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Old 09-06-2015, 07:14 PM   #1
Talon87
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Mercy vs. No Mercy in Competitive Sport

I'm not really sure how to set this one up so we're just going to dive right into it and I think you'll see pretty quickly what it is that I want to talk about.

Showing mercy: In the story Hikaru no Go, 10-year old Akira is the son of world-famous Go player Touya Kouyou, a.k.a. the Meijin. Akira has been playing Go with his father since before he could read, and at the age of 10 is already so proficient at the game that he could probably pass the annual Pro Exam without taking a single loss. Akira's father, the Meijin, forbids Akira from partaking in any amateur Go tournaments. He forbids him from partaking in any tournaments with any children his own age. Indeed, the Meijin goes so far as to forbid Akira from playing Go against any children period, tournament or no tournament. Why does the Meijin do this? Well, we discussed this in the Hikaru no Go anime thread last March (click here for the first relevant post), and while we interpreted the relevant dialogue in different ways, one interpretation of the Meijin's actions was that he didn't want Akira to so utterly crush the other children's spirits (as surely he would, what with being a virtual pro) that they would give up on Go altogether. Even if that's not what the Meijin had in mind when he forbade Akira from playing amateurs, the idea is revisited throughout the series through other characters: people dropping out of the competitive Go scene one after another as the protagonist rises through the ranks, witnessing frustrated player after frustrated player who abandons the game because, in losing to far superior players, they lose the confidence to continue on, the confidence that maybe one day with enough practice they too can become a Go pro.

In my own life, I have a friend who showed renewed interested in Pokémon circa 2010. He had just completed HeartGold/SoulSilver and was confident he could defeat me. (I think he had read up on a few strategies online.) He asked if he could use any Pokémon and I said sure. I used my Staraptor, Mamoswine, Togekiss, Milotic, Starmie, and one other Pokémon. (All EV trained.) He used a team that consisted almost entirely of legendaries and starters. I led with Staraptor, and I Brave Birded every single one of his Pokémon into a OHKO untl Staraptor died from recoil (which I think happened on the fourth or fifth creature), then cleaned up the other two with I don't even remember who. So I won 5-0 and it was over in six turns. He packed up his DS and has never wanted to battle me again. I want to be clear about a few things. First, he was the one who challenged me, not the other way around. Second, I warned him about the difference in our skill levels but he ignored me. (He even knows I spend a lot of time on UPN, and what UPN is.) Third, I offered to play him with my non-competitive (HGSS Story Mode) team immediately afterwards but he declined. And fourth, not then and not ever, he has never come to me asking for pointers or tips about how he can become a better battler. (Contrast this with the testimonies below.) The point is, I "showed no mercy" and consequently crushed this guy's interest in competitive Pokémon. And I feel like that's my fault, even though I feel like I was otherwise a good sport (dialogue, body language, all of it) and that my only offense was the decimation of a pseudo-Ubers team using my OU team.

Another anecdote from my personal experience. I have a friend who was introduced to Go, kept losing to sub-24k strangers on the Internet, and gave up on it altogether. I was 18k at the time (now I'm somewhere around 11k) and a friend of ours was like 10k (last I saw him he was around 1k). After years of swearing off Go as a "stupid game" -- and I mean years, it was almost eight years to the month -- he decided to give Go another go this past spring. I recommended he sign up on KGS and try out playing against the computer first. He could not initially beat the 25k bot, and only after days of strenuous battles did he finally manage to beat it. This frustrated him, especially since he had previously heard from me (and also from Hikaru no Go) that the comic relief idiot in the show's post-credits segment, Yuki-kun, is around 25k and that the kyuu ranks only go from 1k (best) to 30k (worst), placing 25k near the bottom. Despite my frequent encouragement and cheering him on, I believe he's since re-given up on Go. (He hasn't brought it up in conversation since the spring.)

Showing no mercy: In this Reddit thread, an older Pokémon fan talks about his experience at a tournament. He was paired against a 10-year old boy and thoroughly trounced him. He felt bad about this and questioned if he acted poorly. The Reddit community was almost unanimous in their response: they told him that he had done the right thing, that he treated the 10-year like an equal, that you should never ever show mercy at a tournament. Fuck it: let me just quote them directly:
Quote:
I remember going to a local tournament at a comic book store when I was like 11 or something, only ever played against my friends so had no idea what to expect, and equipped with 6 hacked legendaries (Because they're OP right?)

Ended up losing horribly, but some guy there encouraged me and asked what my favourite pokemon was, and ended up trading me the 3IV Gardevior he had used in his team (Remember back in those days IV breeding was actually difficult).

