Archived Discussion Main / StopHavingFunGuys

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

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The Final Destination No Item Wavedashing Pro launched as "Stop Having Fun" Guys: From YKTTW

Working Title: The Final Destination No Item Wavedashing Pro: From YKTTW

Known Unknown (retroactively put on top of the page so that it can be read)

• As the guy responsible for this trope, I'm both elated that it's getting so much feedback, and aghast that it's being misinterpreted so much. This isn't some soapbox rant against tourney people, nor is it bitching and whining against using such tactics. As a type of player I moniker a "professional casual" (Yu Yu Hakusho called it a battle junkie) I like to play for fun, and solely for fun (that mainly mean that I will play any way I wish, be it All Items Icicle Mountain or No Items Final Destination, and still have fun). As I played, especially after looking at forums (yeesh...bad idea), I was increasingly annoyed by the petty Flame Wars btw Scrubs and "Stop Having Fun" Guys, though I won't say that I didn't fall into one side or the other in trying to voice a reasonable compromise (in fact, when I wrote this thing I had just come off reading of a very ridiculous argument that caused me to swear off the Smash World Forums, and may have influenced my writing).

In any case, when I read The Scrub trope on here, I seemed like a slap in the face towards all casual players, not just those who are the annoying section (in short, the guy who made The Scrub made the same mistake I did), so, a bit offended, I decided that there should be one on that kind of tourney player as well. So, my objectives were:

• Make a trope just as scathing as The Scrub.
• Make it clear that these are merely extremes, though the most outspoken, and make clear that just because I'm criticizing players who happen to be tourney players, I'm not slamming all tourney players for having an alternative playstyle (that would make me exactly what I'm trying to criticize).

I may have failed on the last bit. But it's not a soapbox, it isn't meant to be immature, and one might want to remember that, just because it isn't all Politically Correct doesn't mean it's a ranting complaint. Not that that means that I didn't mess up a bit on writing the damn thing.

Winter: I kind of disagree with this reasoning—according to Sirlin's definition, which is generally the one i go by, the two are actually kind of the same thing: every "casual player" is a scrub. If we want to be nice (and we probably do) then we could split it as follows: the "hardcore" players might regard all casual players as scrubs, but as long as they play with others who agree with them or in the comfort of their own home (etc) they're only hurting themselves even if Sirlin is right so we can't complain. When someone brings that sort of mentality (that people should play "for fun" and not "to win") into overtly tournament/competition play then it's disruptive and silly. It's only the latter example of the Scrub that's really objectionable. I think the "hardcore" types could agree to this split, but i only speak for myself.

I think, however, that saying exhortations to play to the best of your ability (a'la Sirlin's "don't be a scrub" essays) are the same as saying you should play by some arbitrary set of "honorable" rules is a false equation. There's a distinct difference between the two, so if making that claim was the goal that might be part of the reason this page is so confused.

I think the problem people are having (or that i'm having, in any case) is that the article is inaccurate, not that it's a hard-hitting response to the Scrub article. I know just as well as anyone else that the hardcore player can be an annoying jerkass—maybe moreso than most people, as i play with the "hardcore players" all the time. I'm not going to sit here and say all people who play to win are saints, because that's obviously untrue. However, i would rather tone down the Scrub article than deal with a mess of archetypes lumped together in here to make a point.

• Known Unknown again. What you say is partially true, but you fail to see part of what I'm trying to say: that the Scrub and the "hardcore" players are extremes, and not the norm. Reducing all players to those two types is not only unfair to everyone who plays the game, it's more than a bit foolish. There are loads of tourney players play to win without obsessing about it, just like not all casuals are fluffy players whose whole approach to playing is to "play for fun," as you claim. Seeing this distinction is the key to seeing what I'm trying to say. I once saw an essay by a player (might have been who you're talking about, but I doubt it), who explained the tournament mentality without being condescending (which, even if you're not trying to be, you're kind of being), and that's partially why I made this trope: to show that there are tourney players who aren't assholes, but the ones who are give the others bad names. I just didn't telegraph it as well as I'd hoped (I was furious with one such player at the time...).

