East Coast Stamina (ECS) is a high level competition centered around a
selection of some of the most difficult custom content available for In The Groove, a four-panel dance game similar
to Dance Dance Revolution.
It has been an annual tournament since September 2011, eventually becoming a
biannual event starting with ECS2.5. The mainline East Coast Stamina tournaments are traditionally a live event, but ECS13 will be held remotely.
ECS13 features an upper division, mid division, and lower division (as well as a special, separate speed division);
if you wish to compete, you'll need to have participated in the Stamina RPG 8
qualifiers. Placement into Upper Division and Mid Division is dependent upon your points for qualifying (TP + LP).
Current event standings can be found here:
There's also a page with a schedule and links for the Twitch streams of the various competitors (unfortunately this one isn't very mobile friendly, sorry). It is not mandatory to stream your set, or to schedule your stream-- adding yourself here totally up to you:
Historically, the tournament has generally consisted of a "marathon" (a mix of songs usually
roughly an hour in length), and then a timed set where players could choose
songs from a preselected list, where the songs are assigned point values based
on their difficulty in addition to the scores the players obtain on them. The ".5" events starting from ECS4.5 have
added team play as an aspect of the format, but the mainline ECS tournaments-- the whole number ones-- have all focused on each individual competing against the other entrants to achieve
the highest score possible on the marathon, and also to gain as many points as possible in the timed set.
More information on the event is available here:
If you qualified, you can enter scores any time between 2024/10/11 and 11:59 PM EST on 2024/10/27 (dates tentative).
Score submission will open once the event begins.
It costs a lot to run these events between paying for prizes, mailing said-prizes, paying for art, paying for music, paying for marathon syncing, paying for convention space for the live events, etc., and most of this comes out of my pocket.
If you want to help out a little, an easy way is to buy shirts (or hats, or face masks, or whatever!). You can buy merch for various ECS and SRPG events (including SRPG8 and ECS13) at the Stamina Nation spreadshirt page:
If you just want to make a direct donation, you can use this link:
I really appreciate you guys helping out!
When I started running these tournaments, I handled almost all of the work by myself. In ECS3, Zaia and @@ were the first to join the team when they helped with stepping the marathon that year, and things have grown from there in terms of
collaboration-- and I really appreciate all the assistance I now get in trying to make all of this possible.
To start, I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed monetarily by either purchasing merchandise or making a direct donation. Art, original music compositions, marathon mixes, the .5 prizes, and the live events all cost a considerable
amount of money, so anything you guys do to help make that hurt less is a huge help (though I never realistically expect I'll be able to fully recoup those expenses). Here's a partial list of those people (this just includes everyone who
donated through the RPG site and properly followed the link back to get the Godfather's Token relic):
- flip
- DanPeriod
- MaruDeHabanero
- NinjaNabi
- Roujo
- PkGam
- nihongo wakaran...
- sore
- Lotarr
- zaniel
- antipathetique
- Janus5k
- atomcat
- Sapphron
- titandude21
- MINGW64
- aminuteawayx
- Beremy
- Zarzob
- Amoo
- Telperion
- Dingoshi
- Fanatik25
- Zylos
- Cozy
- hk
- LFK
- Xynn
- Franksoua
- help
- Fierra
- Nao Hikari
- hi_im_los
- Sereni
- teejusb
- Once again, all the magic in the theme this year is thanks to the tireless efforts of teejusb. Thank you for everything you do!
- The talented Rems has produced three very excellent mixes for the marathons this year, and as always, I'm very pleased and excited for everyone to experience them! Much appreciated!
- Thanks to my Lower Division marathon stepartists: Chief Skittles, Rems, mang, Janus5k, and Mango! I'm still not sure that mang and Mango are actually two different people though?
- Thanks to my Mid Division marathon stepartists: Xynn, Archi (hey that's me), Tuuc, zaniel, and Kyy! It was a different kind of suffering this year, but you suffered through the stepping all the same and persevered!
- Thanks to my Upper Division marathon stepartists: JWong, tyler.exe, Zaia, and Levitas! Good job stepping the hard thing!
- Xynn, for checking the sync on the marathons for us!
- Upper and Speed division curation brought to you by Levitas. Now you're a free man for a few months.
- Pluto, once more, has set the tone for the event with her sick art! Thanks muchly!
- YourVinished's enthusiasm for producing this year's music for the theme shines through pretty clearly I think. Thanks man!
- dbk2 made the original ECS theme that was used back in ECS7, which we've iterated upon in the years since. Thank you for that!
- Credit to Rawinput wrote the original score automation script back for ECS7. It was the original basis for a lot of what I've done to parse submissions in all the events afterwards. Thanks man!
- To all the stepartists who are featured in the tournament: Thanks for all the work you do! It's heartening to see new artists year after year contributing to making these tournaments great.
- Everyone who helped with SRPG but wasn't mentioned above-- thanks for everything! Let's make next year great too!
- ...and finally, to everyone who continues to participate in my events: Thank you for playing!
-- Ian
