It’s been a while since I’ve done a direct response blog – mostly because I don’t find much discourse around fighting games lately to be worth pontificating too hard over. Most of it isn’t serious, and if it is, the avenues of conversation people use are prone to reward the most hyperbolic and aggrieved voices over any more rational voices. At one time, I probably would have been elbowing for that space with my own loud and aggrieved voice, but I’m a little older, a little wiser. This is post-Death Stranding Tanner, someone who wants to connect rather than disconnect, so if I see someone at least attempting to leap above the BS and have their voice heard, it’s probably worth considering.
So I watched this video of Street Fighter player Chris Tartarian in a very stripped down video format where he tries to have a dialogue with another person – in this case, FGC legend Ryan Hart.
The phrasing in both the title of the video and the conversation stemmed around ‘immaturity’ in regards to how players discuss strategy in games and on social media. I can’t disagree that the incentive for most people on social media where everything is sort of a pseudo-performance for your own audience means that maturity goes out the window. Most people are just trying to pop their friends, and you can always hide behind anonymity to go as big and loud as you want. In that way, yeah, a lot of FGC talk is really immature. That’s doubly so for strategic talk of the games as games themselves, which was hard enough on dedicated forums, let alone the sprawling mass of the greater internet. There was a point made, I believe by Hart, that sometimes there can be too strong an element of pride in not wanting to communicate with other good players, and Tartarian added that he felt his experiences in Japan showed him that all the best players frequently chatting and playing together offline was quite a bit more conducive to actually learning new strategies.
What I found was for a little while, I mostly had nothing to disagree with – I do find that Twitter is a horrible place to try and start a dialogue. I also think that when it comes down to the actual craft of fighting games, there are very few out there who can not only articulate the strategy of what’s going on behind the screen, but also ask questions of the designs of these games that are more philosophical in nature. I probably normally wouldn’t agree with Mr. Tartarian on a lot of things – I’ve probably said some not very kind things about him on this blog before – but this is the credit where credit is due era, and I didn’t find anything too objectionable about him and Mr. Hart’s conversation.
Then the topic sprawled into treatment of opportunities and accommodations for players in tournaments, particularly in comparison to other major Esports leagues, and it got pretty silly.
If you’ve somehow been blessed to have slept under a rock for roughly the past 15 years, you might not ever have had to participate in heated conversations about tournament set length. It’s our own Hundred Years War, and it’s very tiring, but in a nutshell: most major events’ rulesets have tried to implement a Best-of-Five (Bo5) games win condition for every match in the tournament. Given the nature of lower-end pools play, sometimes these games can drag on quite a bit to the last game, and it has the potential to make a lot of tournaments, most of which already rarely run on time, drag on quite a bit. Sometimes compromises are made to have the final eight only have Bo5, but it’s generally a really difficult conversation to have because people absolutely lose their shit over it. Either way, and it’s something that Hart brings up specifically, a smaller amount of sets is an issue of logistics typically brought up by the tournament organizers (TO’s) and viewers rather than the players themselves.
For both Tartarian and Hart, this is a mistake, a focus on “external factors” that distracts from the optimal way to not only give players the best chance to succeed, but the real fans to experience in real time the high-level adaptation that makes these games compelling to watch. To quote Hart, “The problem that we have today is we have very impatient people with no attention span…This mentality doesn’t fit for me – like it’s gotta be out the way as fast as possible. Why are you even running it, then?”
Tartarian goes even further, stating that the “bums” who would suggest this are, in fact, hurting the tournaments themselves. “…if it’s not for us, there is no stream, there is no tournament. No one’s going to tune in to watch bums play, I’m sorry, but that’s the reality of it. I’m not gonna fucking waste a whole day watching bums press buttons.”
The two also frequently cite other Esports titles, particularly Counter Strike and League of Legends, as tournament scenes that get it right. Not only do their grand finals last all day with several hour breaks in between, but they still wrap it up by the end of the weekend. “If every other TO for all these other games is telling me they can make time, then we can make time. If the organizers organizing the event, they could make the time, they just didn’t schedule it,” says Hart. Tartarian also makes it clear that it’s not a matter of saying no organizer works hard or is lazy: “None of us are disrespecting TO’s,” he says,”none of us are disrespecting sponsors. But there is a better way to do this, it’s been proven already, through CS and League of Legends.”
Were I to gleam an argument from these two, it would probably be something like:
- Other Esports titles like Counter Strike have long sets between players and broadcast to millions. The FGC is willfully ignoring this template because they don’t want to spend the money and/or are poor at scheduling
- Professional players are disadvantaged when sets are shorter and, for the betterment of the tournaments and the community at large, should be catered to when it comes to determining rulesets
I say “gleam” because, and this is my main area of critique, there’s a lot of talking but not a lot of saying. To both Tartarian and Hart, what they would prefer is incredibly simple, easy to do, and rational, and the only argument against it is…the bleating of malevolent, faceless internet trolls and laziness/frugality? It’s tautological, in other words, and, ironically, I think leads to a really immature discussion being had.