MOD: Since I've suggested a new definition for Scrub I make a daring claim: Scrubs and "Stop Having Fun" Guys are not only not on different ends of a scale, they overlap. A lot of people would put the "you didn't do anything complicated and difficult so your victory doesn't count"-guy under "Stop Having Fun" Guys but usually he is away being presented as prime example of a Scrub. Being Scrub does not require being anti-competitive. It only requires you to complain about how your opponent wins instead of accepting he prefers another way to play and the game rewards his. Sirlin talks about experiences from a time where people were banning tick-throwing to "improve the competitivity of a game". At the time they were extremely pro and knew all tactics and beat everyone. Then someone came up with his Guile and started tapping out jabs before grabbing you just as you stopped blocking, no time to do something in between, repeated "tick tick throw" was all you heard for the rest of the match so it was called "tick throwing". People knew: it's unfair and you don't do that if you are really pro and especially not in tournaments. So those people had pretty much all the traits of "Stop Having Fun" Guys. Tick Throwing is regarded legit by now and if someone complains about it he bears the mark of Scrub, no matter if he keeps telling "I'm the best, if you beat me you must have cheated" or "I don't care about being competitive, so play on my level, it's your job to make playing fun for me". Where I see the place for "Stop Having Fun" Guys: They might be winning or not, but find their participation in the upper circles of pro players so significant they need to share their wisdom with everyone coming around. "You're not interested in playing competitively? You just didn't try! First you need to study the 5 Tomes of Battle-System-Basics, then you need to learn the exact frame-data for all characters and train at least 3 hours a day so your combos get consistent. It's great, really." The only scale I see to put them on would be: If you are offended by losing to "unfair" tactics and complain you're among Scrubs, if you are offended by winning against "miserable" tactics and complain you're among "Stop Having Fun" Guys. Another approach would be to just drop this separation completely and make "Stop Having Fun" Guys a (partial) supertrope of The Scrub. "Stop Having Fun" Guys would then just have an own idea of what "fun" is and expect others to play in a way that is fun to them: "If you cannot make playing fun for me I'll spoil yours too". This would include Smash-players who think no items/Final Destination is the only way to make the game fun as well as the players who claim there was no reason to play the game with items disabled since it was "designed with items in mind".

• Known Unknown: Er, yeah. The main page notes how ironically similar Scrubs and SHF Gs are. As for making them a sliding scale... that's a really bad idea, since the things that drive the two viewpoints are very different - it's more just that every viewpoint has assholes as well as more sensible people that follow it. The SHFG has a lot more in common with Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy. Now that I think about it, Arrogant Gamer Guy would've been a much better name for this...

Now back to your regularly scheduled debate

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Tanto: Ugh, this is exactly the kind of crap I was worried about when this popped up on YKTTW. I'm not even a competitive player and this stuff strikes me as immature whining. Speedrunning isn't this; it's about challenging yourself and improving your skills. Neither is Sequence Breaking. To many people, these things are fun. You're bitching because everyone doesn't play exactly the same way as you? Pot, meet kettle.

David Sirlin's article is a much more cogent argument than anything that's been presented here. I hereby declare this page dead to me.

Seven Seals: Heh. Whoring still exists and basically is this page in neutral form (except obviously for the title).

Unknown Troper: It's not bitching. It's supposed to ironically be as scathing as the trash spouting from the mouths of jackasses who say call everything that it's the way they play a noob move or a bitch/whine, though you might know something about that. Basically, it's supposed to be a mirror to the Scrub page, which is just as bad.

Note #2: No-one's talking about Speedrunning, or Sequence Breaking, or any techniques like that. Maybe you judged before you read the whole thing, but it's about people who refuse to play the whole game, and instead play their small, particular, "pro" set. We're not bitching about that kind of playstyle, we're criticizing the people who bring everyone else down to do so.

Tanto: It is, in fact, Mr. Anonymous Prick. The so-called sarcasm is not evident in any way, shape, or form. Besides, acting like a douchebag yourself is no cure for other peoples' douchebaggery, as you yourself demonstrate. It's called taking the high moral ground. If your attitude is better, prove it.

Response #2: They were when I wrote that comment, but the offending example has since been deleted, and rightfully so. The entry, as currently written, is bitching about that kind of playstyle. It's explicitly stating that people who don't play games purely casually are self-important jackasses who are taking it too seriously. It doesn't seem to acknowledge the idea that if you don't like cutthroat competition, then the option exists to avoid it. If you don't like hardcore competitors, don't play with them. Nobody's putting a gun to your head.

You now have permission to kiss my ass. That's not very polite, but hey. I give what I receive.

Falcon Pain: I'm the one who removed the speedrun and sequence breaking bit. As Tanto said, it has absolutely nothing to do with this trope.

However, the rest of the trope is valid. I know it is. I've seen people no-contest matches in Super Smash Bros. Brawl when they got a non-tourney stage. I've read the threads about people arguing I Vs and E Vs in Pokemon. The Portrait of Ruin example plagued message boards for the entirety of that game's popularity.

And no, your "don't play with them" comment doesn't work. Go on Wifi in Mario Kart DS and try to play a match. You WILL get a snaker. And the people on Puzzle Pirates who owned that island certainly weren't forced to defend their island week after week... except, you know, that they ran poetry and song contests on that island and considered it a nice thing to have in general, and there were unoccupied islands to conquer.

While I haven't added it to the page due to relative insignificance, the worst example I recall was a person saying, without irony, that if you don't learn how to roll cancel in Capcom vs. SNK 2 (a technique that requires three-frame timing practice, is undocumented in the game, gives most special moves invincibility frames they shouldn't have, and even David Sirlin has bashed), you shouldn't be playing the game. As I said when I read that, if that's true, casual play is officially dead.

