AN OPEN LETTER ABOUT MODERN TETRIS

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I usually don't make posts like this but this needs to be said. Please read so you know what is going on.
Credits to a few Tetris players for their feedback, but especially to bitbybyte for helping me writing this, doing grammar check and rewording most of the things I've said.

The modern Tetris scene is in bad shape now because of the lack of change to official Tetris games and recent events have only made things worse. I'll try to explain things as simply as I can so anyone can understand the issues at play, even if they're not familiar with the nuances involved.
For reference, TTC stands for "The Tetris Company," which exclusively manages the Tetris brand and licenses the right to develop the game to various developers. They bear the most responsibility for the state of modern Tetris, so let's take a look at why:

--- 1) Background on Guideline Tetris ---

As a bit of prior context, modern Tetris is also called "Guideline Tetris" because all official Tetris games need to follow specific rules to be approved by TTC. A non-exhaustive list of these rules include:

- The color of the Tetriminos (the I piece is cyan, the T piece is purple, etc.)
- Including a hold piece and ghost piece
- A specific rotation system (the way pieces rotate)
- The inclusion of the de facto Tetris theme song (Korobeiniki)
(Source: https://harddrop.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline)

Simply put, if the game doesn't follow these rules, it's not an official Tetris game in the eyes of TTC. This is the most popular form of multiplayer Tetris currently being played.

--- 2) Issues regarding game balance ---

Even though Guideline Tetris has existed since the early 2000s, most players first encountered these rules in online multiplayer games, beginning with Tetris Battle on Facebook and Tetris Friends. Tetris Friends (a free, browser-based Tetris game) was the most popular game of its kind at its peak, starting in the early 2010s. This game got me interested in multiplayer Tetris, just like many veteran players. While it wasn't without its flaws, it was the most accessible game of its time, both among official games and fan games. It was shut down on 30th May 2019.

(Fun fact: the Tetris official Twitter account actively hyped a spiritual successor to this game and many people were excited for it, except it turned out to be... Hello Kitty Tetris, a simple reskin of the barebones single player experience on Tetris.com: https://twitter.com/Tetris_Official/status/1135654102732541958)

Tetris Friends was one of the first (if not the first?) games where balancing issues started to become apparent. As in other Guideline games, to send damage (called "garbage lines") to your opponent, you need to clear:

- 2, 3, or 4 lines at once
- T-spins
- Perfect Clears (clearing your board so that no blocks remain)
- Consecutive lines (combos)

Combos have been a sore issue competitively for a long time. In most modern Guideline games, after a combo higher than 10, a single line clear can send 5 garbage lines to your opponent, which is even more than a Tetris (4 lines). With this aggressive combo table, players have found a way to optimize competitive play by relying exclusively on combos to win.

A frequently exploited pattern known as "4-wide" takes this to an extreme (https://harddrop.com/wiki/Combo_Setups#Four_Column_Combo_Setup_.28.224-Wide.22.29), and has been widely derided for being overpowered. 4-wide is extremely repetitive and boring to deal with, with most of the games ending after 30 seconds. Here is an example where I beat another strong player in less than 1 minute with this strategy: https://twitter.com/doremypuyotet/status/1334339117333798912

The main crux here is that this pattern is easier to understand/replicate than most other attack patterns that exist in Tetris, yet it's the one that produces the most damage output by far. Try to imagine a fighting game, but there's a character that's easy-to-play and impossible to beat unless you also play as that character yourself. Isn't that unfair and unbalanced?

This has been an issue for the past decade, and almost all official Tetris games released since then experience the same issue; Puyo Puyo Tetris is just one of the many games that suffers from an overpowered combo table. Despite this, TTC has done nothing to remedy the behavior of combos, even though the community has been vocal about change for so long. While the specific combo table is not necessarily a part of the Guideline rules (though is speculated to be), TTC has ignored this imbalance and developers continue to implement it without much care.

