Wrestlers are entertainers. Nevermind that they are paid professionals. They are in the business of entertainment. I don’t see how it’s at all comparable.
Gamers shouldn’t be compared to pro athletes either. Professional poker players is a better comparison.
No. They’re telling you to compete. Do people not read the thread? It’s been established multiple times already that no one is forcing you to strictly play your main. Hell, only 2 post before this, there is a grand finals set between Sako and Ryan Hart show casing multiple character switching.
The decision ultimately comes down to one person, yes. Yes, it’s a grey area with a blurred subjective line. But how often has an incident straddled the line so close that the decision was ever hard to make? They’ve all been obvious as broad daylight so far and even if it’s only effective on those cases, then that’s already a job well done imo. Hell, EVO has had this rule in state as a direct aftermath of the 2004 Soulcalibur II GF and they’ve never had to enforce it even once since then. If we can trust TO’s enough to put on a quality and fair tournament, then we should be able to trust them enough to not abuse said rule and go on personal vendettas with it.
Not to mention the shitstorm and future problems that would occur were a TO to unjustly punish a player. They’re definitely going to take extreme care with their decisions. No TO wants that kind of heat.
So instead of pro-wrestling, let’s take a look at my favorite non-electronic sporting genre - motorsports. Every year, organizations s F1, ACO (Le Mans), DTM, etc. spend tons of time and money figuring out how to make the racing exciting either by limiting the cars or adding new rules. Heck, NASCAR gets around this simply by making sure that their cars are all made the same way (with the same general engine specs and same shape and aero) and only just look like real road cars. Why is this? Because exciting races not only bring in more viewers, but they also keep people interested in the sport. It’s this same reason that “collusion” is also looked down upon in motorsports. Just look at how Martin Truex Jr. was removed from the Championship Chase after they found out that his teammate Clint Bowyer spun on purpose to help give Truex the win and the final chase berth. For Formula 1, remember “crashgate” from 2008’s Singapore GP, where Renault’s Nelson Piquet Jr. crashed (on orders from the team as he admitted later on) to bring out the safety car and allow teammate Fernando Alonso a chance to put early and go out in front. Upon Piquet coming out that his crash was on purpose, F1 management charged Renault in court with interfering with the outcome of the Singapore race (a breach of Article 15c of the International Sporting Code). The result of this was that Renault F1 received a suspended 2 year disqualification and a couple of team heads were outright banned from motorsport for a period of time. And even beyond this, lets not forge F1’s long standing rule against team orders that prevents teams from saying that one driver must allow the other to pass at all times.
In other words, this isn’t just a thing for Pro-Wrestling and/or fighting games. Some of the biggest sporting organizations in the world, heck the biggest form of organized sporting competition in the world (Formula 1) recognizes that it’s important to keep the quality of the competition that’s being broadcast up. At the same time, it’s recognized that any sort of manipulation or shenanigans that could affect the outcome of an event is also recognized as being bad for the sport.
Video discussions relevant to topic
Goto 25m22s (timestamps don’t work with embeds)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcPREGjkkj0#t=25m42s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mio2Br4CEIg
Yes, as I come from a poker background, I guess I have a different idea of collusion than most. Generally at a final table there is always some kind of agreed split. If the tournament isn’t big, things will usually end right there, with everyone walking away and not playing things out. For the WPT and WSOP etc., competitors usually want to play for the title (and are contractually bound to do so), so they leave some of the prize money on the table like splitting 80% of it and playing for the rest. In my opinion, this is how all grand finals splits should be done in the FGC to allow some actual incentive to keep playing. Everybody gets their money and nobody gets cheated out of a final match.
When talking about collusion nowadays, this match and the commentary always com to mind (what Gootecks say when Mago picks Rog, hear the whole thing):
This. Poker has had pot splitting in tournaments for a LONG time, and the amount of collusion at final tables is very low. Why? Because even those degens have the intellect to know that they should play it out.
It’s not just about appeasing TOs, or title, or seeding points. It’s about maintaining integrity of the game.
That’s what I’m talking about. It’s not a sport. I understand some people want it to be one. Some are investing quite a lot in making it into one.
No TO in their right mind wants to be put anywhere near any sort of need to make any sort of call upon this subject. There were obnoxiously clear and evident examples of collusion in the past year that required, for the first time ever in the history of the FGC scene as I know of it, one simple “global” rule put in place to put a check to that very specific and pretty isolated behavior. This isn’t going to affect the general player and it shouldn’t needlessly affect anyone. The final decision should be between the TO and the very suspect competitor, and it should be pretty heartbreaking to need to make that call. This should be a rule of utter last resort.
