This part is fucking bothering me so much. You used that primary character all the way into Grand Finals and you’re worry about ONE matchup being showed while all your other
matches were showed all ready?!
If one person goes to their secondary; more power to them. If both of them change;
yeah so we’re not gonna agree no matter what. I have no problem with guys picking secondary teams/characters in GF or at any point in the tournament. they paid their entry fee like everyone else. I also have zero problem with people switching to secondaries to put on a show, like MOV with Ken or Justin with Dan. to me that’s all fair game.
the thing is too - this shit happens all the time in smaller tournaments and no one cares. at Rusty Parry Sanchez played an Alex SA1 mirror for fun early in the tournament. it wasn’t grand finals but these dudes were clearly friends and obviously having a good time. or I’ll play C/K/Y/M on a rotation locally and no one gets upset. no one feels the disrespect that I didn’t play Chun the whole time. it’s not intended that way and no one is bothered. my first post obviously ruffled some feathers but it seems pretty straightforward to me - this is a majors/stream/“FGC” thing and not a universal tournament thing.
also from the character of some of these posts, there seems to be a fundamental divide on one simple question: do the best players owe something to everyone else? do they owe anything to the other players, or the TOs, or to the streamers, or to the people watching? couched behind some of these long paragraphs of text I think that is the big question being addressed.
I guess I just don’t see a pot split as BS. Once you earn a spot in GF, it is your match to do with as you will. Obviously playing against your BROTHER who is going to be very familiar with the matchup, you are going to be more concerned about what people might learn from watching.
Nobody EVER owes a SPECTATOR ANYTHING.
Are the players who have already lost owed something? Who cares, they lost already, what could they possibly want? They are SPECTATORS from that point on. They are LUCKY to be allowed to watch. All of this shit is putting the cart before the horse.
@crabe Just because you made it in GF doesn’t mean go fuck around. The pot split can be done after the match but everyone came to SEE you do your best against everyone.
That includes the guy that won loser finals.
You should really drop that brother example, like seriously.
I dont get why these colluders(ugh) have to pick weak teams in the finals. Just be like pro wrestlers and go out there and give people a show, then meet up later and split your money. Everybody wins.
Eh…If you want to potsplit at a weekly tournament, no big deal. Some of those run til the wee hours of the night. I can understand people just being tired by then and wanting to no play the thing. Deciding to split the pot at a major tournament I can see too.
Completely fucking up the finals of a major tournament because you decided to split the pot and then ruining a nice experience for everybody…I mean, how fucking stupid could you possibly be? All they had to do was play it out completely, TO gets a finals like he wanted and then they can split once everything is settled. You know FGC dudes are a whole new level of dumb because they don’t just do that.
Nobody’s saying that you can’t split the pot. Just do so without making a sham of the grand finals.
And as Preppy has stated, it’s all about RESPECT. Colluding, more specifically making a sham of the GFs shows a flat out lack of respect to everyone involved. It shows that you don’t care about anyone involved. Not the players, many of whom may have traveled long distances at great cost to compete. Not the organizers who are most likely shelling out of their own pockets and taking a loss just to have the event. Not the spectators (either at the event or on stream) who, whether you like it or not, actually help keep these things alive with the money they bring in. At this point you might as well say that you DON’T GIVE A FUCK about the community in general so you might as well just quit and get the fuck out.
Not like your colluding ass is gonna be making any money in majors anyway, what with the new rules.
So first it’s “nobody is saying you can’t split the pot,” but then you post that rule? And if nobody cares if you split the pot then why isn’t it understandable that you would not want to use your main team against someone who you play all the time?
Why do people keep on thinking everyone is mad about pot splitting? No one has an issue with that.
There’s nothing wrong with you OR the other guy playing your secondary team. Now, if you AND your opponent BOTH use your secondary team; mostly
everyone will think something is up.
