The devs behind Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero have made clear that it's "definitely not an esports game" from the very start, and that assertion has very much proven true even as official Bandai Namco-sponsored tournaments get underway. The French qualifiers for the game's Dramatic Showdown tournament ended in disaster as a pair of players showed just how far those intentionally imbalanced mechanics can be broken, and the community's split on whether it should be fixed.
The Dramatic Showdown tournament has kicked off with an array of online qualifiers in various regions. The most recent of those was for French players, and the whole broadcast was pretty normal for the most part, showcasing high-level play between the region's best players. Then the final between Hilliasteur and Shiryuu came around and, well… this was the result.
Amazing competitive game. The commentators just gave up on commentating after this lol pic.twitter.com/gZq37u8KpzNovember 25, 2024
Hilliasteur and Shiryuu just kept flying up and down, over and over and over again. Because Android characters in Sparking Zero don't use any Ki when they're dashing, it's relatively easy to keep your distance from an opponent - so an effective strategy is to try and rush in for the first strike, deal a tiny bit of damage, and then simply keep your distance until the timer runs out. With a small health advantage, you'll win the match when the counter hits zero.
The issue is that these tournament rules defaulted to a full 600 second match timer, meaning everybody watching had to wait a full 10 minutes while Hilliasteur and Shiryuu played keep away with each other. The official broadcast soon cut away, leaving the commentators to simply make conversation while waiting for the match to end. Eventually it did, with Shiryuu ending up the winner.
Some viewers interpreted this as a bit of collusion between the two players, as a sort of protest of the game's broken mechanics. Shiryuu seems to be among those demanding an update addressing balance problems like this, retweeting a clip of the final alongside the message "I WON BY JUST RUNNING WITH ANDROIDS #FIXSPARKINGZERO"
If protest was Shiryuu's intention, Hilliasteur didn't seem to be in on it. "Shiryuu and I played seriously for 10 minutes while they cut the live broadcast," Hilliasteur said in a tweet after the event. "After the match, we were told to stop and to 'really play,' even though I had tried everything, even using giants. The issue is that they warned us we’d be disqualified if it happened again."
Are Hilliasteur and Shiryuu wrong for making use of what amounts to an in-game exploit? Are the tournament organizers wrong for demanding they change their tactics mid-tournament? Those are the sorts of questions that the community is locked into right now - if you want to see some capital-D Discourse, check the replies to this thread from content creator Globku - but many are just hoping this all makes Bandai Namco 'fix' the game. Of course, that kind of protest might be moot since the devs already announced a new balance patch is coming in December.
It's worth noting that there's no cash on the line in this tournament, though regional winners will be flown out to the Battle Hour event in Los Angeles this coming January for the grand finals. The grand final format shows that the devs know this can't be a traditional fighting game tournament, as everybody's going to be pre-assigned a certain character of roughly equal power levels, with items given to weaker characters to smooth out the imbalances.
But the grand final format also embraces the chaos inherent to the game's design by allowing players to choose one additional weaker character on top of their assigned fighter. The very same Android characters that facilitated the controversial timer scam win in the French qualifier are among the available options. Here's hoping that the devs decide to address this specific issue in the December patch, because otherwise a whole lot of players are gonna have to make their peace with a very boring tournament from here.
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