[isotypic]

> In guideline 1v1 a lot of very high level games are decided by garbage RNG which I think is even less interesting than determining who is 0.1pps faster.

I have played a lot of (moderately high level) 1v1 tetris and I would have to disagree. In fact I often felt that the reverse is true - if I felt I died to garbage hole RNG, really that meant I was getting out pressured and would have lost eventually anyways. And while my playstyle was more aggressive, try to out speed opponent, I lost my fair share of games to people playing (much) slower but just incredibly efficient.

I agree there is an overall disappointing amount of interaction between players, though. Watching your opponents board and adjusting to it is hard and takes a while to build the skill to do. And a lot of the times you can just get away with it by playing faster and out pressuring and ignoring the other player.

[jchw]

> I have played a lot of (moderately high level) 1v1 tetris and I would have to disagree. In fact I often felt that the reverse is true - if I felt I died to garbage hole RNG, really that meant I was getting out pressured and would have lost eventually anyways.

To be honest, I was never good enough for it to be a big issue, but it does seem apparent to me that it is an issue for the highest level players. I could be wrong, of course, but assuming I'm not, I think this brings up an interesting question: if it's something that you have to be so good at the game to have impact you meaningfully, does it really matter for 99.9% of players including myself who will certainly never get there? I guess the answer is probably not, but it does have a psychological impact of sorts. It definitely can make tournament outcomes feel less interesting.

So really random garbage just irks me because it seems like an unnecessary addition of RNG into an otherwise skilled game. I don't think random garbage is more fun than deterministic garbage schemes. I would suppose some people disagree.

The lack of serious interaction and a deep meta game, though... That's a bigger problem, yeah. I am not sure you can fix that while still producing something that you can really call "Tetris".

(And even when Nintendo called "Panel de Pon" "Tetris Attack" outside of Japan, I don't think it wound up having a terribly interesting interaction between players, either, despite being an entirely different game from the ground up! Still pretty fun though.)