If you ain’t gonna play your match like you mean it, may as well do a no show and get dq’d. It’s the same shit from a tournament perspective. You can still switch characters or play secondaries like you still mean it (counter-picking for example), but it’s obvious when guys are just fucking around. Ultimately it’s a judgement call on the TO’s part but this is a very tight nit and niche community. TO’s aren’t so far removed from the scene to not be able to detect bullshit when they see it.
It’s real easy to see which people here have entered tournaments with actual aspirations to win, TO an event, and/or done anything to help and build the community based on how they feel about this.
Yessss, bingo. I’d been trying to find a way of articulating this succinctly.
Ahh, the infamous STSFN and the age-old debate about it. Should you be out to build up the community, or try to win at all costs?
(For anyone who didnt already know, STSFN is an ooold expression in the fighting game community. It’s an abbreviation of “Save that shit for nationals.” I’m sure you can guess at what it means.)
Is our community better if we share knowledge as much as possible, or is it worse? Is the community better if we carefully guard our secrets, revealing them only as required to seize victory, or is it worse? The former is certainly more warm and welcoming, but there’s definitely something exciting about the arms-race spy-wars dynamic as well, with the quiet hype of tension in the face of the unknown, and the surprises that can come out of it. And when we say “better”, do we mean better for the players (in the present), or better for the spectators (which could arguably also be better for the players in the long run)? There are a lot of questions worth asking, and I honestly do believe that there’s a good argument to be made for both sides of this issue.
To connect ideas: If the two finalist players split the grand finals as a longer-term strategic metagame decision, the statement they are both essentially making is: “This tournament is unimportant compared to (a larger) one down the road.” If you put aside all money talk, this is functionally the same as if both players were to independently try and throw the match to each other… and we cannot reliably create rulings that differentiate between a two-sided match-throwing and a both-players-agreed-upon-it collusion.
(( If we’re talking about pot-splitting in the grand finals, “collusion” seems like a bit of a misnomer, seems to be missing the heart of the matter. Collusion is when any player intentionally underperforms to help another player progress through the bracket and/or win the tournament. The problem with splitting in grand finals is that neither player cares who wins! ))
Is intentionally throwing a tournament match for strategic considerations beyond the scope of that tournament right or wrong? Well I don’t know!!!
Remember in this case, the key is that a player throwing the match is still playing to win, but has made the conscious decision that he is playing to win in the bigger picture. We call this sandbagging. Lots of people sandbag in casuals to give themselves a leg up in a money match or tournament. Some people will throw a small money match to help them beat someone in a tournament later… or vice versa: throwing a tournament match to help them beat someone in a money match afterwards! Can we criticize someone for throwing a local tourney to help them win a major? Can we criticize someone for throwing a major to help them win Evo? (For the record, I don’t think that any top players are throwing majors to help them win anything bigger, but what I’m doing here is following an idea to its natural extension.)
This manifestation of altruism versus domination (ie., amassing and holding power, or at least making a bid for power, which we advocate as “playing to win”), as philosophically opposing courses of action, can manifest in any area of human competition and obviously predates the fighting game community. On one of Aris’ first Tekken podcasts, his guest (another strong player) brought up The Prince, a treatise on political strategy written by an Italian diplomat named Niccolò Machiavelli, where he asserts that showing anyone how to do what you can do is essentially training them to bump you off: they will absorb your lessons, add their own learnings to it, and potentially surpass you. Aris and his guest had a short but honest discussion about the merits of this approach. To be clear: like it or not, if you’re trying to win, there ARE merits to this approach.
By default, though, my sympathies always tend to rest with the (good) tournament organizers, because no matter how hard a player thinks he’s been training in his video game, the TO’s have put in more (and more real) work, and (in our grassroots community) generally without hope of turning a significant profit from those efforts. Assuming the TO’s actually care (and virtually all of them rightfully do), throwing a match at any tournament is disrespectful to its TO’s, regardless of whether or not this showing of disrespect is the intention of the player (which it’s usually not). If I may borrow the parlance of casinos, since I know so many of you like to gamble: In my mind, this may be a case of “dealer wins on a tie.”
