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 guessing you're one of those people who never completed a single game in your entire lives without using a large amount of cheats, claiming it's more fun that way."
Well when playing against my brother on Call of Duty, I do cheat a lot by.
Looking at the screen (it dosn't matter which half, but it's not cheating when "he" looks at my half), killing him, thinking, paying attention to what he dos and how he kills me, using a gun he dosn't like me using, using a perk he dosn't like me using, camping, crouching, going prone, running, walking, using the scope, letting him kill me, dodging his attacks, using flashbangs, using smoke grenades, using grenades, shooting him, not looking at the screen, shooting my gun, using a fully working controller to control my character and having below 1:1 as my kill death ratio.
If what I do in Call of Duty is classed as cheating then I'm even worse on Left4Dead2, because I know exactly when a horde is gonna attack, or which kind of Special Infected are on the level at any one time. I also use throwing items to get through hordes and destroy the Tank, then as if that wasn't bad enough I go through every single level with another three characters, either player or AI controlled. I'm no better when playing as an Infected in Versus, I can see exactly where the Survivor players are nearly all the time, spawn multiple times per level, have a horde of common infected to slow and damage the Survivors, and three other Special Infected controlled by either humans or AI helping me then just to top it all off I know a few locations I can use to instantly kill one of the Survivors.
In PoKéMoN I'm breeding PoKéMoN so they have the right Natures, IVs, Abilities and Moves, training them to get the right EVs, giving them the best possible moves with Tutors and TMs, am giving them Items to improve their fighting abilities and teaming them up with PoKéMoN that both compliment their fighting ability while covering their weaknesses. I'm also level grinding, have a few PoKéMoN with HM moves so I can get around and use attacks the my enemy PoKéMoN are weak to.
It is more fun playing these three games using the cheats I do, without them Call of Duty is impossible for me to play, I need to kill the other Survivors at the start of every level in Left4Dead and stay away from half of the entire game so I don't use any of the Infected cheats and as long as I don't hack my PoKéMoN and use stuff that's Battle Frontier Legal, nobody minds how much I cheat on PoKéMoN, which is good because the last time I played I used only a few of these and lost badly.
I do wonder sometimes why everything "I" do in a videogame is classed as cheating, while other people are able use stuff that makes everyone's description of Akuma look tame, but it dosn't count and I should just stop being a sore loser. The ultimate example is from several races on Mario Kart 64, I'd be in the lead and about to cross the line to win, my brother would reset the console, we'd then repeat the same race and he'd win, obviously the reset button in this case isn't cheating because someone uses it against me. Sirlin you and the majority of your followers are just ridiculous, clinging onto Akuma like the Chuck Norris Meme, no intelligent explaination has been given regarding Akuma compared to other games from people with practical experience, instead there are people without the experience who also don't understand Akuma stating that Akuma will win even with absolutely no input at all from the player.
You said your article isn't about winning on the game, but is about winning on a homemade tournament version of the game, tournaments are run by people who use a set of made up limitations which don't exist in the game itself, I understood this, at least until you then turned and told me you never said anything, I don't understand the point you've been trying to make to me but I do understand the way you've been making it, how you're the almighty preacher and all hail Sirlin or be guilty of heresy.
Threadnaught, please refer to my post a few days ago. Since you may not, I'll clarify something for you below.
Designers design a game. Commonly the game will contain elements that the designers did not intend, muta stacking in SC for example. These elements not have been indented, but they are still part of the game, and should be treated as such. In the competitive scene, tournament hosts may add additional rules to keep the games competitive and/or diverse.
Given the games design and the tournament rules, Sirlin writes about playing to win. Adding further rules to your play and considering anything within those rules beneath you will only hurt your performance in the competitive scene. In my eyes, that is message of his article.
In terms of the game rules that you do have to deal with, a 'good rule' is one that is strait-forward and simple to enforced. A 'bad rule' has a lot of gray area about it. A 'well designed game' requires very few rules. A game is not well designed if there a lot of them. These definitions have NOTHING to do with how fun a game is or how good it is. AoE is considered to be a good and good game. But if a tournament really does require all those additional rules, then I agree that it was not that well designed, but so what? It's a fun and good game anyway.
