Improvements to the Cyclone mechanic

[Electra]

In Master Mode past level 1000, the Cyclone mechanic starts, rotating each piece randomly. This mechanic seems to parallel the level 1000 mechanic from Shirase in TGM3 (monochrome pieces) in that it forces you to pay more attention to your next queue.
At least among the people I've talked to during this game's launch (including many pros at the cutting-edge of the mode), this feature is very poorly recieved, with many people considering it an extremely annoying and badly-designed mechanic. I personally have pretty much no interest in trying to learn Master Mode past level 1000 because it just seems so unfun to deal with, and that's unfortunate since this seems to be the flagship mode of the game (given the title of Master). Some players have even resorted to pause-buffering because of how fast you have to react to adequately play with this punishing mechanic, and this doesn't seem like the sort of thing we want to encourage.

I'd like to suggest some small tweaks to the mechanic which I think would make it more fair and fun for high-level players, without fundamentally changing your vision for the mechanic.

improved next queue: currently, only the first box of the next queue accurately shows the adjusted rotation. this can feel frustrating for high level players because the next queue is effectively lying, and at high-speeds you usually rely on the next queue in order to plan your moves ahead. Having only the first next box be accurate somewhat forces you to play with only one next box, which heavily increases the requirement for a good reaction time over planning ahead. I'm not sure how possible it would be to change this (since the vertical pieces take up a good amount of space) but it would probably help the mechanic out a lot to have the full next queue be accurate (maybe shrink its size so it only shows 3 next boxes instead of 5, to account for the verticals? I'm not sure the best way to implement this visually)

2-state rotations: In Standard rule, the S, Z, and I pieces have 4 rotation states which are very hard to distinguish, due to being only visibly different in 2 rotation states. You can technically see the difference due to the small offset in the next box, but it might be helpful to make this more visually apparent (perhaps a skin that marks the rotation center of the piece would be helpful?) The randomizer could also be changed to only allow 2 starting rotation states for these pieces, guaranteeing you know which is which. Watching top-level gameplay, it seems that one of the most common misdrops is caused due to misjudging the 180-state of one of these pieces, effectively making many moves a 50/50 chance to work. To me, this just seems like an unfun mechanic when some moves won't work seemingly at random.

Or best of all (in my opinion) Deterministic cycling: I think a simple yet effective way to fix most of the issues with this mechanic would be to make it cycle deterministically instead of at random. So instead of having each piece pick a random rotation state, they would always alternate between 0 -> 90 -> 180 -> 270 -> 0 again ... This would still force you to utilize each new type of rotation, but would allow greater mastery over the challenge with practice, letting you get the rhythm of the rotations into your head to predict the rotations of the next pieces (even if they aren't shown). To me, this seems like it would solve the 2 problems I mentioned above, while giving more control over the mechanic to the best of players (though frankly actually getting good enough to be able to keep track of this rotation state still sounds very difficult to me), being relatively easy to implement (no massive visual changes necessary), and not changing the creative vision for the mechanic really.

None of these changes are necessary (or as high-priority as the various keyboard / controller issues), but I do think these could be nice tweaks to make the game feel more fair and fun without changing it in a fundamental way.

If any top-level players want to comment or have additional ideas for improving on these mechanics, that'd be great.

[Patashu]

What about adding a sound cue for the next piece's rotation, similar to how you get a sound cue for what piece is next?

[LucyAwawa]

The specific iteration of your deterministic Cyclone you present here is really compelling!

[LucyAwawa]

Originally posted by Patashu:

What about adding a sound cue for the next piece's rotation, similar to how you get a sound cue for what piece is next?

The issue that we're trying to address is that you cannot know ahead of time what orientation your piece will spawn in. This still would only tell you the orientation of your first next piece. I also imagine it would make the soundscape too cluttered to put another sound effect on top of the next piece sound.