Banning Gems in Street Fighter X Tekken
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 5:44PM I feel like I must be missing some facts about this issue, because the correct course of action seems clear (ban gems or ban the game in tournaments), yet there is debate about it. I may very well be missing facts, so sorry if I'm stating anything incorrectly. It appears that the upcoming fighting game Street Figher x Tekken allows you to customize your character with "gems." Ok that's fine, I have no objection to such an idea. It further appears that you must grind to unlock these gems, and/or buy them, and that some are "pre-order" only. Further, even if all gems were available, actually selecting them is believed to be too time consuming to do match after match at a tournament.
This article on SRK muses about these issues.
As competitive gamers, we should reject games (or parts of games) that violate the concept of fair competition. Those games can still be played "for fun," but not like real tournament games. The reason this question about SFxT seems so clear (if I understand right!) is that "pre-order only" should automatically cause us to ban. That's not an acceptable concept in a competitive game, therefore it must be rejected. We need only figure out what to reject. The choices are: a) those gems, b) all gems, c) the entire game. It is possible that these pre-order-only gems are cosmetic only, or strictly inferior to other gems (that you must buy? that you must grind for?), but we don't know yet.
Grinding to unlock is also unacceptable in a competitive game. It's antithetical to the nature of fair competition, not to mention a major hassle to event-runners. Anything that materially affects gameplay should be available to any would-be competitor right away. This actually means DLC characers are potentially fine. You buy them and they are immediately available. If all gems were possible to buy, then there is no "crime" against competition, we'd just have to see if the game cost $500 or something, ha.
Anything locked away behind some grind is not acceptable though. That's a barrier between the player and the game that we as competitive gamers don't want. We want each other to have access to the real game right away. More and more of this has crept into fighting games, and we've all kind of let it slide, but an entire system based on forced grind (if that's what this is...is it??) should be roundly rejected out-of-hand. Is that what you'd like to become standard? I know I don't. I subtract 1 point out of 10 in each version of Soul Calibur that doesn't let me pick Cervantes the moment I buy it. (Looking at you Soul Calibur 3.)
Yes I'm aware that League of Legends has a forced grind in order to unlock materially important aspects of gameplay. That means it, too, violates the minimum standard of what competitive gamers should accept. (Sorry League of Legends, just make a way to buy a full character, full level, full mastery immediately and you're off the hook.) If we applied this kind of reasoning to Starcraft, it would just be ridiculous. Imagine if you had to grind to unlock the Lurker in Starcraft3, and that Reavers were pre-order only. I used to use that same joke with Street Fighter. "Imagine if you had to grind to unlock Chun Li and that Zangief was pre-order only." But now the joke is getting pretty real. It's scary to think competitive gamers might accept that, which will encourage game companies to go more and more in that direction. Leage of Legends has millions of dollars worth of reasons to coninue doing what it's doing because those gamers *do* accept the idea that it's ok to lock gameplay-affecting things behind a grind and still call it a competitive game. Will that be the future in fighting games as well?
If there really are pre-order only gems that affect gameplay, and if there really is a forced grind to get these hundreds of gems, the competitive community is best served by sending a message that such things aren't acceptable. I personally think the idea of customization in a fighting game is pretty interesting, though. You too might be interested in the gameplay these gems could create. I think the best way to get that is to make sure game developers (not just Capcom, but any fighting game developers at all) see that players won't accept things that violate the spirit of fairness in their tournaments. If Capcom could try again another game that incorporates customization in an acceptable way, that would be nice, and maybe we could use that customization in tournaments. Just keep in mind that other fighting game developers are out there too, and they'll be looking at this situation to see if they should do nonsense like pre-order only Mitsurugi and grind-to-unlock a +5 sword for Mitsurugi. They can absolutely make that game, I just wouldn't want to have to play it at a tournament, and especially not at Evolution. On the other hand, when stuff like this is an optional mode that I can mess around with and turn off for competitive play, that's no problem at all. In fact, it sounds fun. Well not the pre-order only part.
Finally, there's the issue of selecting the gems before each match. I think this one is somehow solvable with good UI or something, but I don't happen to know how off the top of my head. If each player really has to select several gems from a list of hundreds before each match, that's actually not feasible in a tournament. Button config already takes a huge amount of time in tournaments, too much really. Picking gems out of a list of hundreds might be reason enough to disallow them in tournaments, just for time-reasons. If you haven't been to a tournament (or watched a stream) you might very well underestimate the importance of this. Once you are waiting for hundreds (or thousands!) of players to select gems before each match, you will see how big of a time-sink it becomes and how hard it becomes to run an event Again, I think this one is solvable...somehow. We just don't know if SFxT will do a good job of solving it yet. Maybe?
