I would enter this tournament to support the community if not enough people showed up otherwise, as paying the entry fee isn't a problem for me, even knowing I'll place dead last.

However, due to the fact that I'm kind of sickly, my skill is highly disproportionate; I can be competitive on 7s and 8s, but if I even attempt anything over 10 feet, my heart rate speeds up to over 200 and I have to stop. For this reason I don't USUALLY enter Expert ITG tournaments and, if entry was high enough without me, I'd probably just be a spectator/cheerleader for my husband.

If this goes well, maybe we can look into running an oldskool Max 2 tournament for the old losers like me.

I'd probably show up to watch, but like Laura, I wouldn't last past round 1 against people playing 11 - 13 steppers. I know my strength and weaknesses, and playing ITG's 11+ songs are not one of my strengths.

On a positive note, I have two friends who would probably participate in this.


I'll be there in a heartbeat!

I dont believe that a free-range of difficulties from the getgo would be a good or fun idea; we would likely say <= 10 up through the last 16, <=11 for the last 8, and all difficulties for the semifinals and finals. I am (as a mathematician hehe) brainstorming and consulting people for ideal tournament styles as not to just have people show up play 1 or two songs and then get knocked out.

Also bear in mind there is a DDR 7th mix and a DDR Supernova machine at Acme as well, which will happily service those not currently playing in the tournament =) So even if you don't make it that far in it's still sure to be a good time for all.

Realistically speaking, a tournament in the PNW hasn't had more than 16-20 people show up for years, so by your scale, it'd still be bad news for those with no stamina.

Obviously there are dance games that people who can't pass hard songs on ITG can play once they get knocked out of the tournament, but that's not really the point... it's not so much about winning or losing and more about running a tournament people want to participate in. I feel like there are a lot of newer (or oldskool and therefore unaccustomed to ITG level difficulty) players who would support a tournament scene IF they felt like that scene catered to them.

If you really want to see who the best DDR player in the PnW is, 13s are the only fair way to do it. For drumming up interest/reviving the tournament scene/making friends, though, your best bet is probably capping the difficulty or offering some kind of alternative for those who know that entering Expert ITG is a lost cause.

Capping difficulty at 10 or 11 turns it into a quad attack tourney. You could argue any ITG tourney will have those high level players, but I don't see limiting difficulty that low the whole tournament correlating to lower level players doing better.

I don't know how newer players progress these days, but I can remember when my friends started playing around Max 2's release, the goal was to do suicide runs (all 10s). After the "OMG I PASSED OMES" experience, we turned to AA's and SDGs, then AAA's.

I don't think it will make low level players do better. I think it WILL make low level players choose to participate at all. If you're not able to pass 11s, chances are you can't quad star a 7 either. But I know that if I didn't desperately want to support local Bemani, I'd find no interest in entering a tournament where I knew I would have to walk off the stage during rounds because I'm incapable of physically executing the stepchart.

Then again, I'm coming from the perspective of an "old school" player (my first games were on 3rd mix in 2001), who has seen countless people develop all kinds of problems from said suicide runs and from the increasing difficulty of charts - I know about 3 people who now have bum knees, not to mention the countless injuries I've witnessed during play (I remember one girl who was considered the best female player at the time trying Queen of Light on ITG beta and having to go to the hospital because she threw her back out and couldn't continue/stand/walk.)

13s and suicide runs have their merits. But like I said, it vastly depends on what kind of crowd you're trying to attract. If you want 7-8 people who think they're the best and want to prove it to enter, that format is fine. If you want to attract old or brand new players, and make it more of a fun social event than a serious business tournament, things like how a wide range of players will perceive the tournament need to be considered.

Idea:

If possible, consider having two tournaments. Expert and Hard mode. Each player can only enter one, but make the prize more substantial for the winners in the Expert category. This way those who should play in Expert will feel compelled to participate in the Expert division and hopefully won't compete in the Hard division just so they can insta-win.

On another note:

Yes, the 11+ songs on ITG do a good job of separate the strong from the weak in terms of skill. However, I haven't seen a crowd get worked up when the two players going at it on an 11+ song have scores over 3% apart. It's just not close enough to get excited about. You claim that making it easier results in a "quad-star" tournament, but you should watch the crowd's reactions at Sakuracon when Chrono and I played End of the Century (no bar) and we both got 2 excellents. Yes, it was practically a AAA attack race, but damn the crowd loved the suspense. No one knew who was going to win until the final scores rolled up the screen. I can't say I get that kind of suspense watching two people play an 11+ song. The exceptions to this are the ITG nationals in '05 and '06, but that is the stuff of legends!

