CANCELLED: NJ DDR X3 Division Tournament? (currently an IDEA)

Hello everyone! This is just an idea at the moment (if we get enough interest, then I can host the tournament). This will be a division-based tournament all players can enjoy fierce competition from similarly-skilled players. This will be hosted (currently, subject to change) at the Rack N' Roll Arcade in Passaic County in New Jersey (they have a DDR X3 machine). There will be no prizes for any division (yet, but I currently lack the funds to do this), so this will all be for fun.

Here are the current divisions I have at the moment (all will be on Versus play in PRO mode):

New Arrivals: Players that have played for less than a year are available to enter this division. Songs will be a mix of (there will be a vote to remove this difficulty) , , and as well as charts with a difficulty of 11 (there will be a vote to determine the difficulty limit) or less. All songs will be randomly selected moment before this division plays. This will be a good proving ground to help new players improve their skill in order to compete with the higher divisions. Using "Little", turning off Freeze Arrows, turning jumps off, difficulty reduction, or any other prohibited option will be disqualifying.

RAAAAAANDOM DAAAAAAANCING!: This division will be open to all competitors. Before every song, options will be randomly selected for both players. You might end up with x3 scroll speed, Flat, Hidden, and no screen filter! Songs will also be completely randomly selected. Shuffle will be a required option for this, so that will be the only option that will not be changed. All songs in this division will only be songs. Unplayable modifiers such as Stealth, X5 and X8 options will not be present. There will also be an "option" as to whether a player can use the bar or not which will be randomly determined. You'll have to be ready for anything! Using any option that is not selected for you will be disqualifying.

New Arrivals (No Bar): Tired of going against people using the bar and you want some equal footing? This will be the exact same thing as the New Arrivals division except any use of the bar will be disqualifying. Using "Little", turning off Freeze Arrows, turning jumps off, difficulty reduction, or any other prohibited option will be disqualifying.

The Classics (No Bar): Want to relive some of the older memories that games like DDR Extreme and other games gave you? This will be a division solely focusing on these classics! Songs like The Legend of Max, MAXIMIZER, and other songs of that era will be selected. Any song prior to DDR SuperNova 2(?) will be selected. Because this is a no-bar division and all songs will be on and , this will be for experts only! Using "Little", turning off Freeze Arrows, turning jumps off, difficulty reduction, or any other prohibited option will be disqualifying. All players will be welcome to join this division.

Open Division: This is where the gloves come off. Completely random songs on and will keep the best players on their toes. You may select any options you please for this, however using "Little", turning off Freeze Arrows, turning jumps off, difficulty reduction, or any other prohibited option said beforehand will be disqualifying. All players are welcome to this division.

Versatility Division (No Bar): This will be the same as the Open Division, however "Shuffle" must be used. Using "Little", turning off Freeze Arrows, turning jumps off, difficulty reduction, or any other prohibited option will be disqualifying. Use of the bar will be disqualifying as well. All players are welcome to this division.

Champions' Division: This is where the best DDR players will face each other off in a gruelling 9 song set each (each broken up into 3 sets of 3 songs, but you will be playing continuously). Songs will be extremely difficult (and they will remain unknown until they arrive for the Tournament) and I will be creating the setlist for each group of participants. To qualify for this division, a player must be playing this game for 3-5 years or more and they must have won at least one Division Tournament. Songs will only consist of and songs with a difficulty of 15 or above.

The Low Scoring Division: Yep. You heard that right. Remember Mission 96 from DDR Extreme (PS2)? It's that all over again. The players with the most Goods will be the winners of this division! Songs will be only, however there will be no difficulty cap (to be debated). Freeze arrows will be turned OFF for this (turning them on will DQ you) division. Using "Little", turning jumps off, difficulty reduction, or any other prohibited option will be disqualifying. All players are welcome to this division.

SUBJECT TO BEING SCRAPPED Team Endurance Division: Oh my god. We're going to have to use a full day in order to get this event done! Teams of 3 dancers each will compete in an 8-10 hour near-nonstop set of randomly-selected songs. All songs will be on and you may change out your current dancer at the end of every 6 songs. The first team to completely fail a song (i.e. their health gauge hits zero) loses. If both teams somehow make it to the end, scores will be calculated and the highest score wins! Using "Little", turning off Freeze Arrows, turning jumps off, difficulty reduction, or any other prohibited option will be disqualifying.

