STGT08: Criticism and what to do next year

[mikwuyma]

szycag: I didn't see anyone incredibly bitter about close voting results, maybe I didn't look hard enough. Also, I have to disagree, having more than 3 choices is more likely to cause vote-splitting, or a throwaway game.

Take Psikyo, what would I add? Adding another Strikers game would just split the vote on Strikers games, making them less likely to be nominated. Adding Sengoku Ace or Blade wouldn't really do much, those games would probably get around 5 votes, and I don't think a lot of people like those two games.

MR_Soren: Notice how I don't want any Cave games next year? Also, your idea is what "hidden gem" week was previous years. I think it's a fine idea, but I'd need more games than just Thunder Dragon II, so propose some games (Cyvern would probably fit too).

ED-057: I wouldn't have a problem with this, except I have to agree with Icarus in this case. Being easy or having a non-existent scoring system isn't a problem, but the combination of the two is not good. If you can find some exceptions that are easily accessible (read: easy to emulate), then I'll consider console shmups.

DMC: I'm not sure how I can make voting blind.

[Icarus]

DMC: I'm not sure how I can make voting blind.

Don't announce game lists so early, as they give the more competitive teams a chance to practice. One of the nicer things about the past STGTs was that games lists had to be guessed - giving most players a bit of a breather, and a little more tension while the voting week was being prepared.

If you know what's going on the list in advance, it means you have to start practicing in order to stay competitive, and it is easier to work out what's likely to win the vote (Feveron and Progear being the two obvious ones this year). If you absolutely, positively must announce early, just state the themes for each week, not the shortlists.

[Ghegs]

Having said that, console-based shooting games like TFIV tend not to have any scoring systems of any kind, and are extremely easy.

Harmful Park on Very Hard. Has a scoring system and the easy default difficulty gets tossed aside in favour of a more challenging one.

[Ruldra]

My suggestions:

- Remove NMK week altogether. There are no appealing options there IMO. The other weeks are fine.
- Another vote for a 2008 redo week. Playing Varth and RFJ next year would be great.
- Another vote for less rest weeks. They make the tourney too long.

And well, I'd love to play Dimahoo on Raizing Week, but I'm sure that's just me

Nothing else to mention. This year's tourney was awesome and I'd love to participate again.

[Danbo]

Dimahoo would be hilarious, I don't know of anyone on the planet who fully understands its scoring system.

[Icarus]

Dimahoo would be hilarious, I don't know of anyone on the planet who fully understands its scoring system.

People do understand it. The system however is extremely hard to manipulate, and is far more anally retentive than most Cave games.

[FIL]

This was my first STGT and its certainly the best run online tournament/league i've been a part of. The game choices clearly weren't everyone's cup of tea but trying to get the entire forum to agree on one game is going to be an uphill struggle no matter what you pick. Despite this, I thought the game choices were okay on the whole and certainly head and shoulders above other contests i've played in. Nothing needs to change as far as organisation goes.


The potential weeks for next time look fine, although I think there should be a 'trains in shmups' week.

[lgb]

We should play Zen-Ichi next year.

[maxi]

And some caution with the choices of each week, because on the Doujin Week all the games were unknown and on this last week all of their score system were complex.

What is wrong with unknown games if they are good?

Nothing, but it's better play Tumiki Fighters and Cho Ren Sha or Uwabami Breakers and Xed?

and please tell us, what is wrong with complex scoring systems??

Hum, 90 million or more points of difference in the score of the players?

[DMC]

DMC: I'm not sure how I can make voting blind.

Don't announce game lists so early, as they give the more competitive teams a chance to practice. One of the nicer things about the past STGTs was that games lists had to be guessed - giving most players a bit of a breather, and a little more tension while the voting week was being prepared.

If you know what's going on the list in advance, it means you have to start practicing in order to stay competitive...

Exactly! and I think this is an important issue.
The problem though is that the ones responsible for the nomination obviously must know about the games - and if they participate, it may not be a fair competition.

my thoughts:
1. the best solution. An independent group of game selectors, that do not participate. Keep breaks as they are.
2. the ok solution. select and announce the games very shortly before the onset of stgt, and skip som of the breaks, so it only take 6 or 7 weeks, instead of 10. The breaks are pretty unnecessary if everyone knows about the games. at least for the more competitive players.

[Icarus]

1. the best solution. An independent group of game selectors, that do not participate. Keep breaks as they are.

This sounds fair. We seem to collect non-participants, so one or two of the more active ones could do this. Having a break each week is also nice for those of us that really hammer the games each playing week.
Though there's every possibility we'll end up with Space Invaders in one of the weeks as a result...

[lgb]

I'll do it.

[bsidwell]

sikraiken and Twiddle have been discussing some fairly radical format changes for '09. The one that seemed to stick the best was to announce all 5 games at the beginning and then, rather than have a separate week for each game, just give the teams a 12-week period in which to play all of them.

