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. East Coast Stamina 9 is a remote event this year,
but it is normally a live event.
ECS9 features an upper division and lower division; if you wish to compete in either,
you'll need to have participated in the Stamina RPG 4
qualifiers, which are now over. The top 24 players on the ranking for combined TP/LP are able to enter the
Upper Division for ECS9.
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. ECS4.5, ECS 5.5, ECS6.5, ECS7.5 and ECS8.5 have
added team play as an aspect of the format, but the mainline ECS tournaments-- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and the
upcoming ECS9-- 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 format is available here:
If you qualified, you can enter scores any time between September 4th, 2020 and 11:59 PM EST on September 20th, 2020.
More information on score submission can be found here:
Yeah, 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 SRPG4 and ECS9) 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!