Rules, Scoring, Scheduling, Faq


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skeezix

Internal Development
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Retro. Offline. Tournament.

Welcome! And remember, the first rule of ROT is not to talk about ROT.. but to DOMINATE ROT!

Basics:

The Goal is to play the current game(s), and submit your score at the end of the 'game period'. Repeat for each period. At the end of the 'season', the leaderboard is immortalized, and the bragging assured!

The pacing will be relaxed enough that we hope everyone can deal with it -- even those of us with real jobs, kids, and coding in the spare time :) Games should be selected that can be played in short bursts, or played a few times ... we will steer clear of games that require 10 hours to get anywhere, of it we do have those games, the scoring will be defined in terms of the first 30-60 mins of gameplay! No stress!

A ROT game-period lasts two weeks.
In each game-period there will be one or more games you may pick from to play for league points. (You can play whatever the hell you want, but only 1 or 2 games will be scorable each game-period :)
A season is 6 game-periods long (ie: 3 months or one 'quarter year'.)
During the season, a running Leaderboard Post will be maintained, and finalized at the end of the season, to be linked forever. Glory forever in the eyes of your fellow forumites!

Who:

Generally this is GP32x and OPBoards forumites, but we are by no means exclusive! If you have friends in RL or in other forums, invite them to sign up and play! More blood is good! (I'm thinking GP32Spain, DCemu, etc here. Language may be an issue with GP32Spain, but we can try! Someone pass the word around!)

Settings / Savestates / etc:
- For score submission, you should be playing the game on Normal (not Easy, not Hard); this might be tricky if you want to play Easy for practice and it gives you a giant high score.. do a reset/reload before going back to Normal :)
- It goes without saying, don't be turning on cheat-modes or 'hax' :)
- Save-states is a tough one; obviously you're playing in your spare time, so if you need ot hit a savestate to catch the bus, go ahead. But don't use save-states to cheat -- if you snapshot every 30s, it sure makes life easier, so don't do that. Use savestates for life, not for cheat.
- No continues

Summary; standard difficulty, no continues, no cheats, no save states for your submitting score; for practice play, go ahead. In-game saves depends on the game realy, so the rules are defined on a per-round basis during the voting process as defined by the GameKeeper.

Scoring:

Scoring comes in at least 3 flavors, depending on the game being played and the mood of the players.

Your worst league score for any given season is discarded when finalizing the leaderboard, so you can just suck one game-period, or be away for a few weeks, without worry.
Further, if you are just average at a game, you'll do fine.

So, there are 6 game submissions per season, and your best 5 will be counted. If the best score for a game submission is 100, then theres approximately 500 points over a season, despite being 6 submissions. Got it?

1) High score - fair/sedated
2) High score - vicious/cut-throat!
3) Achievement based (achievements depending on the game or genre)

Example:
For both high-score systems the plan is to get all submitted scores, and list them in order, and break them into 5 blocks of league points.

High Score Scoring:

League Point blocks are: 100 points, 80 points, 60 points, 40 points, 20 points (and 0 for no show.) If you submit a score, you get 20-100 league points.
Consider - Anne submits 1000 score, Bob submits 900, Chip submits 800, Doogie 700, EvilDragon 600, and Finnigan 500. (6 submited scores. We hope for many more, but the illustration stands.)

For 'fair' scoring, we see that there are 6 submissions, and we have 5 blocks. We fill from the top, to make it more exciting. This means we have 2 in top block, and 1 in each of the other blocks, in order .. or specifically, an even number of people in each block, top-heavy. If 30 submit and 5 blocks, thats 6 people in each block
100 points - Anne and Bob
80 points - Chip
60 points - Doogie
40 points - EvilDragon
20 points - Finnigan.
0 For anhyone who did not submit that game-period.

For 'vicious' scoring, instead of being an equal 'more or less' number of people in each block, you have a pyramid. Only one can be top, only two can be second, and so on. This drives most submissions to be at the bottom. (We may need to refine this a little, perhaps allow some number at the top and widen out from there; if you get 30 submissions, maybe 3 can be top, 4 can be #2, 5 can be #3, that sort of thing. We'll have to play it by ear, up to the current league admin.)

For Achievement Scoring:

This is appropriate for RPGs, Wargames, or other games without an easy 'scoring' mechanism. (Consider Civilization or Eye of the Beholder ..) We do want some competition and to declare 'winners'. For these guys, during the discussion period before the gamne goes live into competition, the players and league admin discuss appropriate achievements, such as 'conquer 3 cities gets 10 league points' or 'beat the 3rd floor boss gets you 10 points, and the 5th floor boss gets an additional 10 league points', that sort of thing. Achievements can afford rewarding multiple play styles 'you complete the game with no armor or magic used, +10 bonus points!' and so rock, but require research to define. We'll have to see how it goes.

