Playing to Win, Part 1
SirlinI wrote this article many years ago. It was so widely quoted and valuable to so many that I spent two years writing the book Playing to Win. The book is far more polished than these articles, better organized, and covers many, many additional topics not found on my site. If you have any interest in the process of self-improvement through competitive games, the book will serve you better than the articles.
Playing to Win, Part 1
Playing to win is the most important and most widely misunderstood concept in all of competitive games. The sad irony is that those who do not already understand the implications I'm about to spell out will probably not believe them to be true at all. In fact, if I were to send this article back in time to my earlier self, even I would not believe it. Apparently, these concepts are something one must come to learn through experience, though I hope at least some of you will take my word for it.
Introducing...the Scrub
In the world of Street Fighter competition, there is a word for players who aren't good: "scrub." Everyone begins as a scrub---it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you're doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or "learn" the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the "scrub" has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He's lost the game before he's chosen his character. He's lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.
;)
Historical Scrub: Neville Chamberlain. He didn't even try to win, instead offering "appeasement" to Hitler. (Caution: not serious historical commentary.)The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations "cheap." So-called "cheapness" is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn't attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design--it's meant to be there--yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield which will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.
You're not going to see a classic scrub throw his opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize his chances of winning? Here we've encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you...that's cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that's cheap, too. We've covered that one. If you sit in block for 50 seconds doing no moves, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.
Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is another great way to get called cheap. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can't counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn't I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of "honor" or of "cheapness." The game only knows winning and losing.
A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is "boring" or "not fun." Let's consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play "for fun" and not explore the extremities of the game. They won't find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they'll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use his counter and he's again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic. (See my article on Yomi layer 3 for much more on that.)
Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the "cheap stuff" and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it's unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.
;)
Historical Scrubs: The British Redcoats. The ultimate example of being too bound up by rules to actually fight. They fought "honorably" in a row. (Caution: not serious historical commentary.). Let's return to the group of scrubs. They don't know the first thing about all the depth I've been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more "fun." Superficially, their argument does at least look true, since often their games will be more "wet and wild" than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn't nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent's mind to such a degree that you can counter his ever move, even his every counter.
Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they've either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.
The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about "skill" and how he has skill whereas other players--very much including the ones who beat him flat out--do not have skill. The confusion here is what "skill" actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is sequence of moves that are unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take "skill," according to the scrub. The "dragon punch" or "uppercut" in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a "skill move." Just last week I played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with "no skill moves" while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him 5 times in a row asking, "is that all you know how to do? throw?" I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, "Play to win, not to do ˜difficult moves.'" This was a big moment in that scrub's life. He could either write his losses off and continue living in his mental prison, or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.
I've never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves. I've also never seen a prize for a player who played "in an innovative way." Many scrubs have strong ties to "innovation." They say "that guy didn't do anything new, so he is no good." Or "person x invented that technique and person y just stole it." Well, person y might be 100 times better than person x, but that doesn't seem to matter. When person y wins the tournament and person x is a forgotten footnote, what will the scrub say? That person y has "no skill" of course.
Depth in Games
Scrub of the Future: Captain Kathryn Janeway. Voyager would have been home ages ago if it weren't for her silly rules. (Caution: Voyager is a bad show.)
I've talked about how the expert player is not bound by rules of "honor" or "cheapness" and simply plays to maximize his chances of winning. When he plays against other such players, "game theory" emerges. If the game is a good one, it will become deeper and deeper and more strategic. Poorly designed games will become shallower and shallower. This is the difference between a game that lasts years (StarCraft, Street Fighter) versus one that quickly becomes boring (I won't name any names). The point is that if a game becomes "no fun" at high levels of play, then it's the game's fault, not the player's. Unfortunately, a game becoming less fun because it's poorly designed and you just losing because you're a scrub kind of look alike. You'll have to play some top players and do some soul searching to decide which is which. But if it really is the game's fault, there are plenty of other games that are excellent at a high level of play. For games that truly aren't good at a high level, the only winning move is not to play.
