Random does not favor anybody. What you get is what you get. As opposed to final round where Marn, Justin, Evil Rashaan and other people who were written into the brackets with a nice red pen so you could see that they were being purposefully separated.
While you are 100% correct, there is unfortunately no chance of getting your point across to ‘community’ tournament organizers. They will always play favorites because of the insular nature of the fighting game community. The best we can hope for is that a more detached, professional outfit like MLG will eventually incorporate SF4 and seed their tournaments randomly.
Lets please not open the Pandora’s Box that is MLG.
Oxymoron.
Random is dumb as fuck, unless its some kind of small local or no prize tourney it doesn’t matter but when moneys on the line its pretty dumb. Nobody that actually participates in tourneys wants random. I wonder if the people favoring it are just spectators or scrubs.
As BlackShinobi said location is number one priority in seeding, winners will win regardless, but location is one of the most optimal ways to do it. Its fair for everyone and ensures players will actually have some fun or learn something new.
I am a tournament organizer…
I think pure random is only acceptable if the tournament is single elimination. If it’s double elimination, meaning you are more concerned with the placings besides first, I think you should try to distribute the skilled players evenly throughout the bracket so some bum doesn’t get an easy ride to 20% of the pot.
Really though, I don’t care that much if some big name gets outted early, but don’t expect to not hear people complain about it.
Somebody needs to give a really nice explanation as to how tournaments are held for the learning experience as opposed to the competition. Casuals are a learning experience. Practicing for the tournament is a learning experience. Tournaments are to put the stuff you learned to good use and win. I don’t know a single person that went to a tournament to learn something; I do know a bunch (including myself) that ended up learning many things at the tournament. But never have I gone a tournament with the intention of learning something (correction, entered a tournament once just to see how a format worked).
The learning process in a tournament is not the main goal of the tournament, stop trying to make a competition into a feel good place. Fuck, no wonder we need J.D. to make posts about top level mentality when the discussion on pairings is backed by “ZOMG i played my neighbor” and “I learned something today.”
I play in tourney to learn, so you can add me to the list.
Sure I PLAY to win, but I go to learn and to become a better player.
I know that I have a near zero chance of making it out of my bracket in a major, but I still go because I learn something really important at every tourney I attend.
This is true for me and probably 90% of pot monsters if they are being honest with themselves.
Sure, you can tell yourself “I’m here to win!” but if you have never made it out of your bracket at a major before, then you know damn well that you are likely not to even place top 3.
And before you rant and rave and quote Sirlin at me, I’m fine with my attitude. I am a dedicated player and I get better every single month that I play, I just don’t fill my own head with hot air about my chances.
Enter a tourney to learn, play to win.
pertho you don’t learn through tournament play? thats one of the best trials by fire out there.
I don’t need to quote Sirlin. But really, the reason why a lot of people don’t care about how pairings go is because they have a defeatist attitude about their place in a tourney. I wouldn’t bet me over 95% of the people on SRK on a money match. There’s a lot of things that I need to learn to get the same level of skill I had with M:TG to be present with fighting games. But at the same time, if you are not going to a tournament to win, don’t bother showing up. You go to a tournament, do your best and call it a day. I’ll go to a tournament, get the same jitters regardless of who I play and do my best whatever that is at that moment.
I don’t think I can emphasize this enough “tournaments are not for learning, they are for competing.” Anything that can jeopardize the integrity of a tournament is not worth doing; which is why random pairings are so important.
“Enter a tourney to learn, play to win.” I mean no offense by this but this is probably one of the better examples for “you’re doing it wrong.”
It’s interesting that nobody seems to want to talk about what happened at Final Round. I suppose that’s an indictment of how common it is for organizers to seed based on status and play favorites at the pool. It’s expected at this point.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this.
you in the right here. just because you are in a tourney doesn’t mean that you cant learn something. as a matter of fact a bigger tourney (with a much more diverse amount of players and playstyles) means that there’s MORE to learn, both in the tourney matches and in casuals surrounding the event.
um… i play in tournaments to learn. because it’s not like i’m going with the idea that i’m going to win (i go thinking i’m gonna get in dat ass, but when i am still struggling to not go 2 and out i don’t need to be thinking about winning the entire tourney). playing to learn is very liberating, i don’t have to stress about how much money is on the line, because for me there is none. and fyi i know of a lot of other players just like me here in norcal.
Read my post above. I have learned a lot in my tournament play for all the games I have participated in tournament play for: M:TG, poker, fighting games etc. But learning is not the reason I go to tournaments. On the contrary, learning for me usually means that I did not practice as well or as thoroughly as I should have and something new came up. This is the situation that you want to avoid when you go to a tournament. Surprises are not your friend when you go to a tournament (this is something I have been on both ends of). But you take your lumps and deal with it.
Seeding is actually fair for everybody.
Random means you will have to deal with 3 top players on the way to the semi finals and your friend will have to deal with none.
If you use seeding everyone will have the same difficulty of reaching those semi finals.
I’m not asking this to flame you, or set you up for a flaming, or anything like that.
But I would like to know: How long have you been going to FG tourneys? How many tourneys? How have you done?
I’m trying to understand the context of your view on this whole “don’t play to learn, play only to win” issue.
These arguments about whether or not you go to a tournament to learn are a distraction from the main subject because tournament organizers aren’t playing favorites at the pool to turn their tournament into a learning experience.
Honestly, how seeding should be done is not an exact science, it really needs a lot of discretion based on the event you are holding. For instance, if you hold a small weekly tournament or something with locals only, random seeding makes perfect sense. Seeding would just result in the same matchups over and over again, so it gives it a nice variety in a semi-casual environment. Stepping it up a bit, a small gathering with a few out of town-ers held once every other month or so might merit regional seeding, to give the people who traveled a chance to do exactly what they came for; an opportunity to play some new blood. As tournaments get larger, with bigger payouts, a larger variety of competition and being held less often, seeding based on skill makes more and more sense as gaps in player skill become more apparent. That said, seeding in an environment like the fighting game community, where new blood can constantly filter in, this can become trickier.
Also Pertho, I see your point, but ALL playtime should be considered a learning experience. Of course in a tourney, your #1 priority should be winning, but for new blood and for people who just aren’t that great, the end goal of a tournament doesn’t have to be to win it. I know I have entered well over half the tournaments I have with no expectation to actually win, but rather just to draw from the experiences to put myself into a situation where next time I do have the skills and experiences I need. I joined to learn, especially about things that aren’t directly related to the games at hand. Things like playing in front of a crowd doesn’t sound like it’d be a whole lot different, but it’s a very real problem for some people, and no amount of casual play can get you that experience. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you or anyone else should join a tournament with the expectation to lose, going in with that mentality makes the experience nearly pointless.
Fighting game tournaments started last year. Involved with a competitive scene in Magic: The Gathering for 10 years until a series of unfortunate events made it so I had to quit. I’ve been in pretty much all sides of a tourney in that aspect: playing, setting up tournament site, judging, running brackets for single elimination and swiss (tournament style for M:TG where players go through a set number of rounds and the best records make it to top 8). For that, I was playing weekly tournaments 2-3 times a week plus random playing online, reading blah. I was knee deep into that bitch, heh.