about a year ago me and two of my friends used to play wc3/tft 3v3 on battle.net on a daily basis. we haven’t been extraordinarily good players, but practice and knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses well got us at least a 2:1 statistic. in “normal” games, that consisted mostly of creeping, harrassing, expanding and one or two final battles, we were quite successful.

but about 1/4 of the matches were different. the opposing team exploited some “special strategy”, like just playing with a single hero, constantly harrassing and annoying us and teching us out, or getting mass summoned units, etc. (there are many “special strategies” in tft…) and we used to call that cheap and were extraordinarily proud when we managed to win against it by “normal” play.

but one day, annoyed by a number of “exploiters” that frequently owned us, we decided to try one of those dirty strategies we deemed “cheap”, and we realized two things: 1) many of those cheap strategies aren’t cheap at all, since most of them actually require far more skill, than they seem to from the perspective of the victim. 2) it is incredibly fulfilling to find a mechanism that works. development, finetuning and execution of “cheap strategies” is a very rewarding way to play the game.

but every time we used such a strategy and won with it a couple of times, we tended to feel guilty and soon stuck with “normal play” again. this artice changes my mind about that: in fact the rules of the game are meant to be exploited in order to win, it is kind of the essence of the game.

but i think there is a limit: as soon as a strategy cannot be countered by any means, it is beyond game balance and should therefore be avoided. this is not the case for any of the “cheap” strategies i know of in wc3/tft, but in the early days of dawn of war, there were a couple of overpowered exploits.

this game had serious balancing issues (and keeps suffering from that until today) and some strategies and units were so imba, that they couldn’t be countered effectively. since relic wasn’t too fast fixing balancing issues and tended to cure one desease with another (one unit was too weak and wasn’t played at all? be sure it was overpowered after the patch. another unit was imba? the next fix would render it useless..), this was about to destroy the small dow community. but soon a remarkable thing happened: these exploits were avoided more and more frequently and it became good conduct to do so. today it is common sense in the community, that exploiting the (still existing) balancing issues would have a desastrous effect; it has become the domain of fools and newbies, but not of the serious players.

If I annoy him, taunt him, do whatever it takes to make him lose his ability to play effectively then thats fine by me.

I remember in a game called Raven Shield me and my friends would set up in a room and cover it, sneak out and make hit and runs, chuck tear gas. The amonut of cheapness whines was amazing, but it wasnt the “camping” that won it for us, it was their inability to overcome it.

Its not hard to flush out defenders if you just think about it.

Anyways, I love playing games of any sort, and it’s hilarious to finally find someone who doesn’t just call my tactics cheap.

1. It is legal to make deals with other players ahead of time about splitting prize money. These deals can take any form and do not need to be secret.
2. On the tournament floor, you may ask your opponent to draw/forfeit in order to split money with him. You can only ask him one time, and it must be in front of a judge.
3. The most important rule: you may never ever play a “fake” match. Doing so makes a mockery of the competition far more than simply forfeiting would. The above two rules ensure that you have no reason to ever play a fake match anyway, as there is no rule against forfeiting and splitting the money.

Again, these are not the ideal rules, but I think they are the least bad ones we can hope to realistically enforce. We will never know what kind of deals are going on, but we can at least stack everything to prevent fake matches. Sometimes fake matches are obvious shams (and that really hurts the viewership of the game, especially if it’s televised!). Sometimes fake matches are hard to spot, so the best we can do is give you no reason to play them.

Anyway, that’s my vote on how to handle things, and it has real-world basis in the form of the MTG floor rules.

–Sirlin

How do you apply this reasoning to ties and/or cheating in game tournaments?

If Hatch was a tournament player, would we still praise him for forming alliances and influencing the result?

What if i’m about to play a tough opponent, and we just agree to split the combined prize money, and just allow one person to win so we’re both fresh for the next match? What if I agree to send the best player to the losers bracket, so I get 2 losses and he’s in a weaker bracket? According to survivor law, i would just be playing to maximize my winnings and those in my alliance, but it’s no doubt bad for the crowd and for future suppoer. What are your thoughts on this?

But here’s something interesting from an interview* with Mark Burnett (the creator and producer of Survivor):
“what makes the game work is the fact that the way to win is not by eliminating other people, but by convincing those people you eliminated to give you the money…The contestants are also learning something…which is that likeability is as important as capability in life.”

I’m trying to fit that into this discussion of competitive play. In the end, if *every* other player in a game is playing according to some unstated rules of conduct (i.e. everyone’s a scrub), then I think an unwillingness to adapt to those rules can itself be a form of scrub-iness…I just looked up Richard Hatch on Wiki and he seems to get eliminated early in his subsequent appearances on reality TV shows.

*The interview is at http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/10/games-mark-burnett-tech-cx_lr_games06_1212television.html

Also, I’m with Daniel_BMS on wondering why everyone accuses Sirlin of wanting to apply his playing-to-win mentality to life in general. Lrn2read, ppl.