Boundaries of Playing to Win
There is a gray area here I feel I should point out. If an expert does anything he can to win, then does he exploit bugs in the game? The answer is a resounding yes...but not all bugs. There is a large class of bugs in video games that players don't even view as bugs. In Marvel vs. Capcom 2, for example, Iceman can launch his opponent into the air, follow him, do a few hits, then combo into his super move. During the super move he falls down below his opponent, so only about half of his super will connect. The Iceman player can use a trick, though. Just before doing the super, he can do another move, an icebeam, and cancel that move into the super. There's a bug here which causes Iceman to fall during his super at the much slower rate of his icebeam. The player actually cancels the icebeam as soon as possible--optimally as soon as 1/60th of a second after it begins. The whole point is to make Iceman fall slower during his super so he gets more hits. Is it a bug? I'm sure it is. It looks like a programming oversight to me. Would an expert player use this? Of course.
The iceman example is relatively tame. In Street Fighter Alpha2, there's a bug in which you can land the most powerful move in the game (a Custom Combo or "CC") on the opponent, even when he should be able to block it. A bug? Yes. Does it help you win? Yes. This technique became the dominant tactic of the game. The gameplay evolved around this, play went on, new strategies were developed. Those who cried cheap were simply left behind to play their own homemade version of the game with made-up rules. The one we all played had unblockable CCs, and it went on to be a great game.
But there is a limit. There is a point when the bug becomes too much. In tournaments, bugs that turn the game off, or freeze it indefinitely, or remove one of the characters from the playfield permanently are banned. Bugs so extreme that they stop gameplay are considered unfair even by non-scrubs. As are techniques that can only be performed on, say, the player-1 side of the game. Tricks in fighting games that are side-dependent (that is, they can only be performed by the 2nd player or only by the first player) are sometimes not allowed in tournaments simply because both players don't have equal access to the trick--not because the tricks are too powerful.
Here's an example that shows what kind of power level is past the limit even of Playing to Win. Many versions of Street Fighter have secret characters that are only accessible through a code. Sometimes these characters are good, sometimes they're not. Occasionally, the secret characters are the best in the game, as in Marvel vs. Capcom. Big deal. That's the way that game is. Live with it. But the first version of Street Fighter to ever have a secret character was Super Turbo Street Fighter with its untouchably good Akuma. Most characters in that game cannot beat Akuma. I don't mean it's a tough match--I mean they cannot ever, ever, ever, ever win. Akuma is "broken" in that his air fireball move is something the game simply wasn't designed to handle. He's miles above the other characters, and is therefore banned in all US tournaments. But every game has a "best character" and those characters are never banned. They're just part of the game...except in Super Turbo. It's extreme examples like this that even amongst the top players, and even something that isn't a bug, but was put in on purpose by the game designers, the community as a whole has unanimously decided to make the rule: "don't play Akuma in serious matches."
Sometimes players from other gaming communities don't understand the Akuma example. "Would not a truly committed player play Akuma anyway?" they ask. Akuma is a boss character, never meant to be played on even ground with the other characters. He's only accessible via an annoying, long code. Akuma is not like a tower in an RTS that is accidentally too powerful or a gun in an FPS that does too much damage. Akuma is a god-mode that can't coexist with the rest of the game. In this extreme case, the community's only choices were to ban or to abandon the game because of a secret character that takes really long to even select. They chose to ban the secret character and play the remaining good game. If you are playing to win, you should play the game everyone else is playing, not the home-made Akuma vs. Akuma game that no one plays.
My Attitude and Adenosine Triphosphate
I've been talking down to the scrub a lot in this article. I'd like to say for the record that I'm not calling the scrub stupid, nor did I even coin that term in the first place. I'm not saying he can never improve. I am saying that he's naive and that he'll be trapped in scrubdom, whether he realizes it or not, as long as he chooses to live in the mental construct of rules he himself constructed. Is it harsh to call scrubs naive? After all, the vast majority of the world is scrubs. I'd say by the definition I've classified 99.9% of the world's population as scrubs. Seriously. All that means is that 99.9% of the world doesn't know what it's like to play competitive games on a high level. It means that they are naive of these concepts. I really have no trouble saying that since we're talking about experience-driven knowledge here that most people on Earth happen not to have. I also know that 99.9% of the world (including me) doesn't know how the citric acid cycle and cellular respiration create approximately 30 ATP molecules per cycle. It's specialized knowledge of which I am unaware, just as many are unaware of competitive games.
;)
Not everyone has to know every subject. This chart is for biologists and Playing to Win is for those who want to win tournaments.
In the end, playing to win ends up accomplishing much more than just winning. Playing to win is how one improves. Continuous self-improvement is what all of this is really about, anyway. I submit that ultimate goal of the "playing to win" mindset is ironically not just to win...but to improve. So practice, improve, play with discipline, and Play to Win.