I’ve long talked about the tension that will always exist between organizers and players, a tension that will only increase as the stakes grow higher and higher. The two sides will mutually benefit from working in harmony, but their aims are ultimately going to be different. I think this is a totally healthy state, but at the same time, as with any conflict, compromise is going to have to be on the table in order to resolve it. I’m sure Tartarian and Hart would agree that that is the mature way, to argue for your positions and persuade the other side into agreeing either fully or in part, most likely the latter.
Tartarian’s frustration I think rings true – not every criticism of an existing tournament structure is necessarily a personal attack or callous condemnation of the organizers themselves. There are many who conflate the two, mostly because it’s well understood that for the amount of work that TO’s and their staff do, they are woefully underpaid and dreadfully overworked. Of course, the larger-scale tournaments are also businesses putting out a product that people pay a lot of money to attend, so the customers are well within their rights to voice their criticism.
While I wouldn’t always expect said criticism to be on point, or even particularly good, I think if you want to tout “real discussion” and “real change,” it should probably be in good faith. And I think that the threads of an argument presented in this podcast, while likely not intended, are so poorly constructed that a less charitable person could easily construe them as being in bad faith. Moreover, I think it frames the conflict as TO’s and (imagined) viewer capitulation being a bigger obstacle than the obvious, real obstruction to a different style.
For example, Hart brings up several times that if you were to look at a tournament such as the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) event for CS:GO, one could find a perfectly reasonable solution to issues of time, ad breaks, commentator cutaways, and the proper amount of games played to determine who is truly the best. As he puts it, it’s a scheduling and planning issue, not a serious logistics consideration.
Let’s say I grant that he’s trying to directly compare an IEM event to one of the bigger FGC events like the Capcom Cup Finals or Evo. Being an invitational with only one slot dedicated to a last-chance-qualifier, and only focused on Street Fighter 6, there’s probably room to believe that Capcom Cup has the most potential for experimentation with a longer set format. Even so, I’m skeptical that Capcom Cup would have anything approaching a similar budget or expected audience that an event like IEM Katowice would – the 2023 event had over 65,000 in attendance – so there would be necessary considerations given that likelihood.
But Evo? IEM Katowice is running CS:GO and Starcraft II, which have a play-in stage for qualifiers along with invited, highly-ranked players and teams. 24 teams for CS, 36 players for Starcraft. Evo, in 2023, was tasked with running 8 main tournaments in all open competition brackets, with SF6 having 7 thousand players, Guilty Gear Strive having 2.5k, and two others well over 1k entrants. Right away, the scale is something completely different than the type of Esports majors that CS:GO does. There may be some similarities in terms of broadcast structure, ads, and downtime, but the aims of the staff are already wildly different from those who would run a largely spectator-attended event.
Not only that, the finals of a CS:GO event like Katowice are single-elimination, best-of-three sets. CS:GO has, as noted in the podcast, a Best of 30 round structure, but that’s the default game settings, not something ordained by TO’s to get the best competition possible. If Capcom was going by the same logic, Bo3 is the default round setup of SF6, and Bo3 quarter and semifinals with a Bo5 grand finals would be well within the scope of normal Esports ventures. Starcraft II has longer sets in its finals, going to Bo7, but it’s also single-elimination. Is that something that would be acceptable to these two if that was the tradeoff for longer sets? Would it be possible to extend the amount of rounds played in a game of SF6 beyond the default two? It would be impossible, but we’ll get back to that.
That’s why I find these 1:1 comparisons bordering on bad faith – different tournament structures demand different rulesets, and we all know that. If the goal is to do open bracket tournaments that exceed well over 1k entrants, as most of our biggest events do, there are certain luxuries they simply won’t be equipped to handle that an event like IEM Katowice could. One of those luxuries is being able to consider the plight of the professional player as its sole concern – they simply aren’t the only ones in attendance, nor are they the only party who needs to be appeased. Unfortunately, those “bums” from earlier are also paying customers whose experience needs to be maximized! Fortunately, it may be the case, as Hart points out, that the aims of the beginner and the expert often co-align, but there may also be times where they don’t, and that’s just the reality of the moment.
More troubling than just the wonky comparisons, however, is the way the discussion is framed as to who or what is to blame for these inadequacies. Tartarian is understandably flustered by what he sees as “vindictive” trolls who don’t allow honest conversations about Bo3 vs. Bo5 to be had and interpret every statement in the worst possible light. Hart seems to believe that there’s a mentality issue – people have no attention span and also want to rush through tournaments, and that “it’s not a good look” to want to do everything on a shoestring budget.
The real trouble is that no matter the amount of healthy debate there is to be had, it’s all meaningless because that decision, at least for SF6 on the CPT, is not up to players or TO’s.
Maybe I’m overthinking it but isn’t it obvious the problem is…Capcom? Think about it – they’re the IP holders, so any sort of broadcast rights or advertising (AKA the real money maker) is explicitly tied up in what they want to happen. And as it happens, they’re deeply, deeply attached to a very rigid format – double-elimination, open brackets, Bo3 until finals, then Bo5. Those are the rules for any CPT event, which I imagine is what these lads are really concerned with.