Back to your relentlessness about Akuma. Things are banned from tournament play from time to time. Sirlin wrote a bit about what sorts of justification should exist for something to be banned, and then gave Akuma as an example. I assure you that Sirlin would agree that Akuma's availability is a design flaw in a game that he is very fond of, but Street Fighter is still a fun and good game. If you want an example of something comparable to Akuma, look up some tournament rules and find something that is banned. I gave a link to MTG banned cards. It may not seem comparable, but a fighting game and and turn based card game aren't very comparable, so the banned elements won't be either.
im a long time guilty gear player. over a decade. exceedingly good with chipp. however, i refuse to corner, or do consecutive grabs, or infinite combos, or the like. i keep it pretty basic with combos and counters, then back off and let the opponent up, and see what they do and if im able to counter. do i know HOW to do these precieved 'cheaper' methods? absolutely. i choose not to, nor really think them 'cheap'. simple reasoning is that its no fun for me if the opponent is in the corner and im keeping them there with a combo. the bare minimum may WIN the match, but i dont ENJOY the win in and of itself. the ONLY thing i actually consider 'cheap' is a combo that once stuck in, is literally escape proof unless the executioner makes a mistake. it may win matches, but is no fun. least for me, recieving OR performing.
personally, i enjoy matches i lose that come really close, or are 'win by a thread' for either side more than ones i win through sheer intensity of combo and pressure. if my opponent decides they want such extras used, then ill consider them, but even then, they are rarely fun to execute for me. the fight itself and its course is more interesting than the outcome. this is the big difference between a 'scrub' *a term i dislike because everyone at least is trying to enjoy themselves, which is all that really matters*, and someone who just has different interpretations of 'fun'.
just idle pondering. not tryin to push my perspective, just state it.
I know I'm now referring to some of the posts back from 2009, however, just some thoughts on the matter (and the discussion back then between Sirlin, anon and Auspice mainly).
(Plus I skipped some of the later comments, so sorry in case of digging up already resolved business.)
The Extreme View (1):
Playing to win! No (!) exceptions. Winning is your one and only goal, no matter what it takes or what measures you have to use. I guess any remarks from my side towards the kind of players who accually apply for that group would fall out of place here.
Basically they would use Akuma or whatever nessessary to guarantee their victory.
You want to win, Akuma will pretty much guarantee your victory, so use him in every match.
The Less Extreme View (2):
Followers: Sirlin, Auspice (as far as I suppose.)
Probably most likely comparable to the idea of free market. Let the economy handle it, it will sort itself out.
If certain strategies/tactics are discovered that appear to be too good or unfair just throw it at the players and see if they find a counter. Glitches or "cheap" moves will probably not last for long as such.
Only tactics that have proven themselves nearly absolutely resistent to any attempts to counter them may be removed. (Akuma e.g.) (No monopols. ;) )
I.m.o. the borders however shift here a bit.
Some comments mention that following the Playing-to-win-dogma Sirlin cannot seriously support banning Akuma.
The breaking point probably is that certain cheats or glitches are supposed as alright, as long as there is (or probably going to be) a counter towards them.
Take it you can jump behind a wall because of a glitch and shoot the opponent through it, while he is not able to hit you behind it.
View (2) would probably state that you could yourself use the glitch and then both players may have their shootout behind the wall or just be there first and kill the opponent before he can use it. So no need for a ban here. If you want to win, you just use it.
However two players using Akuma... well, I suppose "some animals are more equal than others". ;)
The trouble is, how do you differ between cheats and glitches that are somehow accepted and those that are not? Or are by some and probably should not, or should they?
You should get my point here.
This is where we get to
The Moderate View (3):
Followers: Anon (again here, as far as I suppose.)
Just because you can use some means to win, doesn't mean you will accually use them.
Of course you can bring a gun to a knife-fight, but you wouldn't know who is better at knife-fighting afterwards, right?
When gaming I'd like to find out wether I'm the better gamer, better know how to play my class or whatnot and not wether I know how to use exploits better.
Take "noobtubers" in Call of Duty, for example. I mean sure, when you launch the grenades into the starting area of the opposing team you're probably going to kill some players, before they even had the chance to make a move and thus increase your team's chances of victory greatly. Then the counter would be if both teams just used Grenadelaunchers at each beginning of a match and see who walks out alive, to then decide the match between the remaining survivors of the bombardement. (You can probably neglect this in common deatchmatches, however you get the idea when you only have one life per round...)
But it just wouldn't be an "honorable" kill, would it?
It would make the game more attractive for competitive gameplay to just decide amongst players to not use this tactic. Just like some of the rules for AoE that anon mentioned.
Just refrain from certain moves to make the gameplay more attractive for everybody.
