12 hours away 

Been training a long time for this, as many others have too. See you guys there.

I can vouch for that. Gerrak is as ass on the forums but not when hanging out. (Not sure why, but it's true.)

Don't mind us... Sometimes we go "I HATE EVERYBODY" on the forums and kill each other with our terrible derogatory statements, but we get mostly along in person Believe it or not I'm not totally an asshole in real life. Weird huh...

Looking forward to seeing you guys in action at this thing, although glancing at the thread makes me glad I'm not a competitive player. Best of luck to all participants and remember to have fun!

Sorry to split hairs, but completely devaluing perfects would be making them the same as greats or just doing Marv = 1, everything else = 0.  This system does greatly deemphasize perfects, though. 

I MA.  You MA.  James MAs.  Tony MAs.  There are plenty of people who are good at getting a whole lot of Marvelouses.  I don't think there will be any complaints day of because I think the only people entering this tournament are people who like to practice MA anyway; it's not the main draw of this event, ITG is, and is mostly a consolation meant for players like me with strong timing and poor stamina. 

Don't get me wrong, I get a lot of marvelouses and lots of greats and no perfects, so this ruleset benefits me, I was just stating its blatant lack of reasonability, considering 90% of the tournament entrants don't stomp the holy god out of DDR for Marvelouses.

Also
This speaks to how little you know the current players. Only a few of us have been around for more than a couple years and have played through all of it; probably fewer than 5 people (all of them in expert division) have played through all of ITG 1/2, the standard division are fairly new players and this random song will inherently screw a lot of them up. But as Tony stated, with two songs its fairly unlikely both will favor one person in the same way.

Still I have to point out the blatant flaws in both systems. One of these days you'll all realize I ain't typing the day away for me, I'm doing it for everyone else who's not perceptive enough to extrapolate the potential consequences from each aspect of the ruleset or isn't here to speak for themselves.
You have completely devalued perfects. Marvelouses are devalued with the SN2 scoring system, I agree, that's why I suggested 5/4/2 rather than 3/2/1. This would provide much more of a reasonable MA without making getting greats not matter at all. But hey it's not like I'm a mathematician who thinks about this stuff.

But minus this change, you'll get plenty of complaints day-of when this 50g 0p 100m B guy ties the 0g 100p 50m AAA guy, so I'm not so worried about grilling you about it now.


Again, you keep making rules that benefit me, so thanks I suppose, I just don't see how they're remotely fair for 75% of the other entrants.

A little bit off topic, but for those that are concerned about out of state players joining the tournament (Flash in particular) I can confirm that he won't be attending.

"Nope, I haven't really been interested in any tournament play lately for some reason. I'll prob make my return to tournaments at fr5." -Flash

Anyways, carry on!

The only completely fair method for me is to have no one pick the qualifiers. I think Laura's idea is good, however, so I'll be implementing that as well. I must mention that you will only be able to participate in the qualifier veto process if you're there on time at 11am, when qualifiers are scheduled to start.

There's one last issue to be resolved: the prizes, and the potential for donation to charity. Per Bill's instructions, I am not going to be able to find out about this until the day of the tournament. There is nothing I can do about that.

Also, I should mention that we really have to scram by about 8pm. Masterman Vending can't be sending people out any later than that to lock up the cabinets. While I really doubt that the tournament will run that late, please do be on time to everything, as this will greatly speed things up.

Laura's also right about the Kevin Point system. It's just an experimental rule set that I'm trying out, mostly to do Marvelous Attack without completely devaluing perfects.

If you haven't played all of ITG1 and 2 by now...well...the game's been out 5 years, I feel like we've hit the point where it's not necessary to assume that people haven't played it to death.

Gerrak, I'm pretty sure the point of the Kevin Point system is to artificially place emphasis on Marvelous Attack by penalizing players a disproportionate amount for Perfects without just straight up saying "Marvelouses are worth a point and nothing else is worth anything."  It's not a standard ruleset by any means, but I think that was the point; it's kind of like how a couple of years ago, most of the ITG community could be reasonably expected to do 10s, but now it's 12s - DDR players have nothing to do but refine their timing, so now he's trying to up that difficulty.

It's sort of like how some DDR tournaments gave you two points for a perfect, one for a great, 0 for a good, -6 for a boo, -8 for a miss, etc, whereas others calculated based on straight number of perfects.  The first tournament style was structured to emphasize comboing (this was back when people thought that was hard, mind you) whereas the second tournament style was meant to emphasize precise timing.  They definitely tested different things, but neither was really unfair; if you were really good at the game, you could win any format by AAAing the song.

I just kind of caught this also; it should have been mentioned long ago but I think now would be better than never:

The difference in points between Marvelous and Perfect really shouldn't be the same as the difference between Great and Perfect. Imagine 5m 5g versus 9p 1g. I would argue the 9p 1g should be a better score than 5 greats in 10 steps (which wouldn't even be a AA, or even a B for that matter I think), but they have the same value in "Kevin Points". Or on a larger scale, imagine 200 marvelous, 50 perfect, 5 greats versus 205 marvelous, 40 perfects, 10 greats. The fewer greats should plainly win, but they would tie by this system. This is supported by the fact that the difference in timing windows is far different between Marvelous and Perfect compared to Perfect and Great.


I really don't mean to poke holes in this a week in advance, but I hadn't really looked at the rules for the SN2 tournament and this seems like something that could cause major problems. If you're going to use "Kevin Points" like this make it
Marvelous 5 pts
Perfect 4 pts
Great 2 pts
OK 2 pts
Or something similar to preserve more healthy ratios

Probably just put a few people in charge of deciding this, not the whole tournament. Maybe just the expert people plus Laura Tony and KDDR? I'm sure we'll have a pretty decent consensus if a problem song were to arise anyway.


I still think it will give a better seeding to just pick a few songs, dunno what's so difficult or undesirable about that. If we put up the list now, people still have time to play them all. As-is I keep hearing about people panicking to now play all of ITG 1/2 and it will literally take 30 seconds to just pick songs. Tony's post regarding Randoms instills better faith in it than I had before because he makes good points, but I still think a list in advance would be far more preferable to most people.

what a load of options both simple and complex here on the table, i just hope if any last changes are to be made that they are done by tomorrow's day-end seeing as thats one week before the tourney day.

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. 

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

     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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.