Each division tournament will act as a single-elimination tournament.

http://challonge.com/tournaments/bracket_generator?ref=Jq54HMPORc

For example, if we get a 14 player tournament like this (with player 1 as the best seed and player 14 as the worst seed), the top 2 seeds will get a buy-in into the second round. Then all of the other seeds will fight it out like so:

For all divisions except the Low Scoring Division: The highest combined score of the three song set (or 9 song in case of the Champions' Division) will advance to the next round (regardless of failing any song). If a player gets disqualified from a rule break, then they will be immediately eliminated from the tournament. If both players get disqualified because of a rule break, then there will be a rematch to see who goes on. If both players are disqualified from the rematch, then they will both be eliminated and a reshuffle of the tournament bracket will be required, and the highest one or two seeds will advance to the next round. Last man standing wins!

For the Low Scoring Division: Highest amount of Goods wins. If a player gets disqualified from a rule break, then they will be immediately eliminated from the tournament. If both players get disqualified because of a rule break, then there will be a rematch to see who goes on. If both players are disqualified from the rematch, then they will both be eliminated and a reshuffle of the tournament bracket will be required, and the highest one or two seeds will advance to the next round. Last man standing wins!

There will be no seed numbers. The buy-ins will be determined by a luck of the draw as to who gets the buy-in.

Ignore this. This tournament has become a major screw-up because of a lack of logistic thinking and is now cancelled until further notice.

---

Luckily Im in New Jersey and is interested in being in the contest

This sounds pretty cool. The only issue I can think of:
-Random Dancing
-x3 Speed Mod
-MAX 300

...Aaand going no-bar on just about any 16+.

Otherwise, I would love to check this out. Unfortunately, I live on the other side of the continent, where DDR doesn't exist unless you go out of state.

For Random Dancing, I may just have a predefined set of songs that could be used for Random Dancing and have a difficulty limit of 15 or less for no-bar stuff.

---

I dunno how you plan to run all of those tourneys concurrently, much less on a machine in complete disrepair. Auditions are dumb and just make competitors feel alienated.

Also why the hell are we still perpetuating this bar/nobar debate instead of just letting people play how they want? Let it goooooooooooooooooooo

---

I don't think this is trying to continue the bar elitist debate. Playing with the bar is pretty different from playing without, and no one plays tournaments without the bar, so having a specific tournament for playing without the bar sounds like fun. I'd say it lets people play the way they want.

Last time I checked, the machine was fine, just a little quiet. The way the day would work is this:

There would be a schedule sent out for players as to when they are supposed to come. On the day of your division(s), you would show up and play your set of songs at your assigned time (so let's say the schedule was New Arrivals first, then Random Dancing, then Versatility and you were in the Versatility challenge, after the Random Dancing division completed their set of songs, you would play your set). Each match will go up one after the other in a random order (assigned by choosing cards from a small deck of cards) (this will be a multi-day thing). The team endurance event will run on completely separate days and there will be a different schedule assigned for them (they are EXTREMELY long).

The auditions would be used for determining seed numbers, but I could just run a lucky draw.


I have no intention of pursuing the bar/no bar debate, but I would like to give players that are not using the bar an even chance to play against similar competition.

Also, the Open division does exist for people who don't care if people use the bar or not... (probably will be the most popular division to enter)

---

forcing people to play a certain way does not in fact let people play the way they want

---

They can choose to either play in no-bar divisions or open divisions...

Anyway, I don't want to carry on the debate, can we please keep it towards just gathering interest at the moment?

---

This is too many divisions.

---

We can cut down the divisions that people don't sign up for.

Speaking of divisions...

Can I get a headcount of who would like to sign up for what division?

---

Im going for the Low Scoring Division

There seems to be a bit of confusion of what kind of a tournament this is...

As far as I can tell (Correct me if I'm wrong, the only rhythm game tournaments I've heard of are the KAC and UKSRT), most tournaments seem to be about scoring as well as possible on the hardest songs. But this isn't really a hardcore competitive tournament, if the existence of a beginner's division is any indication. It's one thing to only get good at the best character in a fighting game, but I honestly see more fun in mastering the joke characters that no one plays. With all the different ways to compete, there's a way to play for pretty much everyone. There's a big difference playing with the bar and without, and the random, low-scoring and endurance divisions are quite unique. I'd compare this less to a regular competitive tournament, and more to competitive Mario Party. (I've heard that those kinds of players exist...) The only thing forcing you to play a certain division is skill level, and even then that just matches you up with people of your skill level.