Of course I'm mad, when I get beaten by players using cheat tricks/glitches.
I then try to counter these, without falling into the same scemes as they do.
Playing for fun does not mean for me I have to play to win.
If you only play to win and need to use all means possible, well have your shot at it. If that's how you figured it out for yourself, you have to play, go and do that.
Of course I probably like to win as much as everyone else, I just want to win in a fair way and then because I simply played better than my opponent in an even match.
That's what makes out my satisfaction in a victory.
I honestly can have fun (!) playing, without nessecarily having to win everything.
After all, in the end I play to have fun and a good time. ;)
And now
The Scrub View (4):
Ban everything that keeps me from winning.
xanatoss
Ok, let's go over it yet again. Should tournament organizers ban Akuma? Yes they should. Should a player play Akuma if he is playing to win? No he should not because it's not a tournament legal means of winning. So an extreme view of playing to win includes NOT playing Akuma. He would be legal in no reasonable tournament because he removes practically all gameplay and creates a game no one wants to play, no one practices, and no one has tournaments for. Akuma is like a thing you scrub around with in your basement, the opposite of playing to win.
My 2 cents on Akuma.
Ok, I've never played SF, any edition, so I'm not sure if Akuma can play Akuma. Let's assume he can't, that's kind what I've gotten from the chatter here.
Akuma is basically like an 'I win' button. One player has it, one player does not, it's not a contest of speed to who can press it first, it's not a contest at all. If it's not a contest, how can there be a winner?
Banning Akuma from a tournament is like banning people from literally punching each other on the face so you can KO his character in the game. It's not part of the game to punch each other in the face, even if it will help you win. Like the article said, you can take playing to win to far.
Not sure why people can't seem to understand that.
You say at the end that this is all about improving, but would you say that winning at all costs, with no sense of honor is self improvement?
By honor, do you mean self-imposed rules that handicap you from winning? Or do you have a different meaning?
It was widely believed in World War I that wearing helmets was cowardly and against honor. It was, however, the smart thing to do. Pilots would refuse repairs on their planes believing in superstition and against their honor, and obviously it would also cost many pilots their lives.
The idea of "honor" and "chivalry", while quaint, lack any kind of practicality. Never you mind that the idea of "skill" and "honor" are subjective (to the Mongols, honor was victory and any means to that end was acceptable; it worked out pretty good for them for a while). Most people are not going to share your views and if you want to win, you better understand that you will have to cross your own lines if you want to remain competitive.
The classic case in FPS games is the issue of camping. It is controversial, hated, often blamed. But it is also fair and, with some exceptions, very effective. People will often argue that camping takes no "skill" and is "cheap". Why? Because it beats you and you can't figure out how to beat it?
What is camping? It's finding a good location to hunker down and let people come to you. It typically involves taking an advantageous position with an excellent view while minimizing any threat to your own person. To a sane person, this is smart. Soldiers do that all the time in the meat world. If a person can command that position long term, they clearly got something going on or else the other team is just terrible.
Anyway, it comes down to whether or not you want to win. Ask yourself that question. Do you want to win? If you answered yes, realize that the idea is not to give the opponent advantages; it is not a charity. They are the enemy, your competition, and you must beat them with every tool at your disposal. If you limit yourself, you have only yourself to blame.
Playing some Starcraft can heal from scrubness.
At first, a cheese (this is a very early all-in attack) like a zergling rush seems to be game-breaking. Anyone can do this. One needs no macromanagment skills. If everyone cheeses, no one builds high-tech units. So does take cheese away large parts of the game?
No; however it does force you to scout your opponent in time and to defend well. It looks so unfair at first, if the zerg sends six zerglings to your base before you have even begun to build the first fighting unit. But with proper unit control it is possible to defend the zerglings with just the workers. Of course, some workers will die but the zerg player does not have many workers, either.
Another argument against cheese is that it takes additional effort to defend, so it just makes the game longer until it gets to the mid- and late game where the "real" game is (with high-tier units). While this is may be true, a rule like "no attack first 10 minutes" would result in very boring 10 minutes. With no such rule, the entire game is exciting. But a scrub will call anything cheap which is in fact much to handle for him.
I also noticed that any scrub truly believes that he could get good at the game if he just would have the time to practice; but since he also has a reallife, he sadly is not able to compete with the no-life-kids who don't really have better knowledge about the game. This kind of thinking annoyes me the most.
I think Xanatoss' comment sums it up for me:
"Just because you can use some means to win, doesn't mean you will actually use them.
