【東方】 Yet Another Touhou Draft

[Komeiji Koishi]

I can do the tweaked version right now if you want me to. Otherwise, go ahead!

Yeah I'm not good with rules other than "Don't die, don't fail too bad," so please be a cool person and write up da rules?

[Scarlet]

'aight, here you go:

[spoiler=Tweaked ruleset]Rules:

1. This draft is for either 4 or 8 players. If 8 players join, each shot type will be available twice.
2. All the Windows games will be played, except for PoFV and the ones that aren't integers. As of now, that's eight games.
3. Only one character/team/shot/whatever may be drafted per game. Only teams will be picked in IN, but you can then use one of the characters of your team solo if you wish to.
4. No cheating. You can abuse glitches and safespots if that's your thing, though. (MarisaBroken in MoF, however, is banned because the Lv3 Laser glitch eats bosses for breakfast, eliminating basically all challenge in 1ccing.)

5. The Hitbox Patch for EoSD, as well as V-Sync-Patches to help with laggy controls are explicitely allowed.
6. Practice all you like, but all replays presented are to be recorded during the this draft, and in the correct order. No here's-one-I-prepared-earlier.
7. Default gameplay settings (where applicable) - that's 3 lives and 3 bombs in EoSD, PCB and IN.

8. Continues are not allowed. You can continue as often as you like when you practice, but your actual submission can't use them.

Procedure:

1. Snake-style drafting will be used to determine shot types used. Take your pick from the entire pool, but after choosing from one game you obviously can't choose another from the same game.

2. Once all players have picked their shot types, you'll need to choose in advance what difficulty you'd like to play each game on. You can choose any difficulty you want (regardless of what the other players choose), and you don't need to choose the same difficulty for each game. Choose wisely, however, as you can't go back and change your mind afterwards!
3. The games will be played in chronological order, with each player using what they drafted for each game. You can send in as many replays of the same game as you like, only the latest will be counted - however, once you've sent in a replay of the next game, no further improvements of the previous game will be accepted.

So, for instance, when you finish EoSD, you can send in improvements of EoSD as well as replays of PCB. Once you send in a replay of PCB, improvements to EoSD are no longer possible, but you can move on to IN (or improve PCB).

Of course there's the deadline, too. You have one week per round.
4. After attaining a satisfactory score, players will send the host a replay as evidence (preferably by linking to it via PM, although sending it as an attachment also works). At the end of each round, these replays will be released for everyone to watch and the scores and rankings will be declared. You can upload your replays here (although at this time, DDC does not seem to be supported. You can upload DDC replays here instead). Please don't watch others' replays before the end of each round if they upload them there.

Scoring:

1. The primary source of points is obtaining the highest score. The player who scores highest will get seven points, second place is four, third place is two. The lowest score doesn't get any points.
2. 1ccing the game gets you a flat three point bonus.
(For your convenience: this results in 10/7/5/3 points respectively when the game is 1cc'd, and 7/4/2/0 when it isn't.)

[Komeiji Koishi]

Okay thanks VAMPIRE CHAN

We'll have to work out that scoring table for 8 people though.

Anyway, let's start.

[metalsnowman3]

Are you making another thread for this?

[Scarlet]

We'll have to work out that scoring table for 8 people though.

Oh, right, I forgot about that. xD

How about this?

1st: 15

2nd: 12

3rd: 9

4th: 7

5th: 5

6th: 3

7th: 1

Last: 0

1cc: +5 bonus

(Total with 1cc: 20/17/14/12/10/8/6/5)

Uh, adjust as needed I guess. Depends on how much emphasis you want to put on Scoring vs. Survival.

[Komeiji Koishi]

Oh, right, I forgot about that. xD

How about this?

1st: 15

2nd: 12

3rd: 9

4th: 7

5th: 5

6th: 3

7th: 1

Last: 0

1cc: +5 bonus

(Total with 1cc: 20/17/14/12/10/8/6/5)

Uh, adjust as needed I guess. Depends on how much emphasis you want to put on Scoring vs. Survival.

Sounds good.

*publishes thread*

[Fera]

I want to hear Fera's explanation. :O

Entry for DDC: http://threplays.appspot.com/replay_files/th14_ud000s.rpy

Forfeiting this round to unranked because I like numbers that line up, so no clear bonus or anything. I'll probably sit under Proto's demon knives run anyway even if I did get this ranked. This entry is really just so I don't get a sad Koakuma. Koakuma best SDM, everyone go home.

Really, I just wanted a 62/62 score. Also ZM gets some points for actually submitting this time.

Also every score has a 2. Wee numbers.

