S.M.H. 2: Stepcharts Made Doubly Horrible!
Brought to you by Ben (sfxazure) with help and hosting from Scott (Suko)
July 24, 2016, Starts at 11am sharp.
Entry Fee: $5.00 if you preregister, $10.00 at the door.

SMH2 is a tournament held in the PNW every summer with a ruleset inspired by various customs tournaments. Entrants can submit up to four songs that, once approved, comprise the tournament pack. The pack is frozen after a cutoff date, and the tournament is a (mostly) standard double-elim bracket played with the competitor-submitted pack.

Download the pack HERE!

What’s new this time around:

• I’m adding a new phase for chart revisions! Since a large part of the Seattle ITG community hasn’t had easy access to an ITG machine with USB support, people submitted untested charts with sync issues. This time around, you have a chance to tweak and/or revoke your submissions (but not make new submissions) for a short period (TBD) after the cutoff. Once the cutoff has passed, the pack is FINALIZED and will not be changed before the tournament. This includes song removals; if you want to remove your song from the pack, you MUST do so before the pack is finalized.
• Song/Side choice is now determined with a game of Rock Paper Scissors (just like DOWNS/UPS) instead of registration order.

Otherwise, the tournament’s ruleset is identical to S.M.H.’s.

The Rules

Phase One: Preregistration and Stepchart Submission
Ends June 18, 2016

Preregistration will begin immediately and will run until the end of Phase One. Attendees who preregister will pay a discounted rate ($5.00 instead of $10.00). Reach out to me either by PM, in person, by carrier pigeon, etc. I’ll be accepting payment through PayPal (username bkirz), Square Cash (send to $bkz), Google Wallet (PM me for my email address) or in person.

You will have from today until the submission cutoff to submit up to four songs (one stepchart each) to be included in the tournament pack. Make sure to identify yourself by name/forum name somewhere in the file. I’d prefer for you to create and submit new stepcharts, but any are fine as long as you had a hand in their creation. Submitted songs/stepcharts will be rejected if they do not conform to the following rules:

• The chart must be to a song which does not exceed three minutes and thirty seconds (3:30) in length. This keeps the tournament moving and makes it so people don’t to have to pay more to practice “long song” charts.
• Songs must be appropriate for play in public venues such as ACME Bowl. Please avoid profanity or find some way to work around it (clean versions, comedic censoring, etc.) Any content deemed inappropriate for a public venue will be rejected.
• Songs must be ITG Arcade Ready. If your song is over 2 minutes, DO NOT .OGG PATCH IT. OGG only; songs submitted with MP3 audio will be rejected.
• Stepcharts must have at least 50 hittable arrows. While there may be ways to make an interesting chart with under 50 steps, it would increase the likelihood of ties and slow the tournament down.
• The stepchart must be Expert difficulty. This is to ensure that we can use the ITG machine’s built-in Random selector to pick tie-breakers. Submitted songs can have any number of stepcharts, but only the Expert chart can be picked during the tournament.
• No charts that have been submitted to a previous SMH/SPERGIN tournament can not be resubmitted. Make some original content! If you’re not sure what counts as “the same chart”, ask me.
• Don’t be a dick. Don’t crash the machine. If you do some fancy LUA scripting, clean up after yourself.

If a song is rejected for any reason, you may submit a replacement; cleaned-up versions of rejected submissions can be submitted, as well as completely different songs/charts.

As soon as a stepchart is accepted into the pack, it will be made available for download.

I can’t stop you from preregistering, submitting charts, and then not showing up. But you should totally come to this thing. It’ll be fun, I promise!


Phase Two: Validate and Revise
Ends June 26
After the submission cutoff, I’ll see about getting the pack on the ACME machine ASAP. I’ll set a cutoff date for pack finalization, probably around a week after getting the pack on the machine. Until then, anyone who tests their chart and notices issues with song volume, sync, gimmicks, etc, can send me a modified version of the chart. If the chart can’t be fixed, let me know and I’ll remove it from the pack. This is your LAST CHANCE to change or revoke your submissions.


Phase Three: Practice
At this point, the pack is finalized and preregistration is CLOSED. After aggregating the finalized submission results, the pack will be released and installed on the ACME machine. At this point, songs will not be changed or removed from the pack.


Phase Four: TOURNAMENT!
July 24, 2016
This will be a double elimination event. Only songs from the SMH2 pack will be playable in this tournament.

Seeding:  Seeding is based on registration order to encourage early registration.

Matches:  Both players play a game of rock paper scissors! Winner gets first choice of machine side or pick order, other choice goes to the loser. Each player will then pick one song of their choice to play against the other player.   Whoever gets the highest percentage (as calculated by the machine) on a given song wins that song. (You know how this works by now.) If both players are tied at the end of two songs, a third song will be chosen randomly from the SMH2 pack. If both players are still tied, keep picking random tiebreakers until the tie is broken.

Song Selection:  Each player may only use a song as their “pick” once over the course of the tournament. Because this is not intended to be a serious tournament, either player may fail any song throughout all tournament rounds with no additional penalty - once you fail, your percentage is “locked” as your score.

Prizes:  Once preregistration ends and we have a better idea of how many entrants we will have, we will determine a prize structure based on 100% of the entry fees.