Of course you can bring a gun to a knife-fight, but you wouldn't know who is better at knife-fighting afterwards, right?"
It depends on if you must win at all costs, or if you want to try to win within a certain spirit of the game. Even better if you figure out a way to beat the person who is using the cheap exploits without yourself resorting to exploits in the game.
If that makes me a scrub, I'm happy to be one. :)
There's nothing wrong with putting artificial limits on what you're allowed to do to win, k?
But define your priorities and don't assume everyone else shares them.
Calmin: there's nothing wrong with posting comments to the article, but don't assume that I'm assuming you should have the same priorities. That is why the very first page of my book lays that out explicitly: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/prologue.html
That comment was actually directed towards "scrubs".
Meaning, if you are going to put an artificial limit, make sure you define your priorities so you can keep your limits consistent, and don't assume everyone you play with are going to follow those limits.
Although the advice applies to the other side too.
Hey sirlin, I've read the six topics on playstyles and im wondering in your opinion what the best style is?
if theres no best style, does it depend on the style you have the most fun doing? type of game?
im curious of your opinion on this and would greatly appreciate your input on this
I'm an avid fan of competitive Melee, and I don't know that much about other fighting games or Akuma, but I feel like I understand the issue behind the banning of Akuma and how it differs from scrub mentality. After reading so many of the comments debating your perspective about the banning of Akuma, I feel like I have somewhat "solved" the inner turmoil and paradoxical hypocrisy of it all. What it seems to come down to is Playing to Win is for the player. As a competitive player, you should use anything and everything within the game to give yourself any edge. This means, of course, that if you are playing to win that you will choose Akuma and destroy your opponent. I don't think anyone would argue that if Akuma is a legal character, that it would be stupid not to pick him.
Now where I feel you appear to become hypocritical is in your analysis of how fair Akuma is. You explain why Akuma is not a balanced part of the game, but this is not from the perspective of a player competing, but from a person in the community or some sort of third party that has nothing at stake. This perspective is not playing to win, but simply viewing the game and trying to make it the best competitive experience possible. Scrub mentality is when a player makes up rules on his own, typically with little to no consideration about how the rules actually change the game. The banning of Akuma was a community-wide decision where game play balance was the main concern, and unlike the scrub's imaginary rule, the community has created a legitimate and concrete rule that is applied to all players.
Refusing to play as or against a strong character like Akuma is scrub mentality, but when the game's community agrees upon a rule banning Akuma, it is no longer scrub mentality. The players are not creating rules to suit their own game play, and the rule does not actively attempt to thwart other game play styles, but rather attempts to save them. Yes, from a purist point of view on Playing to Win, players would ideally abandon a game that was broken by a single character, but in reality there aren't exactly great competitive games growing on trees, and if the entire community can safely agree on a rule to put in place then there is no reason to abandon the game. It's subjective and not ideal, but to say there is no clear distinction between the rules of a large community and the rules of an individual player is ludicrous. I play to win, but if I find the game to be vastly more competitive and enjoyable experience with a simple rule such as a ban in place that almost everyone else agrees with, I will play to win by that rule.
Sure Bones, but I don't like your phrasing that there was ever any paradox or "hypocrisy" in the first place. There isn't and never was. Whether to ban Akuma is not an issue about playing to win. It's an issue about what tournament organizers should ban. And only an insane person would say "NOTHING should ever be banned, no matter how powerful and gamebreaking. Even if there's no game at all left and you press a single button, don't ban the thing causing that." I mean clearly that's absurd, so absurd that no one is arguing it. And therefore there is exists such a thing as "not extreme enough" to ban and "yes extreme enough to ban."
The truly confusing thing is why anyone thinks that giving no example of "yes extreme enough to ban" is a problem. Actually, giving no example would be the problem, because then you wouldn't really have anything to go on. I think the people with a problem have just decided to intentionally misunderstand or be argumentative for the sake of it. Anyone spending even a minute to think about it should not be upset that there exists a thing so powerful that it's ok to ban.
I think that the big turning point of broken stuff is whether, after exhaustive testing, someone can conceivably "counter" the technique deemed as broken without degenerating the game into who pushes I-WIN buttons faster.
By this perspective, Akuma is broken, because allowing Akuma would degenerate the metagame into Akuma vs Akuma matches, simply because if you use anyone else, it doesn't matter if you have a better knowledge of the mechanics nor if you have better reflexes, or anything else. Incompetence aside, the Akuma player WILL win, and there is nothing you can do about it. You can run, you can hide, but soon or later he WILL trap you down.