Yeah, we used to do that when there were more players and it worked really well, aside from the fact that there were always those two people or so who had AA'd most of Heavy (hard to do in the Max days!) and still entered Standard, which capped at 7 feet IIRC. I don't think it'd be a problem now though, other than the pain of having to run 2 tournaments.

Midwest still has close calls at every tournament so I don't know how strong the scene is here in the PNW (I'm pretty detached here). And it's a lot of the same dudes from way back playing (minus DjStunna and a couple others I guess).

Judging by skill level I know to exist in the SeaTac area though I figured this tourney would be aimed towards the high end players. But alas, I only know a few people who play out here versus the community I know a lot better (Indiana/Ohio/MI/KY).

Oh, and I really hope no one does "no bar" tourneys still. I hate the kids in Salem who are terribad at the game but still insist that "bar-raping" makes you a noob.

EDIT:
Check this forum out for ideas on how to frame your tournament if you want some ideas.

http://midwestmusicgames.com/index.php?showforum=11

Let's not forget that difficulty caps are always a touchy subject at DDR/ITG tournaments.  Holding it to 10's for a round or two would be a step towards including newer players, but a lot of skilled players play very tactical tournaments where they figure out their opponents' weaknesses ahead of time and cater to them, and blocking the ability to do so has created some friction in the past.  It's not as much of an issue as it used to be, but I remember at various times (on extreme, not ITG) there have been pairs of players throughout the tournament level spectrum who would have had almost perfectly balanced DDRecall comparisons because one would almost always win on 7s and 8s by a very narrow amount and the other would do the same with 9s and very definitively so on 10s.  Neither player "deserves" to be in later rounds more than the other, but by capping at 8s for a couple rounds, there would've been the connotation that mastery of lower level Heavy charts was more important that mastery of higher level charts.  I will admit that ITG players have less of this effect, but there have been rounds where clever song choice let me win a song (or the round) against players generally much better than me.

The secondary issue is the state of competitive ITG in WA.  It basically doesn't exist at this point - other than Amber, I don't see anyone who trains on non-r21 charts more than occasionally and, personally, I haven't touched an ITG song's single chart outside of Marathon in months.  Laura and I just drove down to Portland for what worked out to be a 4 person Extreme tournament and had a blast (all 4 of us did), so it's no function of me losing my interest in these games in general - I've just become very disenchanted with the normal flow of our ITG tournaments.  This tournament actually worked out a little like what I described above; we ended up playing with tennis-style rounds (win at least 3 songs and 2 more than the other player) and had rounds go as long as 7 songs (4-2 with one tie) because of some very even matching and lots of work trying to figure out what people were and were not good at.  I've fallen pretty far out of shape since our last ITG tournament (I used to be able to play sets of all 12's, I was down to the point where a single 9 rendered my exhausted and am back up to playing sets of 10's), but after only a few days of training, I got myself back up to some kind of competitive state and enjoyed myself.

I will also vouch for the fact that there a lot of newer players who are getting low 90's on 8's and 9's.  I've met people who were in similar situations when they played in their first tournament; those in DDR tournaments seemed a lot more likely to enter another than those who played in ITG tournaments, because ITG tournaments lend themselves to only allowing the top players to feel like they belong.  Additionally, a lot of our top tier players have recently stopped playing or moved, making something of Extreme's level a lot more appropriate than it had been for awhile.

An ITG tournament could be made to work, but it'll take a lot of careful planning and tweaking to make lesser skilled players want to try again next time without alienating the expert players.

Also, an idea: DMN ran a tournament at Narrows where about 55 preapproved r21 charts were available to all players for their rounds.  What if we did this again with another 50-100 songs (with hard/expert for every song) and disallowed all official charts?  It would let us keep it to a reasonable level (say a couple 11-equivalent charts) and help keep tournaments from falling into the same rut they always do where only 20% of the songlist even gets used.  With a little screening, we could block out stupid gimmick charts and try to branch into different playstyles (ITG sticks to a couple core things and a lot of charts, especially 9's, end up all looking the same to most players) with a fair amount of balance.  Obviously a lot mroe work to coordinate, but worth throwing out there.

@Suko: Regarding 11's not being that close, the last couple ITG tournaments we had, the top 8 always had rounds within 1%, usually much tighter than that.  I think we had some down all the way to 1 or 2 excellents.  Of course, at least 3 of those players have left the state since then, but the point still stands.  Of particular note, there still wasn't as much excitement over those as there was at S-con's DDR tournament when people were fighting for the slight better SDG this year.  It's probably tied at least partly to the fact that regardless of the song, every single  top 8 round in an ITG tournament looks exactly the same because most of the 11+'s look almost exactly the same.

