Is nes tetris flawed?

[Admin]

Nes tetris has a system where your level will determine your score and the speed of the game

Level   Frames per Gridcell
00      48
01      43
02      38
03      33
04      28
05      23
06      18
07      13
08      8
09      6
10–12   5
13–15   4
16–18   3
19–28   2
29+     1

The scoring increases linearly with your level:

Level  single  double   triple   tetris
0      40      100      300      1200
1      80      200      600      2400
2      120     300      900      3600

9      400     1000     3000     12000

n      40(n+1) 100(n+1) 300(n+1) 1200(n+1)

 

[Admin]

From pace to indurance
Having a good pace used to be very important in tetris since player couldn't survive long at level 29+ (if they could score at all).

Lately however with "rolling" players can now keep playing long at level 29+ racking up line-clears. Since the difficulty doesn't increase past level 29 while the scoring does the most important thing is survival. You are better off only clearing singles and lasting to level 100 than doing only tetrises and topping out at level 29.

Blue: level 18
Purple: level 19 to 28
red: level 29 to 237

As we being able to survive long past level 28 gives you a massive advantage due to the the linear increase of points awarded when you level up while the difficulty remain static.

The game does have a second killscreen at level 237 making scoring past that difficult to impossible.

Score = efficiency*(((starting level)+1)²+((final level)-(starting level))*((final level)+(starting level)+1)/2)

 

[Admin]

What should be done?
You could argue that the scoring-system is fine, it just means that players need to improve their level 29+ survival and as they are able to go deeper pace will become increasingly important (with the pace latter in the game being much more important).

Having later levels be more important might actually be good in terms of making it exciting since then it will be easy for the player behind to catch up.

If the goal is just to change the scoring that might be relatively easy to change via some mod. For example you might want to stop increasing the points per level at level 29.

One alternative is to increase the difficulty in surviving as levels increase, it's unclear if there is any good way to do that though. One option is adding significant garbage to clear at some levels such as 50,80,100,115,125,134,142,149,155,160,165,,,).

 

[Admin]

What about making a 120hz version of tetris?
Technically this can already be done simply by increasing the speed in which the game is run(via emulator). That would make it very difficult to survive past level 29 even with rolling, it would also make DAS more viable since the DAS-speed would be twice as fast.

A maybe better option is to simply make a new version similar to existing nes-tetris clones out there.

https://github.com/Elanif/NESTRIS

 

[Admin]

What about changing the levels in which you level-up to level 29?
That would increase the importance of skills at level 19 speeds and reduce the importance of post 28 speed.

For example we might want to delay the killscreen by 20 levels:

 

[Admin]

The current state of competitive tetris
So far players still usually score most of their points before level 29, that's because no player has particularly great survival at the level 29 speed. Typically they will top out after some missdrop, sometimes they will end up in a bad position due to bad RNG and not be able to survive because of that.

This creates a lot of opportunity for roller, the game has a lot of untapped potential in terms of scoring.

 

[Admin]

The tetris effect connected chasedown timer
Tetris effect connected has a mode similar to nes tetris where the other player has 2 minutes to chase down the score if a player tops out. This means that you want to have a better pace than your opponents. There is one big difference between this "pace" and the pace sometimes talked about in nes tetris since with the timer it's about your score relative to the time and not relative to the number of lines cleared.

So while it does incentivize players to do tetrises more than nes tetris (where you can play until level 237) it rewards players even more for clearing lines quickly since the scoring is proportional to the level+1 and there isn't any disadvantage to playing at a higher level once you have reached level 29. That means that high-level player will benefit from playing high up at the initial level 18 and long-term that will end up being more valuable than the maximizing the number of tetrises scored.

At level 29 pieces drop 1 row per frame, at 60hz that's 4 pieces per second if there is an average 5 filled rows below where the piece is placed which is 1.6 lines per second if we ignore the line-clear animation, etc meaning you could score 192 lines past your opponent topping out

Using this video 7.5 until crash i got 44.8 lines per minute or 0.747 lines per second meaning you could score around 90 lines before your opponent tops out.

It would probably be better to not start the timer until level 30 if that level isn't reached yet and also cap the level to 30 to 40 to prevent score/(tetris, triple, double, single) to keep increasing as players clear more lines.