Customization sounds fun and interesting. But remember that your "vote" counts as a competitive player. If we accept more and more unfairness in supposedly competitive games, then game companies will give us more and more grind-to-unlock Lurkers and pre-order-only Reavers.
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TLDR version: we have no real choice but to ban SFxT gems in competitive play, or ban the whole game. Either way, make sure your vote is heard on this issue, becuase it will affect more and more fighting games in the future.
Reader Comments (72)
@Sirlin. To clarify, I don't think that any grinding in games is great, perhaps I should have been more clear. True competition will always be hampered by grinding for in-game rewards, which are unavailable to a new player. I just meant that I feel it will be more of a problem in SFxT than it is in LoL. Now, a small problem is better than a big problem, but ideally, there would just be no problem at all.
I personally feel like introducing some topics to more experienced players might be more like not using castling in chess with a novice player. Introduction of advanced topics can be saved for more advanced players. I know its not exactly the same as character customization, but just my thoughts. To be honest I'd prefer if LoL didn't allow unlocks at each level, but they do. It hasn't really hurt my enjoyment of the game, since when playing on the ladder I go up with someone with at most 1% stat difference if they're a level off of me. Player skill makes way more difference at that level. I will concede that yes, there is still a difference during leveling, which is bad for competition at a novice skill level.
I made my original post as you made the point:
"Leage of Legends has millions of dollars worth of reasons to coninue doing what it's doing because those gamers *do* accept the idea that it's ok to lock gameplay-affecting things behind a grind and still call it a competitive game."
I read this as meaning that you thought the in game transactions could be used in a play-to-win sense of spending money and getting upgrades as a result. After reading your response, and rereading the OP, I realize this is not the case, just my mistake.
Anyway, making players grind before they hit the cap is bad. Making TOs grind every machine thousands of hours seems worse. Making TOs invent a bunch of extraneous rules to "fix" a "balanced" games seems just stupid.
This debate reminds me of the disappointment/anger I felt when I encountered paid DLC characters in BB:CS ranked matches. Up until that point I was sure that the paid DLC were not selectable in ranked matches, because it wouldn't make sense at all due to the competitive nature of ranked matches which require player equality. But turns out they are! I then got my ass kicked by a player who spent more money than me so he/she can use a character I know nothing about. Seriously, ASW, what the hell?
I am still baffled by this to this day, this is just as bad as this gem thing, yet I don't hear a lot of people complaining to ASW.
This issue could be resolved if online match making had option to play matches with gems or no gems. I seriously doubt this idea or anything sensible will be incorporated so my position is boycott the game.
On the subject of TF2...
American competitive leagues ban about half the weapons. New weapons are softbanned until both the end of the current season and also until each new weapon has been vetted as non-game-breaking in a competitive context (which is a bit different from the typical 12-on-12 public server gameplay). European leagues ban almost all new weapons save those from the first few patches. They also don't play half the gametypes or the vast majority of the maps, for what it's worth.
TF2 is a working example of both a MTG-style banlist and a "fuck this part of the game, it just doesn't fit" hard ban on part of the game working in the wild.
TF2 sounds like Smash Bros. A party game that wasn't designed to be played competitively.
Ono said that gems in SFxT would work something like MTG, although I didn't expect the "pay $300 for a competitive deck" bit to ever happen in a fighting game. That why I walked away from playing CCGs and moved on to fighters: I can spend $60 once and have access to everything in Street Fighter, but in YGO or MTG, good luck trying to even play casually without breaking the bank.
In MvC3, two playthroughs of Arcade Mode to get four characters is reasonable in this new age of gaming with achievements and whatnot. But even then, it wastes time in preparing tournament set-ups, which, as Wolverine would say, is unacceptable.
I remember in Guitar Hero 2, there was a code that granted instant access to every song in the game, but in exchange, you couldn't save. Well, if you're going to hold a GH2 tournament (which is plausible, since the game does have a "Head-to-Head" mode), saving the game doesn't matter.
Point being: Organizers of fighting game tournaments and fighting game developers would probably love a "master unlock" code like that, since it gives you the best of both worlds: At-home grinding/fun and out-of-the-box tournament play. Heck, something like that should be plainly displayed (AKA no cheat code) and have the ability to be toggled in the Options or Main Menu.
Of course, all of this could be averted if developers just gave us all the juice right when we put the game in.
@ Sirlin: You're into game design. From a development standpoint, is there any reason other than single player enjoyment to withhold characters at the outset of a fighting game? The single player would have to be really good in order to justify it.