--Sirlin
Reader Comments (308)
I'm not a tournament caliber SF player, but I was shown the Akuma issue first hand and found it analogous to multiple chapters in Magic the Gathering history (Academy decks, Fluctuator combo, Memory Jar- Megrim, Arcbound Ravager, and more recently Jace the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic).
All those decks in Magic caused the whole metagame to regress into play it and coin flip or lose to the fact that other decks at the time were inferior by a chasm wide margin.
Academy, Fluctuator and Memory Jar in their respective areas received an emergency ban. Arcbound Ravager shifted the paradigm Wizards R/D used for making cards and Jace the Mind Sculptor was a play me or lose to me card in decks during its era. (Numerous events at the Pro level for Magic had decks in the top 8 where all of them had 4 Jace the Mind Sculptor in common.)
It's actually not analogous to those MTG examples, it's much, much worse. This further illustrates that I think the real problem is people do not understand the order of magnitude here. In the MTG examples, some game designer somewhere thought that those cards were maybe ok, printed them, and it turned out they were too good and dominated the metagame. By contrast, no one at any point thought Akuma was ok. He was intentionally created to be an unfair boss character, and at no point was he ever supposed to be a real part of the game. It's much, much easier to see that he's unacceptable with even 5 minutes of play than it would be know about those MTG cards. You'd have to hold tournaments and look at the results to know if the MTG things were a problem. Imagine if a cheat code was found in Starcraft to give you infinite money and the map hack, or something. You don't really need to hold tournaments with that to know it's outside of the competitive game.
I see the difference more clearly now, thank you for your reply.
Your article was a very, very interesting read.
I could hardly understand if someone had a different opinion regarding that matter, this just all makes sense.
This might be old (yet still true, set in stone IMO), but I still wish to thank you.
All Points Bulletin players should really consider reading this, hell GAMERS should read that.
...Playing to Win is for those who want to win tournaments.
Sirlin, I really feel like this is the most important part of the article because it provides context for the rest of the arguments. Had you more heavily or more explicitly emphasized WIN TOURNAMENTS in the article proper (and maybe you do in the book) the ST Akuma ordeal could have easily been avoided.
To wit: "Why not employ strategy X?"
- Strategy X is tournament banned
- Employing strategy X gets you disqualified
- You cannot when while DQ'ed
:. Employing strategy X is not playing to win (the tournament)
Whether or not the ban on strategy X is justified seems to be outside the scope of the article. After all, the article seems to be addressed to players who want to win tournaments -- players who ostensibly have to abide by the rules of the tournament in order to have a chance at winning, no matter how arbitrary the rules and regardless of the players' personal agreement.
After looking though years of posts, I think the "Akuma" issue can be broken down simply as this. Think about Rock, Paper, Scissors. Now add Dynamite to the Game. Dynamite destroys everything but Scissors has a 5% chance of cutting off the wick before it explodes. That's what Akuma is to Street Fighter 2 Turbo
Interesting article overall though it seems to mostly devoted to the standard tournament of different games and excludes quite a lot of plays. We all in the end play games for fun, sure winning is the goal but who disagrees with the idea that it is better to lose in a game you like than win in a game you don't?
For example I have played Starcraft a lot over the years and while I normally play the standard tournaments sometimes me and a group of people agree on several rules and see what comes out of it. Why? Variety. It is impressive what from time to time comes out of those matches when the rules are completely different, some are completely stupid others are the things that we remember as awesome for years.
I have played games with very strict no rush time miminum. In some units were sent just before it ended and time it so that they arrive at the exact second others were left to some chance instead and try to rush certain units by taking advantage of the non attack time.
Or games like Dota using the random heroes, only heroes of a cerrtain atribute, only ranged heroes or no life steal.
Or in games like CS the no camping rule, there is nothing wrong about camping but it gets annoying when you have 2 people with lots of patience doing it for a long time instead of all playes playing several games.
One learns more about any game by deliberately limiting yourself from certain aspects of it forcing you to figure out new counters to certain strategies and in the process creating new strategies someone else will have to create a counter to.
In the end what I personally call(feel free to object) difference between a player* and a scrub is that the latter plays a game a few times, states a rule and never deviates from it. The former however plays a game for months, years with a myriad of people, characters, weapons, scenarios, etc and using different rules from time to time. Then after all that this player decides what allows the most different possibilities in play and those rules become the standard. There is off course always games with different rules but that is simply part of any decent game.
