The developers behind Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero have made it clear that it is “definitely not an esports game” from the beginning, and that statement has proven true even as official tournaments sponsored by Bandai Namco begin. The French qualifiers for the game's Dramatic Showdown tournament ended in disaster when a pair of players showed just how much such intentionally unbalanced mechanics can be broken, and the community's division over whether it should be fixed.
The Dramatic Showdown tournament began with a series of online qualifiers across multiple regions. The most recent one was for French players, and the entire stream was pretty normal for the most part, showing high-level play among the region's best players. Then came the final between Hilliasteur and Shiryuu and, well… this was the result.
Amazing competitive game. Commenters just stopped commenting after this lol pic.twitter.com/gZq37u8KpzNovember 25, 2024
Hilliasteur and Shiryuu kept flying up and down, over and over. Because Android characters in Sparking Zero don't use Ki when running, it's relatively easy to keep distance from an opponent, so an effective strategy is to try to rush in to land the first hit and deal a little damage. and then just keep your distance until time runs out. With a small health advantage, you will win the game when the counter reaches zero.
The problem is that these tournament rules defaulted to a match timer of a full 600 seconds, meaning everyone watching had to wait a full 10 minutes while Hilliasteur and Shiryuu played to stay away from each other. The official broadcast soon cut out, leaving the commentators simply chatting as they waited for the match to end. Finally it was, and Shiryuu ended up being the winner.
Some viewers interpreted this as a bit of collusion between the two players, as a sort of protest over the game's broken mechanics. Shiryuu appears to be among those demanding an update that fixes balance issues like this, retweeting a clip from the final along with the message “I WON JUST RUNNING WITH ANDROIDS #FIXSPARKINGZERO.”
If Shiryuu's intention was to protest, Hilliasteur didn't seem to be involved. “Shiryuu and I played seriously for 10 minutes while the live stream was cut,” Hilliasteur said in a tweet after the event. “After the match, they told us to stop and 'play for real', even though we had tried everything, including using giants. The problem is, they warned us that if it happened again, we would be disqualified.”
Are Hilliasteur and Shiryuu wrong for making use of what amounts to an exploit in the game? Are the tournament organizers wrong to demand that they change their tactics mid-tournament? Those are the kind of questions the community is stuck on right now – if you want to see some capital D speech, check out the responses to this thread from content creator Globku – but many are just hoping all of this makes Bandai Namco' fix the game. Of course, that kind of protest might be moot since the developers have already announced that a new balance patch is coming in December.
It's worth noting that there is no money at stake in this tournament, although the regional winners will be flown to the Battle Hour event in Los Angeles next January for the grand finals. The final grand format shows that the developers know that this cannot be a traditional fighting game tournament, as everyone will be pre-assigned a certain character with roughly equal power levels, and weaker characters will be given items to smooth out imbalances.
But the final grand format also embraces the chaos inherent in the game's design by allowing players to choose an additional weaker character in addition to their assigned fighter. The same Android characters that facilitated the controversial timer victory in the French qualifying are among the available options. We hope that the developers decide to address this specific issue in the December patch, because otherwise many players will have to make peace with a very boring tournament from now on.
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