Arguments against Modern Tetris Tier List

modern versus tetris needs to change over my years playing this game it's become pretty clear to me that it's very flawed and that something needs to be done however if you ask a versus tetris player what the problems are you'll get different answers from everybody in this video i'm going to be ranking 9 different arguments against vs tetris on a tier list based on their impact on the game and how fundamental the problems are to it we'll start from the d tier where arguments have no weight at all and move our way to the s tier which are the best arguments for change also some disclaimers this list is very subjective and should be treated as such if you want to talk about what you think about some of these placements feel free to leave a comment about it also to make things clearer i'll only be talking about the versus side of modern tetris not single player lastly by talking about the flaws of modern tetris this is in no way an endorsement of classic tetris or other types of games like tgm it's not that i particularly dislike them but it's just outside the scope of this video with that being said though let's get into the list so let's start off in dtier here we'll have some of the worst arguments you'll ever find usually made out of complete ignorance to kick off the d tier we have no skill the gist of this argument goes like this modern tetris has added too many mechanics such as hold seven bag ghost piece 5 previews srs and many other things which have removed the difficulty of stacking as tetris is a game about stacking the active stacking should be challenging and therefore the game is flawed you basically won't ever hear anybody who actually plays modern tetris saying this and it's an argument made with the assumption that because everyone can stack it means that there's no skill in stacking this is simply not true as the ability to stack is constantly the main skill that's being tested in versus tetris as you have to stack cleanly into t-spin adapt to garbage down stack and basically do anything properly modern tetris is undeniably skill based and putting two players of different skill levels against each other in a sufficiently long set will almost always end in the better player winning making this a d-tier argument for my second d-tier pick we have t-spins shouldn't exist so this is another argument you'll almost never hear any modern tetris player making the argument goes like this t spins rewards so much in so few lines that there's pretty much no reason to do anything else because of this clearing things like tetris has become irrelevant at a surface level for people who don't play a lot of modern tetris this seems true however in practice versus tetris splits stacking into two parts up stacking and down stacking t-spins are efficient to upstack but other clears like combos tetrises and even regular singles doubles and triples are much more prevalent in down stacking even in up-stacking you can't clear only t-spins and even if you want to maximize the amount of t-spins you'll need to have very good stacking in this less extreme form this argument would be calling for a t-spin nerf because tetris should be stronger but in most cases t-spins serve as a better reward to good stacking than tetris justifying the reward with all these reasons considered this one lands in d tier with those other way let's move on to seat here i'll be putting arguments that are misguided but have a bit of truth in them here for this tier i'll be picking memorization game this argument is one that's usually made against teaspoon setups it goes like this t-spin setups are some of the most powerful attacks you can do and the setups and forms are ones that you need to memorize since there's so many different t-spin setups modern tetris overvalues memorization there's several problems with this argument so first let's talk about good setup usage to use teaspoon setups well you'll need to have the right amount of tea pieces for it if you don't you'll be forced to stack the sides while stalling for a piece usually ending in an inefficient up stack second you'll need to make sure you can build it in very few pieces since you want to avoid needless stacking you also don't want to be waiting on many pieces for the setup for these reasons something like a very clean mid game trinity is very hard to do and rarely happens because you'll need 3 t-pieces and a board that would support a trinity in around 2 blocks for these reasons only a few setups are really viable ones which don't use a lot of t pieces and can be completed from regular boards in a few pieces additionally teaspoon setups are pretty much only for up stacking so most versus players even high ranking ones opt just to not use teaspoon setups since they're too difficult to be efficient with however there's a growing class of players most are lower level but some have reached places like x-rank and tetrio and that is opener mains the idea is that if you kill your opponent with your opener you won't ever need to learn how to improvise it really only works in lower skill brackets or tetrio but it was enough to win an underdogs cup with xynix literally having a 3 pps dpc and a 1 pps mid game winning probably the wackiest tournament run in tetris history anyways memorization game's going to go in seed here for me let's go to beat here now so these are going to be some of the very popular arguments among versus players which i'll also agree with to an extent however they're also arguments i feel