WRT MtG: You have other options than paying $300 for a deck though, you have Limited formats which may even be more skill testing than constructed. Hell, even make a cube with some friends and just play that.
MTG's flagrant cash-grab scheme of selling rares in random packs is just as much as a rip-off, even if you can choose to play some format that is cheaper than $300 per deck. I mean buying new packs every time you play is hardly better anyway. The whole model is inherently offensive. I don't think it needs an apologist stance. What it needs is a real alternative. Just wait.
The Wizards' model is a rip-off, no argument there, and their cash grabs have been getting more and more obnoxious over the past few years.
HOWEVER, I am suggesting that from a competitive point of view there is definitely less of a money issue than it appears as an observer. You don't have to pay into their model to get good at the game or to compete (well, tourney fees exclusive), I mean every card they've ever printed is documented and open. You have Magic Workstation, there are draft simulators, you can beg, borrow or steal.
I have friend who's not professional, but plays fairly competitively (he was on PT Nagano). He doesn't actually buy the hundred dollar decks he pilots, and I'd say most of the professionals don't either. Once I was looking through his card pool and found a couple of key cards (literally a couple) for a deck archetype:
"I could build Mind's Desire from these"
"I played Mind's Desire at a PTQ a while ago"
"Oh, where are the rest of the cards?"
"I took it apart, I don't own the others"
Anyways, the last time I caught up with him he was playing Mythic, which is called such because it largely consists of mythic rares (it would have been upwards of a grand to put together if you bought all the cards back then). Most of it he borrowed from friends, borrowed from stores, won in competitions and such. (Naturally he goes on to make fun of people that buy cards because he is a Cocky Bastard, but that's something else altogether.)
Call it apologist if you want, but I'm reasonably sure they're milking more money out of the casual/FNM crowd than anything else.
(How unfortunate for my casual playing ass though.)
I want to defend TF2. There is (nearly) no grind for competitiveness in TF2. Sure, there are hundreds of unlocks, but only about a dozen of them are of competitive importance, because of a very simple fact: The default weapons are superior to the unlockables, which is very different from Call of Duty or Section 8, where you unlock clearly superior gear. Sometimes this is not so obvious (Rocket Launcher versus Black Box is one of these, but the clip size is better than the very small health buff, especially in competitive matches where you have a medic), usually it is very clear (Warrior's Spirit or Half-Zatoichi are just plain bad).
Those that are decent are usually better for beginners than experts (Natascha), or side-arms to begin with (Axetinguisher), or only used by classes that have no real relevance for clan games (Pyro, Spy, Engineer), or only good in pub games (Sandvich).
People who did grind the weapons (or just spent 20$ in the store) do have an advantage over the new players, but it insignificant. Most tournaments ban all unlocked guns, and training with them is usually not much of an issue (which is very different from the gems in SFxT). The new players also would not profit from having the unlockable guns, because they usually need a lot more experience to be effective (a newbie with a Loch'N'Load or Kritzkrieg is only a threat to himself).
I agree that this is risky design, because it assumes that every single unlock is balanced well in a fundamentally flawed system.
I think there might be a compromise as far as character unlocks go: cheat codes.
Just put cheat codes in the game to unlock all the characters - that would give players who don't want to grind to unlock these characters an easy way out.
As for selecting gem combinations, I think that vgambit's solution of having input-codes for the gems would be a way. But still, for 2 characters with 5 gems each, that would be 20 inputs before a match (you could also have the game create codes for any 5-gem combination to bring that number down somewhat but it would still remain a lot of inputs).
I completely agree about your main points Sirlin. I do NOT plan on buying SFxT currently, and I couldn't tell you how excited I was for it about 4 months ago.
LoL requires at least 100 games to reach max level, and you will need another couple hundred to make different rune pages which give your character innate bonuses. Add another thousand to that in order to unlock all characters without paying, or throw in hundreds of dollars a la MtG to access them right away. The only difference is, LoL is a joke as a competitive game IMO.
I am very sad that MtG is a great game, or I wouldn't have to waste any money playing in tournaments. Luckily, there are programs which are essentially sandboxes which let you play for free, but you have to do all the work and know all of the rules yourself. This at least limits your expenses as you can find the very best deck that suits you without having to own any of the cards prior.
@SR re: BBCS:
I would guess there are a few reasons why ASW gets away with it:
-Post-release DLC, as opposed to the at-launch crap Capcom is doing here
-The characters are added to the arcade version before they're in the home version (obviously this doesn't help if you live in any part of the world without arcades)
-They (generally) rebalance the game to take the new characters into account
-How many people who play at a competitive level honestly care about ranked matches compared to playing against real people, anyway?