Another example would be Wobbuffet in 4th generation Pokemon. In a game mainly based on switches, he have the power to prevent switches, and to force you to use the same move again and again. Once wobbufett is on play, incompetence aside, it simply doesn't matter what you do, wobbufett WILL kill something on your team, or worse, give the opponent a free turn to switch-in whatever he wants, and another to do whatever he wants. More often than not, this situation, in mid-late game, means you just lost.
I think this is easy to troll because you say that a player should never play Akuma no matter what. This is a slight contradiction. I've never really played street fighter, but if Akuma was legal and nobody picked them, I think learning the game a bit and selecting him every match in order to win is something I could live with. That also sounds exactly like playing to win. It is the tournament host's fault for not banning something that should be banned.
I agree that things exist that should be banned, but that is not up to the individual player to decide. It is those individual level bans that are the 'scrub behavior' Sirlin warns against. It would be up to the tournament host or whoever it is that decides the rules.
skies: You should / shouldn't play Akuma depending on if we are talking about a hypothetical world we don't live in or the actual real world we do live in. In a hypothetical world where Akuma ins't banned and the game is broken, degenerate piece of trash, yeah you should play Akuma. But this is some made-up situation that isn't reality. In reality, Akuma is banned (and rightfully so), so if you practice him, you're playing some game that is not the tournament game. It's similar to if you practiced Starcraft with cheat codes for infinite money.
A cutesy point is that if you really wanted to win at Starcraft tournaments that allowed infinite money cheats, then you should turn on the infinite money cheat and use it. Yeah of course, but this is unhelpful advice about a fantasy world rather than real advice about playing to win in the world we live in that has a real competitive scene.
A friend sent me this article today. First and foremost, I liked the article very much.
Now, about the still-lingering Akuma problem...
I'm not much on Street Fighter, but I have played with/against Akuma before. Is Akuma beatable? Sure. Is it easy?
HELL. NO.
I'll throw another example that I've been through: Call of Duty Black Ops, Free-for-All.
1)"Why do you use that stupid camera spike?"
"To film idiots like you coming up behind me."
2)"Why the hell did you keep using that RPG in that match?!"
"To blow you up...? Was that not obvious?"
And my personal favourite:
3)"QUIT HARDSCOPING!"
"Quit running in front of my cross-hairs..."
(I'll point out now that I always play on Hardcore.)
People have called me "cheap" for using such things as these, but what I especially don't understand is when they start using the same tactics after me and they're considered "pros." What happened to some people's common sense? Really?
Now, as the issue for Akuma, I still find it broken, but if that's the only way you can win, go for it. Does that thought make me a scrub, accepting something broken like Akuma? That's your opinion. Use whatever works for you in whatever game you're playing. If you think the Commando/Python tactic on Black Ops is "cheap," whatever. If you think Akuma is "cheap," whatever. I'm not going to call anyone a "scrub" because one day they could come back and bite you in the ass with something they made up. If you can find a counter for Akuma, by all means, use that, but don't expect it to work one hundred percent of the time. I think I've only been able to beat Akuma once in around fifty matches against them.
So, what I'm saying is, don't complain about what's "broken" and what's not. If you really hate the game because of the "Akuma" in your game, then either forget it and keep playing or quit the game entirely.
Nanaki: you are not getting it at all. First, there is no lingering Akuma problem, nor was there ever a problem. It was clear-cut since day 1 that he would be banned, and he is. Next, you mention that you've played with and against him a fair amount, but I wonder if you have. We are talking ONLY about Akuma in the game Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo here, not any other version of Akuma. He requires a long secret code to select every time, and he is a cheat-mode boss character. Someone is no more "cheap" by playing him than they are turning on infinite money in a Starcraft match. It's not a tournament legal thing to do, so you're just playing your own homemade game instead of the actual real competitive standard.
Also, your advice to quit the game entirely or play only Akuma is nonsense. Akuma is not even on the regular character select screen, fyi. Banning an obviously broken boss character cheat is feasible, and is what has been done for 15 years now. Why in the world would you think that the existence this banned cheat implies that everyone should quit the game? You're just so far off base here.
I don't understand why Sirlin keeps the comments open for this article when any new comments are just repeating the fallacies that have been debunked many times.
People don't cry "cheap" in a game of chess. If they do, they won't have a justification. There aren't banned moves nor banned pieces in tournaments.
