The developers behind Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero have ensured from the outset that it’s “certainly not an esports game”, and that claim has been strongly validated as genuine with official Bandai Namco-backed competitions underway. The French qualifiers for the game’s Dramatic Showdown event resulted in excitement as a couple of players demonstrated just how far those intentionally unbalanced mechanics can be exploited, leading to a discussion in the community about whether or not these issues should be addressed.
The Dramatic Showdown event has launched with a series of online qualifiers across various regions. A few recent ones were specifically for French players, and the entire broadcast was generally well-received, highlighting high-level competition between the region’s top players. However, when the final match between Hilliasteur and Shiryuu occurred, well… this was the outcome.
Incredible competitive match. The commentators basically gave up on providing commentary after this lol pic.twitter.com/gZq37u8KpzNovember 25, 2024
Hilliasteur and Shiryuu continuously soared up and down, time and again. Since Android characters in Sparking Zero don’t consume any Ki while they’re dashing, it’s relatively simple to keep your distance from an opponent – thus, a strategy is to aim for the first hit, deal a little damage, and then just stay out of range until the timer expires. With a slight health advantage, you’ll win the match when the timer reaches zero.
The issue was that these match rules were set to a full 600-second duration, meaning everyone watching was left to wait a full 10 minutes as Hilliasteur and Shiryuu maintained their distance from one another. The official broadcast soon cut away, leaving the commentators to simply chat while waiting for the match to conclude. Ultimately, it did, with Shiryuu emerging as the victor.
Some spectators interpreted this as a bit of collusion between the two players, given the state of the game’s broken mechanics. Shiryuu seems to be among those advocating for an update to address balance issues like this, retweeting a clip from the final with the message “I WON BY JUST RUNNING WITH ANDROIDS #FIXSPARKINGZERO.”
If this was Shiryuu’s intention, Hilliasteur didn’t appear to be complicit. “Shiryuu and I played earnestly for 10 minutes while they cut the live broadcast,” Hilliasteur stated in a tweet after the match. “After the match, we were told to stop and to ‘really play,’ even though I had tried everything, even using giants. The problem is they warned us we’d be disqualified if it happened again.”
Are Hilliasteur and Shiryuu guilty for exploiting what amounts to an in-game bug? Are the match organizers at fault for insisting they change their tactics mid-match? Those are the kinds of questions the community is grappling with right now – if you want to delve into some serious Discourse, check the responses to this thread from content creator Globku – but many are simply hoping this all leads Bandai Namco to ‘fix’ the game. After all, these sorts of issues could potentially become moot since the developers already announced that a new balance patch is scheduled for December.
It’s noteworthy that there’s no prize money on the line in this tournament, although regional winners will be flown out to the War Hour event in Los Angeles this coming January for the grand finals. The grand final format indicates that the developers are aware this won’t be a traditional fighting game tournament, as all players will be assigned a specific character with approximately equal power levels, and weaker characters will receive enhancements to balance out the disparities.
However, the grand final format also embraces the chaos inherent to the game by allowing players to choose one additional weaker character alongside their assigned fighter. The very same Android characters that facilitated the controversial timer duration present in the French qualifiers are among the options available. Here’s hoping the developers decide to address this particular issue within the December patch, or else many players will have to come to terms with a rather tedious tournament from here on out.
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