Waldstein Infinite Discussion (Tournament Legality)

[White Man]

The prevalence of stuff like this is proof that the fighting game community has lost its collective cojones.

Back in the glory days of the thriving American arcade, a braindead one-button infinite wouldn't have been an issue because anybody who used it to stall out the timer would've gotten their teeth knocked down their throat.  Sure you got thrown out for punching somebody, maybe even banned from the arcade, but you went out to a chorus of cheers from everybody who had their quarters stolen by the d-bag that stood there mashing a single button round after round then had the nerve to brag about his "epic" win streak.  That was an unwritten rule of fighting game etiquette: You pull stupid, broken crap like that, you get a fist in your face.

Nowadays, online play ensures anybody can be as much of a glitch-exploiting dick as they want without fear of repercussions.  And every in-person encounter is dictated by this Neo Sirlinist philosophy that anything goes no matter what, and merely suggesting something might have been unsportsmanlike makes you a scrub.

It's the opposite of real life.  If we find out a player in the NFL used steroids, they get kicked out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and their team is disgraced.  If somebody sweeps a FG tournament and takes a $5,000 prize pot by abusing an obvious glitch, we applaud their creativity and skill in breaking the game.  Because effort is for scrubs.

If the official motto of the community is "blame the game", then cool, I can play by those rules.  But if we're going to reduce ourselves to the level of somebody cheating at Monopoly because of some ambiguous wording in the rulebook, then let's be adults and admit these games are nothing but silly toys where success amounts to finding the most useful bugs before everybody else.  And if we go route, let's maybe not try to elevate events like EVO to the same tier as the Olympics and stop treating every tournament player like they were a pro athlete deserving of endorsement deals and a manga series chronicling their rise to YouTube fame.  It's starting to get embarrassing.

[Beautiful Death]

The hell? Who is this, JamesMK?

 

"Durrrrrrr why should "top players" get paid for "pushing buttons? I play my gameboy on the bus, should I get sponsored by Madcatz?"

Gee, JamesMK, I dunno. Should a violinist get paid for "moving their fingers around?" Should a painter get paid for "moving brushes?" What about a soccer player? He's just running and kicking balls!

 

And goddamn, if people don't get their "teeth knocked out" for using infinites is a sign "that the fighting game community has lost its collective cojones" then well, cool. I'd say that the fgc growing up from being a pack of stupid savages is a good thing. What, was there something like the "video game police" back in the day at the arcade? Like, you had these big bad men standing around at arcades cracking their knuckles and waiting for someone to use an infinite so they could beat them up? If that was the case then man. I'm GLAD I didn't play in arcades back in the day.

 

Anyway yeah ban the infinite. That shit is goddamn stupid. One of my least favorite things to see in fighting games is long combos. I even consider a lot of the full length combos in BB and persona to be way too much. Infinites? Yeah no. I don't see any reason for things to be dragged out due to combos being so long. You get your hitconfirm in, get some more hits in, done.

[Tigre]

Not allowing the glitch doesn't make the game any better, I feel like we're pretty beyond that.

Not allowing the glitch potentially saves everyone a lot of time, though.

And as far as this "gap between old and new school" why aren't we seeing Japan do this every round? It's practical enough to go into.

Let's get away from arguing semantics guys, and let's be respectful to other people.

Only other thing I will add though is if we think it's going to be patched out fairly soon (according to the Arcade loktest notes) why not just ban it now on console? Soft ban will not work in America, it will pretty much self enforce itself.

I've pretty much made up my mind with how I'm going to go, but I'm going to leave this open for a bit more.

[JettyLovefield]

As long 6C's wall throw can still be combo'd i won't mind. 

 

I can understand the various reasons to keep it but i'd rather it banned IF used to win although i'm more worried about Gordeau's antics than anyone else.

[Fatalis]

I think the reason they don't do it is respect.

Even dead body hitting in a game like BB is considered very rude and bad sportsmanship.

[Warpticon]

I dunno, this seems really cut and dried to me. Leaving it in benefits no one in any way, and banning it basically hurts no one in any way. The arguments in favor of keeping it have been:

* It's the developer's job to fix, not ours! (we still have to play the game and get people to play it with us, regardless of what the developer does)

 

* It's hype! (does anybody really believe that relatively easy timer scam infinites are "hype" for anything beyond the first few times they're seen? What is the precedence for this opinion? Are you seriously willing to gamble any part of this game's competitive future on the possibility that people are going to perceive a timer scam infinite as "hype?")

 

* Japan hasn't banned it...we think...so we shouldn't either! (who gives a shit? Fun fact: Japan doesn't run a lot of double-elimination tournaments on console hardware, either. It's not our jobs to parrot whatever Japan does; it's our job to do what is best for our own scenes. Understanding the thought process behind their decisions is useful; wholesale copycatting is not. If people quit, or never start, playing because tournaments devolve into Waldsteins taking turns playing catch, are you going to console yourself by saying "at least we did what Japan did?")