I hate for this to boil down to such a crass and unpersonable ultimatum, but at the end of the day, the event belongs to the person who’s running it. If a TO has made his expectations for his tournament clear, and a player doesn’t like those expectations, then that player simply shouldn’t enter that tournament. Easy. Done.
Oh god I’ve created a monster I do not have the time to proofread this
I think it is in the best interest of players to play it out correct if they love their game. It helps everyone - TO wants to keep doing tournaments, other players stay excited, streamer sees you’re doing quality stuff, guys watching at home are like “wow that was really sick, I wanna play that game.” and when it’s for love of the game, I don’t think you ever really see this collusion stuff. any time I can get an audience or local players for 3s, I’m gonna play my best and try to do some sick shit. excite everyone and it only leads to good things for my game. 99.9% of players are gonna feel the same way.
which brings me to something no one has brought up yet - this whole situation is partly caused by people playing games they don’t particularly like for money. So the thought process is like “who cares if I shit up the GF of Marvel 3? it’s an awful game anyway, let’s make my money and go home.” you don’t see this when people are playing games they genuinely are passionate for. it’s an expected side effect when a good chunk of the best players don’t respect the games they’re playing and are only playing them because that’s where the money is.
I think you guys are drawing the line in the wrong place though. there’s a really big difference between “I don’t give a shit about anyone else and am going to make this GF look awful” and “I’m going to play my secondary in GF because I’ll have fun doing it.” at the end of the day these are video games and you shouldn’t be honor-bound to stick with the same character all tournament if you’re not feeling it. do what’s fun and weigh that against any money on the line and if the risk is worth it.
Uh lol no.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to strictly draw the line at “what character are they picking” either (no one is, really), but it’s not rocket science trying to figure out whether people picking alt-teams because they are actually trying a new strategy or because they are screwing around.
please stop doing this. it’s not true and it’s insulting to people who have actually put in work trying to build local communities from scratch. please stop shitting on other people just because they don’t agree with you.
it has been morally righteous in here from the first few posts. “here is the way you are allowed to think and if you deviate you can choke on a fucking dick.” it’s been an unpleasant experience altogether because a collection of people who I usually enjoy talking to or reading their posts are acting pretty unpleasant for no good reason.
seriously. this is not so black and white as some of you are treating it. I’m feeling the exact opposite impression here - from what I’ve experienced the last couple years, I have a hard time imagining that some of you have spent any amount of time recently trying to build small communities where the main factor in getting people to come back every week is “is everyone having fun.” you guys talk about how disrespectful it is to pick secondaries or whatever, and I’m like “where the fuck are these guys playing that this is even a big deal.” it’s so divorced from my own experience I can’t make any sense of it.
I asked if two people picking their secondaries in GF is collusion, more than one person said yes. I’m just using the information I’ve been given.
if you’re saying “the context matters, picking side characters isn’t necessarily shitty” then great, we’re in agreement all along. unless I’m reading this thread all wrong the impression I get is that doing anything but picking your main the whole way through is disrespectful to everyone else involved and they should be DQ’d.
If you support things that damage the scene and ruin hard work I’m gonna shit on you harder because you should know fucking better if do things to try and build the community. You’re fucking worse than the guys who just collude in my eyes.
Theirs a huge fucking difference between picking your secondary because it has a better MU or you’re msin might be figured out and picking your second because you’re a shitthead.
The thing is that much more often than not, both people using “secondaries” (they could be actual secondaries, or characters they’ve never played seriously ever) usually points to collusion of some sort.
And let’s be honest, all of the excuses you could point to as reasons for why both players in GFs happen to not be playing their mains are real stretches compared to the easiest, most likely possibility: they’re colluding. Stuff like “I play him all the time I want to try something different” or “I’m STSFN so I’m not playing my main in GFs even though I did for for most of the tournament” are bullshit excuses 99% of the time.