In a game of chess there is no disparity between what is considered fair and what the game allows you to do. If someone does the closest thing to cheapness in chess, eternally evading with the king, then the rules are set up to end the game.
What a game lets you do is set in stone, but what is considered fair is subjective. Also subjective is one's enjoyment of the game based on characters chosen and tactics used. Someone might take a character, and be good with it, partially because the player identifies with the fictional character, or it might happen because the player enjoys the character's movelist.
Now I ask, why is that in one game people don't cry cheap and in others they do? Is the game or the player at fault? Did the players not understand the intent of the game, did the developers failed to communicate the intent for the game, did the developers fail to accomplish the intent of their game?
Most of the times that is hard to tell. But with your occasional update it becomes obvious that at least partially the developers are at fault. Nerfing characters, removing infinites, working on the balance of the game in general, just shows that developers had an intention they couldn't accomplish on their first try. Of course, updates don't show that only the game is at fault, it just shows that in some situations it is partially at fault. The players could still be a cry baby with a perfectly balanced game.
Nerfed characters also reveal, IMO, another situation in that there might be something wrong with the game. You could reason that a player that wants to win will pick only the most powerful characters available. Sometimes a character is so much stronger that if you don't pick it you'll significantly lower your chances to win. Fine, you could say, it is in the game after all. In chess you won't refrain from making peons into queens if that will give you an edge.
But then, developers go and nerf a character. They do that with updates or with new releases of a game. What does that tell us about the developer's intentions? For me, it shows that they don't want the game to become a one character game, and they don't want that I think because they made the game to be enjoyable in multiple ways, not just about victory.
This is why they usually don't add a character that can easily perform an instantaneous full screen OHKO. It would break the engine they've worked on. They created the game with multiple possibilities of how to be played and they want you to experience it, which is why they nerf cheap characters or simply don't create infinitely powerful characters. It would restrict the player's options, and that deviates from a developer's intention when they make a game with 30 characters in the roster. It wouldn't make sense to make all of them when only one is any good.
Trying to make the game enjoyable in multiple ways also reveals another problem. Not just for fighting games btw. This problem is that the developers will dress a virtual doll with a colorful personality.
Ryu is who he is because they wanted to make him relatable. He could have the appearance of a spoiled valley girl and still play exactly how he plays. The problem with this is that they communicate the player the wrong intent. They attempt to make all characters interesting but fail to balance them all. They give you several choices but they can't guarantee that all choices can participate fairly in the game. And people want fairness in the game, regardless of how one defines fairness.
The developers give the wrong message to the player. Why the hell would the developers bother in creating the visual design, movelist and backstory of a character if it is going to end up being unusable trash? The player thinks all characters (that is, all non-joke characters) are supposed to be good. Those expectations will be broken and the player will either drop the more relatable character in favor of the more effective character, or they'll just whine and complain about it. It gets specially problematic when it is harder for the player to realize which ones are supposed to be top tier.
Playing to win can end up turning into an exploration of the developer's shortcomings, of their own mistakes. Mistakes the developers never attempted to tell you they were intentional, mistakes you were mislead to believe they didn't exist until you knew better. But the game was made to be competitive AND fun, not a competitive exploration of what is plain boring. If they wanted boring they'd make the instant full screen OHKO and make the game a race for who can pull it out first.
Of course, bad losers will always exist, and I don't mean to justify them. However, it is in the game how much can be used to justify defeat, to cry cheap. The game leaves room for the player to be mislead. It is plagued with inevitable mistakes made by the developers who are just human. If the problem was entirely on the player, people would cry cheap in a game of chess all the time.
And can you blame the player? The developers go out of their way to mislead, creating huge rosters and a complex fighting mechanic that can be thwarted by a limited moveset or one specific OP character. The fact that the game is rebalanced with updates and new releases shows that indeed, sometimes the perception of the player was the same as the intention of the developer. The fact that there are banned moves and characters in tournaments shows that sometimes everyone agrees that indeed, some things are cheap.
Playing to win as a justification will sometimes fail when it is obvious some things were wrong to begin with.
Easiest way to explain the Akuma power issue.
Take the 2 best players in the world. First make them play as any character other than Akuma for 20 matches, both players will have victories against each other. Then give player A) Akuma for 20 matches and chances are he will now win every single match by a wide margin. Then give player B) Akuma and watch the complete opposite happen now player B will win every match by a wide margin.