Yet there are competitions for drifting, road biking (and bmx… not sure which was the ‘style’ one here), freestyle skiing, and street skating.
It’s not a question of necessity, but reality. The reality is that style factors into all kinds of competitions. You could argue that there are competitions that are almost exclusively about style. And the competitors both expect and enjoy that part of it.
But if you want to be a “spirit yoyoer” and yoyo just for yourself and your style, you just don’t sign up for a contest.
I just don’t see how really general stuff should score well. Contests may mean something different to others on here, but to me at least, I go to competitions expecting to see really unique, difficult concepts. I’m not saying the fast/generalized type of style isn’t impressive but I want to watch people compete with unique, insanely difficult concepts. Paul Kerbel, Janos Karancz, Takeshi Matsuura, and Zach Gormley are a few that come to mind. Contests should be about impressing the audience, not the judges and that’s why I’m such a fan of those players above. They do focus on impressing the judges a bit, but that’s not their entire freestyle.
Clickers in a yoyo contest should assign a numerical value to difficulty and nothing else. A trick that is three times as hard as any other element should be scored three times as high, even if you’re comparing a difficult “overdone” element with an easier original element. Though trick difficulty is subjective, knowledgeable judges usually get a pretty good idea of how one element should score against another.
Things like originality are factored into performance scores like “rareness”. How many points that category should be is up for discussion, but originality should not be factored into clicks, which serve to display the technical difficulty of a freestyle.
By forcing players to make sting hits you totally compromise and lose a section of competition play.
Going back to figure skating, every person needs to land a trick list to score well, what interprets their overall score is the STYLE in which they execute their tricks.
With throw comps sting hits score the most so you are seeing a lot of the same moves because they are technical yes, but have lots of points attached to them. There is no trick list and then style thrown in there like figure skating.
If the contests could somehow have style thrown in there as well it would add a whole new aspect to the game. Obviously you can play slower /more style if you are flawless in your tricks as you will make up the points because of not having errors.
In my opinion they should have some type of compulsory tricks in the contest but then have a large section of the routine be for true free style, not speed. So then it would be who can complete the compulsory tricks the best but then also you can get points for having an original style and incorporating those compulsory tricks into your routine.
I think it caters to most everyone and is a fair way of judging overall
It would also allow people to “copy” the same tricks and score higher or the same but only based on person style not the fact that the tricks are copied.
I agree that technicality of a freestyle should be a major part of the score, but I’m not sure how much I agree with how they give points for difficult concepts which aren’t unique. For example, you could do the most basic GT and land an everyday gt suicide and get a click for that. Its a highly risky trick but in this case, it’s not at all unique. I’m slightly biased because I prefer watching throwers who have very unique styles, so its just my opinion. With the current system, someone can do some of the more basic tricks such as gerbil, kwigybo, and others and still win a contest, as long as they hit all of the tricks and have enough string hits crammed in there. In my opinion, it doesn’t really promote much of a sense of creativity. This can be seen in prelims especially, where the majority of the contestants do fast/general freestyles in order to maximize points. In finals, a person who plays at the speed of Ricardo fraolini isn’t ever going to have much of a chance. His tricks are basically impossible for humans, but they don’t incorporate enough string hits to score high in a contest. This is where we can run into problems. This means that someone with fewer creative concepts and more string hits can score higher, even if their tricks aren’t necessarily as difficult or unique. I just think creativity and difficulty should be given more weight than they have right now, even if that means they don’t have a bunch if string hits. It’s tough coming up with something everyone will agree on. If we change it so number of string tricks isn’t valued much, then fast players will be annoyed. If we give too little weight to creativity/slow tricks, then those throwers will be bothered. Would be interesting seeing some more contests incorporating various ways of judging and seeing what works best to show how “good” someone is.
String hits are not what is being judged. Knowledgeable and experienced judges are looking for difficulty, not string hits. Tricks that are difficult do not require string hits and tricks that have many string hits can be very easy or very difficult.
The person with the most difficulty crammed into three minutes should be the person with the highest tech score, not the person with the most elements, the most string hits, the most style, or the most creative elements. Things like style, creativity, uniqueness, and flare are for the performance scores. The clickers only function should be to assess difficulty.
Well, you’ve been in the contest scene way longer than I have so I trust how you say it is judged. I always thought that a positive point was due to any string hit with a certain level of difficulty. I still feel like extremely slow players are at a disadvantage with the system. Even if their tricks are just as difficult as someone who is going fast, then their technical point evaluation will be limited due to the fewer number of elements they perform. I feel like there is a way to get a better balance between scoring fast and slow players, but its not something that’s going to be solved easily.
It is absolutely impossible to access the difficulty of a trick by its appearance. Rather, it is the trick creator’s own duty to design tricks that readily demonstrate their difficulty, if this do ever gain more weight in judging than they already do.
‘‘speed’’ (as a buzzword) is not irreconciliable with ‘‘difficulty’’ ‘‘originality’’ etc, nor does there exist any trick that, when factoring ‘difficulty’ in to the extent that it is already done today, cannot pick up enough speed to score as high as any other trick. Players that play slow do not do so because they cannot play fast, but because they do not wish to do so.
As you grow as a player, and as a judge, you learn that there are certain indicators of difficulty. There are sometimes elements that, when I go back and learn them, I find I gave an incorrect amount of clicks to, but the majority of the time an experienced and knowledgeable judge will be able to make accurate assessments of difficulty.
So is my exact point. Nothing significant is being judged too unfairly to fail to meet the requirements inherently imposed by the level of the contest. and the whole issue is
If anything, looking at 1A finals of nationals, continentals and worlds, increasing the weight of difficulty will very possibly end up favoring fast players even more.
Yeah, I’m not saying that originality should be factored in clicks. I judged PEv and TEv, and rarity is only worth like 1/8 of all the scored evaluation (non-tech), and not just that, being rare doesn’t 100% means being original alone (be it in style, concept, and or tricks), since you can copy Zach exactly and still being rare, regardless of not being original; that gets confusing while in the judging sheet rareness means: Uniqueness, Originality, Creativity, Newness, Unusualness of tricks. It’s almost like, contradict itself…
It’s just, I personally think that originality should be weighed more than a mere 1/8 of the performance score, which will be normalized again to the point they are almost not having much effect if at all. A completely original style vs a downright copy of some previous champion only make up 5% difference of the total score (if say that the points other than rareness are the same), and that is if the original player go 10 rarity points and the copycat got 0 point.
Not just two prolific posters that seem to post replies to threads more often than your average bear…