It is in short bias that is the difference beween a player and a scrub. Not something as arbitrary as so many mentioned before.
*I call player instead of expert because to be an expert you need to put in time and effort. I for example while playing fighting games in general from time to time will always lose to someone who pulls out all stops because if it comes to a decision between say Street Figher or Starcraft I will always put the effort in the latter. Which inevitably means that between me and an expert I will lose in a normal game if there are 'scrub rules' in place however things can be fairer, not because anything is cheap but because otherwise he might as well call someone else to play because the result is pretty much fixed.
Lastly when teaching someone a game it is better to do it in steps so the person can see progress even meaningless progress is still better than improving a lot but not noticing because you still can't hit the other.
His whole "No Akuma" rule he describes is remarkably simple, the guy describing the rock paper scissors analogy is rather close to the mark.
It's not arbitrary because it fundamentally BREAKS THE GAME.
The people debating this are arguing "well based on your logic, if you want to Play to Win, you should pick Akuma!"
The other side of the coin though is "If you want to Play to Win, you'd be an IDIOT to NOT pick Akuma!"
Ergo, everybody playing to win should always pick Akuma.
In conclusion, all matches should be "Akuma vs. Akuma"
Since people don't want to end up playing "Akuma Fighter II: Hyper Akuma Edition", and the variety of champions and skill sets is a fundamental design aspect of the game, then as a rule, people ban Akuma.
And this doesn't apply to moves, since they (generally) aren't a guarantee, no matter how cheap they might seem. So long as there exists some kind of a "counter" to something, no matter HOW obscure, then it's not a guaranteed win.
re: Mag
Sirlin addresses all those things in the book. In short, to learn and teach it is very useful to add rules to focus on one aspect of the game. However, there aren't any FPS tournaments (that I know of) that institute a "no camping" rule and there aren't any RTS tournaments (that I know of) that institute a "no rush" rule, so you're playing to learn the real game, but you're certainly not going to win any tournaments only playing with house rules (since there aren't any tournaments with those house rules).
Games are games and they are all about fair play. If you cant win fair, you shoudnt play anyway and better running around doing crimes and going to jail for it.
Thats what cheaters are, criminals in mind, without the "balls" to play it real. IF they get the chance, they will do the same shit in RL.
If i see ppl in games, which cant pllay a fair game, i know, they are evil ppl and you should never ever trust them.
Ppl with honor would never abuse a disadventage of their enemy and that ppl i can respect.
All other will always stay loser, no matter how often they "win".
I must say... I mostly agree. I was concerned about TRULY game-breaking exploits which hurt competition (and are therefore banned in competitive environments such as tournaments), but you somewhat covered that later on in the article.
Hey Sirlin,
I have a great deal of respect for your previous work, this article is very topical for another game right now. Perhaps your assessment of comp rules for Tribes Ascend could give us some insight of weather Tribes Comp players are scrubs or not. I will describe key rules changes from the default play mechanics.
Overview:
TribesA is a shooter game and has 9 classes in 3 weight categories (light medium heavy), CTF gameplay, 7v7 is the common tourney size.
Special Comp Bans:
Infiltrator (Invis character) Banned weapons: Smoke (instant restealth), Jackal (one shot kills mediums + air juggle)
Sentinel (Sniper character can typically 2 shot a flag runner): team limit of 2. (no team limits for other classes)
Base Upgrades (which make base assets tougher and more effective): Banned.
By contrast, none of these restrictions are present in regular pickup play, everything is available without special codes, and infact, base upgrades are largely essential and expected for defense in normal play. Noone would ever call you cheap for upgrading your base turrets!
There are other rules, but I wanted your insight on these. There has been a LOT of discourse on them being arbitrary and scrubby.
What is your assessment? Comp players typically say that Instant recloaking character that can oneshot a medium is "Akuma" but since base assets can't be upgraded, he can focus on players at will.
Reference:
Here's a thread on the Smoke Grenade.
http://forum.hirezstudios.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=313&t=70168&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=banned
"Mabel" is one of the biggest comp players, I'm sure he could give you another perspective.