A note on Honor:

This is an honor system; at least for this season we are not depending on screenshots, camera pics, savestates, videos, or other trickery to prove your score. We are hoping people will play a shmup, and post track and post their high scores, for instance. The prizes are bragging rights, so hopefulyl no one is cheating here. (If we do end up with real prizes someday, we may have to clamp down, but thats no fun. We're all a bunch of retro nerds here, we can play nice right? :) If you are caught cheating, we reserve the right to post you forever on the Post of Shame!

Scoring counting:

The scores will be tallied by the league admin or score keeper or whatever on the first day (or some day) in the new round to reflect the now concluded round. This means you can submit to the last minute and not worry.

And if you want to edit your post, please do :) Keep one submission reply for yourself and edit it until the end of round, but feel fre to post discussion/trash talk as much as you like.

Also note -- you can submit scores for both games if you like, but clarify in your post which _ONE_ is for league submission. You can use the other to compare with folks or whatever, but ot keep score tally simple, lets just (for now anyway) have one official league submission per round. We'll see how it goes.

On multi-games: The two games at play 'simultaneously' are scored separately; theres no real sensible way to merge scoring across games (especially for the size of the league we're talking about.) So each game is to be scored separately, and hopefully we have multiple submissions for each game. In the event of 30 people submitting for game1 and 3 people submitting for game2, the Scorekeep for game2 will opt to score top heavy (100/80/60 say) or spread out (100/60/20 say). But in general, you might have the case where 30 submit to one game and 5 submit to the other ... but it should be rare, should not really impact things too much, and perhaps does provide strategy in which game you choose.

Schedule:


There is a sliding schedule; while you are playing games in the current game-period, the games for the next period are being nominated, voted on, the scoring system defined.
During Game X, you are discussing scoring for Game Y (the next game period), and nominating/voting for Game Z (the game-period after the next one.)

We will aim for 'first half of month' and 'last half of month' for rounds, to keep it easier to follow.

Example:

While Season 1 Game 1 is being played (for 2 weeks),
S1 G1 Week 1: Play S1 G1 of course, discuss scoring for the selected game S1 G2 (a week from now), and also nominating games for S1 G3 (a couple weeks from now.)
S1 G1 Week 2: Play S1 G1 still, finalizing the scoring for upcoming S1 G2 (in a few days), and vote on the game for S1 G3 (in 2 weeks) based on the nominationss from previous week.

So essentially you're always playing the current competition games, while voting and discussing the upcoming games.

It would be nice to have a 2 part cycle instead of 3, but it seems too tight .. we want 2 weeks to play a game; during that time, to do nominate, vote, and define scoring for the next pair of weeks might be a tall order. People have lives, you can't demand all the nomination and voting be done 'in the next 3 days' type thing, so we figure to allow nomination for a week, vote for a week, then lots of time to discuss before that game goes live.

The current schedule will be posted in the Season Status posting.

Platforms:

This is the retro offline tournament.

Retro -- generally old games, as new as PSX since many devices (and desktops) can play PSX games. However, most people do not have wide PSX collections, so not too many games shall be pickable from that one..
Offline -- we're not doing Quake here, even though its retro and awesome. We're trying to be handheld centric (though if you have desktop buddies, sure, bring 'em in!) Quake is hard to do across platforms fairly. So just play Quake with everyone all the time, but our scorable games will be offline single player games.
Tournament -- we're here to compete and brag!

Platforms for games -- as noted, we're centering around the golden era of the 80s and early 90s.
Arcade -- a natural fit, and MAME4ALL is ported pretty much everywhere!
PSX -- maybe a game here or there, but not too many, since few have wide collections; advantage .. many of these games are still available for purchase, but hard to squeeze onto handhelds unless you have a PSP or Pandora.
SNES -- for sure, this is in, and probably the most popular platform we'll pick from
Genesis/Megadrive -- also a top contender and popular!
TurboGrafix/PCEngine -- I imagine quite a few games from here as well; smaller library, but very high quality, especialyl for shmups.. and we do love our shmup action!
C64 / Vic20 -- sure, why not, the occasional classic?
Amiga / Atari ST -- possibly harder for our console brothers to grok, but some truly great classics; lets have some of this as well .. I mean, how can you not love Time Bandirs or Dungeon Master?
PC (DosBox) -- also harder for people to set up, and tough on performance .. coudl rule out Dingux, PSP, and other devides quickly, but some games should be on our list.. we must be mindful.

Games should be selected for fun, that take short bursts of time and no time commitment; skill should be rewarded, not having 30 hours to invest! ie: an arcade game is a good example -- you might just play 3 times for 20 mins and record a respectible score; if you play for 3 hours, you probably get a better score, but in that first 20 minutes you probably do okay.

Platforms to Play On -- This is central to the GP32x and OpenPandora forums, so let us choose platforms and games that are generally playable across Pandora, Caanoo, Wiz, GP2x. Let us try to include modded PSP and Dingux if we can, so that we have the widest audience! If you must resort to firing up a game on your desktop with a USB gamepad -- thats okay too, we're here to kick ass, not be rulemongers!Heck, play Mame4All on your Dreamcast, retro for retro! Play on your arcade cabinets if you have the real thing, thats only fair, right?
 
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