I agree that scrub mentality can be very annoying. But the competitive mentality isn't blameless, and has its share of jerks as well.

Ununnilium: I honestly think this is a legitimate trope, chronicling a common thing to run into in video game culture.

Tanto: Of course it's a trope. The problem is that despite claims to the contrary, casual players are using it to soapbox about how serious players are doing it wrong. There's more than a little "My way is the only right way!" in the tone.

Ununnilium: That's annoying and bad. `.`v Feel free to yank or edit that, and put in a link to Player Archetypes. Actually, I think I'll do that now.

Winter: I would support splitting this article. A number of examples on this page are actually examples of Scrubs—which has its own page anyway and it doesn't entirely make sense when you're also including hardcore "play to win" types, who are the exact opposite. Notably, the Smash players who only play on one stage, one character, and no items and can't play anything else. Although the game rewards this, the top players will destroy this kind of player. Also, the Street Fighter example is pretty scrubby (unless you're talking Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, where Akuma is banned in tournament play because the game wasn't built to survive air fireballs and the like) although the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 one is not scrubby, mostly, as those characters are extremely powerful. I would say the section on Magic the Gathering is woefully misinformed—it's both a thousand times more hardcore than Yu Gi Oh (unless there's a lot of super-hardcore YGO players hiding right under my nose or something) and the example given (of "rogue decks") isn't an example of not playing to win (or "stop having fun guys", if that's an accurate example of this behavior) but instead an example of a romantic game theory strategy wherein you do something unexpected because nobody is expecting it. (Or because you found a new broken deck, but then that deck will quickly stop being "rogue".) The "Two Headed Giant" poison rogue strategy was BRILLIANT, and everyone who is a "real" Magic player admits it. The bitter detractors would be Scrubs. Regarding the Magic Psychographics: possibly that would make a better breakdown for these things? Mind you though, the top Magic players are often Spike hybrids (Spike/Johnny or less commonly Spike/Timmy) or not even Spikes at all! So the Psychographics don't totally break down into "play to win"/"casual"/etc.

Just putting Sirlin's Play To Win articles in here (or better, in an article under a different name and then pulling everything but what fits out of here) would be better.

Looking this article over there's a lot of minor spelling/grammatical issues and a bunch of editing for clarity could be done, etc. I'm not really the person to do it though, as i'm part of what's being talked about. (I only have two settings: ON and OFF. If i'm playing at all i'm Playing To Win. That's not to say i am going to force everyone who plays with me to do the same—unlike the Scrubs, who want everyone to play by their own personal rules of honor/etc. It's just that, unless you're better than me and on your game, you will lose. What i'm saying is, i don't want to start making edits because i'm guessing the rest of you will disagree and i don't want to start drama.) Some editing is really needed, however.

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Pteryx: Moved the stage magic example to the new Fan Haters page. Deleted the Professional Wrestling example hanging off of it outright since there's a similar example on the Fan Haters page already.

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Man Called True: Yanked a Justifying Edit that was beginning to start a fight, as follows:

• And this troper would like to say that the entirety of the above statements are untrue/over exaggerated. Tournament players play on a much wider variety of stages then 4chan would want you to believe. Believe it or not, FD is far from being the most balanced stage in tournament play, and items are turned off due to the fact that they break the game, competitively, and rely way too much on luck, especially since you have MONEY on the line. And, finally, try and believe this: us "tourneyfags" actually DO have fun playing in tournaments. but guess what? Losing hundreds or thousands of dollars all because a random hammer spawned near the opponent, or a campy fox took away one of your lives, and spends the remainder of the match running on hyrule temple, which a Ganondorf player would certainly would never catch up to on such a large stage, is, you guessed it, NOT FUN.
• Placing such nervousness as having hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line for a video game, NOT FUN.
  • Of course, no ones saying that tourney players are assholes (as the text states, tourney play is just another way people have fun, there's nothing inherently wrong with it.), just the ones who are, well, assholes about it. In any case, might I suggest that adapting to the random is a vital skill in itself, and that staking hundreds of dollars on a game is incredibly unwise?
  • Furthermore, there's no reason that some nervousness and risk can't be fun. After all, some people play high stakes poker.

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Ununnilium:

• Pokemon Stadium is actually tourney legal and common, sometimes considered more balanced than FD because it changes.
• Fox from Star Fox is supposed to be one of the best, if not THE best character in Melee. This troper uses Fox fairly exclusively. I often have to explain that I just like cartoon foxes. The reaction is generally one of relief.
• Speaking as a former level 75 Bard, this troper was oftentimes frustrated by the fact that the heavy insistance for melee-burn parties to go to such designated camps usually lead to immense competition (especially at peak hours) to the point that efficient experience chains are much more difficult to maintain, which rather defeated the whole purpose of the elitist mindset in the first place. Although, for a time it WAS a fun challenge to compete for pulls...