I'm in favor of this because A.) it gives people some time to make up the skill/experience gap and B.) it lets you switch games when you want, rather than grind on one until you hate it.

[lgb]

Hey, I actually like the sound of that. It's like RPG quests or something.

[VorpalEdge]

12 weeks? That seems rather long, especially when people are complaining about 10-week periods right now. Now, if you went with 8 weeks or so, I'd be up for that.

Or, in a more traditional route, perhaps we can announce shortlists at registration, but then play the weeks in random order? I really think the shortlists should be announced, simply because I'm not signing up for something when I don't know what specific games could be played. However, switching up the week order would at least partially alleviate some of the "practice-during-spare-week" concerns people have.

[Danbo]

sikraiken and Twiddle have been discussing some fairly radical format changes for '09. The one that seemed to stick the best was to announce all 5 games at the beginning and then, rather than have a separate week for each game, just give the teams a 12-week period in which to play all of them.

I'm in favor of this because A.) it gives people some time to make up the skill/experience gap and B.) it lets you switch games when you want, rather than grind on one until you hate it.

Hey that's actually a really good idea.

[MR_Soren]

sikraiken and Twiddle have been discussing some fairly radical format changes for '09. The one that seemed to stick the best was to announce all 5 games at the beginning and then, rather than have a separate week for each game, just give the teams a 12-week period in which to play all of them.

If this was a shorter period, such as 5-8 weeks, it might work. However, this would give an unfair advantage to people who know the games ahead of time. I also suspect that participation would be worse.

I've been in college courses that handed out programming assignments with an "end of semester" deadline, and everybody slacks off until the last week. In a game contest with no prizes or crucial grades to be earned, people who fall behind won't rush out scores at the end. They'll just not play.

Also, how would voting be handled? Or would the organizer just pick five games with no voting involved?

[Icarus]

I've been in college courses that handed out programming assignments with an "end of semester" deadline, and everybody slacks off until the last week. In a game contest with no prizes or crucial grades to be earned, people who fall behind won't rush out scores at the end. They'll just not play.

That's my concern as well. In my case, with a long play duration I tend to get lazy and prefer to do other things. With a week to play, I'm more motivated and more focused.
In the 1st Arcade Extreme Cup last year - links: [1] [2] - out of the two months allocated for play, I think I played a total of about 9 hours. -_-;;

[FIL]

A league I used to play in tried this once, 6 games over 6 weeks. I wasn't too impressed, it didn't improve the pacing any and we just ended up with a couple of games getting tons of scores and the rest with only a small few. 12 weeks would make things a little better but I still think people will just concentrate on their favourite game rather than putting time into all of them.

Playing 1 game a week at least tries to ensure that at least some people will play all of the games. We're going to have mass non-participation either way though.

[Enhasa]

BTW, what's the reason we don't consider console shmups again? (I know, someone's going to say they all suck but aside from that) Unlike Windows-only doujins, there are a lot more options for console emulators and there might be more people who own carts/CDs vs. PCBs.

STGT values accessibility. I think there should be a separate console tourney with even more recent stuff like PS2. The difference here is that you know what you're signing up for, so you won't feel bad if you're excluded from anything.

The same idea would work for a (commercial) doujin tourney. If you are against piracy of games being currently sold, then you wouldn't sign up, and since it's not the main STGT, people wouldn't feel excluded.

I'd like to see less-popular games get played. That way, most of the field will be learning from scratch so skill will be more important than past experience. Ideally, this would be accomplished by having five new games developed just for the contest, but stuff that nobody plays like TD2 is pretty close to that ideal.

Let Macaw pick all 5 games.

Take Psikyo, what would I add? Adding another Strikers game would just split the vote on Strikers games, making them less likely to be nominated. Adding Sengoku Ace or Blade wouldn't really do much, those games would probably get around 5 votes, and I don't think a lot of people like those two games.

SPACE BOMBER, just ask bbh

my thoughts:
1. the best solution. An independent group of game selectors, that do not participate. Keep breaks as they are.
2. the ok solution. select and announce the games very shortly before the onset of stgt, and skip som of the breaks, so it only take 6 or 7 weeks, instead of 10. The breaks are pretty unnecessary if everyone knows about the games. at least for the more competitive players.

I agree with this, except that I prefer #2, which I was going to suggest earlier but I forgot. BTW the problem with announcing themes but not shortlists is that it's usually pretty easy to figure out what would make a shortlist (say, Batrider for Raizing) and then what will win.

Either keep everyone completely in the dark (with no voting) for suspense, or let everyone vote during registration before the tourney even starts for transparency. I prefer this one so we can cut down to 5-6 weeks and to be able to plan ahead which weeks I'm going to spend more time on. Anyone who was in the SDA tourney can tell me whether or not they prefer suspense or transparency though.


