Blame the Tetris Guideline. In the mid 2000s, they changed the rotation system, and under the new system, any player of intermediate skill can just play forever. Once you know the tricks to keeping a piece in play and building the stack in a way that you can always get a piece where you want it, you can’t lose until you voluntarily lose. That was, needless to say, a bit broken for leaderboard purposes. So as a bandaid solution to that, the main mode was changed from endless to 150 lines.
The difficulty curve in Tetris has a few different possible knobs to adjust as the levels go up, generally involving how much of a delay you have on certain events. The most obvious is gravity, which is how many frames it takes to fall one space (or, to ramp that up further, how many spaces it falls per frame), but the relevant one here is lock delay. This is the amount of time between the piece landing and the player losing control over the piece. Low lock delay like you have on NES tends to make small mistakes a lot more punishing. High lock delay lets you reposition a piece shortly after it falls. Modern Tetris has a small but highly controversial change to the lock delay logic: rotating a piece resets the timer. This means you can spam the rotate button to think about where to place a piece indefinitely, a technique called infinite spin. Presumably this was done with timed and battle modes in mind, where this isn’t really an advantage because it’s always better to play quickly, but in endless it has no meaningful cost. So leaderboards started to get pretty grotesque, with top scoring games dragging on for dozens of hours. Something had to be done about it, and shifting focus entirely to timed and line limited modes was the choice they made for better or worse.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you’re submitting before posting to see if it’s already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don’t share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don’t want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
Blame the Tetris Guideline. In the mid 2000s, they changed the rotation system, and under the new system, any player of intermediate skill can just play forever. Once you know the tricks to keeping a piece in play and building the stack in a way that you can always get a piece where you want it, you can’t lose until you voluntarily lose. That was, needless to say, a bit broken for leaderboard purposes. So as a bandaid solution to that, the main mode was changed from endless to 150 lines.
Sounds interesting, can you elaborate?
The difficulty curve in Tetris has a few different possible knobs to adjust as the levels go up, generally involving how much of a delay you have on certain events. The most obvious is gravity, which is how many frames it takes to fall one space (or, to ramp that up further, how many spaces it falls per frame), but the relevant one here is lock delay. This is the amount of time between the piece landing and the player losing control over the piece. Low lock delay like you have on NES tends to make small mistakes a lot more punishing. High lock delay lets you reposition a piece shortly after it falls. Modern Tetris has a small but highly controversial change to the lock delay logic: rotating a piece resets the timer. This means you can spam the rotate button to think about where to place a piece indefinitely, a technique called infinite spin. Presumably this was done with timed and battle modes in mind, where this isn’t really an advantage because it’s always better to play quickly, but in endless it has no meaningful cost. So leaderboards started to get pretty grotesque, with top scoring games dragging on for dozens of hours. Something had to be done about it, and shifting focus entirely to timed and line limited modes was the choice they made for better or worse.