I should elaborate on the bingo card making process, and how it is balanced. The bank of potential squares are each game on each difficulty, each individual spell card, and some challenges imposed on your gameplay. The naive way to make a card is just randomly throw 25 of them onto a bingo square and challenge people to do them. The way they do it for Oot and other successful bingos, is to weigh each square in a square bank and use dynamic programming, or graph theory, to make sure the rows and columns are similarly weighed. So if the hardest square is something like UFO lunatic 1cc, any row with that square will have to have something like "Icicle fall easy capture" to offset it, or it just will not be present on a card unless it has a high weight. In my sample card, something like "use Marisa" is interesting because it is sometimes very inconvenient to use Marisa (IN Magic team is the worst, and SA Reimu A is the only noob-friendly shot-type) so in row 1 of my card using Marisa in PCB or TD shouldn't be inconvenient, but for column 4 with IN this is more troublesome (I don't know how Marisa fares in DDC because I haven't played it yet) and the program should be able to keep track of different weights for this row and column. To make a card all the user would need to do is pick an rng seed and a weight range for the rows/columns. The program then generates a card while checking to see if it is balanced and adjusting if it needs to. We may need to borrow some code from the other bingos and modify it, but in the end the runners shouldn't need to know any computer science to make a card.
Squares can be ranked for both time and difficulty if need be, and the rows can be balanced for both as well. Time is easy, just time how long it takes to do the stage up until the card or 1cc, but difficulty is somewhat more arbitrary. It would have to be a community effort to rank the difficulty of each run. For the sake of argument lets say EoSD Normal 1cc is 10pts difficult. Then where do we place PCB Normal 1cc? I wold say 9pts. I think PCB is slightly easier. What about SA Normal 1cc? 15pts?I am biased though. It would be too ambitious to assume I would get it right on the first try, so there will be some unbalance at first, but hopefully it will evolve into something well balanced. Different tiers can be accomplished by setting the range for each row, e.g. if the rows in my sample card are worth ~100 pts each, then you could make a card that has the rows be wort ~50 pts each, which means likely lowering the difficulty level of each square in the row. But note, that even though the sample card has hard and lunatic 1cc's on it, there are rows that can be completed without ever playing on hard, you just have more options if you can do more, which is what I was going for. It may be easier (and certainly quicker) to forget about full game runs and just do captures of particular spells with maybe two modifiers.
It definitely seems like a good idea to ban spell practice, otherwise It'd be faster to cap Fujiyama Volcano than any of Rumia's cards, even if you cannot consistently do it, just because you are forced to go through the stage. Rather than ranking each card in games with spell practice really low to compensate, we should just force all of them to be done in practice. This might preclude the photo games, which I wanted to include, but such is life. Also banning patches might be a good idea, the hitbox patch for EoSD makes it easier and rather than force everyone to use it we should force everyone to play it the way it was meant to be played (I may be biased since I don't use the patch). Also with something as innocuous as VPatch you can force your game to run at 61fps, which shouldn't change the difficulty all that much, but over the course of a 2 hour bingo could save you a couple of minutes, which is huge in an autoscroller. I like the idea of making people stream it, both for the spectacle, and to keeps people from cheating: manually changing a rpy file's timestamp or pause buffering to trivialize a really hard card, which would go unnoticed if we used replays.
I've gotten some interest from the twitch Touhou community I don't know what quorum we would need to do a bingo, but scheduling aside it might be enough for a test bingo. It was brought to my attention that this will be easier to explain/ discuss over a skype call, so I may organize a stream/skype discussion session sometime after thanksgiving.