 

* Let it rock because until we see people using it constantly, there's still a possibility it won't be completely terrible? (in other news, maybe this hot thing won't burn me if I touch it...ow)

 

* Let it rock becasue when the game degrades to clown business, it'll force the developers to fix the game! (good luck getting the players back after the patch, by the way. This idea is steeped in principle and divorced from reality.)

 

Not exactly convincing stuff.

 

 

Reasons the infinite is bad:

* It wastes time. We live in the real world in people die and time available is finite. In this same world, tournaments have schedules to keep. It's already been explained how this can make touranments drag on a long time, and it's already hard enough running tournaments and fitting them into a defined schedule space. You wanna make that harder for what? So you can watch Waldstein play catch with himself?

 

* Image. People dismiss this or call it scrub talk, but the reality is that attracting and keeping players is both important also difficult for a scene. We don't have the luxury of playing whoever walks into an arcade any time we feel like it. We have to find people who are interested in playing and dedicated enough to keep playing, or there is no scene. There's plenty of recent precedent, too. SFxT's patch fixed most of its most egregious flaws, but the perception of it as "Street Fighter x Timeout" contributed heavily to a deflation of the competitive scene. It's interesting that the lead programmer of Skullgirls is in favor of keeping it in, considering that the perception of that game as 7-day combos and Double assist only not only did irreparable harm to its competitive scene but more than likely took money (or "money", as it were with that whole legal situation) out of his own pockets. Is it worth the risk of obscuring the other 99.9% of the game for some false sense of rule enforcement consistency?

 

* The infinite removes interactivity from the game. And before anybody talks about infinites in MvC2 or 3 and one touch kills, those games have multiple characters per player and thereby multiple opportunities to get around them.

 

* Because he does above-average damage, the likelihood of landing a hit into infinite is higher than with other characters.

 

* He doesn't even need it. He's top tier already, and this just gives him a way to win more annoyingly/less fairly.
 

Reasons the infinite is beneficial:

*crickets*
 

Nobody has given an actual reason it should be kept outside of adhering to some unwritten non-rule that isn't even consistently enforced. What is the good that is done by keeping it in?

 

Banning it is easy to enforce, has multiple positive effects, and has little to no effect on Waldstein's competitive viability, outside of possibly preventing him from being game-breaking.

Also, I find the argument that banning a timer scam infinite is one step away from banning throws to be patently absurd. Throws work the way they're supposed to, and they are a fundamental part of fighting game offense/defense interaction. This very clearly is neither of those things.

[TD]

The fact alone that it murders the time clock is enough to ban it. Forget the rest. This is America, no one has much free time anymore and certainly not wanting to spend it watching THIS shit.

I for one will be rage quitting if I get caught in it. I am not waiting for round 2.

[White Man]

I think Warp just KO'd this debate.  Excellent points, very well said.

Concerning my train wreck of a post from earlier... Sorry about that.  I started off being facetious with the arcade nostalgia (I never actually saw anybody get punched, though there was an understanding that abusing obvious glitches got you a disgusted look at the end of a match) then kind of got sidetracked into a rant about the FGC that had next to nothing to do with the topic being discussed.  Sorry again.

The only other thing I'll say concerning that whole mess is that if anybody thinks being really good at a fighter is comparable to being a concert violinist or a master painter, they've officially lost all touch with reality.

[Tigre]

Warpticon pretty much hit everything square on the head. Waldstein is an amazing grappler without this, and it's obviously not intended. I don't really buy into the "The Developer left this in the game, they must not care if they didn't patch it". It appears that in the upcoming loktest that they're aware of it and are patching it. The burden isn't on the developer to police it, it's on the community.

So here's how myself and Nadakai will be handling it:

This will be banned at all of my events going forward. My monthly, Summer Jam, NEC, etc.

YOU HAVE UNTIL THE SECOND REP TO DROP IT. If you connect the second 6C, the player stuck in the infinite should pause the game and come get one of the TOs. The offender will be be disqualified if this is true (If it's not you just paused and that's on you, standard tournament jazz). Not a round loss, not a game loss, not forfeit that game and go to losers. I'm just DQing you, and you're officially a pot monster. Don't try to be cute with it. I think this is pretty cut and dry.

I really hope this gets patched out so we can stop saying silly things like banning this (a glitch that leads to a timer scam that is almost certainly getting patched in the next loktest, and might take a bit to arrive to consoles) is anywhere close to banning throw.

I'll level with you guys tho. I'll unban Chizuru.

[DaiAndOh]

French Bread I believe is issuing an arcade patch on August 4th.

http://inbirth.info/topic0174.html

I don't know Japanese. Google translate suggests it may fix the infinite.
 