are kind of weak anyways our first one is combo system without a doubt this is the most complainable and cited problem in modern tetris and even in tetris as a whole generally you'll hear people saying that 4 watt is op and that the combo table needs to be nerfed to account for it so the problem here is that given the scaling nature of combos things like 4 wide will pretty much always be strong by scaling i mean that even if combos were to cap at 3 max instead of the current 5 in most games there would still come a point where 4 watt is sending a higher attack per line than anything else in the game so anyways the people calling for a nerf to 4 wide tend to not understand how it scales and it leads to things like this proposal being pushed to ttc which does pretty much nothing to impact how strong forward is if you want to weaken forward to any significant amount you'll have to attack the scaling some proposed solutions to this are that combo damage goes down after a certain point combo's sending nothing after 12 combos resetting after a certain amount and many more in general though people tend to understand the situation with four wide very poorly the more rare formless argument says that power stacking is the issue and that combo rewards unclean and brainless stacking in faster games this is true since it's much better to build up a stack quickly without a solid plan for it and resolve using a combo however power stacking is also the only thing in any tetris meta right now that involves any significant risk and reward so i'd argue it's not entirely bad or unhealthy but that might just say more about the other problems that tetris has anyways it's still a pretty decent argument held back by the sheer amount of misunderstandings around it so i'll give it a solid b tier for my next pick we have too fast so this is an argument you might be surprised to hear is made by lower and higher level players it's mostly targeting the unrestricted games like tetrio and gestures which have a pretty much limitless speed cap the argument goes like this efficiency doesn't matter as much if you can just play faster and things like timing become way less relevant if each second awaited is just costing you something like three pieces this argument is actually pretty valid and everything said there is true to a decent extent of course you still need to make efficient placements but the value of each piece is heavily diluted when you crank the speed however i think that the fact that people play brainlessly fast is indicative of other flaws in tetris rather than the problem being caused by the ability to play fast which i'll talk about later in the higher tiers i also think that fast and slow tetris games can co-exist and both be good games making the speed preferential but yeah with that being said too fast makes it to b tier for my last b-tier choice we have rng game alright let's talk about luck there's a decent amount of influence that luck plays in tetris this argument is a broad description of things like garbage hole spawns lucky down stacks and more it's especially relevant in games like puyo puyo tetris since garbage has a random chance to become messier when received additionally in games like tetrio spikes can occur from the multiplier without a lot of skill as players stumble their way into 20 spikes at the lower ranks on complete accident it's a pretty simple argument and it's true that rounds are completely swung by complete chance however things like this are almost always just an inconvenience and are just tilting if you don't get tilted the better player will still win given a significantly long set because these events only have a big impact on the mental game i'll be giving rng game a beat here alright now with the bt are done we can start getting into some of the really good arguments these are all ones i totally agree with and talk about all the time also with each of these i'll be giving my reasons why they aren't s here with that being said let's get into our first a tier argument down stacking is opie so this argument is something that will make a lot more sense the better you get at the game basically once you get good enough at down stacking it's the solution to pretty much every problem you face the reason is because garbage is free lines so instead of stacking up you can use your garbage and be several times more efficient the only game that's really free from this problem is puyo puyo tetris and that's because the game has a ton of line clear delay and cheesy garbage making up stacking much more viable if you watch any higher level play down stacking is pretty much always the right choice when available this has kind of led to the tetris meta being one where people don't take any risks because being safe is also the most efficient way of attacking this problem has spawned entire playstyles such as qmk's infinite down stack where he down stacks the entire game until he finds a good combo and then wins now don't get me wrong down stacking still takes a lot of skill to do and not everyone can down stack well but that doesn't mean it can't be overpowered generally as you go up in skill level you'll see down stack and become more and more important until it eventually becomes the entire game at the highest levels of play the only thing stopping this from being an s-tier argument for me is that it really doesn't affect most of the player base but it's still a big fundamental flaw that needs to be ironed out but yeah all in all a tier all right that's it for the eight