Rejoice comrades! Chairman Nintendo is here to bring true equality to gamers in the glorious players paradise!
My brother-in-law Nathan is an avid player of Tetris Party on the Nintendo Wii, every chance he gets he positions himself on the couch, tosses a pillow under his feet on the ottoman and fires the game up for a bit of online world play. He is a strong player with an average score of between 6000 and 7000 points. I say “average” because this is the realm in which his score fluctuates.
Accusations that Nintendo likes arbitrary equalization of the scoring system and slanted game mechanics is nothing new. Penny Arcade has broached the subject and I have experienced some of the same issues present in Mario Party.
Tetris Party’s online component randomly pits you against players in a head-to-head challenge where clearing blocks or combinations will reward the opponent with a corresponding number of blocks under their workable blocks.
The major issue is the sliding scale by which Nintendo rewards and more importantly, punishes players for a loss.
The scale functions as such: As a new player you receive points for each victory, if you lose then a certain number are subtracted from your overall score. New players (those with lower scores) will receive larger amounts of points for each victory and a small portion subtracted. As you progress up the ladder the scale tips from rewarding victory to punishing failure. The amount of points earned per victory diminishes and the points subtracted increase exponentially.
I watched as my brother-in-law approached the 7000 point mark, a single win granted him 15 points towards his score, but the corresponding loss that followed saw 65 points taken away. If you lose to a player of lower ranking, their victory is given a much higher value than yours while your loss hits your points to a much greater extent. The scales problem is the tipping point, if you are a few hundred points higher than the shift point, your punishment becomes exponentially greater automatically.
Nathan waged a series of battles with the same player. They were pretty much on an equal footing, both winning and loosing an equal number of matches. By the end of their run they both had lost nearly 1000 points. They were essentially, BOTH loosing even though they were engaging in an equal exchange of blows. Eventually they both quit out of the matches because neither wanted to be punished.
What game translates four losses as twenty-fourth place?
The games does not provide players with the same pieces but generates random shapes, it is entirely possible to lose by a string of pieces that leave you with limited options. This “random” element throws a wrench in to the game’s overall mechanics. I’ve seen players lose simple because they were given pieces with no good corresponding place to drop them while your opponent blitzes you with combos.
One might say” thats up the skill of the player to determine, its a puzzle”, if this is your view then I’m sorry to say you either aren’t a player or you haven’t examined the dynamic well enough.
A simple crunch of the numbers outlines the flaw. A single loss must be countermanded by four or even five victories as you reach a higher level. That single loss punishes the player while those below your level are given more points and less punishment to bring them up to a higher level faster. While it is true that you need to win a proportionally larger number of games to attain a score, the balance favors lesser players and assaults ranking ones. The ratios are be designed to keep everyone within a specific score range.
In later stages, four losses need to be offset with as many as twenty-six victories, and this will only bring you back to your previous score. Whats worse, how you attain victory does not seem to be a factor, are you given extra points for beating players in a shorter period of time? Perhaps for stringing combinations or performing certain moves in succession? Not at all.
Good players need to be proportionally rewarded, not exponentially punished for their success. Being forced to win constantly to maintain your basic standing is not amusing or frankly, fair. This is little better than some strange form of socialism where you are unable to adequately gauge the rank and quality of a player unless they ace the game and maintain a near perfect record of victories. how is this different than games like Gran Turismo where you need to hit the perfect button combination every time within a fraction of a second to achieve a basic goal? Here the dynamic is skewed further because of the introduction of the random elements.
There are always players who can do this, but the disparity means that equal rank players will not be readily apparent because one has to ask, how many victories does this player have? The system dictates those with more victories are equalized and totaled in with players that have more losses than they do.
This reduces the overall quality of the title experience. If you don’t care about anything but dropping blocks, thats fine, go play Bejewled or Bubble Breaker. Once you introduce a scoring system your game mechanic has to function within that set of parameters in order to make sense of it all. If you don’t then frankly you are proving to me that you don’t really care all that much about your product or engaging the minds of people who play with some form of strategy and goals. This can be the difference between a great game and one that feels mediocre and sloppy.
Japanese games are notorious for punishing players instead of rewarding them, but Nintendo seems to have more than a few games designed where everyone is intentionally kept equal and unless they overcome the game itself, are not allowed to shine or stand-out. This is the worst kind of “everyone is special” crap that ruins games for those with anything more than a casual interest in them. Nobody likes to be kicked in the beanbag, but Nintendo’s only justification for this seems to be that you deserve it because you dared to display you are more talented than the other players.
Good game design does not force artificial punishment on players by exerting a “fairness doctrine”. Games are meant to be unfair but it has to prove this inequality by allowing people to succeed by allowing their talents to challenge each other without standing in their way.