I'd say that there's a fair amount. Besides, I'm in speech and debate. We have twice as many divisions, and that's not counting the split between novice and open.

Would it be possible to livestream this event on Twitch or something? I'd love to watch this, but as I said earlier, I'm too far away and too busy to join anything. A Twitch livestream would be cool!

I will probably play in the New Arrivals No Bar and the Versatility Division (yes, you can sign up for more than one division!).


We would need someone on site filming the entire thing, so if someone was to bring in a camera and film it... then maybe... I could try but I'm not sure if I could do it.

Also... Should we get enough people for more than 3 or four divisions, each division (or group of divisions) will play on different days. I will NOT be available most days (except for Friday evenings and possibly Mondays, but Mondays are hard to take off for me, maybe Sundays), so I can get some "Event Moderators" who are responsible for taking photos of all the scores for each division and posting them here as well as making sure the day runs smoothly. They will be required to stay for the entire day until all divisions have played.


And this is EXACTLY what I was going at when I was creating this tournament. This is supposed to be a fun thing where everyone can play the way they want to play. It's not super competitive per-say (aside from the Champions' Division), but if people want it to be competitive, that's what the higher divisions are for...

---

You aren't even gonna be there most of the days wtf? I think you need to reevaluate how doable this thing really is.

The lack of any cash prize and date/schedule for that matter is super off putting and tells me this is in no shape planned with the arcade at all. It also quite frankly makes this hard to take seriously enough to attend (especially someone like me who would have to travel across the country and for quite a number of days for that matter.)

There's literally no mention of how pad arbitration will be handled or if even the pads will be worked on before/during the tourney if issues come up. If problems with how long tourneys go on for, can everyone who set aside a certain number of days off work just fuck off right there if something doesn't go smoothly? How are you possibly gonna enforce and check how long people have actually been playing? It would be so easy to just lie and say I've played for a year to sandbag and then oops I slaughter the whole bracket. It also implies that experience at this game is completely the same for every single person which is just laughable.

No qualifying of any sort to seed people (aside from making random pairings to go up and play a huge hassle and waste of time) is gonna make super unfair matches and possibly punish people who are legitimately better, along with possible rewarding shittier players because lul guess you got lucky with the buy in! And on THAT note let me get this straight you want to put a buy in for tourneys but have no sort of cash prizes in a pot with said buy in's?? Paying the arcade for using their time and space is one thing, but not having a cash prize at all just feels completely pointless even paying at all. Are these "event moderators" gonna be reimbursed at all for staying the entire day(s) essentially working for you, or do you honestly expect to get volunteers just out of the goodness of their heart? Do they even get to compete in said tourneys?

Playing on X3 is really dumb when frankly it would be a lot better off hosting it somewhere where a ddr a cab is instead (especially if you want a division with 15+ block rating charts, the number on X3 PALES in comparison to A). Hell even failing that 8otB has a more recent mix to use.

Literally no one wants to just dance for 8-10 hours nonstop. Not even ECFA/ECS goes anywhere near that long, and you're certainly gonna have a very hard time making it a team thing. A lot of these divisions have super lame gimmicks or even redundant ones (random dancing requires shuffle but so does versitility so like what's the point?) that will either wear out in interest fast or will basically have no interest to begin with.

Single elim is old and outdated, makes better players losing to a close upset not have any chance to redeem themselves in a loser's bracket. Having random for practically every song is super unfair and would make some matches have piss easy sets and others have super hard sets. Something like card draw would work wonders (hell even PickPickR would be a better system). Who gets to pick what side they wanna play on and how is that gonna get sorted out?

Seperating nobar/bar is just DUMB. Your analogy of comparing it to playing as joke characters makes no sense, it's more like playing the fighting game but playing with one hand instead of two, and it's still seriously baffling how you keep saying people can play how they wanna play despite that fact that your divisions literally LIMIT how someone can play, like what the fuck. There's a huge bias against using the bar in over half of these tourneys. This is not fun to players who have spent YEARS refining their technique to get good, it's spitting in their face for no real reason other than to make it out like nobar is the better way to play anyways (which is seriously is not, there is no objective best way to play this game).


