Time to test All-In tournaments

It has finally been added, All-In style tournaments that let you play songs at any difficulty level within a single tournament. This means you can compete against everyone fairly regardless of skill level. Medium players can take on Experts, and Easys can take on Hards.

With mucho help from Michael S. and Pete M., I was able to update the bracket system to allow All-In tournaments and we're going to be testing them all week long. So please pick any tournament you can make and play along. Your playing will help test the All-In tourneys and help fix any problems.

All-In tournaments work by adjusting scores up to match Expert levels. So if you are a Medium player and get 100,000 on a song, through some mathmagic that score is adjusted to what it would be if you played on Expert, maybe 200,000. How your score is adjusted depends on what song you play and what difficulty you play it on.

To fairly adjust scores, we've taken the top 5 high scores for each song per difficulty and averaged them together. By then dividing Easy/Med/Hard scores by the Expert score we are able to get a multiplier value (a decimal). When your score is recorded, the system looks at what level you played at and finds the corresponding multiplier to up your score.

Our tests have shown the concept to be pretty fair and stable, but please keep in mind this is the first real-world test of All-In rules...so there will be changes and there will probably be problems, just don't get worked up about it. If this beta goes well the All-In tournaments will find a home here with the leveled tournaments. All-In will not be replacing the leveled tournaments.

Hopefully the All-In style will let more people join in a single tournament and give everyone a fair chance to win and thus hopefully see some new champions get rewarded for their skill. It will also allow us to schedule the harder songs like "One" and TTFAF since you can play it at any level and have a better chance of actually finishing the song.

Please check out this week's tournaments and enter one that fits your schedule.