And for players who do want to play online but don't want to deal with fighting characters they can't use or practice against, well, there's always the option of waiting for BBCS Extend (where every character will be available from the start), or just not playing.
The DLC characters in BBCS are not nearly as offensive as, say, Jill and Shuma-Gorath in MvC3. Platinum the Trinity is genuine post-release content; DLC characters you get for free if you buy the limited edition are not. And you can't practice against those guys either.
Does the fact that LoL tournaments run on a special tournament realm with everything unlocked affect your opinion at all? While this makes it hard to practice, the actual competitive environment isn't affected TO much (ignoring Ranked games)
Adam: No. Imagine two games:
1) Street Fighter
2) Street Fighter where you have to play some shitty Chun Li unless you grind really long. But there is a tournament server so in tournaments you can play the real Chun Li.
Why can't you just always play the real Chun Li? If you are serious about competition, you always want the real Chun Li, you always want your opponents to have her, and anything else is a waste of everyone's time. Choice 1 is so far superior to choice 2. I wonder if I should implement choice 2 though in my games to make more money? It seems everyone accepts this far worse experience. I thought the reason to make money was to make good things, aka competitive games that don't spit on the spirit of competition. I seem outnumbered on that.
You know, Sirlin,
I've thought about it some more, and I think the problem is that you're drawing some very hard lines here.
Yes ideally, all competitors would enter the ring equally matched all the time; but this rarely happens in life. Like you enter a match with a professional tennis player and he's probably holding a thousand dollar racket in his hand. He's already got an advantage over you, skill independent. Not to mention his personal nutritionist, his professional coach and everything else.
And then there's life in general, maybe you're not as good as you could be just because you can't afford to travel to as many tournaments as John Smith.
Then the question is whether the impedance from the game to your progression is going to be significant relative to the impedance overall and of course that varies from person to person.
So I think that it's not so much that people don't agree with your points in a vacuum, it's just that whenever you (inevitably) target someone's favourite game, they naturally want to justify that the system in place is reasonable enough that they're still deriving a large net enjoyment.
Do I wish Wizards would stop pulling stupid crap like Mythic rares? I guess. But I don't see why I should withdraw my dollars in support as long as my net enjoyment remains. And then WotC will try their best to toe the line all the while remembering that there is a line. It's only realistic.
I mean, in my ideal world Makoto would also put on some pants, but that's soo~ not going to happen.
While your analogy doesn't translate 100% to LoL (the 'best' runes for any given character are much more a matter of preference (early lane dominance, or late game power?)) the broader point is spot on; those that have have an edge in terms of raw gameplay, and in terms of being able to experiment more with different builds.
I find it distressing how game developers are tying per-player-development tracking (in a raw sense, that's what CoD and LoL levels are) with in-game unlocks for play. When achievements were pointless, I didn't care, and found them mildly charming. Now that they are actually tied to real, in-game rewards, the novelty is wearing thing quickly.
Fil: you're saying developers (such as me) should trample on the spirit of competitive gaming just enough such that people don't revolt. Uh ok. Kind of lame attitude though.
You have an example that a tennis player may have a better nutritionist than you. I do not think it logically follows that I should therefore intentionally add grinding to a supposedly competitive game, though. I don't think it logically follows that it's ok you have to grind for a bunch of stuff in LoL before you can play the real game. That's just badness that could be taken out and WOULD be taken out if it was rejected across the board by more people. Too bad for all of us that it isn't.
Why must everything be either competitive or not competitive? Why can't something be designed to be 80% competitive? Or 20? Maybe that's exactly what I want.
Also, "revolt" is a pretty strong word. It's not like anyone is forcing me at gunpoint; my default position is already set to Not Buy. So your product better be decent enough to convince me in the first place.
I guess others are different? I have friends that shell out for every new blockbuster game that comes out, perhaps they're keeping Battlefield afloat.
Fil, I don't think anyone is denying the existance of "80% competitive games", or that they can be enjoyed. The point is that if you are a designing a game, you get to decide weither you want it to be competitive or not. If you want it to be, then there is no reason to not make it 100% competitive. If you don't want it to be, then you can start with all of the noncompetitive features, then try to make the game as skillful as possible anyway, to try to appeal to strong players as well as the casual crowd (such as LoL or WoW arena). I think it is basically priorites, I don't think designers start out by going "Ok, let's make sure this game is in the 70-80% competitive range". It just will turn out that way.