I'm really against this combined 12-week thing. Most of what makes STGT interesting is discretizing into weeks. The deadlines are interesting, you get to see where you stand, where your team stands, and see if you can make weekly comebacks.

You know how right now there's a rush of scores at the end of the week? With a combined tourney, you would spend the first 11 1/2 weeks with no idea what's going on, then at the end Icarus does a namakoteam scorepost and the tourney is over.

[third_strike]

Shooting all week
Chain week
Buzz week
Cancel bullet week

Would are cool!

[mikwuyma]

Personally, I'm more for transparency, I like knowing what I'm playing ahead of time, and I like being prepared for a week (though I really didn't do that until one or two days before a playing week started ).

The 12-week thing: At first I thought it might be an interesting, cool idea, but I have to agree with Enhasa and Icarus. Motivation will burn out after a couple of weeks, and the final couple of days will be flooded with scoreposts (and a 10-page long namakoteam score post with diary entries of what happened each week)

Ruldra: Dimahoo is just you, gross

[Icarus]

(and a 10-page long namakoteam score post with diary entries of what happened each week)

I can do that next time, if you want me to.
In fact, extra-long blog-like scorepost entries should be a requirement for every score posted by every participant.

[moozooh]

Both solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. For instance, if I work Monday to Friday, I have only 4-6 hours to play on these days combined, and I'm not always able to do so to the best of my ability simply because I'm already tired by then. If a worthy real-life time investment pops up on the weekend, it results in a failed week. I do, however, agree that having a stricter schedule motivates better. Maybe some compromise can be found?

On another note: if we still have ~3 voting options next year as well, I propose being able to cast a negative vote. This is for the cases where, for instance, you can't choose between two games and the only option you'd be willing to take is at least not let the third one win. Basically, it gives no noticeable advantage or disadvantage to speak of, but provides more flexibility to the reduced option amount. Any thoughts?

[DEL]

bsidwell wrote:
sikraiken and Twiddle have been discussing some fairly radical format changes for '09. The one that seemed to stick the best was to announce all 5 games at the beginning and then, rather than have a separate week for each game, just give the teams a 12-week period in which to play all of them.

I'm in favor of this because A.) it gives people some time to make up the skill/experience gap and B.) it lets you switch games when you want, rather than grind on one until you hate it.

Hey that's actually a really good idea.

Thats the only way I could actually compete in this tournament
I do so much business and family-based travelling at this time of year, that I always miss 3-4 days playing time per week, so I'm basically a no-show.
With a total period in which to play all the selected games, I could do something despite my many away-days.

groobo for the win btw.

[lgb]

Shooting all week
Chain week
Buzz week
Cancel bullet week

Would are cool!

That would be great, but shmups.com doesn't like scoring systems.

[Twiddle]

waiting for sikraiken to repost last night's discussion on irc here

[msm]

i enjoyed this year more than previous ones, probably because there were no games i really hated. will be sad if there's no cave next year though.

only thing i can think of to improve it would be to end the voting on friday so there are 2 weekends to play each game as i have the same problem as below.

Both solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. For instance, if I work Monday to Friday, I have only 4-6 hours to play on these days combined, and I'm not always able to do so to the best of my ability simply because I'm already tired by then. If a worthy real-life time investment pops up on the weekend, it results in a failed week. I do, however, agree that having a stricter schedule motivates better. Maybe some compromise can be found?

[szycag]

szycag: I didn't see anyone incredibly bitter about close voting results, maybe I didn't look hard enough. Also, I have to disagree, having more than 3 choices is more likely to cause vote-splitting, or a throwaway game.

Take Psikyo, what would I add? Adding another Strikers game would just split the vote on Strikers games, making them less likely to be nominated. Adding Sengoku Ace or Blade wouldn't really do much, those games would probably get around 5 votes, and I don't think a lot of people like those two games.

space bomber duh (jk, even though I do like space bomber. Also, if developer weeks give way to this scoring system style weeks you'd find four games easily.)

For the people nagging about two Cave games getting picked, whatever- everybody knows Dangun Feveron is effectively a post-Toaplan game, it shouldn't even count. And I don't like the idea of not seeing a Cave game next year just because we played two this year. If it fits the theme it should be on the list.

And lol at trying to avoid situations where people who have played it before will have an unfair advantage. Somebody's going to be good at everything. It's not possible.

I'd also like to state the scoring system idea quoted right below me is genius (bullet cancel week, rank week etc.) That or what sidwell proposed.

[Arvandor]

Shooting all week
Chain week
Buzz week
Cancel bullet week

Would are cool!

Hah, actually... i like the thought of putting together a game selection based on system rather than company/sub-genre. Throw in a "rank week," "reflector week," or something, and you'd have a list =D