ECFA 2021 – the biggest online event in the tech open-source dance game community’s history – is here! PLEASE read the following very carefully, as this post will contain lots of very helpful information. Firstly – a review of what’s changed: A few things have been adjusted since the last announcement as a direct result of beta testing feedback and other factors. Chiefly, the event scoring system was overhauled for better smoothness and consistency. The planned unlock system has also been shelved in favor of a bi-weekly DLC schedule for all players that will begin 4 weeks from the event’s start. Finally, we just didn’t have the resources to focus on a team event this year. This doesn’t mean that unlocks or team events won’t happen in future editions of ECFA Online, but we wanted to narrow the focus of this year’s event given the massive shift in direction in hopes of nailing the experience. Leaderboard and Chart Reference Guide The main spreadsheet tracker for ECFA 2021 will serve three purposes. Firstly, it will house all the scores submitted throughout the event and organize players onto a singular leaderboard. Secondly, it will show detailed statistics for each player’s ranking for everyone’s reference. Lastly, the spreadsheet will include a very handy chart reference guide containing all the charts in the event, their tech ratings and annotations, and source pack info. The main tabs in the spreadsheet are: Chart Reference: chart reference guide for the ECFA 2021 base pack, plus DLC as it gets released. ECFA Participants: a list of all confirmed participants for the event ECFA Score Sheet (raw steps): this is where all your step information from the scores you submit gets loaded ECFA Score Sheet – DP% Calcs: this is where DP% are calculated for each score and compared to minimum requirements for the block difficulty level. ECFA Score Sheet – Raw ECFA Point Calcs: this is where DP% turns into raw ECFA points Raw Score Summary: a summary of all players’ raw scores submitted in the event ECFA Player Score Summary: a summary of all players’ ECFA scores (i.e. after applying appropriate weights for top 50, top 100, outside top 100) ECFA Leaderboard: main event leaderboard for the event. Now, for some VERY IMPORTANT INFO. Players need to sign up using the sign up form in order to participate in the event. If you are in the ECFA Discord and plan to utilize that medium for posting scores, please make your username for the channel match the alias shown in the leaderboard. This is to reduce the chance of errors or miscommunication. Players may submit scores through the group Discord, Facebook group, or by DMing an event staff member. All score posts, regardless of medium, will need to be made by uploads of screenshots of results screens. Screenshots must clearly show Waterfall judgement grades and ECFA point totals. We have identified a potential solution that would allow us to use the ECFA Summary Screen built into the theme (more on that below), but for now, this is what we’ll need. Score posts in Discord need to be made in the ecfa-2021-score-dumps channel, and may be made by simply uploading photos to the channel. A member of the score tracker team will mark the scores as uploaded with a green “checkmark” react once they have been uploaded to the leaderboard. Score posts on Facebook should be made in the ECFA 2021 group. Please put your alias in your post as text. The first time you load into the new version of the theme, any ECFA 2021 scores you had recorded will be cleared. You shouldn’t have had any anyway, but this mainly affects beta testers who removed the lock on score tracking. The base pack is separated into ECFA 2021 folders by difficulty; however, you may sort charts as you wish, as long as each song folder starts with “ECFA 2021”. This means, for example, you can combine all charts into one big pack, or separate them some other way if you like. If you rearrange your ECFA 2021 folders in some way, any charts that were removed from your game based on folder path will have the recorded scores cleared. This in no way affects your event status or rank, as the leaderboard sheet governs that. Likewise, any duplicate charts within ECFA 2021 folders will not have their scores consolidated into one; if you play a chart from multiple places, it will record them separately. To view your overall ECFA 2021 summary in the theme, press MenuLeft + MenuRight on song select to open the sort menu, and find “View ECFA Scores”. This option will only appear if one of the active players has at least one score recorded for the event. At the summary screen, you can scroll through your scores with MenuLeft and MenuRight, as well as take a screenshot with the Select button. Note that the event does not rely on the theme side score tracking. It’s there for your own convenience, and likewise, exploiting any of this stuff locally won’t do anything for you in the actual event. If you’d like to volunteer to be a score tracker – let us know! We could use the help. There have been a large number of sign-ups in the last 24 hours! If your name or alias isn’t on the sheet, don’t panic – everything should get updated over the next several days. You’ll be able to play and submit scores, they just won’t be on the sheet right away. Apologies! If you notice your name in the leaderboard sheet doesn’t look quite right or would like to change it, ping McJeebie and he’ll fix it. With all that out of the way, here are some important links: ECFA 2021 Base Pack: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1213iPDGmrDeJ-yK74StkjH8c7linpipX?usp=sharing ECFA 2021 Theme: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L-PEUf2XhVk7ng6s1nASg7rVVR9_2HpQ/view?usp=sharing Sign-up form: https://forms.gle/JjKnbYue7AzqZzwW7 Full rules: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xZF0vxxg-pMOgbiJqOdQxad0gM70tJlXwmCSCLnGxHk/edit?usp=sharing Leaderboard and chart reference: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ft-Jce-ys8V4zbKxCXgwsSOj7wKNaGzvCBPOR-WC-lQ/edit?usp=sharing There are a lot of people that had a hand in making this event possible. Our beta testers Omid Farivar, Tommy Reyes, Leon Charles Brunson, Pattianne Stone, Ekaterina Ageeva, and Alessandro Tenorio-Bucci provided invaluable feedback that helped us validate where we wanted to go and make ECFA 2021 a better experience – thanks very much for volunteering! Also, big thanks to Dalton Runberg, Brandon Sudzius, and other step artists for contributing graphics – much appreciated! The ECFA 2021 event development team of Dyle Kobay, Logan Edward Barnes, Trevor Whitehurst, Tj Barber, Leon Charles Brunson, Mason Hester, C Oliver Wing, and SteveReen have spent countless hours since July 2020 thinking this thing up and getting everything ready – every member of the team have poured their soul into this project for the community, and we are so excited to see it come to life. Finally, SteveReen has gone several extra miles to make sure the user experience inside the ECFA 2021 theme is as good as it can be – we couldn’t have done this without you, Steve. If you are ready, let’s take the plunge down the Waterfall… the revolution is now.