Since then I've learnt a lot, but I don't think I'd still be playing without that guy's encouragement.
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The way I figure it, you can only grow as a player by competing against a superior opponent.

I've learned more in a chess game that I've lost to a better player than I'll learn in a hundred games against people I outrank.

You're doing them a service by kicking the crap out of them, it'll show them what the true competitive scene is like, and it'll give them a hunger for more and make them yearn to do better.

But it is really respectable that you treated him nicely afterwards, too. I've played games with people who wouldn't give that common courtesy, and the fact that you won but did so gracefully speaks volumes about you as a person.

Never pull a punch, but offer your hand and a "good game" after the match is over. That's the true spirit of sportsmanship.
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Teacher here. Kids need to learn to fail. If you treat him like a rival, he will appreciate it. Trust me, learning to lose is more valuable than being given a pity win.

I play magic the gathering competitively and play 100% competitively against all opponents. I explain what I'm doing to newer players and they get better as a result.
Quote:
Agreed. I'm a pokemon tcg league leader and I don't hold back at all against kids. I do however explain how I beat them (actually having a strategy, using item/supporter cards) and try to help their decks afterwards. Also I don't use tier one decks against them unless they're a tier one player, you're much more motivated to improve after some close games than getting stomped.
People tend not to like to be patronized. There. That's this paragraph. Next point.

People tend not to like it when their death is prolonged/drawn out, when it's obvious that they've lost but now their opponent decides to start "playing with his food," so to speak, instead of just finishing them off.

The debate: I don't think it's a black-and-white deal of "You should always show mercy" or "You should never show mercy." I think there are factors, some obvious and some subtle, that influence our decision to show or to not show mercy and that (in the eyes of modern Western society) determine whether we were a good or a bad sport. Help me out here, and let's discuss. What to you are some of the factors that determine when you show mercy to someone, when you pull punches, when you go easy on them? And what to you are some of the factors that determine when you go the other way, and you show no mercy? Just some ideas off the top of my head ...
  • the age of the other party. When does it matter? When does it not matter?
  • your relation to the other party. Do you treat people in one social group (e.g. brothers and sisters) differently from people in another social group (e.g. strangers)?
  • whether the other party has been boastful before the match or not. Does the other party boasting permit you to smash them into pieces? Or should you still show some restraint in defeating them?
  • the setting. Is it a tournament at a 3rd party location? Are you hosting someone at your house? Are they hosting you at theirs? Other?
  • the nature of the tournament. Is it casual or serious? Is it low-level or high-level? How big is the pot, and does that matter? How much money did you have to spend to attend the event, and does that matter too?
  • if it's a tournament, does it make a difference whether you're already losing (relative to getting 1st place) or not? Like, say you know the best you can do is take home 32nd place. Does that influence your decision to go easy on a 10-year old, or maybe even throw him the match? Or would you still play him with every bit of ferocity you'd display if this were the championship game and winning meant you'd take home the grand prize?
  • does the sport make a difference? For example, is Pokémon seen as a "kids' sport" and thus you're picking on small, helpless children if you're the grown adult who decimates them? Vs. is American football seen as an "adult sport" and so if you full body tackle an opponent and he runs off the field crying that's his own fault?
  • does the other party being/not being a sore loser influence how you choose to play with them? Should it? (For example, should your sore loser friends be coddled? Or should they be scared off of the sports that they're poor at? Are you doing them a service or a disservice to pull punches?)
These are just the questions or ideas that come off the top of my head right now. You're free to explore this topic of Mercy vs. No Mercy however you like. I just want to know what your thoughts are on the topic.

The debate (Pokémon): And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't especially interested in your thoughts about this topic and how it pertains to Pokémon. There's lots of room to answer here: the competitive video game scene, the competitive TCG scene, the casual scene for both of these, the PASBL, Fizzy Bubbles trainer battles, so on and so forth. You could even attack it from the angle of judging the fictional characters inside the Pokémon universe, e.g. Lance showing no mercy to Red even though he's a child, or the player-controlled character showing no mercy to a kindergartner NPC and taking their lunch money.
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Old 09-06-2015, 07:49 PM   #2
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This is pretty clear-cut to me. The higher the level of competition, the less mercy you show to the opponent. At higher levels, players are less interested in improving themselves and more interested in outright winning, and if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. It's easy for them to justify whatever methods they used if they have the gold or the millions.

In Yu-Gi-Oh! for example, all I care about is winning and padding my record to qualify for the DN bonuses. I'm not interested in being a good sport of being a celeb, not right now anyway, because those objectives run counter to my current objective of wanting to get those wins.

