i51 gives Miniraser loss for playing for stalemate - Page 19

On April 21 2014 05:25 Plansix wrote:

No, I think I am going to blame the player who decided to drag out every game once he realized that he couldn't win.

People need to accept one simple fact which cannot in anyway be overlooked: Tournaments have time limits that must be kept.
They had already spent 3 hours on one set, how much longer would it go if they did another re-game? 1 more hour? 2? maybe another forced draw happens, that is potentially another hour or so. Therefore these rules have to be in place to prevent this from happening.

On April 21 2014 07:27 ejozl wrote:

This still does not answer why Ourk should be rewarded the win.
Because some admin guy thinks he played better? Because he's ahead? 2 times infinity is not a bigger number than infinity, if it's a draw, it's a draw.
You can shorten the series, you can give a free win at random, but you cannot just decide a winner, that's the beef I have with this rule.

On April 21 2014 07:27 ejozl wrote:

This still does not answer why Ourk should be rewarded the win.
Because some admin guy thinks he played better? Because he's ahead? 2 times infinity is not a bigger number than infinity, if it's a draw, it's a draw.
You can shorten the series, you can give a free win at random, but you cannot just decide a winner, that's the beef I have with this rule.

On April 21 2014 07:37 ejozl wrote:
Which brings me back to, get rid of this silly rule.

On April 21 2014 07:19 FiWiFaKi wrote:


I mean I don't see an issue with it. You start a game, and things don't go your way, and you see it's not possible to win. Instead, you go for a tie, and try to win the next game.

It's a common occurrence in chess to play for a tie, and win the next game. So it's not a completely one dimensional issue.

On April 21 2014 05:38 MoonfireSpam wrote:
Sounds like a good decision. Sounds like a situation where he couldn't win so just turtled up. Sortof like if a boxer was getting beaten up then hugged the ringpost so the opponent could only land illegal shots to the back.

Quite a few sports have rules to prevent that sort of behaviour (shot clocks, points for aggression, timewasting rules).

On April 21 2014 01:24 TotalBiscuit wrote:


Oh cool, we found someone who read Sirlin once and now thinks he is an expert in progaming and tournament organization.

I was hoping we'd see one of those in the wild at some point, I've only heard about them in fairytales.

So basically you are regurgitating someone else's opinion without any consideration as to the context. Sirlins website is not the holy gospel of eSports nor does it apply to absolutely every situation. When you are playing in a tournament, particularly one whose games have an indeterminate length and the ability to run super long (which fighting games don't by the way so you can immediately disregard some of what Sirlin argues), the schedule is king. There will be flexibility, there always has to be to make that work, however if the tournament massively overruns, you are compromising the entire event and all the players participating in it. I'm willing to bet the vast majority of SC2 tournaments have measures in place to deal with this, they simply haven't had to utilize them, with the exception of Dreamhack who has resorted to coinflips to sort this out when the schedule had to be maintained. Blizzard have designed a god-forsaken terrible unit that causes this kind of stuff to happen. These games did not occur prior to the introduction of the swarm host. One of the longest Wings of Liberty games was Boxer vs Rain, if you can believe that. Now this 3+ hour bullshit can happen (oh hey turns out infinite free units is a terrible mechanic, who knew). Tournaments must now adapt to the possibility that this might happen and where necessary take steps to prevent players from deliberately and knowingly fucking up the entire event.

iSeries is the longest running eSports tournament series in the UK. They have operated many hundreds of tournaments for all manner, they know what they are doing. This was clearly the right call in this situation and if you go into an event knowing the rules and then break them anyway, you deserve the consequences of your actions.

On April 21 2014 08:14 Kashll wrote:


This was clearly the wrong call and there are many more equitable ways of dealing with the time issue if that is what is at stake. At the very worst the game should have been decided by coinflip if they were out of time.

What actually happened is that a player got punished simply because the admins "didn't approve of his play", when in actuality all that player was trying to do was maximize his chances of winning a set in a tournament (GASP).

I'm aware that tournaments have very real logistical issues that they have to deal with, and I am in no way trying to say that 3 hour swarmhost games are fun to watch or not complete bullshit. What I am saying is that there are philosophically much better and fair ways to deal with this issue.

On April 21 2014 08:22 RampancyTW wrote:
Except they had it explicitly posted in their rules that doing what Miniraiser did could result in being awarded a loss.

He didn't get punished. He was awarded a loss so that he couldn't force a regame indefinitely until he fluked out a win.

And the coinflip would have been the opposite of fair. Ourk was clearly in the dominant position, which is why Miniraiser retreated to his main both times. A coinflip would have been utterly unfair to Ourk.

On April 21 2014 08:28 Kashll wrote:
In no way am I saying a tournament should offer multiple re-games. What I am saying is that they are out of time they need a way of arbitrating the match without FUCKING OVER one of their competitors.

On April 21 2014 08:30 Figgy wrote:


No one was fucked over. Miniraiser is a complete douchebag for wasting the time of over 30 people at the venue and every single viewer then bitching about it afterwards.

What the hell did he think was going to happen? He was going to stall for 8 hours before someone went in and said something?

On April 21 2014 08:33 Kashll wrote:


Ignoring what he did afterwards, how is a player a complete douchebag for maximizing their chances of winning a competitive game in a tournament?

I'm pretty sure what he thought would happen is that he would demonstrate that the game was a draw, and it would get replayed or arbitrated by a coinflip, thus increasing his chances of winning the set.