I was on the fence, but if it indeed patches it out, that would swing me towards banning it.

[nadakaineko]

To DaiAndOh's point, yes, the second point mentions correcting an issue with certain throws in the corner, so that's most likely related to this bug.

[mAc Chaos]

If you are going to enforce a certain amount of reps, you'd need some TO or helper to watch every match. Is that something that can be pulled off at a major? If not, then it might be better to just ban 6C straight out. Although I guess even then you'd need someone there to make sure that it didn't happen. And then you'd have a headache if they did it by accident.

[Anne]

It won't happen unless somebody is going for the infinite, and if it does happen "accidentally" you'll be able to drop it before the 2nd rep. It's pretty easily enforceable coming from a TO perspective. Probably a good idea to just ban this quick until it's removed.

Shit's going to be banned at most events now, so that's pretty much that.

[Tigre]

Honestly, most of the enforcing happens just by stating that it's being banned, most of the community is pretty good about this.

Like I said, the person in the infinite can pause the match as the second 6C hits and call over a TO to verify what's happened, it's pretty easy to see exactly what's going on.

We'll most likely be playing pools on something like three or four setups, one of them will be a stream setup too, leaving at max three setups for the rest of us to monitor. it'll be easy enough to keep an eye on.

[Fatal Seabass]

Banning for the sake of banning is always a poor excuse. Many players from different communities ask that things be banned without even understanding why. They just think it's overpowered and end it at that when in actuality, very little ever needs to be banned. You run the risk of prematurely banning something versus actually seeing if the game can grow organically from where it's at. You also run the risk of creating arbitrary rules that change the game when it's possible that the game is fine as is, as Mike Z said. In other words, we don't know enough about it. We're watching one single video and are jumping to the conclusion that it needs to be banned. From the hours and hours of tournament Waldstein footage I've seen, not once have I seen anything remotely like that. 

 

@Time: TOs will find ways to fit games into their allocated time slot. The games will be played one way or another. Some TOs are good at it(even finishing well before what they anticipated). Some are bad at it.

 

@Image: I'm not buying this "image of a fighting game" nonsense. We shouldn't have to curb a game's meta because it won't attract people. If people will look at a few videos and come to the conclusion that they don't want to play that game, it's on them. Not us. 

 

@Interaction: No, it does not. No kind of interaction would imply that the opposing player doesn't get to "play the game", which is almost always exaggerated when brought up, honestly.

 

I'm for banning something if it stagnates growth. We haven't even seen if that is the case with this infinite.

[Tenryuga]

I can't believe some of the arguments I have heard in this thread. Are you guys seriously telling me you are ok with a Wald getting the life lead (with the round still being perfectly winnable for you) then going for this the next chance he gets in the corner? Not only that but you are really trying to tell me that having people sit there and watch the same repetitive action over and over and over and over when the outcome of the match is already decided for however much seconds will generate hype? You might as well toss the round the minute the loop starts to save everybody a minute or two. If I was a viewer I would instantly be turned off and not touch this game whatsoever (competitively) until it was addressed,

 

Character is already a dominant character and now people have to deal with the chance of a round getting sealed on his life lead on the corner? Nobody sees how this is retarded? Respect to the japanese players who had the sense to not do this bullshit and any other Wald players. This is not even winnning by outplaying somebody; Are you guys serious right now?

[Fatal Seabass]

All of what you said is not only circumstantial, but depends on the actual match between Player A and Player B. This goes back to that argument about "interaction" that people were talking about. Waldstein's infinite isn't a guarantee by any means.

 

Granted, those are valid concerns. 

[zankoku]

By the way, regarding the 2.03 patch due out on the 4th.

http://inbirth.info/topic0174.html

One of the bullet points of fixes that is mentioned:
・特定の投げ技を画面端で当てた際に、ヒット効果が発生しないことがあった現象を修正しました
translates roughly to "When certain throwing techniques are used along the edge of the screen, the anomaly where a certain hit effect might not occur has been corrected."

In all likelihood, this is directly addressing Waldstein's infinite.

[Rhiya]

By the way, regarding the 2.03 patch due out on the 4th.

http://inbirth.info/topic0174.html

One of the bullet points of fixes that is mentioned:

・特定の投げ技を画面端で当てた際に、ヒット効果が発生しないことがあった現象を修正しました

translates roughly to "When certain throwing techniques are used along the edge of the screen, the anomaly where a certain hit effect might not occur has been corrected."

In all likelihood, this is directly addressing Waldstein's infinite.

 

Yeah, that sounds a lot like it. 6C's supposed to wallbounce/wallslam but doesn't wallbounce/wallslam.

@Mods, Tigre: Has the topic served its purpose, since Tigre made his conclusion? If so, can we lock it, since the reason the topic was made has been addressed?

[Tigre]

yeah i'm locking this lol. thanks for the input guys