Holy shit, I think *I* remember that.  Wasn't that the day she was putting temporary pink dye in everybody's hair? :O

Team Mattitude 4 lyfe.

Lol yup and we had our team shirts that we just wrote our team name on lol

Totally wondering (since I haven't been to a tourney since the ddr one in 09) if bringing some lawn chairs would be an issue? Perhaps to place right behind the hydro thunder game or something during the tournament. Im cool if it's not okay, but there will be a good deal of us there, and i know a few of us would want to sit (as long as it doesn't block up the place). But i know it isn't the largest place to begin with. Let me know, thanks.

Hey, can we actually get the qualifier songs up on the main post for this thread instead of down below some other posts?

Finally unbanned enough to say this:

Epileptic Crisis would make a terrible qualifier. 100% of the at least dozen people I've talked to agree, including Rudo Tuan and James (with me making 2/3 of the expert division, and the majority of the group of players who actually know this song well enough to execute it with any degree of accuracy). As much as I'd love a free ride to first seed, this song is blatantly a test only of how well you've studied it and not how good you are as a player.

People will refuse to play this song if it ends up the qualifier. For the record, I think that seeding should be done on a 9 and a 10 as we all said in the thread that started this tournament, not an 11, and especially not these 11s. Half the standard division will probably fail or nearly fail Epileptic Crisis and Clockwork Genesis, and probably Destiny too. 10s would give a much much better seeding for our community's overall level of skill.

Anyway just my 2 cents; again, I'll seed very high on any of these songs anyway, as I do have the record or in the top 3 on all of them, but if you want a remotely fair qualifier, you'll listen to what everyone has to say.




And sorry for getting so angry about this shit before. Truth be told I dont really care who comes to the tournament and at this point I probably wont further bother much with trying to fight for anyone who doesn't come onto the forums to speak for themselves, especially when the ruleset all along has been just fine or even advantageous to me anyway. Hope you're all training up! Less than 2 weeks left.

Welcome back Allan.

Ditto with the suggestion of dropping Epileptic Crisis, since it has everything to do with memorization. Might as well swap it with Energizer-hard since it's... similar..sounding, heh. And there's already one 10-footer in the set of random 9s.

I'm fine with the other 11s, since I believe it will clearly separate the stamina players that have great timing from those who only have timing down on 9s. Even if you fail Destiny, there's still a high likelihood that the player can place high within the Standard tourny from timing on less stamina-intensive charts.

Yeah I think Epileptic Crisis should be switched out.
Then again these are potential qualifiers. We will only be playing 2 of these I believe so it might not even show up,  but regardless. I would switch it for good measure

There's a high dependency on how failing the qualifier is handled and how sandbagging rules are applied.

Destiny is a very useful example for this: it opens on a 16th note run and the song is pretty fast - a player who struggles with stamina charts could fail in the opening run with a single digit percent score.  If we recalc based on the full song, then sandbagging via strategically dropping steps to conserve energy is being highlighted as the way for tech players to compensate; if we leave it as is, we still haven't resolved Laura's questions about when she should stop playing to not be unintentionally sandbagging.

I'm going to have to jump in on the 9 + 10 bandwagon.

For once, I agree completely with Gerrak (and everyone else, for that matter.)  These 11-foot qualifiers are simply too hard for the playerbase we're dealing with.  I understand why they've stayed for so long - if it's just someone like me who thinks they're too hard... well, I'm the kind of player they're supposed to weed out, so tough shit.  But if the best players in this community still don't think these qualifiers are appropriate, what are we waiting for?  Let's see some 10s!

I also agree with the consensus here, even for a good deal of us who enjoy, and are even quite adept at these 11's, epileptic (for reasons gerrak stated) can be a massive challenge/funkfest for many in our community. But I am speaking for others and not myself here.

I think the big kahuna is the epileptic on hard (that is an ooohhweee), while personally I am perfectly okay with the other 11's, i don't mind a change either that'll make everyone happier if thats the case.

