STGT'12: The Aftermath

[Illyrian]

Paperboy is a run 'n' gun

[Deca]

Sounds fun, I like the rivals idea. One way or another I'm down for more than one tourney a year.

[Naut]

Haha, I was thinking I might hold a more competitive tournament at some point too, what kind of games did you have in mind for us to play, trap? I was going to choose from a pool of games that were hard as balls and need more competitive scores as well as being quite fun (think Futari Ultra, Donpachi, Bakraid, APB, etc). None of this old "gem" shit that always turn out to be crap in STGT. But I also know that your opinions are questionable at best so I'd like to know what you're planning before I scrap my tournament... :V

[Hiki]

We need moar Cotton scores! Mystic Riders can have a week too.

[MX7]

This paperboy thing is almost as tiresome as tacos and ponies.

[Eaglet]

I was going to choose from a pool of games that were hard as balls and need more competitive scores as well as being quite fun (think Futari Ultra, Donpachi, Bakraid, APB, etc)

Awesome! I think that would be precisely what this forum needs!

[Hagane]

It would be great if you make that tournament. I also hope Dragon Blaze is on it if it ever happens!

[brokenhalo]

I was going to choose from a pool of games that were hard as balls and need more competitive scores as well as being quite fun (think Futari Ultra, Donpachi, Bakraid, APB, etc).

the only problem with that is that those are games that can't be scored well in in a week or even a month. maybe rather than a tournament we could set up single game challenges. let them run for 3-6 months. everyone who wants to compete throws $10 in a pot and the person to post the highest score (with replay) at the end of the time period gets the pot. just a suggestion.

[RNGmaster]

It would be great if you make that tournament. I also hope Dragon Blaze is on it if it ever happens!

I think he mentioned that one was in the list.

[Naut]

My list was:

Armed Police Batrider
Battle Bakraid
Dimahoo
Dragon Blaze
DOJ or DOJBL
Donpachi
Guwange
Mushihimesama Ultra
Mushihimesama Futari Ultra

And possibly Gunbird 2, Eschatos, RFJ and Air Gallet. All these games are very challenging and have shmups forum records worth improving (with the exception of the last four, but they're good fun anyway). I wanted to choose three games from the pool and I was going to give two weeks per game, which is subject to change based on how everybody feels about it (I don't want to give less time for fairly obvious reasons, but more time seems like the tourny would drag on too long). The three games to be chosen were going to have drastically different scoring systems to mix things up, for example: Futari Ultra (cancelling), DOJBL (chaining) and Dimahoo (item collection). This would hopefully get rid of significant advantages certain players would have as well (ex. Gus and futari, but I know he hates dojbl). There wasn't going to be teams or anything, just a pure individual tournament, however looking at that TOM-STGT thing... The rival concept is kinda neat. I was going to open up an irc channel specific to the tourny to talk strategy in addition to providing resources for each game like links to replays and whatnot.

the only problem with that is that those are games that can't be scored well in in a week or even a month. maybe rather than a tournament we could set up single game challenges. let them run for 3-6 months. everyone who wants to compete throws $10 in a pot and the person to post the highest score (with replay) at the end of the time period gets the pot. just a suggestion.

You'd be surprised what people can accomplish in a little amount of time with the right resources and motivation. I was heavily considering the money in a pot thing, but I figured people wouldn't trust me with their money simply because they don't know me. However, if we're all cool with it, I'm totally down for a small entry fee and 100% payout to the winner (or maybe 80% first place and 20% second, etc). Or we could get somebody else to hold the money. Since I figured not very many people would be cool with giving me their money for a few weeks, I was just going to give out a monetary prize out of my own pocket (though it would be a lot smaller than if we used the pot method) and try to defend my money by entering the tournament as well :V

[Hagane]

Needs a bit more oldschool, but seems like a fine list (I'm not sure about games with counterstops though, even if they are hard to achieve).

[The Coop]

Armed Police Batrider

Uhg. I don't know what's worse about that game; the lispy announcer (BUTTWIDER!), or the gameplay that feels like an uninspired Battle Garegga clone that didn't turn out as well as the game it borrows from (which is sad, given who made it).