tier now let's get to the best of the best this tier has stuff that's pretty much core to modern tetris and the game would need to be restructured and played entirely differently to solve them let's get to the first s to your pick being always one hundred percent always one hundred percent is an argument that has to do with the pacing and different game states and mid to high level play it goes like this tetris is a game that suffers from terrible pacing the path from the start of a round to when someone tops out has no build up if you watch say a jester's cup fod you'll see the state of the game resets constantly and people just play until someone dies through either a mid-strop or a big down stack combo whether the round ends in 30 seconds one minute or two minutes it's all the same due to the temporary nature of garbage only the last garbage line really matters so the line between living and dying is very thin i describe this as a game being at 100 intensity all the time now having a game always at 100 intensity might not sound bad but it actually makes the game pretty stale to both play and watch there's a kind of yin and yang effect where if the game is at 100 all the time there's nothing special about any of it and nothing really stands out you could almost describe the game as anticlimactic in a fighting game you lower your opponent's hp so the danger increases as the game goes on in a moba farming and getting kills in the early game will give you a tangible advantage which can be snowballed into taking objectives and winning the game in both of these examples a win is the result of events that happened before it however what happens at the end of a tetris round will usually be the only thing that's relevant to the win and pretty much everything that happened before it doesn't matter this argument has a lot in common with down stacking as op so it's not huge early on but it becomes more relevant as the skill level increases and people are better at down stacking anyways this one's an easy s tier for me as it makes competitive versus tetris terrible to watch and it also makes it pretty stale to play relative to other deeper games for our last one this is in my opinion the best argument against the current design of modern vs tetris as the final pick on our list in s tier we have action and reaction in pretty much any competitive pvp game there's a lot of actions that you'll take that will elicit a response from your opponent for example if i were to throw a projectile and smash my opponent will probably be forced to either jump shield or get hit in this case there's an action and a reaction however in tetris the garbage is extremely unintrusive it never really requires you to change your plan since you usually just expect to be coming anyways i'd even go as far as to say that you don't really react to garbage but it's more like an obstacle to act upon for an example of an abstract versus puzzle game having interactive gameplay let's look at puyo puyo there's three factors that make the chaining gameplay have actions and reactions that is it takes time to build chains it takes time to resolve a chain and garbage comes from the top and covers your puyos for these reasons players will develop a main chain but they'll also try and take shots of their opponent through smaller chains that resolve quickly what both players do relies heavily on what their opponent is doing if one of these can connect they'll cover their opponent's board with garbage allowing them to resolve their main chain safely and claim the win compare that with tetris where you only gain a marginal advantage by acknowledging your opponent's existence the point being since there's proper risk and reward attached to things and since you can disrupt your opponent directly they've created interaction even with things like timing it really doesn't feel like interaction when you time it usually just boils down to waiting for your opponent to send to cancel or waiting for them to send to accept so yeah i believe that it's impossible for versus tetris to work competitively in its current form with there being very little interaction between the players in the end it makes the game have a lot less depth than you'd ever imagine now this isn't to say that tetris garbage needs to be disruptive but more like there should be some kind of way to disrupt your opponent or cause them to reconsider their moves in versus even if you see your opponent making a horrible mistake such as a huge mis-drop it's not like your plan really changes since you still need to try and send more garbage for these reasons i'll be putting action and reaction in the s-tier finishing off our list anyways thanks for watching if you want to discuss the arguments and rankings leave a comment or join my discord server link in the description also come watch my streams over at twitch.tv garbo can underscore i stream every day at 7pm pst and you can ask me all kinds of tetris questions there if you like special thanks for this video goes out to my patreon supporters i'm sorry julia and rutabaga if you want to support these videos and other tetris projects consider supporting me there they actually picked this video topic too and i'll be putting out another poll on the next video in a few days after the upload of this one so yeah that's it for me thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Garbo

Views: 89,194

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Id: GCQFauk80gE

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021