We also don't want to change things up too close to the tournament, though. I understand changing epileppy, but am cool with the others, that's just my view though. Should something like that happen though, i cross my fingers and hope my top secret pick(s) in the 10 category aren't chosen  using random.org = a great idea, fantastic tool to use.

Been so excited for this to happen, last few days I've even had dreams about it, and woke up thinking it was March 20th. I've felt real good about myself as a player recently, moreso than before any other tourney. and it's real tight to see everyone in our community improving, and always showcasing that special signature quality that makes them a unique player. 13 days away, can't wait to see all of us under the same roof.     

One more vote for "epileptic crisis hard is a retarded song choice"

Yeah it's an 11, and yeah you have to be kinda good to do well on it, but unlike every other f'ing song you chose, this one is highly dependent upon actually having played it and learned it, and is only "skill determinant" if you have a field of people who love to play epileptic crisis.  While I am an advocate of "you should be good at every song if you want to win a tournament," it seems silly to have one song out of a bunch that is memorization dependent.  If you said "epileptic crisis is THE qualifier," then sure, but right now it's like "there's a 25% chance you'll have to play a song that you probably don't know."  It's funny because all the people who do know the chart well are the ones saying "screw that"

Why not just pick two of the 9s or have a set of 10s or something?  You're expecting half the crowd to be the type who don't even ever pick 11s, doesn't it seem silly to use an 11 as a qualifier?  If you're really looking to appeal to those "stamina players" who are going to bitch about their inability to FA easy songs and blame luck, fine, but I still don't think this should be an epileptic crisis tourney. 

By the way, I'm not exactly sure how you're seeding; combined/average score?  You do realize that the score spread on the 11s would be far more than the 9s, which means that obviously, the 11s will be weighted much more heavily in seeding, giving "stamina players" an inherent advantage.  Why don't you make it like, average rank on the songs or something?  So if someone gets the 4th highest score on the 9 and 7th on the 11, then his "rank" is 5.5.  Tiebreak by average score (of course, this means tiebreakers favor stamina players).  Something like that.  Of the people expected to show up at the tournament, I have the highest score on one of the 11s and top 3 type scores on the others so the rules actually favor me, but just sayin.

Oh by the way I don't intend on attending anyway, but my two cents as someone who has been competently participating in tournaments for nearly 9 years.

This post deserves to be on the main page again. 9 days! Getting pumped

Some things for everyone to contemplate for a minute:
1. The majority is speaking out against one or more possible qualifiers that Kevin chose via undisclosed means.
2. Kevin has not responded to these concerns.
3. Kevin still wants to enter this tournament.
4. When Kevin first stated his intent to enter, I pointed out that it would be a conflict of interest for him to then choose qualifiers as well and that he would need to find one or more assistants since the tournament is too much work to run while you play.

Kevin's failure to address any concerns regarding the appropriateness of his choices when there's a clear and previously stated conflict of interest leads me to say that, so long as the qualifiers are not changed, Kevin should be barred from entering this event.

He should also post something about who is helping him run this event, but that's something that, in the worst case, can be handled ad hoc on the day of, so I won't say that he's barred from entering because he has not found his assistants.

I'm not trying to be a dick about this, but there were severe concerns about the appropriateness and ultimately detrimental effects of the organizers entering the last tournament we had at Acme, and I had made a very clear post indicating those concerns still held when Kevin stated his intent to enter his own tournament again.

+1 to emphasize Tony's post.  Kevin, can you address this issues quickly?

If this remains ignored through the weekend can we attempt to draft a list of 10s to replace the 11s ourselves? Maybe put You Wanna Me (which I played again yesterday and is pretty much a solid (ITG) 10, not even that close to a 9 due to stream and awkward-ish timing, as the whole song's purples) onto the list of 10s and pick a new 9? Just feels like everyone thinks the difficulty should be scaled back just a tad. Obviously I don't want to steal someones tournament but I feel that there really should be a good week to at least play all the songs, and that means getting it finalized within 2 days or so.