All these go off the point of the trope.

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HeartBurn Kid: Cut this hideous, badly-spelled, badly-formatted rant out of the page; it does provide an example of the trope in action, but not quite in the way one should on a trope page.

Ununnilium: Well, he was right about the "needlessly long and angry" part. >>

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Ununnilium:

• Gotta argue with both points here. Only in certain versions of Street Fighter II is Akuma certainly a gamebreaker, and besides being hard to get, he's also banned from most tournaments (to the point that others will sneer at YOU for wanting to use him in the first place). Also, Cable, Storm, and Sentinel "top tier" teams have already been surpassed... Not by completely different characters from the tiers, but by teams that better synergize with their skills.

1. Conversation In The Main Page.
2. The point isn't that these are definitively the best ones, it's the arrogance and inflexibility of this kind of player. He'll want to use the Game-Breaker in casual play, because why play at all if you're not going to do every single thing you can to beat the other guy? That said, would there be a better example for Marvel vs. Capcom 2?

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Ununnilium:

• One problem is that not only are E-heros weak, they are also unfun to play agisant (since they can rarely od anythign other than play weak mosnters, or summona fusion that will be killed with removal), and unfun to use (since you spend most of the game sitting their while your cards are destroyed). Were it not for the tv show, no one would even consider using them. Its notable that the kind of people who use them are often the kind who think Ojamas and Armoured Dragon can work well together in a deck. Playing these people rarely yeilds a particurly fun game

Well, okay, but that doesn't mean people should be flamed for wanting to make one. `.`v

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T Matt: I think this entry and Whoring are describing several separate tropes each, some of which they share. As far as I can tell, the tropes are:

1. Doing the same thing constantly, or obsessive focus on one part of the game.

2. The guy who constantly tells other people that their way of playing is "wrong." This seems related to the God Modders.

3. Competitive players, who derive fun from playing the game as hard as they can and pushing the limits of the strategic envelope.

4.The actual Stop Having Fun Guy who seems to think that Real Life (or perhaps rock music) is Serious Business, possibly the Fan Haters?

I think we need to separate these tropes.

I propose:

1. Playing to Win from the eponymous essay Playing to Win. This is for people who will use any move that the game allows and derive fun from difficult conflicts and tests of skill, whether in Chess, Street Fighter or whatever. This will have the parts from "Stop Having Fun" Guys and Whoring that relate to using a particular move or tactic because it is highly successful.

2.Whoring (or possibly Spamming) for doing the same thing repeatedly or obsessive focus on one area. This is not really related to Playing to Win vs. Scrub. Spamming is uncommon in high level play since predictability = death. This is where using hordes of the exact same unit or doing the same move repeatedly go.

3. Stop Having Fun Guys (possibly fuse with Fan Haters). This is the XKCD guy and the quote from the top of the "Stop Having Fun" Guys page, which is completely unrelated to play style. The XKCD Stop Having Fun Guy does not approve of playing at all. This would be the Guitar Hero haters, the people who hate racing games because they can already drive, etc.

4. The Evangelist(The Dictator?) Someone who goes around telling other people how to play the game. The problem here is that there are at least two types of "telling": people who say that their way is the only "right" way (as a moral issue) and people who say that their way is the "successful" way (an issue of strategy). Plus, we have to separate people who offer unsolicited criticism of other people's play styles from the people who respond to "Your play style is wrong" with "No, your play style is wrong."

Tanto: That's an ambitious proposal, but its thesis seems sound to me. It would probably be a good idea to merge both this trope and Scrub into the "Everyone must play my way" trope, and write new value-neutral articles for "tourney player" and "casual player" (if Player Archetypes doesn't already cover those).

It seems like it would be a both clearer and less inflammatory way to approach the subject.

T Matt: I was planning to leave Scrub alone. Scrub isn't specifically about telling others how to play the game, it's about an attitude towards part of the game.

Charred Knight: The Yahtzee quote is to large, and it takes forever to get good. If you are going to use a Yahtzee quote make sure that its a good one, and more importantly a couple of lines at most.

Ununnilium: I prefer the way this is set up. Playing to Win would probably just be better covered under Player Archetypes.

• T Matt: While we could include Scrub and Playing to Win in Player Archetypes, that still *leaves this article and Whoring incoherent.
  • T Matt: Look, even if I don't make most of those changes this page still as a problem. The name and page quote express one concept, the description another and the examples a third. If we want to make it coherent there are two options. Either get a new name, a new quote and a modified description to match the "hard core" gaming type or get a new description and throw out most of the examples to match the actual "Stop Having Fun" guy. And the later would require redirecting all current links to this page (possibly to Whoring).

Charred Knight T Matt, the problem is that this is no less insulting than Scrub, which makes being a casual gamer look like its a sin.

