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Fighting Game Collusion
So apparently there is something going down in the fighting game community that is very interesting to people like me who care about games.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1jioaq/spooky_cancels_ssf4_tournament_grand_finals/
Basically, sometimes players who get to the finals of a fighting game tournament are colluding with each other. Before the match, they agree to split the first prize whoever wins. Then in the final match they do not try to win with their full power. They do this because they do not want to keep their full power and best techniques a secret, and only unleash them at bigger tournaments when they have to.
It's similar, but different to the situation of the Chinese Olympic Badminton teams. In the Olympics the tournament was structured in such a way that losing a single match was actually the best way to win the gold medal. In the fighting game situation players are agreeing to split the gold medal because they both believe it will help them to win another one in another tournament at a later date.
Can you imagine hockey players agreeing not to use their full power in the Olympic Gold Medal game because they believed it would give them a better chance at the Stanley Cup? Insanity!
The victim here is the spectators. They are watching this whole fighting game tournament, and the final game is a complete dud. The players are just fooling around not trying to win, and everyone can tell. So the tournament organizer just shut it down on them. Oh snap!
I can't really think of a simple solution to this. Perhaps the only solution is to make the prize big enough that players will give it their all? But maybe if the prize is too big then half is plenty, and they will try to win even less. Maybe a smaller prize is better since splitting it will be a pittance, but then you won't attract the top players.
Are people just going to play crappy in every fighting game tournament finals except for Evo itself? It's like NFL pro-bowl or preseason games. Teams don't try to win because the results don't matter. They save themselves for the real games. The only solutions people have come up with for that is to cancel the meaningless games, or make them not meaningless.
I'm not sure how the fighting game tournament scene works, but one solution could be to make the small tournaments into qualifiers for the big tournaments. Anyone who hasn't won a smaller tournament isn't allowed to even enter the big ones they care about. Then you will only have a problem if two people who have already qualified make it to the finals of a small tournament. But that is also simply solved by not allowing already qualified players to enter a qualification level tournament. Yeah, that makes another problem of having tournaments without the best players in them.
Very very interesting stuff going on here.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1jioaq/spooky_cancels_ssf4_tournament_grand_finals/
Basically, sometimes players who get to the finals of a fighting game tournament are colluding with each other. Before the match, they agree to split the first prize whoever wins. Then in the final match they do not try to win with their full power. They do this because they do not want to keep their full power and best techniques a secret, and only unleash them at bigger tournaments when they have to.
It's similar, but different to the situation of the Chinese Olympic Badminton teams. In the Olympics the tournament was structured in such a way that losing a single match was actually the best way to win the gold medal. In the fighting game situation players are agreeing to split the gold medal because they both believe it will help them to win another one in another tournament at a later date.
Can you imagine hockey players agreeing not to use their full power in the Olympic Gold Medal game because they believed it would give them a better chance at the Stanley Cup? Insanity!
The victim here is the spectators. They are watching this whole fighting game tournament, and the final game is a complete dud. The players are just fooling around not trying to win, and everyone can tell. So the tournament organizer just shut it down on them. Oh snap!
I can't really think of a simple solution to this. Perhaps the only solution is to make the prize big enough that players will give it their all? But maybe if the prize is too big then half is plenty, and they will try to win even less. Maybe a smaller prize is better since splitting it will be a pittance, but then you won't attract the top players.
Are people just going to play crappy in every fighting game tournament finals except for Evo itself? It's like NFL pro-bowl or preseason games. Teams don't try to win because the results don't matter. They save themselves for the real games. The only solutions people have come up with for that is to cancel the meaningless games, or make them not meaningless.
I'm not sure how the fighting game tournament scene works, but one solution could be to make the small tournaments into qualifiers for the big tournaments. Anyone who hasn't won a smaller tournament isn't allowed to even enter the big ones they care about. Then you will only have a problem if two people who have already qualified make it to the finals of a small tournament. But that is also simply solved by not allowing already qualified players to enter a qualification level tournament. Yeah, that makes another problem of having tournaments without the best players in them.
Very very interesting stuff going on here.
Comments
I don't know if anything can be done about this, but it's interesting.
Perhaps simply make the prize unsplittable, like a vacation or car with no cash option.
Kinda simple as that.
The FGC is a far more rough and tumble scene than the slick spectacles like StarCraft or Dota 2; the spirit of is the spirit of the arcade, slapping a quarter on a cabinet, playing to win, all that romantic stuff. You'll note the appeals to the spirit of the game and the lionizing of sportsmanship and doing your best.