I know nothing about these games, but if I may, I don't think the Akuma thing has anything to do with scale or anything else you're trying to argue. People came to a consensus about not playing Akuma because he's so overpowered, of course. But the reason you don't play him and it's not being a scrub is because you all AGREED not to play him. If you all agreed not to use throws, that would be exactly the same. Your reasons for doing so might not be as strong, but it's not intrinsically worse or better. The game could be better or worse or more fun or less fun or require more or less expertise with the removal of a particular element; there's no universal truth that says "the way the game was meant to be played plus minor bugs is always best". Being a scrub is playing with your own imaginary rules, it's different than playing by the rules you've all agreed to. Being a scrub is calling something legal cheap, instead of using it or just playing in competitions where it's illegal instead.
Telanis, the reasoning you've presented is not correct. There really is a very large material difference in "the reason to not play Akuma is that he is literally game-breaking and because of that, the community universally rejects him" and "the reason not to use throws is that the community rejects them." Those are really, really different. Like not even remotely similar.
In the example about throws, it's the hypothetical community itself that is "scrubby" there. There definitely do exist communities exactly like that, and I bet people could several such examples. Things where a community is just off the rails for some game and bans things for no real reason because they don't understand the concept of playing to win, basically. By contrast, when a community bans a thing that actually breaks a game and seriously and legitimately does prevent that game from having any actual gameplay or strategy, then that is not "scubby." It's more "necessary."
I can't believe you've had this poor guy explaining the same thing for three years.
Its simple - Akuma is SO powerful in ST that the only way to compete with him is to also pick Akuma. The community at the time of his discovery had a choice: either all competitive matches become Akuma vs Akuma, or everyone agrees not to pick him and you keep the rest of the game intact. I can't see how anyone can fail to understand why people collectively decided that the second option was the better one.
I actually agree with everyone who disagrees with Sirlin. Apparently it's "OK" to use glitches, cheats or bugs that were never intentional, but using a character put in by developers not OK? If you ask me, using anything that was not intended by design shouldn't be allowed.
You are being a hypocrite, plain and simple.
Then again, I am simply playing devil's advocate, I play to win, all the time, I don't play by anyone's rules but my own and I refuse to allow any gamer out there to set rules or standards for me that I don't agree with. Like banning Meta Knight from Brawl. You fuck off, I'll do what I want.
Jarman: it's somewhat amazing you can't understand this after it being explained dozens of times for years. Here is your position:
"To not be a hypocrite, ALL things must be allowed. If something crashes the game, it's allowed. If it removes all gameplay it's allowed. If it's slightly strong, it's allowed."
That's a strange positions, insane, strawman I think because no one would ever claim that position. Glitches that halt a match entirely or remove one character from the game should not be allowed by tournament organizers. So practicing them wouldn't really be playing to win, when you know they are banned. If a character is kind of strong, then it shouldn't be banned by tournament organizers. And practicing it is fine. Surely you see the difference? They are hugely different because one is banned and other is not.
Also it should be easy to see that "don't ban stuff for the hell of it" DOES NOT imply that you should ban literally nothing ever. That's a bizzaro argument that you'll have to explain (you can't, it makes no sense). The reason you incorrectly using the word hypocrite is that you wrongly think that A implies B there. You must think that advice to tournament organizers on generally trying not to ban IMPLIES that they should ban nothing ever, even the most extreme and literally game-breaking things. That's clearly wrong. They should ban game breaking things.
Then you might ask what's game breaking. I could say "I have intentionally withheld all examples of game breaking things." That would be a bad answer on my part. Instead, I gave an example of a gamebreaking thing, universally accepted to be gamebreaking and that is rightfully banned. This seems a lot more helpful than no example and it's not "hypocritical." That word means saying one thing and doing another. The situation we're talking about here is there are two categories of things: one super duper rare less than 1% thing where something is so extreme it breaks the game and prevents gameplay or something. The other is the 99% case where something just seems strong. It would defy logic to treat those categories the same. They can't possibly be treated the same. How could they be?
It's frustrating to see anyone manufacture this fake argument at this late date. Please think about how allowing actually broken stuff (not just a bug, but like a cheat to have infinite minerals in Starcraft or something) is something everyone would ban, that should be banned, that is completely consistent with everything said here.