@SoDeepPolaris: Talking to people from other still-competitive areas, we picked up an unusual dynamic where the top players advanced far faster than the people below them creating a huge, huge rift between them and basically had no hope of catching up.  So while our top players were on par with or better than the top players elsewhere (didn't Mykl land in the #8 spot at nationals?), we only had about 4-6 players who were up at that level level, and everyone else was pretty average as far as tournaments elsewhere would go.  Our tournaments ended up catering to the top players normally, and most everyone else just stopped going as a result, since the skill levels were smoothly distributed.

Stream

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Gerrak, I see you've been here a little bit, but I don't know how long you've lurked on the forums. Welcome to the site.   I hope I can fill you in on the scene here a little bit.

I do not speak for everyone in the Washington area, but I have a general feeling of what has worked, what hasn't worked, and where the community here is at in terms of our competition level. I have been to the last 2 major (non-convention) PNW tournaments, and things have even changed since then.

QUICK SUMMARY: Our scene is not "hardcore 11+" players anymore. Yes, there are some of us in this area that like that, and can still play at that level, but those people don't post frequently here. ALSO: Most the people you see playing 10s, 11s at Acme, Gameworks, Narrows, do NOT post here.  They may read the site, I'm not sure, but they aren't the active users here.

The active crowd on this site from the Seattle area has been burned-out from the PA tournaments because we had a group of people that were so good that they dominated every tournament. We wouldn't even be able to place bets on who would win, because we already knew the winners. Those of us still here like to HANG OUT and play DDR. We are not PA score crazy, even though we may have been in the past.

What we are - is SUPER COMPETITIVE, but not PA players anymore/and if we could, we don't enjoy it. Yes, there still are those who enjoy it, but they aren't involved with the scene much anymore.

What Laura and ancsik are trying to say is basically: ITG was played by the PA crowd, and the game was good for that; but it's not fun for anyone else. A tournament *not* focused on ITG and passing 12-13 footers is what we want.

So to answer the original question, we don't recommend a difficult, ITG based tournament if you want a lot of us to come and have fun.

ITG based COULD be ok if, like ancsik (WOW that's weird to type now...) suggested, we used the ITG engine to pose a fun challenge of "here are 50 new charts that will be played in the tournament." What isn't fun is entering a tournament where half the players just play INTIMIDATING BARE BONES TECHNO WITH 13 FOOT STEPCHART on their opponents because they know that not everyone will even attempt to play that chart.

I think part of why I want to see a tournament again is just to encourage new players who I sometimes see around but have never met to come introduce themselves. I know that Tony told me he has some friends from work who go to ACME for ITG every Monday, but I don't know how good they are or whether or not they'd want a 13 foot-a-palooza tournament... nonetheless, those are a few more "recruits."

I think you guys are blowing out of proportion what the intention is here. I go to Acme usually 3-4 times per week and frequently see people, at least a dozen different people, who play proficiently at expert level, not meaning getting 99s on summer or anything like that, but can get >90%s on 10s and 11s a lot of the time, with the best of us being those who play those boring custom 12s and '13's. That's the kind of player base I was expecting and was looking for to fill the top end of the tournament. Sure if Amber enters we'll all get creamed, but I'd like to think it would be fun to go head to head against some of the people I think I'm comparable to, and to meet and play with people from the community. I would hope that players of all levels would at least be interested in hanging out and maybe participating just for kicks. I know personally I probably wont make it even into the semifinals, but I'm just there to have fun with it.

Unrelated, I spoke with an events coordinator and I'll meet up with someone soon to discuss the matter further. And when/if I get a date scheduled I will be posting sheets advertising both the tournament and the pnwbemani forums at Acme, Narrows, probably UW and probably GameWorks in Seattle, as to make sure the word gets out to those not reading up here.

It's exactly like BlueSS said - those kinds of players just don't post on these forums, so you're going to get a very different response here than if you physically approached the 13 feet crowd.


And that's exactly what we're saying; nobody here cares if they win a tournament, but we do care about having fun, and for many of us, even those "upper end" players who  can get high scores on them, 13s aren't even remotely fun. As an example, I know for a fact that ancsik can get very high scores on 12s when he plays them, but doesn't really "enjoy" anything over an easy 11. I think it's about differing definitions of fun for different people - and when planning a tournament you have to weigh things in terms of sheer numbers; four people have already come out in favor of easier charts being "fun" and harder charts being "not fun," VS one person who seems to find the harder charts to be more "fun." You'd have to poll at ACME to get better representation of all types of players, but I think the point that I'm trying to make is that despite the fact that there ARE a lot of people who play super difficult charts, they're not the people who have ever entered a tournament around here. (Amber excepted, and she's a supremely cool human being who I am happy to donate my entry fee to )

Gerrak,

Tell all those people to come post here so that they can give their input on a tournament!!!