It does come up in card and board game competitions and has been legislated against:
There’s many further examples, but I feel the point has been firmly made. Generally I would suggest that the only places where collusion are not in place are where there’s no general governing body over the tournament scene and/or no official tournament regulations. For example, Boggle: since there’s no standardized tournament body, there are no standardized rules to refer to. But if you want to run serious international Boggle tournaments, you’d probably steal the spine of the NSA rules (Scrabble) to start with because they’ve already sorted out most of the kinks of running tournament. If you wanted to fuck around with your friends, you wouldn’t worry about it. Context is key.
You’ll again note that this is about the only “global” rule in place in the FGC (most everything else is done ad hoc or cribbed off of other good decisions by other TOs). It’s just a rule of emergency last resort, and should be viewed as such. Nobody is excited about this, but it does at the least give TOs a small tiny hammer to ask people to not fuck around on their time if they feel that they absolutely have to make that request. Hopefully they don’t: it’s an ugly thing to have to need such a rule, and the faster everyone in the entire community can quietly put this behind us with the simple rallying cry of “just play it out!” the happier every last one of us will be.
It’s a competitive environment. So if high ranked players threw matches or underperformed in chess to manipulate tournament results and rankings, people shouldn’t care because it’s not a sport?
In the Summer Olympics I remember some Korean or Chinese Badminton teams lost for losing on purpose and collusion…
Reminder for those who have forgotten/not realized it: CrazyApe and Pops (the brothers in grand finals) openly admitted they were colluding so guess what, this is not even a judgement call. It was already known due to prior warnings (and written in the rules) that collusion would be punished severely. Doing an Izayoi mirror and mashing on taunt is kind of a dick move (they stated they were doing this), but obviously ignorance has to play some kind of role here. Guess what, that’s part of the problem!
The majority (with some exceptions) of these instances of collusion don’t involve parties twirling their evil villain mustaches and plotting on how to collude for some personal gain or detriment to an event. Collusion should still be punished severely even when the parties have no harmful intent. These things happening due to ignorance don’t make it any less damaging. Think about that. There’s very specific things that you must do to make collusion incredibly obvious, to the point that you either lack a fundamental understanding of what a tournament is about, or you had another goal in mind which doesn’t align with the basic set of rules established for a tournament. I personally look forward to seeing the top 2 play in the future, and I’m 100% sure the TO has no hard feelings towards any of them. The TO did the right thing, even if he expressed it unprofessionally. I only wish there was a ShinSyn around for every tournament where people think collusion is funny/cool/a good idea.
I feel that manipulating tournament results (losing on purpose so your opponent can advance for example) is different from the phenomenon of “staged grand finals,” which is what this thread was originally discussing.
Still you can bet the organizers of chess tournaments do not give a fuck about making a made-for-youtube presentable product. They know damn well nobody is watching. The NASCAR example is a terrible one because that’s a made-for-tv product.
In the world’s top 10 there is no collusion and throwing tournaments nowadays. Maybe during the Soviet Union days there was. Everyone now wants that top spot in chess. USA’s Nakamura is now world’s #3
I don’t know why I’m spending the first hours of 2014 arguing about this but…
This is not just about giving spectators a show or making something presentable for a TV/stream audience. It’s also about showing some respect to the people who put their time into the event, including players and TOs. Let’s not forget that.
Wow.
Moron detected. Please leave this thread so the big boys can discuss big boy matters.
Uhhhh, this is completely untrue. Chess tournaments have been popular for a long time in European countries and China. They are becoming even more popular now with livestreams of most top tournaments and the rise of Magnus Carlsen. You think they pull $3million prize pools out of their asses? Lots of people are watching.
It’s really fucking simple. Fucking around and sandbagging in grand finals is being a disrespectful dickhead. When is it okay to be a disrespectful dickhead? Never. Discussion over.
thanks for the reasonable and thought out response. just want to make sure I am understanding, so I’ll go back to my favorite example. Does MOV picking a side character in GF of 25th anniversary count as intentionally underperforming? since we know it’s definitely not his main character, he picked Chun the rest of the way, and then picked Ken at the end presumably to put on a show.
if no one has a problem with that then I doubt we have much in the way of disagreement on this.