I would be happy to come up with such a list and run it by the thread for criticism if you all would like, as I know basically everything from 1-Rebirth pretty well and I know what's offsync or a retarded chart or whatever, or else I'm positive there are others who would do this as well.

Gerrak: I totally agree that You Wanna Me is a solid 10 foot "upper division" qualifier.  If we could all agree on three more "representative" 10s and one more 9, I think that'd be cool, actually.

Honestly, I'd put in a vote for Fleadh Uncut, since it's basically, in my opinion, written like an 11 but easier.  I suck at it, I just think it's a fair test of stamina.  Also, a little conflict of interest-y, since I play it all the time, but Sweet Things has constant runs with weirdish timing, so I think it would be a good choice too.

I agree with Gerrak and Laura here, by this point it seems too late to change everything that's in place except Epileptic Crisis, which for reasons above should be changed.

9 days, holy cow

To alleviate problems with qualifiers, the qualifiers will be randomly selected from the ITG1 and ITG2 official charts on the day of the event, one from each of the 9 and 10 foot difficulty charts. This includes Hard mode charts.

Additionally, I am in talks right now about donating some of the entry fees to charity. The Acme management actually had no idea about the Sleep Country thing when they decided to allow us to do the tournament, so that's still in the works.

     Kevin, thanks for getting back to us so soon.

     Randoming is going to require that some people are there to determine if a song isn't a good qualifier. For instance if Queen of Light were randomed, I would argue it was a bit too hand intensive to make a good qualifier, or various others. Also, since you would be selecting the day of, many charts that are not easily sight readable (stops, etc.) would have to be thrown out as a possible qualifier. This lack of being able to prepare for the song in advance will potentially hurt people in the standard division and will cause some luck factor as to who has played the chart selected and who hasn't. Of course Expert people should know all the charts anyway but I'm more concerned about this luck factor.

Also, I think Hard charts should be thrown out for the qualifier. I think we said this already: few people play Hard charts, and if ones selected, it will be a sight read for 90% of the people, giving tons of errors in any sort of accurate seeding, and ultimately will be a fairly luck-based stomp fest.


Both of these problems would be eliminated if we simply drafted another list of songs.

I'm taking it upon myself to make it super easy for you and recommend one of the following songs to replace You Wanna Me in the selection of 9s (as it would ideally be a song from 3/Rebirth, I have only recommended such):

Blow my Mind (ITG3)
Be my Friend (ITG3)
The Deep Unknown (ITG3)
Little Red Riding Hood (Rebirth)
Clouds from the East (Rebirth)
Unspeakable (Rebirth)
TechLo (Rebirth)

And 3 of the following 10s (along with You Wanna Me):
Hand of Time (ITG1)
Hybrid (ITG1)
Walking on Fire (ITG1)
Sunshine (ITG2)
Temple of Boom (ITG2)
Tribal Style (ITG2)
Bagpipe (ITG3)
King Kong (ITG3)
The Promised Land (ITG3)
World of Dreams (ITG3)
Ode to Dragon (Rebirth)
One Thousand Cranes (Rebirth)
Tears in May (Rebirth)
Vifta med Handerna (Rebirth)

I tried to pick out 3-4 songs from each pack that are well-synced and have no gimmicks that a single play through or watching someone else play before you wouldn't fix, and few if any hands. In my opinion any of these songs played with any of the 9s would give an accurate enough seeding and be relatively enjoyable for everyone. Of course I don't really care if others not on this list were chosen or whatever, just trying to help.

Just thought I'd give you something super easy to work with to make a quick decision Feel free to grill my picks or crucify me for being so bold as to make such a list.

The only problem is that, as was mentioned by Tony, I can't pick a list of songs (nor can any entrant, really) without opening myself up to a conflict of interest.

