Large bounty offered for Dodonpachi scoring glitch

[EOJ]

And then a thread backfire on shmups forum:

https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=66070

I applaud system11 for doing the right thing here! This whole bounty business is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen in the community. It will only lead to other players keeping more things secret, hoping a bounty will eventually materialize. And then we enter into a situation in which all sorts of things related to the genre suddenly become monetized and the divide between Western and Japanese players widens even further. That is the opposite direction the community needs to move to. It needs to move to more inclusiveness, more free sharing of knowledge, and less tribalism and "West vs. Japan" garbage.

What say you?

EDIT/UPDATE: Bounty seems to have been cancelled.

EDIT/UPDATE #2: Bounty was restarted, this time also open to Japanese players. After a few days the bounty was cancelled (again) because it was claimed that a member of the bounty committee (blackisto) discovered the glitch on his own. As a result, the committee said the large bounty ($2250) they offered was not going to be paid because committee members were not allowed to receive it. Apparently at least one member of the committee knew what the glitch was prior to the bounty, but could not say what it was, for fear of offending the Japanese community (because the details of the glitch were told to the member in confidence). An honest series of events, or all a ruse full of smoke and mirrors that was concocted in order to reveal the scoring glitch without offending the Japanese players who did not want to reveal the details of the glitch to the general public? You be the judge. Regardless of which one is true, the outcome was positive in that no money was paid for the glitch information and the glitch became public knowledge.

[EOJ]

Some Japanese players seem to agree with me:

https://twitter.com/ReQ_DFK/status/1229250759721504768

https://twitter.com/YMGC_haru/status/1229078848806899712

[TimingTripod40]

As someone helping put this together, I'll try to explain what's going on here. The massive response this got from the Japanese community was completely unexpected. The intended audience for this was the speedrun/TAS crowd. The announcement was carefully written in such a way to entice those players and make it seem like an incredibly important but realistic goal they could attempt. While putting this together, something we've agreed on is that attracting new players is far more important than actually finding the glitch. The aim was to create a new crowd of people interested in routing these games without relying on Japanese players.

That said, I don't think the impact this has made in the Japanese scene is entirely a negative one. At the very least, it's made many people aware of the situation and gotten them talking about the utterly toxic strat hiding behavior that remains prevalent in several classic shmups. Even if this whole thing crashes and burns, it can at least be looked back on as something that shouldn't have happened and used as motivation to improve openness in the scene.

[EOJ]

Thanks for your response. Hiding strats for years or even decades is indeed toxic. But combating such behavior with region-specific bounties is not the right way to fix it. It creates a whole new toxicity and threatens to alienate Japanese players who are, or might have been, open to integrating more with English-speaking communities.

A healthy community will tackle these issues in a collaborative manner, inclusive of players from around the world (that includes Japan!), free from aspirations of recompense. That should be our goal.

If you feel the need to offer large sums of prize money to attract new people to play games in your genre, something is amiss. And as soon as the money dries up those people will hit the road. You can't buy love, and you can't buy STG players.

[el_rika]

The shades of grey are many.

[cstarflare]

I'm slightly confused about why this would widen the gap between the Western and Japanese communities but maybe I'm missing a cultural difference. Is it the money? Is it the coordinated effort to break the wall of silence around the bug? Is it the statement that the bounty is directed at the Western scene rather than people who already know it? Would there be a similar backlash if the bounty was for something we believe is possible but the method is unknown, rather than digging up something that some would prefer to remain hidden?

(I'm actually curious how the Japanese community views speedrun bounties as those have been a thing for a long time, and very successful in some cases - though the situation in that community is generally different than it is with the DDP bug)

I kind of understand the concern that people might start to expect bounties for information, but I'm skeptical that people look at a genre like shmups and the level of interest individual titles get and think "yeah, I can make money here." DDP is a special case for all sorts of reasons and I can't imagine many people would be willing to donate towards a breakthrough in many other titles (including most Cave games). I'm unclear on how many existing unknown strats a bounty could potentially be used to learn, but I expect that modern gamers are more forthcoming with their strats via streams and social media than the old arcade guard were. So I understand the concern, but I don't think it's likely to take root and become a problem.

[EOJ]

I'm slightly confused about why this would widen the gap between the Western and Japanese communities but maybe I'm missing a cultural difference. Is it the statement that the bounty is directed at the Western scene rather than people who already know it?

It's this plus the bounty, which, apparently, Japanese people cannot claim (since the whole thing is aimed at Western STG players).

Anyway, it looks like this bounty is no longer active.

[cstarflare]

Ah, I see. I had read things as being "this isn't a bribe for people who already know it" rather than excluding the Japanese scene from the bounty, but maybe I missed something there.

[EOJ]

It looks like Plasmo has deleted his twitter account, which is a real bummer.  I hope he comes back with a new account soon (or reactivates his old one). I always enjoyed reading his posts on new scores.

[TimingTripod40]

To be clear, there is no ban on Japanese players participating. The messages discouraging Japanese strat mafia involvement were largely included due to Plasmo's own close friendship with some of the people involved in hiding strats in Donpachi/Dodonpachi and a desire to not step on any toes. Also, as stated, that this picked up traction in the Japanese community at all blindsided us. As he has seemingly backed out, we now plan to relaunch the bounty while making clear that anyone is allowed to participate, including people who've sworn to secrecy in the past. We will also offer anonymity to anyone who requests it. There's no reason to play along with the strat hiding crowd anymore.

Also, regarding the concerns about this incentivizing people to sit on strats until a bounty comes along, we will also add in the option of sending the bounty to some charity if the person who comes forwards requests it. Hopefully including that option will help make it clear that this is meant to be a community effort to progress the game and that we absolutely do not want people sitting on information because of this.

[EOJ]

If it is open to Japanese players as well then one of my major complaints would go away. I still don't like the bounty idea, for reasons I've already discussed, but the community will decide whether or not they want to go down that road. For the record, I will never participate in any bounty contests concerning the discovery or description of gameplay strategies/techniques (rather, I will continue to provide any information I can find or discover for free).