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Ununnilium:

• Some of the tourney rules are most definitely justified. For example, if you pick someone faster than your opponent on Hyrule Temple, all you have to do is get your score/life count higher than theirs and then RUN AWAY in a big circle until time runs out.
  • Also, competitive players play on more stages than Battlefield and Final Destination - stages which seem 'wacky' such as Poke Floats, Mute City and Jungle Japes are played in tournaments.

Justifying Edits.

• This troper went up against one of the aforementioned "tourneyfags", and was able to defeat him by forcing him to play on Battlefield instead of Final Destination. The addition of platforms to his familiar locale broke his mind.

Conversation In The Main Page. (Also, egregious use of the word "fags" as a modifier.)

• When veteran Melee players received the news that Brawl would not feature L-cancelling or wavedashing, there was a massive outcry of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. Even though L-cancelling and wavedashing are glitches that had been fixed from the previous games!
  • Actually, L-cancelling was an intended technique in Melee. It was basically a homage to veteran SSB 64 players (Z-cancelling). The massive outcry was probably unjustified at the time, but now that camping is the best option to win, it is certainly a reason to cry foul. (This is due to easier defending, lack of hitstun, difficulty of gimping opponents, lack of L-cancelling, among other reasons).
  • The developers also knew about Wavedashing while they were working on the game. The way it works is that the player airdodges into the ground diagonally, causing the player to slide along the ground. In that sense, it works within the game's physics, so it can be considered an exploit at the absolute worst.
  • Known Unknown: That's why it's considered a Game-Breaker and not an outright glitch. If it wasn't for the fact that it's part of the game's physics it would probably be banned.
  • In this troper's opinion, wavedashing is hardly a Game-Breaker. In fact, many of the laggier, lower tier characters actually NEEDED wavedashing and L-cancelling to keep up with characters like Fox.

• Despite its points about having fun by playing this way, if this article doesn't explain the "Stop Having Fun" Guys mindset, it comes very, very close.
  • Actually, later in the book, Sirlin advocates playing "for fun" by using weird characters or tactics or different places even if you are of this mindset, simply because it affords you new and interesting knowledge about the game. The practice is called "love of the game" because it preaches that a pro player who loves the game enough to play it just for the sake of playing it in addition to playing it for raw, rote practice is overall better than a player with a purely professional mindset. Yeah, even Sirlin doesn't advocate being on the extreme described by this trope.

Two instances of following something up with the word "actually" instead of cutting it and replying on the discussion page.

• On the bright side, Edition 3.5 has so many supplemental books for both players and DM to draw ideas from that its impossible to make a single character who can win anything. It is likely to happen again with 4th edition. That and, you just really cannot win against your DM.
  • On the contrary: The problem with the dozens of splatbooks is that they enable unforeseen combos, the most basic one probably being Persistent Spell (let one spell of any duration last for an entire day for an extreme cost), Divine Metamagic (fuel said extreme cost by expending Turn Undead attempts) and Night Sticks (get cheap extra Turn Undead attempts). All of those are harmless by themselves, but when combined you can cheaply cast spells that were supposed to be active for a few seconds and now last the entire day. Further, the divine casters automatically get new spells from every splatbook introduced...
  • An omnipotent character has been built. And you can't blame Pun-Pun the Invincible Kobold on splatbook creep so much, as he is doable with only one splatbook and the core rules. Then again, that one supplement is Serpent Kingdoms, and it has a reputation for being hideously unbalanced.

"On the contrary" belongs in the same category as "actually".

Caswin: Working the Sirlin reference back in with the reply integrated into the entry. Hope this one sticks better.

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Sara: Hi, the spoiler tag didn't work when I tried to do it. Sory guys!

Gizensha - OK. While I agree that some people enjoy playing videogames for high stakes (and why not, indeed? Videogames deserve to be taken seriously just as much as any other game), the elimination of part of the game because it brings an element of luck to proceedings, especially considering the later poker analogy, confuses me somewhat. While Poker, yes, it's a money management game, not a card game, the card factor adds a certain element of luck to proceedings. While backgammon is a strategy game, the dice add a certain element of luck to proceedings. And you don't see Bridge players who are playing Rubber (as opposed to tournaments and/or leagues, since in those the luck is eliminated by having everyone play every hand) for money complain when their opponents got a better deal, that's part of the game (the better players will win 95% of the time, but due to the fact it's a card game there's a 5% chance they won't. When a factor of luck is part of the game, as in the case of items and better evened out by playing multiple times rather than single-elimination (Which is essentially how snooker tournaments eliminate the fact that snooker has far too much positive feedback as well). Removing stages overly biased towards specific character types does make sense, of course, unless you also adopt the whole 'play both home and away' concept of football [soccer].

