Unfortunately, I have to throw my hat into this discussion and agree with Cool-Breeze on this one. While Street Fighter isn’t NEARLY as taxing as something like Tennis or basketball, you have to take into account the toll that playing tough matches takes on your mental and physical health.
Let’s create a very theoretical bracket, here. This has NOTHING to do with what happened at Devastation, just to clarify that immediately, before people start yelling at me about what happened at Devastation. This is pure imaginary bracketing here.
So let’s say Wong ends up in a bracket where he has to play Ed Ma, Combofiend, Arturo, Daigo, and Valle. But let’s say he makes it through. He gets to the winners finals. Then he faces John Choi. If Wong had 3 games, 3 rounds each matches with all five of those players before Choi, mofo’s gonna be tired. Sorry, that’s just the truth. And if Choi fought no one particularly good, he’ll be pretty relaxed and ready to go by the winners finals. It’s not balanced and not particularly fair.
Yeah, Justin still made it to the winners finals, but this IS Street Fighter, folks. Shit happens. A Combo gets missed, someone gets lucky… if you face against Ed Ma, Combofiend, Arturo, Valle, and Daigo, ONE of those people WILL take advantage of that mistake and kill you. Meanwhile, if Choi played no one of note, he could make 5 of those mistakes and still make it out. Surely you can’t expect someone to play 100% perfectly the entire tournament! That’s just inhuman. Wong makes mistakes just like anyone else. Expecting him to win against all 5 of those guys just because “he’s the best” doesn’t make it so that what he had to go through wasn’t unfair compared to what Choi had to go through. What happens throughout the tournament DOES have an effect on what happens late in the tournament.
Also, let’s approach this from the entertainment aspect. No one wants to see Roger Federer play Rafael Nadal at any point before the Finals if they are the two best players in tennis. You want the finals to be some kick-ass match-up. In fact, you want the top 8 of a major to have the greatest players you can. If 6 of the greatest players end up eliminating each other before the top 8, you lose entertainment value.
Now, the biggest problem obviously comes from the fact that seeding will jut be a matter of opinion. You have Triforce and Gootecks trying to seed, and it isn’t right to just go on the opinion of two fairly biased guys. THAT’S the biggest issue here, and that’s what makes what happened at Devastation not really a problem. The advantage of Tennis and NBA and what-not is that they DO have the ability to seed people. They have systems in place to allow for this.
So IF Street Fighter had such a rankings, OF COURSE Devastation would have seeded! Why wouldn’t they have? Even those arguing against seeding would most likely be 100% in favor of seeding people if a valid rankings existed. So there’s really no point in arguing it anymore.
tl;dr version:
If we had a legit ranking system, almost 99% of the people would be in favor of seeding. Without one, however, means Devastation did nothing wrong.