Crushing the 11-year old is a lot more debate-able, because the stakes were not that high, and it was what happened afterward by the experienced player (trading the Gardevoir) that left the bigger impact from the whooping, based on that post.
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Old 09-06-2015, 07:55 PM   #3
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Well, the OP in the Reddit thread wasn't involved in the Gardevoir story. The Gardevoir story comes from one of the many replies to the thread. But as for the Reddit OP, it appears that he did trade the child he defeated a shiny Mudkip. Led many people to joke about how the kid may show up years later with a shiny Mega Swampert and best the OP with it.
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Old 09-06-2015, 07:57 PM   #4
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In my opinion, unless you know the person and you've played a few games already, one should not be showing mercy. People don't take it easy on me on Showdown e en though I might as well be an 11 year old kid to them what with my skill level both in battling and teambuding, and I'd be offended if they did. It's my personal philosophy that what works in any competitive environment isn't what mets you win after win, it's what punches you in the face and knocks you off your high horse, and denying me the honesty of that system is an impediment to my own progress and it gives me a chance to beat you when I don't deserve to. However, a younger kid? If you end up trouncing them, do try to give a hand in return. Maybe give them some pointers, like "you should have your X have Y move and Z item so that you can do this really awesome play" or something like that. For instance, I'd talk about something like, maybe ScarfRaptor for a simple to use Flying Type and a great introduction to Choice Item play.
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Old 09-06-2015, 08:11 PM   #5
Emi
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I don't know how much I can comment on this topic without being a hypocrite, buttttt I typically don't show any mercy when I'm playing YGO or Pokemon Showdown. I go all out, because at this point I've learned almost as much as I can (now if I can get Red-Eyes to work in any capacity...) and I'm looking to win. If someone tests against me, I'll still not show any mercy to them, because they aren't going to get any mercy from anyone they'll play with online or in a tournament (remind me to DQ Kin). If this was some 11 year old kid in real life...I'd probably play with more mercy because its very likely that kid is a lot less skilled than me and simply wants to learn. When someone wants to learn, I do dial it back (I played Deskbots against my boyfriend when he was learning Chaos Dragons instead of something stronger like Shaddolls or Mermails), because they need the experience to learn and they aren't going to learn if I crush them in a couple of turns.

For myself, I typically don't take losing very well. A lot of deep, ingrained perfectionism has made me very critical of myself when I fail and typically doesn't help me learn at all, unless the loss was really close. If I'm in a tournament or playing against strangers, I don't try to let it get to me but in other situations I tend to react very badly when I'm on the back foot (not in a visible way but I've had bad panicky episodes from ASB matches where I couldn't figure a way to get out of some positions I was in). On the contrary, I learn a lot more when I win, because I'm more confident to strike and experiment than when I'm losing. It's in part tied to my emotional state too.

I do think that mercy or no mercy, always be respectful, always be willing to give a lending hand, and try your best to cheer someone up if they look despondent. I don't think one philosophy is necessarily better than the other: there is a time and a place for each.

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Old 09-07-2015, 12:10 AM   #6
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I can't recall exactly who it was (Brahms?) But when I was going through piano, my teacher told me something extremely interesting.

The composer in question was the best piano teacher of all time. Not because he was good at piano, even though he was indeed a virtuoso. Not because he had some quiet authority, not because he knew the best practice methods (The best practice methods have been known since music was created). Not because he had good students. The reason this guy was so amazing was because as he played for the students, he intentionally reduced his skill level so that the student would feel that with just a little practice, he or she could reach the level of their tutor.

There's a reason people are comfortable winning at 25% of the time. More than that and you feel equal - or worse, not challenged. Less than that, and you get discouraged and feel like you aren't learning or winning at all.

Obviously you don't have to be the best teacher like that composer was. However, "crush their spirits so that they get a taste of what real competition is like" isn't the way to go about it, nor is "lose intentionally so they feel better." Win, but barely. Then, they know...you just need a little...bit...more, and then you'll beat me. Which is technically true! It's just that the little bit more that they have to do is...a little bit more than they think.

Directly, I don't think the question is valid. Not only is it not a dichotomy of "Do I show mercy or do I not show mercy?", there's not even a shades of gray deal where you get to pick and choose where you show mercy. If someone is clearly new to the game you're playing, it is your right to claim victory, but it is unethical to win by defeating them utterly. You are sharing your interests with this new person, not competing with them - the victory condition is no longer "Win the game," but "Show the other person why you are playing the game." The win is guaranteed.

I just thought it was interesting applying my piano learning to something directly competitive like go, chess, or pokemon.
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Old 09-07-2015, 06:57 AM   #7
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Surely, if casual play, you show mercy if you feel like it, and if professional, you don't?
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Old 09-07-2015, 12:31 PM   #8
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No mercy. Never.
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Old 09-11-2015, 12:07 AM   #9
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