As for me and SSBM, my preference was always for pichu only, tiny melee, pokefloats, only-items are mini mushrooms had nothing to do with Stop Having Fun Guys, and everything to do with playing it that way is fun. (Ten stock being my preference as well) [Though I'd play anything, pretty much, although my best character was pikachu... Which doesn't mean I dislike Icicle Mountain, far from it. The lack of thunder is the only reason Pikachu (and to a lesser extent Pichu) doesn't totally dominate that stage]

• Tmatt: The difference between something like SSBM and poker is that the effects of the randomness even out much more quickly in poker. SSBM tournaments don't have unlimited time, so they can't simply play more games. Especially since a single item (especially a heart, beam sabre etc.) can change the course of the entire match.

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Ununnilium:

• This is a non-gaming example, but I hope it will still fly here. Impossible-to-please film and theater snobs who take the art WAY too seriously will attack fans of an actor or actress for disagreeing that said actor/actress is a complete hack because s/he has appeared in a Summer Blockbuster, is considered a sex symbol or is not the greatest performer of his or her generation. The fans' opinions are written off as "uninformed" or "plebian" because they're just "sheep." No one is permitted to enjoy popcorn movies or dumb comedies, because filmmaking is Serious Business, and there is always some obscure performer (often of equal or lesser talent) who deserves the fame and kudos far more for making their living in pretentious arthouse movies and eschewing a mainstream career. This phenomenon is depressingly common on IMDB's message boards.

Nah, this isn't this trope. I'm not sure what trope it would be — Fan Haters, maybe?

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• Expect to be called a noob for doing... just about anything outside of using the advanced sword cancel techniques with shotguns in the online game Gun Z the Duel. Even using the most accurate rifle in the game, you'll be doing nothing but spraying wildly... even after you nail an opponent 14 times in the chest. Using a dagger to knock someone down and shooting them while they're on the ground because they didn't jump out of it? You're being a dagger noob.

... That's odd. Back when I played it, I was the only person in the entire game that bothered using the shotgun, despite its obvious advantages. It was really fun to just blast all the people who insist on using melee weapons exclusively in the face as they charge at you.

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T Matt: Reposted down here because the thread of conversation seems to have been lost and I don't want to do anything major without discussing it with people.:

• T Matt: While we could include Scrub and Playing to Win in Player Archetypes, that still *leaves this article and Whoring incoherent.
  • T Matt: Look, even if I don't make most of those changes this page still as a problem. The name and page quote express one concept, the description another and the examples a third. If we want to make it coherent there are two options. Either get a new name, a new quote and a modified description to match the "hard core" gaming type or get a new description and throw out most of the examples to match the actual "Stop Having Fun" guy. And the later would require redirecting all current links to this page (possibly to Whoring).

The problem has now gotten worse, with some examples actually describing the opposite of this trope. Something has to be done.

Steven: I'm wondering about this line:

• And don't forget those wonderful gamers who insist that anything that doesn't have blood, brown, and hookers is "kiddy", and they only play "adult" games.

Wouldn't this fit better under Fan Haters? This line doesn't really show the competitive side of the "Stop Having Fun" Guys.

• gs68: The same goes for the whole bit about Guitar Hero and Rock Band players needing to learn real instruments.

Charred Knight: Here's an idea, why don't we just delete both this article, and Scrub, and pretend both never happened? Their both insulting, and I don't see why both are even up here. Their are two different sides calling the other a bunch of jackasses.

codenamehunterwolf: I'll add this up to fan haters, and put up the suggestion that Modern Warfare fans should join the CIA to kill people at airports, ala No Russian.

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Drascin: Erasing uberschveinen's paragraph, because, well, no. Reeks to much of Scrub, and we're trying to keep the Scrub vs SHFG flamewar outta the page, damn it.

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gs68: Removing an irrelevant line of my own:

• Card-collecting is lampshaded in an episode of Lucky Star by Konata, who claims that cards are not meant to be used, and are to remain sealed safely and away forever. Worse yet, she calls anyone who sells their cards a traitor.

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Steven: Deleted this line:

• Evo2008 tried to use the introduction of Brawl to lighten up the rules and the tourney tards took it as if thier mother had been shot in front of them and the dog had been kicked into next week. Ironicaly enough, items had no say in the final match as it was won by edgehoging (In other words, holding onto a stage's edge to prevent your opponent from geting back on) and yet no one crys out "Ban edgehoging!". Hypocrital sods.

This seems more like a direct flame towards the "Stop Having Fun" Guys because of their attitudes and and doing something that is a part of strategy. It just begs for a Flame War.

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Gattsuru: Pulled this line:

• And why portals summoned by Rikti Communications Officers no longer give a rewards.

Fire/Kin farms weren't the reason Rikti Portal XP was changed; the issue was that players could trick Comm Officers into creating a portal, killing it in a couple hits, escape aggro, and then rinse and repeat. The XP for the portal was just moved to the Comm Officer. The popular builds would (and did) kill the officer even accidentally as is.

Dalantia: actually, it was because a player could ding the portal with something like Brawl, kill the Comm Officer in a couple of hits (or just run away and let the portal despawn), and get full credit for the portal experience. Neither here nor there, though.