Making it a rematch instead of just taking the failing scores and using that instead is a super big waste of time, makes your life as a tourney organizer complete hell having to reshuffle all the seeds constantly, and in the case of low scoring (something that flat out requires you to have as little lifebar as possible since you certainly aren't aiming for good judgement that give a lot of life) makes a fail super punishing for no real reason.

I get you're trying to make a gimmick tourney here but you need to have reasonable rules here and some sort of plan at the start dude. This just sounds thought out in under an hour without really thinking about what is actually implied here with everything. Maybe back in 2004 this would be entertaining, but in the year 2017 where the arcade scene is practically dead and people have lives to worry about this just sounds completely far fetched in every sense. People need a lot more incentive than "it'll be fun!" :/

---

old hat, but i can't get over that there's separation between bar and no bar
did i get transported back to 2003 when this was an issue or something? why does it matter, why does it need to be separated?
did you guys know that using the speed mod is cheating?
and really, so is using any modifications

---

Oh god... this is going to be a nightmare to respond to... but seriously, I'm thankful that you see how many holes I have to plug up in order to make this a success.

I will be able to clear out my schedule in about a month or two (extremely busy at the moment). I should be able to run the tournament with the cleared schedule in (again) a month or two.


Well, to handle the cash prize issue, we could have an entry fee of anywhere between $10 to $15, spread out the prize money across all of the divisions equally, and then the tournament winners will take their share of the money.

With the arcade itself, I will attempt to talk to them as soon as possible about hosting this tournament (bear in mind that this is just an idea at the moment that I thought of) and I will get back to you on that as soon as possible.

I'm not sure how we would run the New Arrival division (qualification-wise) aside from going through profile posts and other identity checks to see how long they've been playing. Cash prizes could not exist in that division to ensure that people have no motivation to cheat.


See above for cash prizes. I will attempt to handle all expenses for the arcade. (big emphasis on "attempt")

For determining seed numbers, how would we run qualifiers for each tournament? Audition videos were one thing that you spoke out against (which is a damn good idea imo), so what would be your idea for a qualifier? If you have any ideas, PLEASE let me know! I need input on this!

For the event moderators (should my schedule go to shit), I haven't thought about that at the moment. I should be able to run it. If not, then I probably won't be able to pay them.


From what I've seen, it's the only arcade within reasonable distance for me (approximately 20-30 mins from where I live in NJ). If you find another arcade around the same place, then PLEASE tell me!


Should there be no interest in a division, it will just simply be cut. Players can suggest new divisions to be added or old ones to be removed. For the team endurance division, I may simply cut it because it may be too expensive to run.


The random songs thing is based on my idea that it would force players to think on their feet and it would show player skill rather than song memorization. Even though scores would be lower, it would again show player skill above song memorization. That's the theory, anyhow.


Again, as I said before...

I have absolutely no intent to divide the community based on the way that they play or continue the bar/no bar debate. (even though it does sound like I am with the different divisions)

All I want to do is to allow players to play against players of similar skill levels and similar play styles. And that's the main point of the tournament. However, should there be enough complaints to lift the restrictions, I shall and I will all no-bar gameplay into a single division (maybe, it may not exist).


Well, this also comes to the risk vs. reward thing that I'm trying to get at here. If someone is about to die, then they would need to get some greats in order to stay alive and not lose their spot in the tournament. You can skirt around having 5% health and keeping getting goods, but what's the chance of you getting a miss and dying? The opposite is true too. If you keep your health bar full with a couple of greats, your opponent could be scoring a little lower than you and beat you in terms of points.


I hope that this gives a bit more insight into my current planning at the moment. I need help with planning this. I don't mean monetarily, but I do mean logistical planning. This is my first tournament I am putting together and I haven't exactly learned all the intricacies that are involved with it.

---

Qualifiers should happen at the event? Why the hell would you think an "audition" would be better?

Oh and losing lifebar being an instant elimination is bullshit and I would be offended to see someone charge money to take part in something with that as an actual rule.

---

Well, auditions give me more time to figure out seed numbers... while for the Low Scoring division, wouldn't it be basically pointless to not have the run out of health elimination rule? You could basically just stand on the pad and not do anything and still win...

---

Make it a Good Attack, problem solved.

---