[RNGmaster]

Whoa, somebody else who doesn't like Batrider. Cheers.

[trap15]

what kind of games did you have in mind for us to play, trap?

Mostly lesser known/played games. The only thing in your list that I was considering was Bakraid. So yes, you probably could still hold one sometime during the year and it'd be significant enough of a difference.

[shmuppyLove]

This paperboy thing is almost as tiresome as tacos and ponies.

Alright, just for MX7, someone please make a hack of Paperboy where you ride a pony instead of a bike, and toss tacos instead of newspapers.

[Pjoxt]

Cool tourney, thanks for hosting, Dex.
My favorites were espgaluda and salamander 2 but I didn't dislike any of the games, not even V-V.
Our team did about as well as I had expected. Made my own team and recruited some friends who don't really play shmups, I guess people started to lose interest around middle of week 4 when dark souls PC version was released. Might join some random team next year.
Shout-outs to Nenea for being the only other person who posted a score every week, and to Jagerath for failing to reach our team's top 3 every week.

[Hagane]

Armed Police Batrider

Uhg. I don't know what's worse about that game; the lispy announcer (BUTTWIDER!), or the gameplay that feels like an uninspired Battle Garegga clone that didn't turn out as well as the game it borrows from (which is sad, given who made it).

What exactly is worse in Batrider compared to Garegga? To me it feels harder, deeper and overall upgraded compared to its predecessor.

[Ed Oscuro]

Armed Police Batrider

Uhg. I don't know what's worse about that game; the lispy announcer (BUTTWIDER!), or the gameplay that feels like an uninspired Battle Garegga clone that didn't turn out as well as the game it borrows from (which is sad, given who made it).

What exactly is worse in Batrider compared to Garegga? To me it feels harder, deeper and overall upgraded compared to its predecessor.

+1

Today is Ed Agrees With Hagane Day!

Well, Garegga certainly stands on its own, but Batrider is awesome, colorful, and still very high-scoring (also fun), at the expense of no longer having Garegga's famously useless rank system (not having to sit through the attract mode is at least okay by me).

The only thing I really don't like about Batrider ("Batwider" is awesome) is that mine is the "A" version and they shoulda added the "B" version's formation control from the get-go. Still, it probably plays fine and certainly according to the way I play these games.

[PROMETHEUS]

I wanted to choose three games from the pool and I was going to give two weeks per game, which is subject to change based on how everybody feels about it (I don't want to give less time for fairly obvious reasons, but more time seems like the tourny would drag on too long).

My two cents : I think the time needed to learn a game and perform well in it (just memorizing and then performing without having much time to improve your skills, and come up with a score that sort of represents it), takes about 100 hours of playtime. 2 weeks means 50h per week, most people won't have time or want to put that much in. I think 1 month is a much better duration for one game. In my view there is little benefit and many drawbacks to having more than one game in a tournament, especially if all players are going to play all games. One of the drawbacks is, none of the players will care enough about every single of the 3 games to participate seriously in all three, so if the winner of the tournament depends on all 3 games, you get too little competitivity, which is what drives tournament to be really interesting in my opinion. Also, having 3 games means multiplying by 3 the memorization effort (before you can perform well or even before you can practice to improve skills instead of knowledge), which I think would also make the tourney lose a lof of punch. Those reasons are why I never took part in any STGT.

I think its format is cool though, I see the point, to have fun for a while with everyone on a bunch of games. It's not very competitive, it's just kind of good fun. Your format goes a step in the more competitive direction in my eyes, I think you should go further if you want it to be very competitive (less games / only one game, and 1 month or more).

Anyway, I appreciate the initiative of thinking of organizing tourneys and everything, so thank you for that.