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• Despite its points about having fun by playing this way, and although the book later advocates mixing it up a bit and playing for fun too, fun by playing to win; the way it describes scrubs actually puts the Stop Having Fun Guys man in the same category-by creating arbitrary and confining rules on gameplay. Admittedly the Stop Having Fun Guy knows all the words and doesn't have to resort to calling every tactic cheap to get his whiny, petulant point across, but he's still a scrub according to the article.

Can anyone clean this entry up? I have no idea what he's talking about.

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• Picture could stand to be clearer, hard to tell what is red.

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Fly: Cutting:

because it seems to have just enough to do with the trope to be horribly misleading as to what the trope is about. Frink quote is perfect, though.

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Zeke: Following up on my Battle Network entry, I hasten to add that I know a bunch of the hardcore GameFAQs guys (I am/have been a regular on the BN boards), and I'm not calling them jerks. I've learned a lot from them, and the Renowned Folder FAQs are great. But this trope definitely applies. They really know their stuff — and they don't suffer fools gladly.

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Eric DVH: As I was sorting the examples by genre, I noticed that a lot of them weren't about hypercompetitive callousness, but instead the type of insistence on absurd made-up rules that defines scrubs. Particularly odd was this part, which I removed: The mark of a true Stop Having Fun Guy is that he has no self-restraint, and will shamelessly whore the cheapest and most boring tactics if he thinks it will work. He still plays this way in goofier rulesets and against weak opponents, even if he is enormously condescending about them. This is the exact OPPOSITE of contriving silly taboos like a scrub (or Self-Imposed Challenges like the truly hardcore.) Should scrubby examples go to the scrub article, or should that article remain example-less?

Removed the following due to redundancy, it's wording is funnier, but I can't really think of how to merge them:

• Counterstrike. Dust. goddammit
  • Also purchase the shield for a free extended essay on the dubiousness of your masculinity.

Also removed this Fallout stuff. Whether or not it's a good game, Fallout 3 is NOT Fallout. Bethesda could've made a non-TES RPG just as easily without hijacking it, and they clearly gained less than nothing from the license. Van Buren wasn't a glorified expansion pack like Fallout 2, but a hugely expanded game (a game which, after judging design documents and other materials made available upon BIS' demise, the community has unanimously agreed would have been brain-meltingly awesome) written using a completely different engine. Oh, and you haven't played the originals? You OWE it to yourself, the games look better than current handheld [=RPGs=], cost less, are now totally bug-free/compatible with modern OSs, and are just too darned fun not to play:

• This troper has noticed a growing rift between fans of Fallout 1 and 2, and the fandom of Fallout 3. People in Camp One accuse Bethesda of screwing up the Fallout series, while people in Camp Two tell those on Camp One to shut up and enjoy the game for what it is. Accusations of “Oblivion with Guns,” “Copy-pasted AI,” and “They Changed It, Now It Sucks!” abound. This troper bought the game without any knowledge of the original Fallout series- other than seeing the story arc in Ctrl Alt Del where the main character goes batshit over the second game's release- and... be right back, Daddy needs his Fallout fix.
  • It's worth mentioning that in terms of sound, graphics, and core gameplay, Fallout 2 was virtually identical to the first game, and Interplay's planned continuation (Known as “Fallout Van Buren”) looked to be more of the same.
  • Fallout 3's own fandom has problems with this itself. Despite having no competative aspect to the game whatsoever, some players seem only interested in beefing up their characters to make them “as perfect as possible.” The fact that the game can accomadate a number of different play styles depending on how someone wants to play the game is lost on these people who only seem to see things from a “game mechanic's” standpoint. Because of this they declare some perks useless even though they may be more useful to others depending on their play style. Their reasoning is apparently to take the role-playing aspect out of the game and focus on making it closer to an FPS in general. Perfectly fine if you want to play it that way, whats annoying is when they apparently act like they're the only ones playing the game right. Then again, isn't building the perfect character a rather lofty goal for all RPGs in general? (Perhaps a Topic for the Discussion page)
    • Except that unlike in old Fallouts where you could avoid all combat and talk your way out of everything given a high enough speech skill, in F3 there doesn't seem to me much other real choice of playstyle other than 'Shoot your way through everything' so creating a perfect character is technically justified.The real paradox comes in when you realise that the game is pretty easy enough as it is and there's no need for such characters.

Steven: Think there should be a troper tales section for this article? I'm pretty sure that there are many personal examples people want to post and it could go in there, reducing the clutter in the article.

• Known Unknown: Something tells me adding a Troper Tales would go a long way towards reducing the Flanderization of this article as well.

• Known Unknown: To Kizor... thanks for deleting some of the excess baggage, but there are one or two of them that are still valid, particularly one which is a Lampshade Hanging of this trope, which I put back.