I actually think that random is a good idea for qualifiers because it reduces any chance of bias.  Sticking to 1 + 2 is also, in my opinion, a good idea, because "official" charts are synced and rated more accurately.

As for a "blacklist," I kind of agree and kind of don't.  There are some songs that are not good gauges of overall skill - Queen of Light, like Gerrak mentioned, is one of them; on the other hand, I don't think anything on ITG 1 or 2 is impossible to sightread, which was the concern with some of the 3 and Rebirth potential qualifiers.   So basically, some players who are disproportionately good at hands would seed disproportionately high if Queen of Light was the random qualifier (but I would seed disproportionately high if No Princess was the random qualifier, and nobody's arguing about that, so maybe this point is moot), but nobody who normally plays at the 9-10 foot level should fail Queen of Light due to inability to sightread it - if you are capable of playing any hands chart in the game, you're capable of playing Queen of Light, and if you're not capable of playing hands charts, you are supposed to seed lower anyway.

Edit:  Most of Gerrak's picks are totally fair, though, and I actually love the idea of Little Red Riding Hood.  I do want to note that Tears in May is an 11, though.

Anyone would seed disproportionately high if we happened to random a song that only they or few people knew, and while the Expert people probably wouldn't matter, I would bet most of the Standard people don't remember all the charts, even off just 1 and 2. That's why it would give an ultimately less biased seeding to just have a list in advance, and the ones off 3 and Rebirth on the list are all well synced, so this isn't an issue either.

My mistake, I double checked and this is correct. Although Palindrome (Rebirth) I thought was an 11 and actually is a 10, and I would say that would make a good replacement on the list if one was needed.

I disagree. The problem isn't you selecting the list, it's you selecting a list of really technical 11s without considering the standard peoples' skill level and not letting the group edit it. Just pick a few songs off the list I gave, it doesn't matter which ones as I don't think any of these songs particularly favor any player.

A conflict of interest would only be a problem if you picked songs that favored you. I picked a list that shouldn't favor you, so pick songs off it that don't favor me and we'll have this problem solved

Or random off that list or ask Laura to pick the songs if you don't want to, this would work fine too. If you guys really want to random I won't get up in arms about it, but we've spelled out the problems with that and I hope we take the 10 seconds to just pick a few songs and repost the list.

To be most technical, a conflict of interest exists so long as Kevin has decision power with regard to the tournament.  Being very clear about the thoughts behind decisions, having other people involved in the decision making process, and leaving this up to chance are all different ways of showing the that conflict of interest is not interfering with his decision.  The key issue here is that conflict of interest leads to unfair outcomes by construction - the organizer can bias the event for or against specific players; bias in of itself is not the issue, because a perfectly fair event is impossible, but organizer bias is easily observed and easily removed in a variety of ways.

Picking the set of qualifiers by consensus - even is the decision group is a small subset of the entrants - is definitely a fair way to do it, but given the subjectivity involved and how long it takes us to actually distill results out of the debate, we probably wouldn't get a good set of qualifiers with sufficient time for people to practice them.

That said, a randomly biased qualifier is always a risk when using random, but there are already three things working to compensate for the bias in this tournament.

First, we're using two songs - the odds of getting two songs biased the same way for a given player are low (let's say any given player is disproportionately good at 10% of the game and disproportionately bad at another 10% of the game [relative to their personal average] - a given player has a 1% chance of the qualifier being completely stacked for or against them respectively and an 80% chance of two normal songs or one from each extreme - it still gives an advantage in certain cases, but the decisive [dis-]advantage of getting their absolute best/worst song is mitigated by a high likelihood of something more neutral as the second song).

Second, issues with severe random bias have generally been more a Extreme issue than an ITG issue, since ITG has much more finely grained judgment and a much lower penalty for misses such that a single accidental misstep won't drop you multiple ranks in seeding.

