer points of various games which were criticized here, and that weakens this kind of criticism of those supposedly grubby elite players.)

You get more flies with honey than vinegar, and frankly I don't think some people realize how exotic a feeling competition (and this kind, amongst all others) can be to many people, and it could be daunting enough without a sense that they must buy into somebody else's ideas about reasons to enjoy games, wholesale. I tend to rate games based on how well I think the vision of how to play the game competitively has been achieved, and yet many games rate very highly that are utterly broken. They would rate better if they weren't broken; alas, there is no universally-designated standard of what constitutes the best design for an engaging interactive work. But we can still aim lower: The ideas of STGT are to make people more competitive (debatable) and to play better and enjoy some games along with some semi-expert knowledge (without argument).

As I've said before, I think there are some very good websites out there (like MARP and I think SDA) that provide people all the rules and structure you would reasonably need. This is not saying that the forced replays idea is a trial by fire.

A small proposal for replays
I propose that some people (I simply can't volunteer the time and certainly don't have the skill) should get together to provide their services to voluntarily look at posted replays for criticism. I would only ask that they respect the decision of some people who post scores to ask that criticisms be kept civil, or even that criticisms may not be shared. This is not a groundbreaking idea; traditional art, photography, and music sites online follow this convention of respecting the artist's wishes concerning critiques.

You've been spending all this time complaining that other people aren't going to bend to your will. You need to take your own medicine.

DJ Incompetent, FIL, dex, njiska, and many others gave very succinct responses. Basically, it is a community thing. I think that Shmups should be a "big tent," to use Colin Powell's phrase about political parties. We should always look for new ways to grow the popularity of classic gaming. In the grand scheme of things, we have choices, some of which are: We can view this as a dying hobby, try to fight over the scraps of the true shroud of Uemura, view it as if the whole world was watching us and waiting for us to trip up, or just have fun and let those other problems solve themselves, in the process possibly encouraging other people to think it is fun and rescuing the hobby with max coolitude

[CptRansom]

tl;dr

[sikraiken]

No one deserves my replays this year.

[Ed Oscuro]

If Ed posts nonseriously, then others will post seriously
If Ed posts seriously, then others will post nonseriously

tl;dr

If you need a tl;dr then you didn't care about the arguments anyway, so we're good!

No one deserves my replays this year.

replays for the poor, replays for the pooor

it's either that or the bandana

I think I see Rowan Atkinson in there. With your mom.

[CptRansom]

tl;dr

If you need a tl;dr then you didn't care about the arguments anyway, so we're good!

Wasn't a request.

There will be no requirement to post replays. If you want to put it up, go right ahead, I'm sure everyone will enjoy it, but this is a friendly-spirited tourney and requiring draconian verification would run contrary to that.

What's left to discuss?

[Ed Oscuro]

tl;dr

If you need a tl;dr then you didn't care about the arguments anyway, so we're good!

Wasn't a request.

Doesn't make the statement less accurate.

What's left to discuss?

Nothing, since I wrote the last word. Would be fine by me to leave it there!

[Shatterhand]

I am not taking part of this year's STGT, but I'd still like to give my 2 cent to the matter.

There was a brazilian forum I used to play arcade games where replays were mandatory. We had to record INPs of our games. And then I noticed how that thing is actually pretty annoying.

I can't reset the game or pause the game while recording an inp. (And pausing the game is pretty important to me when I am playing at home). I also feel I have to quit MAME and reload MAME again for each credit, which is a hassle. (I dont think people would bother to check the replay if I said "Take a look at the 17th credit of this replay, that's where I made my hi-score). I also can't use save states, so I have to choose when it's a "training run" or a "serious run", instead of just go "Well, I just fucked up here, let's save the game here and try some weird stuff". Like someone else said, I can't predict when I'll have a good run, I just keep playing the game and trying my best.

I played it there for a while and then I quit playing, because for most of the time it was really annoying.

And if someone wants to cheat, he will cheat no matter what. You can easily use save states when recording an INP, and this makes very easy to fake a real video too. So unless you record yourself playing with a camera, any replay can be easily faked (Even wolfmame replays).

I don't think anyone here would cheat, it doesn't even make sense.

[Erppo]

I can't reset the game or pause the game while recording an inp.

Umm yes you can. Hard reset starts the recording again too and you can even fast forward through any startup screens. You can also turn your run into save stating midway through if you want and nothing happens except the replay will obviously end up broken.

---

I don't really have a strong opinion about the subject. I think requiring replays for top spots would be a good thing but I don't really see any need to alter the rules. I do have a strong opinion about the discussion here though. It started with people suggesting discussion about the replays and it immediately turned into some people choosing to get personally offended and trying to prevent all kinds of civil discussion about the suggestion. Also if you actually read the original suggestions, most of them weren't focused on cheating.

[Jaimers]

I guess we just have different standards, those of us that "grew up" with Touhou will agree.
In Touhou everything you do is automatically recorded and providing replays for everything you do is about as normal as the sun rising in the day.
Both for watching and learning from other people and the aforementioned side-effect that you can be sure it's legit.

The thing is though, that the same can be done in MAME, so you can see why I find this odd. Especially for a tournament of this caliber.
The whole issue doesn't have to be draconian at all, but not having -anything- for the top 5 is just silly.
The whole demonizing of replays here is incredibly silly too, as there is literally nothing bad about them unless you purposely try to find some reason, any reason.
I guess this just goes to show that the Touhou scene is far more professional than the shmup scene.

I don't think anyone here would cheat, it doesn't even make sense.

Again, judging people based on your own values. And people -have- cheated before.

[Aliquantic]

Umm yes you can. Hard reset starts the recording again too and you can even fast forward through any startup screens. You can also turn your run into save stating midway through if you want and nothing happens except the replay will obviously end up broken.

It's true for the Wolfmame versions that some websites recommend for submitting replays, and those do disable fast forward, pause, and are a little harder to falsify. It's yet another MAME to have to hunt down if you want to share replays, though. So that might be where that idea comes from.

[third_strike]

Touhou is Harder is a very broken team.
Ban please!