The most deceptively hard part is choosing the games to play. You should definitely have a veteran player for consulting to bounce ideas off or divide the researching with. If an issue is discovered after a game announcement, the whole play schedule gets fucked up and you get to go into a panic finding a replacement game. A miscalculated ranking score can always be corrected later. Picking the wrong game is a dangerous thing you do not wanna mess up.heisenbergman wrote:What would be the most difficult parts of running one?
From my point of view, there would just be the matter of what game to play for the week, then people submit their high scores, then all the high scores are ranked into an ordered list.
The first issue is potential infinite milking scoring exploits; checking all high score and strategy threads looking for indicators the game is broke. These are not discussed often, so you will need to credit feed a game yourself and evaluate every section. Every boss, midboss, or section where killing an enemy is required to proceed, you must evaluate, 1. Can you earn points during the fight without damaging the boss? 2. If yes, does this section time-out?
Second issue is setting the autofire rate. In most cases, the answer is '4', but somebody should test the game like this anyway in later stages. Shutting autofire rate off or below the rate of tapping is stupid, because carpaltunnel. But setting the rate too high makes it possible to end up in Darius Gaiden situations where the game becomes way too easy, and comparing score becomes a battle of one-life-clears to make the most out of an end-of-game remaining ships bonus.
Third issue is ports. Console/PC ports are often not 100% of the PCB, but you gotta determine through forum threads how close to 100% the port is and still legit enough to use. Searching Hi-Score threads usually does this research for you, provided you see separate tables for port and PCB/MAME. To learn more, you'll probably have to creatively search Shmups Chat and Strategy for port comparisons and wade through a shitload of false positive threads.
And finally, stick with MAME, advise against PC games. MAME is used because of the highest chances of participation. PC games, no matter how old, how widely available, always will have something that will omit a group to play.
Oh yeah, CV1000 is still a divided topic, so ya may wanna avoid those Cave games.
If running an actual STGT is still on the table, you should seek out user Davey, who should have a tool for calculating player/team scores in the original way.
If you find yourself not confident in game selecting, setting up a community voting period usually solves this problem, at the expense of inviting the possibility of allowing pre-competition practice.