The problem is that it doesn't remove the incentives beyond making it more important for players to collude more carefully (which ends up increasing the risk for tournament hosts who have to make the calls with the potential to end legit matches).
Now money is involved and, I'm guessing, a lot of these guys don't play primarily in arcades anymore between tournaments but are instead playing online (running a monetized twitch stream). If they lose face, they don't have to deal as much with their peers and just have to retreat back to their rooms and into the arms of their fans.
I'm not sure what the sponsorship situation of fighting games is like these days. The quote above came from EventHUBs and Shoryuken who do a lot of work with MadCatz, who don't want their brand stained with cheating.
Ironically, the corporate money that so many in the FGC balk at could be the cure; players won't want to risk a steady paycheck by sullying their brand with the suspicion of cheating.
The story of one guy doing that once may end collusion forever.
The point of collusion isn't to get the prize money from that tournament, the point is to hide your real technology for more important tournaments.
For Magic, I think there is less of a problem though because the "super secret tech" will already be recorded anyway and your choice of using a deck or certain cards which give you an advantage because nobody else thought of how to handle that deck already sealed the fact that you probably will be less successfully with that deck in the future. That is of course if that deck is some sort of glass cannon combo deck.
The cut to Top 8 also helps as it pushes these less than savory practices out of the actual final games.
I myself recently was in finals of a somewhat larger Magic tournament, a prerelease, and offered my concession. This was not for "payment" though. It was because my opponent was a friend who at the last tournament I visited picked up and kept safe the trade binders of myself and another friend that we forgot at the tournament location. In short, I would have lost pretty much all my valuable cards which weren't in any of my decks if not for him, so this was my thanks.
We then played anyway, and he beat me, so it wasn't that much of a loss anyway
A similar thing happened years ago now in international Cricket where players were being paid off to throw. The international commission in response (when it was finally revealed) banned these player from playing in any sort of competition.
Many people stopped watching as well, for the obvious reason of the possibility of a team throwing. It hurt the sport as an entirety more than anything else.
The real causes are a combination of tournament structure, a largely closed and insular community of players, and that the money is substantial, but not "big."
This last point is important. These players tend to rely heavily on the prize money. The money in this "industry" isn't big enough to go fully professional in any real sense, nor is it small enough to write off as a bonus. These tournaments tend to attract people who need that money to continue to be competitive, and it's a vicious cycle brought on by the "amateur-hour" nature of all of these tournaments.
Prize-splitting, at least, doesn't bother me at all. It proves nothing more than that these players are actually seeking extrinsic goals (money) above anything else.
There's also other forms of collusion like having teams that will win or lose specific matches so they don't have to face each other and such in a double elimination or similar.
VxG was notoriously advertised as the next big fighting game tournament, not to the level of EVO but at the level of some of the build-up tournaments such as Final Round, Curleh Moustache, or CEO. However, it was really just an excuse for the fighting game elite to travel to St. Maarten and faff around. Only 35 people entered Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The prize money was there, but to the tens of thousands of people watching the event, they were really mad at what happened.
What's worse, is that this was done by the top 3 Marvel vs. Capcom 3 players, Flocker, NYChrisG and Fillipino Champ. Some of them already have a bad reputation for having poor social skills and reacting like pissy teenagers to losses or drama. ChrisG has even been guilty of collusion before, clearly throwing the Grand Finals of a famous tournament as he and his opponent used Randomly Selected Characters. Doing that really shows that they don't care or that they are so used to playing one another, they don't feel like the Grand Finals is worth it.
Even if the players are talented, they aren't keeping the people who organize the events in mind. People like Spooky or the event organizers or sponsors suffer when the players don't take the events seriously. It just leads to a very disrespectful, boring, and confusing final match that all the hype is led up to. That's why he pulled the plug on the event, because the people in Grand Finals were using characters they had not used in years or characters they never even used before. (Sanford plays Sagat and Chris always uses Sakura.)
People want the FGC to rise up, but collusion and getting obsessed over drama is keeping the scene from growing.
Is the tournament pleasing to the spectators?
That's really all that matters. How it is achieved is of little import to most fans.
The fighting games scene will likely never grow much beyond where it is now. These kinds of games aren't good for non-expert spectators, and never can be while simultaneously retaining their heavy skill component.