Third, the expert division exists this time around; the best players will be unaffected by slight bias since the expert division is not seeded and players who should not be in the expert bracket should not get a sufficient advantage per the last two points to overtake the all-over skill of top players.  The standard bracket represents a range where there is normally a very tight grouping of scores, and therefore a high vulnerability to slight bias anyway, so removing organizer bias and minimizing random bias is sufficient for a fair event; you'll never get a seed ranking that perfectly matches the final ranking, but minimizing these biases should minimize the difference between seeding and final rankings that aren't accounted for by variance across different charts, player strategy, and the randomness of tiebreakers.

There are other ways to weaken any random bias, too.  We could use a weighted average to minimize the bias in one direction or the other - calculate the qualifier score as double the lower score plus the higher score to weaken the effect of favorable bias or double the higher score to weaken the effect of unfavorable bias (doubling the higher score has an unfortunate side effect of disadvantaging a player who scores equally on both, so I would not promote this idea).  Or we could seed via James' ranking suggestion - rank the players on the two songs separately and seed by adding the two ranks.  Under this system (assuming 16 entrants), if, by some fluke, you get 80% and 100% on the two songs, you won't be seeding with a 90% average, you'll be seeding with 17 (16th and 1st on the two songs) points, which should place you right around the center of the rankings (honestly, this is a good system to use, it minimizes the effect of unusually high or lower scores relative to the group, which would then make the second song nearly meaningless for players whose scores fall in either outlying group - disruptively outlying scores are probably the effect of bias moreso than standard skill variance, so the effect of one qualifier being biased against a player should be minimized).

There are definitely examples of stops and other gimmicks in ITG1-2, but there's a huge difference between their usage in ITG1-2 and 3/Rebirth.  A great example is hands in Queen of Light or Bend Your Mind - they exist, and there are a lot of them, but they are written to give you a very solid cushion before and after any hands, so that you have plenty of time to adjust on a sightread; Hearts of Ice and Eternus, on the other hand, treat hands as a completely standard part of the flow and require you to read them with little warning.  When it comes to BPM changes and stops, there really just are not that many - a good number of songs have a half BPM section, which makes sightreading a little awkward if it's hard to tell when the BPM changes are, but that impacts only a few notes; there's definitely no staggering like Epilleptic Crisis and the songs lith the most frequent BPM changes aren't doing simple half-double changes - it's stuff like Hardcore of the North and Da Roots which legitimately change speed by a few BPM multiple times.

Furthermore, 11/12's that had a stronger tendency to do weird stuff than 9/10's (other than using a lot of hands, which was more common to see in 10's), and many of these songs were only 8's on Hard, so they live entirely outside the proposed range.

One last thing to note, we were late to game with regard to hacking our machine, so most players who have spent the time to reach tournament level in this area  theoretically have a lot of exposure to ITG1/2 charts, so the risk of not knowing a chart should be low.

Random is a good idea because now you're expected to just know everything equally as well, vice an intentionally chosen gimmick chart.  Not everyone knows all the songs (I certainly don't), and most songs, especcally ITG1/2 ones, are easily sightreadable without many trip ups.  

I understand that "less hardcore" players probably aren't even familiar with all the songs, but I'd also argue that it is unreasonable to expect someone to go to the arcades at least once a week (= between now and tournament) to play them.  

The best way is honestly to random with a predetermined blacklist of hand intensive or gimmick intensive songs or whatever you guys are talking about.

btw, vifta med handerna relatively well synched?  pffft...

oh yeah, about using hard mode charts.  I think they would be a sightread for 90% of the people as Gerrak said... but just 90% of the "expert division" type people.  A lot of people play hard charts, even more so with ones rated 10 or so that have 12/13 expert charts associated with them.  If randoming a 9/10, hard charts should be fair game (though IMO, still including blacklists)

Actually, there is one way to get around a pre-determined blacklist:

Random the qualifier, and then give the tournament entrants veto power with 60% majority (or maybe more).  If 60% + of tournament entrants think a song is a bullshit qualifier, it probably is.