Believe it or not, we actually have some common ground here. I do actually believe that a lot of tournaments end up trying to mimic the most successful ones rather than do their own thing, and it’s not great for the overall communities or the market. I, for one, think it would be awesome if one of the known tournaments said that they were experimenting with a Swiss-system or system-lite format instead of the usual double-elimination bracket. Maybe one tournament could go single-elim until top 64. A team tournament-only event? There’s a lot of possibilities, but again, this is left often to the less popular games who don’t have to capitulate to the strict terms of a pro tour.
In light of how much power Capcom wields over our collective tournament structure, it seems odd to single out Twitter trolls and frugal TO’s as the reason why you can’t get things to change. Intel invested $100,000,000 into ESL to help fund their Esports program, and Riot Games has a franchise system. Both Riot’s franchising system and ESL’s Louvre Agreement make permanent partners of teams in exchange for millions of dollars in buy-ins, with the idea that there’s a revenue sharing model that keeps these teams funded. Even with that system in place, North American Esports are on a major downturn, unable to find consistent sources of cash. ESL, of course, will be fine, considering they are now a fully owned tentacle of the Saudi Arabian Private Investment Fund…although Capcom is also a partially owned part of that same tentacle.
It’s not that the asks or Chris or Ryan themselves are so unreasonable, it’s just their arguments for their positions are immature, seemingly not at all interested in the very necessary devil in the details. There’s a belief, rather than an argument in favor, of ripe soil where there is scorched earth, that faceless trolls are doing more to hold everything back than the people who actually have their hands on the levers. I frequently have this criticism when people are doing “real talk” but they aren’t really asking the bold questions. Look, I don’t want Emezie in my mentions choking on Capcom’s knob either, but at some point you’ve got to look at the bigger picture and see where everything flows downstream from. Making vague gestures to other Esports with vastly different, vastly more resourceful financial structures, looking at the people who do not have access to that kind of capital and saying “why can’t we have that,” viewed entirely in a vacuum and divorced from reality, is the definition of fruitless.
Capcom, and the people that run the tour, have clearly made some mistakes, the tour itself has been far from perfect in the past. The only reason it changed was because a lot of people, players and organizers alike, went to Capcom and said “This isn’t working, we need something better.” TO’s are just as bound by the rules of Capcom if they want to be on the CPT, that’s why they’re actually in a symbiotic relationship with players, and the two should stick up for one another. Buying into the belief that pro players alone can force Capcom’s hand is delusional, it’s a losing fight, and I think they should turn their ire, reasonable though it is, towards a mutual opponent.
I want to go end with something Chris said, where he was lamenting that random trolls on Twitter will assume any criticism of tournament structure will be regurgitated as “You don’t give a fuck about the TO’s you fucking scumbag piece of shit, how fucking dare you say this about the TO’s, and the TO’s this and the TO’s that.” That’s pretty frustrating, right? You spent a lot of time trying to get better, even though you’ve got a job, and even when not playing you’re looking at film and talking about it with other players. And now, random anonymous losers are mocking you for being passionate, saying it’s nothing to get worked up about and you should just try harder, win more. It’s a huge part of your life that you’re passionate about, and you weren’t even taking shots at other players, just arguing that it would be better for everyone to get more games in. Someone is strawmanning your position, twisting it into something you’ve never said or done. I get it, that sucks.
Imagine a scenario where you are running a big tournament, and you are lucky enough to get CPT sponsorship for the event! That means you can use Capcom art and their name and IP to promote the event, that’s great! But also, you wanted to do something special, and have every SF6 Capcom Cup 2023 participant automatically qualify into top 32. Moreover, you wanted to do a Swiss-system format in a group stage once top 32 was hit, which meant you got a lot of matches that were played at a high level while everyone feels like they got to play people a decent amount. But you can’t, because Capcom says the CPT rules say that you can only do double-elimination, all open bracket. So you do, but then you want Bo5 the whole way through, and they still say no – you have to follow the CPT rules again that state it’s Bo3 until Top 8.
This is frustrating, because you want to try and accommodate the players and the crowd, letting lots of really exciting matches play out while feeling the players are getting their money’s worth. But, you’ve spent something like $60k on an internet bill, you’ve got staff that needs to be paid and trained, equipment to rent, and you’re super in the red and this isn’t even your day job! You can’t afford to say no to CPT status based on the prestige and advertising you get from using the name, so you capitulate and follow their rules.
Now suppose that after you went through all that, you saw someone on Twitter who placed high but just short of the finals, and they said it was your fault. You were the one who made the format Bo3, which means you don’t actually care about high level play, you don’t care about how “volatile to the psyche” that a loss in a Bo3 was, you were too cheap and too stubborn to listen to players. They “only” asked for just one little thing, and you couldn’t deliver it, and it’s a real problem. All the time, the player is never aware of, and can’t know, that you were just doing as the CPT rules were handed down to you, yet you have to take all the brunt because Capcom is Capcom and people won’t speak out against them because they don’t want to lose access either.
Would you take that criticism in the best faith?
Them's fighting words!! 
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