Stepcharts Made Horribly 4!
July 28, 2018. Starts at 11am sharp.
Entry Fee: $5.00 if you preregister, $10.00 at the door.

SMH4 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.

What’s new this time around:

• New location, new cab, again! We'll be running this at The Nest, a new, private arcade space in north Fremont!
• Cabinet/pad specifics are still being figured out, but we'll be on SM5 like last year.

Otherwise, the tournament’s ruleset is identical to S.M.H. 3’s.

Songs will be made available for download here as they're accepted: https://bkirz-smh-4.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

The Rules

Phase One: Preregistration and Stepchart Submission
Ends June 2 June 11, 11:59PM Pacific Time

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 $10.00). I’ll be accepting payment through PayPal (https://PayPal.Me/bkz), Square Cash (https://cash.me/$bkz), Google Wallet (PM me for my email address), in person, or by carrier pigeon.

You will have from today until the submission cutoff to submit up to four songs to be included in the tournament pack. Make sure to identify yourself by name when submitting. I’d prefer for you to create and submit new stepcharts, but any are fine as long as you had a substantial 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.
• Stepcharts must have at least 50 hittable arrows. While there might 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.
• Charts that have been submitted to a previous SMH tournament (or other tournaments I've run with similar formats) can not be resubmitted. Make some original content! If you’re not sure what counts as “the same chart”, ask me.
• Don't break the machine. Your simfile must not crash the machine, and you are not allowed to abuse lua to modify configuration settings that persist after the song is complete.  (For example, you are not allowed to change settings via PREFSMAN)  This is quite an extensive topic, so if you have any questions, please ask.
• Don't be a pain in the ass. If your chart has a three-minute intro/outro without any notes, you are being a pain in the ass.  If your audio is excessively loud or uncomfortable to listen to, you are being a pain in the ass.  If you try to hide inappropriate content in your simfile, you are being a pain in the ass.  If you submit borderline-offensive content without PM'ing me first, you are being a pain in the ass.
• Stepmania 5 Specific  As long as you don't do things that break the machine (see the rules above), you can use the following.
  
  • Allowed Notetypes:  Tap, Mine, Fake, Lift*
  • Allowed Segments:  Stops, Delays, Warps, Scroll Factor
  • Allowed Misc:  Attacks
  * While lifts are allowed, they are a noteskin dependent thing. I don't know of any SM5 noteskins that support them, so they'll probably fallback to the default theme and look like a weird grey down arrow.
  

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: 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 machine at The Nest. At this point, songs will not be changed or removed from the pack.


Phase Three: TOURNAMENT!
July 28, 2018.
This will be a double elimination event. Only songs from the SMH4 pack will be playable in this tournament.

Seeding:  Seeding is based on registration order.

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 SMH4 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. Either player may fail any song throughout all tournament rounds with no additional penalty - once you fail, your percentage is “locked” as your score.

Mod Selection: You may only pick mods that do not disqualify you. Turn mods are not allowed.

The Jonx Dank Strat Rule: Covering my bases after SHENANIGANS at UPS. You can't use any peripherals or humans as an aide while playing any of the charts.

The Sean Paul J Kim Registration Rule: I can't believe I have to write this down, but don't attempt to preregister multiple times to submit more songs. One registration and one set of submissions per person.

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.