--- 3) Tetris fan games and their popularity ---

The modern Tetris community wants to see Tetris develop rather than stagnate in its current state. As such, many in the community have gone on to develop fan games that realize a broader vision for Tetris. A non-exhaustive list of popular Tetris fan games:

- Jstris
- TETR.IO
- Worldwide Combos
- NullpoMino
- Tetra Online

These are very popular in the core community, and even further beyond with more casual players. Many people tend to discover Tetris through these games. On the whole, these games have taken a player-focused approach, incorporating feedback from the community while implementing more robust features, customization, and accessibility options than ever seen in any official Tetris game, with many notably adjusting the behavior of combos.

Fan games by their nature will always expand beyond the bounds of what's seen in official games, but are changes as simple as a combo table too much to ask for? It seems as much, considering that fan games are largely created because no official Tetris game provides what's needed for a competitive scene to be developed. TTC knows about the existence of these games, but largely turns a blind eye to them (with some notable exceptions... read on). It's easy to speculate as to why that might be, including the difficulty in taking down web games or the questionable legal framework used to force these games underground, but it should be telling that games made by fans and for fans are the ones that actively receive praise from within the community, while official games developed with the blessing of TTC continue to be routinely mocked for their lack of change.

--- 4) The first official change in years, and failed expectations ---

Recent years have been somewhat stagnant for the Guideline Tetris scene (in 2019, only Tetris 99 was released), but 2020 led to a few developments that inspired a lot of hope. Three new Tetris fan games were opened to the public (TETR.IO, Tetra Legends and Tetra Online) and two official Tetris games were also released: Tetris Effect: Connected, developed by Enhance, and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, developed by SEGA.

A major step was made when Enhance decided to change the combo table for their main game mode, Zone Battle. This was met with A LOT of positive feedback and praise, with speculation as to whether future Guideline games would see similar changes. Enhance is very open to feedback, bug reports and suggestions to improve their game, having gone as far as to open a Discord server for that purpose. This change alone has inspired a lot of good will from the community, with many considering buying the game only because combo damage was reduced. It undoubtedly helped in balancing the game more, while proving that Tetris developers CAN listen to their customers' suggestions to improve their game. Unfortunately, Tetris Effect: Connected is currently a Microsoft-exclusive and is difficult to run on most computers, so it's still limited in reach.

With that in mind, Puyo Puyo Tetris has always been easier to run and is accessible on more platforms (Nintendo Switch being the most popular), which helped in building a solid player base at all levels of skills. When SEGA announced that Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 would be releasing in December, the community naturally had expectations of an improved quality of life and balance adjustments.
One of the most well-known Tetris players, a Japanese player that goes by あめみや たいよう (Amemiya Taiyou) was in fact involved with SEGA in the game's development, and went as far as asking his large follower base about suggestions to improve the game three months before release: https://twitter.com/inazuma0217tai1/status/1298656693501403137
I made an English version of this tweet to gather all the suggestions from the western community myself, and forwarded them on to Amemiya next: https://twitter.com/doremypuyotet/status/1298666361556738048
(For reference, the most common suggestions were related to multiplayer, including nerfing the combo table, improving the netcode, and adjusting the rating systems.)

Because of this, a lot of hope generated for seeing the game grow to be *the* game that we've been looking for, that would fix the flaws that the first game had. I don't think that we were asking for much -- we're NOT asking for more game modes or additional content, but for competitive balancing that wouldn't alter casual gameplay in any way.

With the game being released recently, our hopes were basically shattered. There were a lot of graphical improvements and minor details adjusted, but the gameplay is an overall downgrade compared to the first game, with many high-level players invested in the game expressing regret for their purchase. The game even managed to indirectly buff 4-wide by reducing the speed of the game, removing one of the only potential weapons to fight against it. Of course, the combo table was left unchanged despite the entire community asking for it... excluding those who use it as a crutch to win, obviously!

It's unclear if SEGA refused a change here or if TTC vetoed the very idea, but given recent events, the answer seems clear. Although I've heard that it was TTC that refused the combo table change, there's no conclusive source for this claim. We know that the game just released, and that SEGA will be performing updates on it, but considering that they've been promoting everything but improved gameplay up until now and that they haven't incorporated some of the most basic, unanimous feedback, the community is already ready to write this game off for competitive play.