Koakuma best SDM.

I'm totally not mad about not getting a 69 score no

[ZemZem]

Fera so bro.

[Komeiji Koishi]

Fera is the true example for all of us.

I wish more people would join my draft.

[Fera]

Fera so bro.

Fera is the true example for all of us.

I wish more people would join my draft.

no I'm terrible and don't you forget it

I can post disgusting lewds of your favorite 2hus! I'll do it!

also lol give it a day m8 don't be so quick, I expected the next draft to be like next week or something at least

oh well

jot me in for scathing commentary

[ZemZem]

The commentary is probably gonna be what I'm looking forward to most.

If it's hilarious, of course.

[Komeiji Koishi]

no I'm terrible and don't you forget it

I can post disgusting lewds of your favorite 2hus! I'll do it!

also lol give it a day m8 don't be so quick, I expected the next draft to be like next week or something at least

oh well

jot me in for scathing commentary

Ein says the same but he's a Pretty Cool Guy

I think this friendship was a great idea

Oh right

:<

I planned to

[Kriemhild]

The death to midboss!Seija looked a bit strange, as if you didn't see that bullet coming and/or forgot you had a bomb left. For some reason seeing both "Bonus failed..." and "Full Powerup!" on-screen at the same time made me giggle though. xD

Well, I actually thought I had that bullet covered, but my head was a mess and I have a hard time reading bullets from the bottom.

Were you getting nervous during Stage 6? That greed death looked completely out-of-place compared to the rest of your run.

Once I reached Stage 6 with eight lives, I figured I should just be as greedy as possible for the stage parts. The points I get will likely exceed the points from bomb loss (especially since each bomb lets me auto-collect twice), and I can accumulate life pieces to get extra lives too. Still, though, that death was an unexpected one that completely caught me off guard. But I don't regret my greediness in Stage 6 at all.

You should really go practice "You Grow Bigger" in Spell Practice! It's honestly not that hard once you figure out what you're supposed to do. Aside from the clumsy last spellcard, though, alright fight.

Yes, I want to capture it in Spell Practice at least once, since it's the only spell that I unlocked that I haven't captured yet.

Overall a very solid run! I feel that you've very notably improved compared to the beginning of this draft.

Yeah, I think I have improved. Especially considering that I 1cc'd SA and UFO for the first time during this draft!

Have you tried DDC on Hard yet? I feel that you should be able to pull off a 1cc at your skill level.

Is DDC Hard easier than other Hard Modes? But well, if I can rack up as much resources like this, I might give it a try.

About Kalas-chan,

Overall, it's good to see that you're making use of your resources! However, you're a bit too trigger-happy.

I can't comprehend how a trigger-happy player has trouble with MoF >_>

Some moments may have been frustrating for some of you, but I hope that even so, you all got something out of all of this.

Only thing that was really frustrating for me was my Hunting Ritual death. But I have enjoyed it a lot, and I do believe this draft helped me grow a lot as a Touhou player. Plus, I was able to help ZM and Kalas-chan grow, which is really nice.

CROWNING. MOMENT. OF. AWESOME.

YES I GOT POINTS ACTUALLY YES

Whoa, congratulations!

Really, I just wanted a 62/62 score. Also ZM gets some points for actually submitting this time.

Also every score has a 2. Wee numbers.

Koakuma best SDM.

I'm totally not mad about not getting a 69 score no

Wait, I still don't understand why you wanted a 62/62 score.

In any case, I was able to beat you in TWO rounds now, I'm more than satisfied with this.

Anyhow, Draft Analysis tiem:

[spoiler=Draft Analysis]First, the set up of the draft, which consists of drafted resources, the competition, and constraints.

The drafted resources were shot types, which was very appropriate and turned out very well. I personally feel that drafting shot types was fair for every single game, including Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism. For Mountain of Faith, though, I think it would've been a good idea to allow MarisaB with the Vsync patch fixing the glitched L3 Laser. I didn't propose this at the start of the draft since I was unaware of it back then, but now I think it should be allowed in future drafts.

As for the competition, well, Touhou games already have a clearly defined score system to compete for. Although scoring is a well established system, I personally don't have enough motivation to compete in score, since I don't find it to be a proper reflection of skill level. For example, Fera beat me in PCB when I think I played better (outside a few silly deaths), while I beat Fera in TD even though I was cheesing through a lot of boss parts. That being said, I can't really think of much better alternative competing factors besides scoring.