[CptRansom]

Go play Gradius III if you want a game to play this month. =P

/shamelessplug

inb4gradiusiiisux

[Naut]

The problem with less games means the advantages of people who have played them before are much more pronounced. Having multiple games allows for the best overall player to win, as opposed to the one who happened to pre-play the game before the tournament unknowingly. Expecting anybody other than Gus to win a "futari ultra only" competition would be foolish, however if we were playing dojbl and dimahoo as well, he would probably have a much harder time winning. It livens up the tournament a bit, rather than people thinking they're just going to automatically lose and not participate.

At the same time, I still want a good competition and good scores to come out of it, so we need a good amount of time to devote to the games for this to happen. We've seen some excellent scores come out of one week competitions that would normally never happen because people aren't as motivated or whatever, so I think two weeks is fine for now. I'm still hesitant to increase how much time is given per game because I think people would probably stop playing for a week or two out of a month long deadline and it ends up being a bunch of two-weeks-worth of scores anyway. Two weeks still feels like you have a deadline to meet soon so you probably wouldn't take much of a break if you plan on playing. But eh, that's just my views on the matter. If many people want the time extended to three weeks or a month then I'd gladly do it. I just don't think many people will actually use that time to play.

gradiusiiisux

Edit: actually yeah, the month long game competitions currently being held are a good example of time completely wasted. Most of the scores in there could be accomplished in a day or two of playing, nobody actually plays for the whole month. I won the Sengeku Strikers competition and I didn't even play the game for ten hours over the whole month (in addition to not using effective practicing methods like savestates, all I did was pound a few credits). So I'm really weary about having a large amount of time dedicated to the competition...

[CptRansom]

Well, I don't really see the STG of the Month as a competition. The whole intent was to bring the community together and focusing on a game (or two) for a month. Shit, it's my thing, and even I don't play for more than a few hours each time.

I think two weeks sounds good for a competition. If something comes up and you can't play for a day or two, it's not going to totally fuck you. It's enough time to work on longer/harder games, and short enough to prevent most burnout.

[ebarrett]

People are too unwilling/scared of moving out of their comfort zones. Gus decided to shit all over STGT because he couldn't keep up in a one-game-per-week environment, after all. I'd still like to see the next STGT have a discard rule, so you can sit out/miss a week for whatever reason and not disappear from the overall rankings, but being forced to learn something you have no clue about quick tells me more about general skill than being allowed to grind the fuck out of something over one month - that'd just let people with more spare time have an even more pronounced advantage, not to mention that if you happen to really dislike a game you're most likely going to fall behind even further. Mixing it up constantly is good for tournaments and keeps everyone on their toes throughout - people can pick the stuff they really liked and further improve on it after the tournament is over, at their own pace, without feeling like they're being punished for either not having enough time or enough patience to put in an absurd amount of hours over a short period.

[PROMETHEUS]

I think you should take a look at Arcade extreme past tournaments, they know how to do that stuff over there and also they have been experiences that you can compare the results with other tournaments you know.

I've only taken part in their Guwange tournament, but here was the format :
- 1 game, tournament was hosted by its western record holder with his money (mainly)
- duration was 2 months
- There was a low tier and a high tier. Players in low tier competed semi-separately and had an extra chance at a smaller prize pool (first of low tier got 20€).
- .inp and .wlf WolfMAME required for score submission. .wlf is an automatically generated file that contains information about how the .inp was recorded, including average speed.

In the end what happened is that there were a little less playing that could have been, about half of the players kind of quit playing before the end, and I think most didn't play consistently over the two months. For me it worked really well, I played for an hour a day pretty consistently over the whole period with a peak at the end, totalled 100 hours. It was a very comfortable format that left time to go to class and do other things while still allowing to get a result representing your potential, and it was a lot of fun playing the game from beginning to end of tournament duration. But I agree that there is a drawback to increasing duration. I think in the end a lot of players had enjoyed playing, there had been a lot of strategy discussion, they took really good care of organizing the thing with a few separate threads, checkpoints and little prizes, recaps, videos.

I know that they organized another shmup tournament later, can't remember which game it was, but it was pretty recently, so I think you could head over to their forum and see how that other one went too.

I believe AEX has moved towards fighting games now which is unfortunate for shmups because they have a very good competitive spirit and experience.