(If you want to know my thoughts about Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, I've written a personal review about how the game feels as a player, which you can find here: https://twitter.com/doremypuyotet/status/1336542806563835904)

--- 5) The shutdown of Tetra Online, another popular fan game ---

Tetra Online was a Tetris fan game made by Mine, who's only 16 years old. Mine has been working on this game since November 2019 and progressively gathered people around him to help him with the development. The game focused on being close to Puyo Puyo Tetris in terms of speed, as most other Tetris fan games have no speed limit (Jstris, TETR.IO). The game released on Early Access on Steam on 30th November 2020, and while it was met with mixed feedback, they were still actively working on the game to improve it for the sake of everyone.

The combo table is broken, you say? Tetra Online went as far as COMPLETELY removing it, giving no bonus damage for combos. The UI looks amateur? A full revamp was planned to bring it in line with community expectations. Before they could realize this vision, however, Tetra Online received a DMCA take down notice from Tetris Holding, LLC (the parent company of TTC) on 9th December 2020.
I'm not going to go into full details here, as I haven't really played the game, nor followed its development, but you can read about this from Mine's perspective here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w1ugURIQiHjAYbDPNpUQmPkNdyodpiK8n1GWVQuNykU/edit#

The issue isn't really whether this deserved a take down or not -- it's about the message it conveys to a community that is still struggling to be validated as a competitive scene.
The past few days have undoubtedly been hectic for Tetris, with the circumstances around the release of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and Tetris Effect: Connected, but nothing better puts into focus how out of touch TTC is than retweeting a meme video ridiculing 4-wide (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/617721934607679516/786003069959536640/Screenshot_20201208-165523_Twitter.jpg), deleting it after swift backlash, and their community manager going as far as to acknowledge issues with balance "as a Tetris player" before then recanting that they had no influence to promote changes (https://kaia.s-ul.eu/5GPtQgS1.png).

As a final moment of tragedy, they've now managed to take down a popular fan game with promise. Not only can TTC not cosign decent official games, but they've taken down one of the few approaches being explored to promote modern Tetris since they’re unwilling to themselves. That's pretty much a middle finger to the entire community that's been working hard to push the scene even further with tournaments (Jstris Cup, World Puzzle League (WPL), Hard Drop Open (HDO), and many more) funded fully by fans of the game.

--- 6) Conclusion ---

While I understand that this comes from a minority compared to the massive casual player base (Tetris is very well known, after all), these concerns deserve to be widely known. We've had enough of this.

A lot of players, including me, have put A LOT of time into Tetris. It's an amazing game, after all, and there are many possibilities that have been realized that you could never imagine from a game where you stack falling blocks. Watching high-level Tetris is fascinating, and I'm also uploading videos regularly to promote it further, but TTC seems far more interested in promoting Tetris as a "lifestyle brand" rather than the competitive game that they tacitly say they want to nurture (https://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/news/2018/07/05/how-maya-rogers-plans-to-make-tetris-a-lifestyle.html). Even arrangements like the Classic Tetris World Championship, an incredible event and demonstration of skill in its own respect, have only received approval from TTC in recent years after decades of competitive history fostered by fans; modern games have seen no such endorsement. I'm not suggesting favoritism here -- this is entirely a reflection of CTWC succeeding in spite of TTC.

I understand that these concerns come largely from a hardcore playerbase, and many people are able to enjoy Tetris as "the cool, famous block-stacking game" while not spending a lot of time mulling over balance issues. However, like other games, there is a scene where players are ready and eager to see modern Tetris grow into a viable competitive venture that can promote the game and community more widely. All we want is the bare necessity of platform and publisher support: a proper, balanced Tetris game created with community intentions that can be held up as a standard for 1v1 multiplayer. Unfortunately, it seems like this isn't going to change anytime soon, as long as this disconnect continues to exist between TTC and the competitive community.

I hope that this wasn't too complicated to understand, even from a casual viewpoint, but I wanted to share this, as the modern Tetris scene is actively being sabotaged by TTC.
By writing this, my goal was to raise awareness about the current situation (written from the perspective of a high-leveled Tetris player) so everyone has context for where things currently stand in the scene.

Thank you for reading.

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