I think the fighting games scene can grow, similar to how DotA and Starcraft got so freakishly big. Even if a game is super technical to master, fighting games are great for spectating. You just can't dominate it with an incredibly poor professional scene, which is what the FGC is guilty for in several ways.
This is why every major sports league has centralized governance. Every attempt at having competing leagues has resulted in mergers. American and National Leagues merged into MLB. The ABA merged into the NBA. The AFL and NFL merged into the NFL. The WHA merged into the NHL. Even soccer, with all its leagues, is globally governed by FIFA.
The benefit of this is that with one central governing body things can be controlled. MLB banned Pete Rose for life because of gambling. He has nowhere else to play baseball. If there were viable competing leagues, the ban would just send him over to the competition. A single set of rules applies to all competitions everywhere. Competitions that happen outside of the league become meaningless while official matches become incredibly meaningful.
The problems of having one central governing body are that players now are beholden to a single employer. This is why player's unions exist.
Competitive video gaming will not become truly serious business until they achieve a modern structure like all other professional sports. One and only one governing body per game/game type. A player's union. Proper player's contracts. In Korean Starcraft they sort of have this already, but it's highly localized.
It's a matter if you want to become a professional and have games fund your life, you can't fuck around and screw over the people running the events or providing the money.
This is also carried across via Riot in the different regions around the world however in Korea, China and South East Asia it is a partnership. The world finals is all under one structure however. A few notable players have been banned for poor behaviour, which meant their account and also removing them from their ability to compete in Amateur or Pro tournaments for a certain period. League of Legends players can now officially get professional athlete travel visas to move around, (the only E-sport to get this privilege yet).
I know Leage of Legends gets a lot of hate but the company that develops the game understands what it is doing on the business and E-sports side of things.
The way it worked was that everyone played short matches against as many other people, in turn, and everyone kept track of their own scores (and, of course, the scores of everyone they played against). Because 34 people took part, that meant at any one time there were 17 games underway. In between, there wasn't enough time or space to communicate everyone's current win-loss ration, so all of that was "secret" until the very end.
This meant that only at the end was it clear that one player, Jonas, hadn't lost any of his games. And Jochen, who was the favourite, lost one of his matches (to Jonas) and actually placed third in the qualification. If I had been trying to game the system (which I wasn't) it would have been really bad for me to try to make sure I didn't aim for a placement, as I'd have to have played Jochen in a semi-final rather than the final.
Anyway, the solution is that the players themselves don't know if they are playing an important game or not. In the Fighting Games, it would go like this:
1. All the players in a room, isolated from the audience and competition organizers.
2. All the players play a series of games against every other player.
3. The number of games and players are actually randomized.
4. Of the x games a player plays against someone else, only one of them counts, as determined in advance by a random draw.
5. Keep the players playing lots of people, and only the audience and organizers (outside of the isolated room) know which of the games streaming from the room are "real" games within the tournament structure.
6. Even after the "final" game, keep the players playing each other randomly. They don't know the final has already been streamed to the world.
The only way to guarantee that you win the entire tournament is to play to win EVERY game. You don't know if the game you are playing is a round one, two, three, quarter final, semi final, third place or final match. Maybe an entire side of the draw is established before the other even begins, and yet matches just keep happening over and over.
This would only work with non-fitness based sports, of which board games and video games are perfect examples. You can have as much information coming out of the room as you want, but only "next match to play" information going in.
Thoughts? I'm not into competitive video games at all, not at a professional level, and only play amateur sports myself. As Scott says, this is solved by professional organizations and good tournament structures, but if you had to do a one-off event, the black box solution might work.
However, if two players are colluding and know in advance, and they know they will both get to the final regardless of the attempts of other players, the game is fundamentally broken.
For example at Evo 2013 -
Last year's winner Infiltration's main character was being beaten handily in the first set by PR Balrog's. In a do or die situation Infiltration changed to a lesser known character in the game that PR Balrog had not prepared for and as a result Infiltration won because he prepared multiple characters, matchups.
In the blackbox situation, playing so many games would allow for PR Balrog's lack of preparation to not be exposed, he would have had a few times to understand the opponents strategy and how to beat him or conversely for Infiltration to better counter the matchup and win with his primary character.
In short - surprise and having superior game knowledge would no longer be valued.
If your sport revolves around secret techniques and surprise, by definition it is immature. At this point, the best thing for the sport to get past its problems is to just keep going for another ten years.