There is such a guy – David Searlin. Cybersportsman, champion in Street Fighter.

There is such a guy – David Searlin. Cybersportsman, champion in Street Fighter, game designer, desktop driver, e-sports coach. He has a whole theory on how to train and play to win.

The main question is whether to use bugs to win. David’s answer is yes, if the bugs have the same effect on the two players. Equally – this is when, for example, because of a particular feature of the fighting engine, the fighter is invulnerable at some particular moment in the execution of the reception. It’s not the same when you can do something, and the screen of the second player goes out.

There are two types of games in terms of preparation. Old Kondovye assumed a very deep study of the platform, because they simply did not release patches (it’s hard to patch the cartridge on Szego). They passed lengthy tests, and everything that went into stores is no longer a bug, but a feature. On the other hand, the Internet allowed the release of raw products with consistently pre-released patches and constant additions.

The most interesting kind of patch is the establishment of certain rules of the tournament. For example, for the Startup tournaments we took one of the strongest project cards out of the pack – this is just a subset of such a patch.

David talks about the difference between good and bad prohibitions. For example, there is a shooter, and everything in it kemperiat (because it is close to the optimal strategy). It’s easy to ban the camping automatically – just drain the players who do not move more than 15 meters within 3 minutes. Since before it was optimal, now the optimal strategy will be as close as possible to the banned one. That is, the campsite for 2 minutes and 59 seconds, and then jump to a new position. There will always be players who will use tactics close to banned, so it is very important not to impose bans on such “fuzzy” concepts, but to create conditions for optimal tactics in the other. On the other hand, there are games that involve clear prohibitions. For example, in MTG you can prohibit a specific card. It’s easy to check, it’s very specific. Hasty ban – the method of lamers, you first need to understand if there is a counterparty to use not the most obvious moments of the game. Many “ultimatum tactics” after the tournament are not viable.