[PROMETHEUS]

but being forced to learn something you have no clue about quick tells me more about general skill than being allowed to grind the fuck out of something over one month - that'd just let people with more spare time have an even more pronounced advantage

I disagree. Being forced to learn something quick (one week) is exactly what advantages free time more than skill, because when you approach a new shmup, gathering precise knowledge (memorizing) takes a lot of time before your skills make a real difference. It can work for very simple games or Caravan games, where there is very little to memorize to perform well, but usually those games are either very lenient and easy to do well in, or very random (then luck will play a bigger role for a reduced duration). For a Cave game, one week, even if you manage to get 50 hours played, you will only have time to memorize a few stages losely and not enough time to get enough tries to get a score representative of your potential.

As an example :
- I was a total shmup noob when I started learning DDP (played around survival style for 100+ hours before I started learning properly though).
It took me about 50 hours to learn how to chain stage 1-2 (didn't use videos at first).
Then 50 more to learn stage 4 and 5 (with videos). Then 10 more hours to get them together in a run. That is only 42% of the game.

- I was very experienced when I started learning DOJ. It is significantly harder to score at than DDP.
It took me 80 hours to learn the first loop and get the performance done. That is only half the game.

If you want to get a result that corresponds to your potential, you need to learn the whole game, even if your final run will include mistakes. You can learn adapted, simplified routes that fit your skill and goals, but this still takes time and I think you can see why a one week format heavily priviledges free time and knowledge over skill and performance : you simply won't have enough time to learn, people putting in more time will get better results almost regardless of skill. For a longer duration, this effect diminishes, because within 100 hours of playtime you can memorize and practice routes for the whole game, but you'll only need a lot more time when you need to improve your skills. So over 1 month, if most players have time to play 100 hours, those who put a lot more will not gain much more knowledge, rather skill, which takes a lot more time than knowledge to improve. Plus, like Naut said, players who already have advanced knowledge of the game will be even more advantaged (no way you'll beat them if the game is any hard unless your skill is like 3 times higher).

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I don't see a problem with the format of STGT as I was under the impression the STGT was more about getting people to try shmups they might not normally try, or focus on a game as a community for a week at a time to learn tricks and such to have fun. Obviously the format of limiting the game to one week or even a month means it shouldn't be treated like a serious scoring tournament focusing on attaining the sort of scores that require dedicating a huge chunk of one's time to, and I don't think that was ever the intention of the STGT anyways. If you're really focusing on a game and you don't want to have that practice interrupted you don't need to participate for the whole week or at all even.

[Drake]

Prom, I get your point entirely and I completely agree, but I still have to side with two weeks being a better time length largely because the boredom factor (and procrastination factor etc) will completely take over every benefit of having a month+ long time period for one game. Sure, generally the more time you have to practice a game the better you get, the more solid you are, and more thorough you will be; but if you end up feeling as though the deadline isn't anything urgent or the competition isn't heated enough or you just plain get bored, all that time that opens up for you will go to waste. I'm not sure about you personally, but I'm certain this would be the case for many participants.

[The Coop]

Armed Police Batrider

Uhg. I don't know what's worse about that game; the lispy announcer (BUTTWIDER!), or the gameplay that feels like an uninspired Battle Garegga clone that didn't turn out as well as the game it borrows from (which is sad, given who made it).

What exactly is worse in Batrider compared to Garegga? To me it feels harder, deeper and overall upgraded compared to its predecessor.

The music, the level designs, the enemy designs, that announcer who needs to be silenced... it's all a considerable step down from BG, while just reusing much of the power up system from BG.

As I said, uninspired, and not nearly as enjoyable to play. Yes, that's just my opinion, and I'm likely in the minority. But if a game plays like BG, but looks and sounds worse, I'll just go play BG and enjoy the better game.

[BIL]

(not having to sit through the attract mode is at least okay by me).

Batrider's rank starts out higher than normal at bootup and goes down if left idling in attract mode. ^_~

[trap15]

This is why Bakraid is best. Rank is (almost always) the same whenever you start