There's also the +3 point bonus for clearing. This is understandably quite high, but it also means the player needs to be very concerned about survival as well as scoring. The problem is that scoring and surviving are not independent of each other. Even in UFO, surviving longer gives you more opportunities to summon UFOs and point items and such. This would make it quite tough for players that have trouble with survival. For example, in any given round, the #2 player would get more than triple the points that the #3 player gets if the former 1cc'd and got a higher score while the latter didn't, even though the mere ability to 1cc already gave #2 a scoring advantage. This would seriously widen the gap between players that can clear, and players that can't.

This gap wouldn't have been as wide if Easy Modo was allowed, which brings me to the constraints. While it's true that Easy Modo makes it easy to achieve the +3, it generally gives the player a huge disadvantage in scoring. And if a player can't even get the +3 in Normal Mode, then they'd have a really hard time trying to compete with other players on Normal Mode. The only exception would be UFO, where Fera beat me without clearing. However, this was due to UFO's unique scoring system, and I don't think such a situation is realistic in other games.

My thoughts on the default settings constraint is similar to that of EASY MODO. All other constraints are very appropriate. That's all I have to say about the set-up.

As for my own performances:

- EoSD: First time playing Touhou in a long time, yeah, I played really badly now that I look back at it. It was fun though! I submitted my first 1cc, so I can't claim to have seriously tried in here. Not really happy with my submission.

- PCB: Despite the large number of silly deaths, I actually tried this multiple times until I was satisfied with my performance. Sadly, I was clueless about scoring, but I'm very happy with this run, even though it's rubbish in this draft.

- IN: HouraiElixirCapture/10. I don't really care much about anything else. It could've been much better, but IN is pretty tough, so yeah. The Hourai Elixir capture is the only thing I cared about in this run.

- MoF: Despite my failure at 1LCing, the fact that I even tried to 1LC should illustrate my confidence. Almost made it too, if it weren't for my stupid keyboard! While I can't say that I'm happy with spending 296 attempts on it, I don't consider any of that time to have been wasted, despite my failure to beat Fera.

- SA: First 1cc, and this probably wouldn't have been possible if I actually got the first pick on ReimuA. This is not only my greatest achievement in this draft, but the second most challenging achievement I've ever had in Touhou.

- UFO: First 1cc, though it wasn't too tough. Still, though, the draft is what motivated me to actually try hard enough in UFO. The run was also a nice representation of my typical confidence -> despair -> victory transitions.

- TD: I put a lot of effort into my approach to TD, because it was the only game where scoring doesn't require a whole lot of skill. While I'm sure I could've done a whole lot better, I find this to be really good for my first Youmu 1cc

- DDC: This is probably the game that I'm best at, from those included in the draft. It was also the only game where I truly liked the way scoring works and thoroughly enjoyed trying to get high scores. The gameplay is also fun as hell.

My top five greatest moments (not necessarily in my final submission):

5. Capturing Hourai Elixir - I've captured it before, but only in Spell Practice. I never thought I'd be able to capture it during actual Normal Mode. This alone was enough to make me quit trying IN and stop considering going for Kaguya.

4. Clearing UFO - UFO might not be such a difficult game, but greed deaths are so common that I had a lot of trouble with 1ccing. Sinker Ghost and Flying Fantastica are huge obstacles too. Considering how much trouble RAYKITTY had with UFO as well, I was really excited about finally 1ccing it

3. Capturing Sinker Ghost - Yes, this is a bigger achievement than 1ccing UFO, for me. Sinker Ghost has always been a huge roadblock for me in UFO, and I always lost a lot of resources to it. Being able to capture it was quite a big deal for me, though it sadly wasn't in my final submission.

2. Clearing TD - While I tried to 1cc TD with Youmu many times, there were always plenty of silly deaths that prevented me from achieving victory. This was the first time where I was able to 1cc with Youmu, where I still maintained high scoring levels during stages, and plenty of boss cheesing, despite having a few silly deaths. I worked on this for weeks, so yeah.

1. Clearing SA - SA is definitely the toughest Windows game imo, and being able to beat Okuu was a huge achievement for me. There were so many runs that ended with Hell's Artificial Sun that seeing her explode felt truly amazing.

[Djeets]

Easy modo? I'll join ^w^

Le me wanna perfect easy modo #banged

[Scarlet]

Is DDC Hard easier than other Hard Modes?

No, I would in fact argue the opposite! DDC Hard is pretty damn tough. Considering your skill with SakuyaA, however, you should be able to 1cc! Just prepare for a huge difficulty spike on Kagerou. x_x

[Djeets]

one does need to practice on kagerou's and tsukumogami's hard spellcard more .__.

no big difference on seija and sukuna .--.