We can only give you own opinion from the people that are on this site. Unfortunately, we don't know those people who are there playing 12's/13's; nor do they post here, nor online anywhere else.

Additionally, those people don't show up to the tournaments we've ran. Granted, there are a lot of new people playing DDR at the arcades, but still; they're not in the scene, they just play.

Could you have a tournament that focuses on high difficulty songs? Yes, and people might show up and enjoy it - but only if you talk to them in the arcades, and that crowd is a different one than the one currently here and posting.

I haven't entered the tournaments because I suck (compared to tournament levels) at anything 9+, and no, I will not enter a hard/difficult 11+ tournament "for fun". I will go to hang out, and run air-hockey tournaments on the side, but I won't enter.

Now tournaments that are with modifiers, something that doesn't require silly stamina only 11+ stepcharts, that - I'd enter. I play technically, not BUTTON SMASH, blow my knee out 11s.

I can usually get 95%+ on most 10+ songs, but I still know entering a tournament without a level cap is pointless for me. I might be able to get 95% on a 10, but what about the 6 others who can get 98%+ on that, or god forbid 99.6%+? That's a HUUUUUUGE difference in skill level (IMO).

Listen, you're the one doing the leg work for this thing, so I say make it how you want to make it. I'll probably show up to the tournament no matter how it's fashioned (as long as it's at a time I can make it), I just may or may not participate. I'll just wait and see. I love ITG, hell I own a damn machine, but I know I had a lot more fun at the DDR tournaments I ran rather than the ITG one.

I agree with BluesS on many of his insights. Particularly regarding how it's never fun when you can go to a tournament and know who's going to take 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. I feel that by adding level caps or mods, or something, you throw a bit of uncertainty into the mix, making everyone wonder who's going to come out on top.

If you're interested, here's the posts for the tournaments I hosted in Pullman/Moscow a while back. These weren't created for the Seattle area however, so keep that in mind...

http://www.pnwbemani.net/smf/index.php?topic=617.0

http://www.pnwbemani.net/smf/index.php?topic=310.0

(Side note, off topic post)
Suko, I still don't think I've met you... that's not cool.

This isn't a bad idea. You should put a flier up saying, "Upcoming ITG tourny, please cast your votes on Pnwbemani.net" or something like that.

It would get more people on the site regardless. I'd be happy to go down there and distribute flyers.

I've definitely seen the people who can pass most 9s and 10s with low 90s from time to time, who as far as I know, do not post here or know too many people from here.  The problem being, every time we've gotten a couple of those people to show up, they get their ass handed to them in round 1 and never come back.  This is hopefully different now that our top players have mostly faded away (Amber is about the only one left; it used to be a group of 5 or 6, so if 16 people entered, the bottom 6 seeds would be killed so horribly they never wanted to try again.  We tended to have about 10 returning players and 2 or 3 new players each time around, those new players fall right into those 6 deadly slots, and yeah, we never saw them again), but who knows how it will work out.

And Laura has it half right with me and hard songs.  I hate PAing hard charts, because playing them multiple times is just painful (my knee won't do it).  I love playing hard charts for the sake of passing stuff, but the staying power is purely tired to the challenge, once I've passed it a couple times, it's old.  Anything above easy 11s is only fun a handful of times for me, so the frequency they show up in tournament play ruins tournaments for me.

Before the Portland tourney last weekend (and ignoring the S-con tourneys), the last tournaments we've had have been things like SN Battle mode and 5th mix, just because it's not an ITG tournament.

Yeah, since I moved to this area last year I've only met a handful of people.

Unfortunately ACME is a 40 min drive from where I live, and now that we own our own machine, I don't get down their too much (except about once a month when we feel like enjoying the arcade experience).

If this tourny happens I hope to meet some new players.

40 minutes from Lynnwood?! Granted, I don't know where in Lynnwood you are, but when I lived on 164th I used to be able to get to ACME in 25-30 consistently... of course, that was when I was 18 and a totally reckless driver... 

Man, you have ITG, I have Pop'n, more people have a machine or two... sometimes I think we should all just rent some garage apartment or something, split the 500 bucks a month rent, and have a freeplay arcade that anyone can go to at any time of day.

lol, that'd be like a private club or a speak-easy? =]

One can always dream. I'm still hoping to get an arcade up here to let me put it in their establishment and split the cash 50/50 with them.