Team tourneys, being single character only for each individual player, do not encourage real diversity. Real diversity is forged when the top players have to learn more than a single character to improve their chances. They need to learn more about the game, knowing matchups and forming a roster. Sirlin does that at ST, for instance. When you force people to play just one character, there is no need for them to learn variety.

So yeah, team tourneys actually reduces variety 9except when the variety is fake) or, when this is not the case, team tourneys reduces the level of gameplay, since the players are not well versed in multiple matchups.

More than that, as already stated, team tourneys are tourneys to determine which grup of best friends is better than which other group of best friends. Even though the game is one-on-one, it is impossible to bet an accurate measurement of who the best player is. IMO, that’s the #1 reaosn why official team tourneys are a complete waste of time anywhere in the world. If its not possible to show who’s the best, why not just forget it and play casuals altogether?

Anyways, this match sucks. People can see/hear that I’m just mashing half the time out of desperation. I hate how often I have to guess in that fight.

The idea of a serious tournament is to eliminate as many random factors as possible, and in a team tournament the biggest random factor is the grouping of the players themselves. An otherwise great player could end up getting stuck on a shitty team and end up losing to a team of three equally great players, whereas he might have actually won in a 1v1 tournament. God help you if teams are created randomly. Swear to god, I’ve seen this happen (and it was pretty much a total surprise, not advertised, sprung on everyone at the last minute) and it was such a goddamn trainwreck that I decided it would be a better idea to try and get my entry fee back than to end up with two fucknuts who didn’t know what the hell. But then, I think that tournament would have been a trainwreck regardless, but that’s a different story.

Another example was last year’s Guilty Gear tournament (team, boo). I was debating between playing Chipp or Potemkin, and because I did slightly better with Potemkin in casuals, I went with him in the tournament. I faced a Baiken player who I had beat several times with Chipp, but not at all with Potemkin. Instead of everyone seeing a more interesting Chipp vs. Baiken match, they got to see me lose really bad in Potemkin vs. Baiken. No one was served by this rule, and I don’t even think it lead to a legit result in the case where this other guy couldn’t beat my Chipp.

A third example is SFA2. In a real SFA2 tournament, I would play Zangief when I could, Ryu against most people, and Rose only in certain cases. In a team tournament, I would have no real choice other than playing Rose the whole time.

Team tournaments REDUCE character variety in these examples above. They prevent the competitors from showing off multiple characters and the prevent the crowd from enjoying all those interesting matches that never happened.

It’s really sad that some people here are actually taking team tournaments seriously (in the USA), as if they are real tournaments. Japan has a different culture and a different situation that makes team tournaments less objectionable there, but most of these points still stand even there.

More to the point of my original post, can you imagine how much worse Evo West top 8 would have been to watch if we all had to keep our same characters?

–Sirlin

Guilty Gear might work better as a 2on2, spread out those top players abit more. Although its def at its best when its 1on1, for many reasons said above already.

Contrary to what alot of you here may think. I believe ST to be a very good team game. You can get some very interesting teams indeed. Definitely would promote more variety. Thing i’ve noticed when watching American tournaments is that players try to either tier whore, or counter pick there way to victory. Which is all good, as your giving yourself the best chance of winning. But this can become stale. At least with a team tournament where teammates can’t choose the same characters, you can get some very strategical teams, which attempt to cover other teammates character’s weaknesses. This is true for all team tournies, but even more prominent in ST, where theres quite a few “bad” matchups. Makes for some exciting games, don’t believe me? Check out the x-mania team tournaments.

And koogychan says: “i highly suggest we vote immediately after EVO this year for GG to be a single player event. i know that they hate the GG community in general, and want to drop the game.”

Don’t worry. I’ll continue to fight for GG’s survival. I still love the game. And remember: Evo Staff hates EVERY game according to each community. We hate Smash, we hate CvS2, we hate Marvel, we hate 3rd Strike, and we hate Guilty Gear. We are equal opportunity haters. ^_^

in japan, there are countless top players. almost 4-5 top players per character. yet, tougeki is a CAPPED tournament, meaning that in order to get in, you must win tournaments and there is a very low number of actual players in a 1v1 tournament. I believe it’s 64. Anyway~~~

A team tournament gives the opportunity for 3 top players to join forces, and reck other top players, while still allowing for more overall players to go. I believe that there were enough players last year for the last call qualifier, that they had 100 teams?

And yet, in America, there are maybe 50 teams total? Maybe 45% of which are random people teaming together with no real reason why, other than they couldn’t find a team mate?