@Jarman. Dude I think you totally missed the point. Those glitches and bugs that are still acceptable in competition are accepted because the game still remains competitive. That means those glitches are not so overwhelmingly powerful that as soon as someone used the glitch, the other person might as well walk off the stage coz they've lost. Akuma, I'm guessing, is much like Jinpachi in tekken 5. Jinpachi is not unlockable by normal means, as in you have to hack the game to play him. He has this move that is easy to do, very fast, unblockable, and stuns you for about 1.5 seconds. During this time, he can keep spamming this move until you die. This is an example of a game-breaking character where as soon as you start playing against him, you can essentially let go of the controller because NOTHING you do can break that stun. Now it's OK for the game to include this boss character since the AI is not programmed to spam that stun move, but if it was against a human opponent who had half a brain, obviously they would just keep using that move. That would make for a very boring and uncompetitive game. So in other words:
- Glitches/bugs that don't break the game - accepted
- Glitches that give unfair advantage to one side and/or breaks the game - banned
- Extremely overpowered boss characters not even AVAILABLE on the select screen - banned
It's not that hard to grasp the concept.
Years later and were still debating about Akuma? Play the character if you want too, but if you get into a tournament and your not allowed to use him anyway, who's fault is that? Yours for not looking up the rules of the game you signed up for. You can complain all you want that something's unfair, but just like pool, there are different variations of the game played using the same equipment.
To be honest it seems like the scrubs got a hold of what "sounded" like a loop-hole in your logic Sirlin, and tried to nullify the whole thing. You called it from the start, people aren't going to see it. I myself have felt some or all of the problems mentioned in this article and look forward to the book someday soon. I hope there's something in there about sportsmanship, because sometimes it's hard for me to lay in that death blow. Especially if it's going to be a frag kill.. lol
Hello, sir. Your comments on how to win have inspired me very much. I am a "heavy" gamer. I play everything competitively. I do have a question, though. Have you ever played Pokemon? In Gen 4, Garchomp was declared Uber (or too broken for OU (which is the standard tier in Pokemon)). The reasons were because he could easily kill everything in sight. There were a few counters, but they were very few, and very ineffective after a point. I'm talking the whole community, not just a few people. It's obviously broken in the Pokemon game itself, but doesn't this count as scrubbiness? You may have to do a bit of research, because I didn't explain this very well...
I have a question about Yu-Gi-Oh!
Isn't that ban list with cards (most from First Turn Kill strategies) considered scrubness? Like, I know that sometimes the FTK MAY look unfair but it depends on luck at most cases and if you don't get the right cards on the first turn, you will probably need to play normal. Additionally, if your opponent has some info about you, ofc he will try to counter your move (which depends on luck too).
Nice article. Took some time to read but I decided to not be a "scrub" at some games anymore.
Spire, ygoo, I can't speak to the specific cases you're talking about. The point is just that if something is claimed too good, that like 99% of the time it's not. But that doesn't mean the claim is wrong for sure, sometimes a thing really is too good. Sometime it really ruins the game and makes an otherwise good game kind of not possible to play. ST Akuma is a great example of that unusual case where it really is over the line and the entire community knows it, and it's not even a disputed thing. "The rocket launcher" in Quake 3 would be a case where it's just a good weapon, not some broken thing. Sometimes there are harder cases like Metaknight in Smash where it's probably over the line and probably better to ban but people still disagree. It's entirely possible that your examples really are over the line and that good tournaments would decide to ban those things, but I don't know enough about the specifics to comment either way.
I just wanted to point out that it sounds like Akuma is like Master hand in super smash bros melee.
You can play as him, but you need several controllers to even select him.
Master hand is of course banned in tournaments because he can't die.
So basically, "playing to win" means "be a dick, because fuck everybody else". I didn't read all of the comments, only about 2 pages of them, but this article still annoyed me immensely. The whole time I was reading it I was thinking "Well, this guy is an idiot and he is clearly contradicting himself."
Just got an email from someone who commented somewhere on this page, but they basically said, "playing to win" means "be a dick, because fuck everybody else".
Okay, first off everyone's best character in a game can potentially be different.
Second off, if your a dick, your a dick anyway...
If you can't be good without having good sportsmanship then that's that persons problem. I don't see how the act of winning with your own preferred character is being a dick unless you also act like one too.
My best suggestion to this person is read more of the subsections in this book/article.
Plz don't be a dick, especially to someone who's trying to open the doors of perception for your gaming. If your not willing to finish off even a clan mate with the same tanacity you would to kill any other opponent, then how will they know to even cast you for the big game?
Anyway, you can be a good player without being a dick... Ask anyone in Tribes, I definitely live by that rule.
-Fenick