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Morgan Wick: I had thought this was "Stop having fun, guys", but I'm seeing it referred to as though it's talking about the "stop having fun" guys, which is a discouraged plural trope title.

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Either people seem to miss the definition of the article or they are just plain daft. Too many examples are not people who play competitively and force it upon others rudely but rather people who play competitively. The trope has been flanderized from "Asshole pro who doesn't let people play their own way because he thinks his style is the only way" to "pro who uses good characters" They are not one in the same people.

• I cut this big garbled mess: A special mention must be given to those who play Super Smash Bros. As a Mascot Fighter, the game revels in chaos and unpredictability. Items spawn all over the place, the very shape of the stage can change, and some areas of some stages can even hurt you. Naturally, many of the type of gamers described here want all of this to go out of the window in Tournament Play. For example, in Melee, rather than playing in the labyrinthine “Temple,” or the frequently shifting “Pokémon Stadium” (both of which incidentally returning in Brawl,) the type of gamer described here plays only in the static “Battlefield,” or the completely featureless “Final Destination,” with no items, effectively bringing the game more in line with conventional fighters like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. The sheer number of options available (and passed over by this type of player) really polarizes the series' fandom. Especially hilarious given the somewhat shifting nature of tourney play in the first place (after all, it's not officially decreed by Nintendo itself, but by those who organize them). Not really a problem, to each his own right? The problem comes from the fact that the Smash Community has the most net percent SHFG of possibly any game with an active community. You can't go into any Smash discussion without someone bringing up how non-tournament gaming is inferior, childish and automatically proves that the player isn't as good as the tournament players. To them, anyone who doesn't play like them only care about some Flanderized notion of “playing-for-fun” and don't play the game like it's “supposed to/properly/more effectively played”. Once again, the people in the middle with sense don't really participate in such discussions much.

The troper who wrote this seems to have never been to a Smash message board in their life. The competitive players keep to themselves and are respectful towards the casuals. On the other hand it is the casuals who throw around TR 4 Q and act like trolls. So I have replaced it with my own more definitive version.

• This: And in Marvel Vs Capcom 2, the guy who only uses Cable, Storm and Sentinel (and maybe'' swaps one of them out for Spider-Man or Wolverine)? That's him.
  • Don't forget Magneto. He, Cable, Sentinel, and Storm were so horribly broken that they were given the Fan Nickname “the Four Gods.” This troper once made the mistake of picking Ryu, Spider-Man), and Felicia in an arcade match once. The opponent's Magneto single-handedly decimated all three of this troper's characters with infinite combos before he could land a single hit.
    • There are also the characters that tend to never show up except as assist characters, but kill the fun for new players just as much: Cyclops, Captain Commando and Psylocke, whose dominating assist attacks make up for their mediocrity as point characters.''

Ummmmm..........no it isn't. Look at the definition of the trope please, the guy who picks good characters (which is common sense BTW) is not a "Stop Having Fun" Guy

• The arcade and Dreamcast versions of Capcom vs. SNK 2 have a glitch that literally kills the fun at high levels of play: the roll cancel, where you input a command for roll (which makes your character move forward a short distance while passing through attacks), and put a command for a special move immediately afterwards. This has to be done very quickly, but if done correctly it makes any special move invincible. While American players initially dismissed this technique as too difficult to execute, they immediately began practicing it after Japanese players massacred them at an international tournament. Because of the predominance of the glitch, certain characters are simply overpowered - Blanka and Sakura now possess uncounterable ways of doing massive block and guard damage when they get close, Bison can simply fly away continuously with his flying chop attack, and Iori can literally just walk towards you with impunity, making an already painfully slow game even longer.

This is still not the trope it is just examples of advanced techniques used to win tournaments, the closest thing to stop having fun guys are the Americans who say that the technique is too hard to pull of and that is still not even close to the meaning of this trope.

I didn't want to go through the entire essay that is this article but I cut these prominent examples of the misconception of a "Stop Having Fun" Guy.

• Not all of those were misconceptions. The Smash paragraph in particular was not, though I cleaned it up a bit anyway.
• The Smash one was the least but it was wayyyy too casual sided, I tried to make more neutral. As for the other two they are definatly not this trope and just people traking advantage of advanced techniques.
• The Smash paragraph wasn't casual sided the way I see it, just very openly critical, moreso than the rest of the examples on the whole, and the Smash Community very much deserves/needs that level of criticism. There's also a Scrub problem (the main problem is that everyone in the Smash community takes themselves too serious, Scrubs and STFG alike), but that belongs on the Scrub article, changing this article to pin the problems with the community on "Scrubs posting ignorant comments" only helps to prove why an article like this needs to exist.
• Lol! Have you ever once been to the Game Faqs or SWF? Didn't think so, the competitive players keep to themselves generally are well behaved. The casuals on the other hand are the ones who make the troll topics about how "TIRES DON EXITS" and that competeive players aren't fun. Alternativly they come into a topic by the competeitive guys and troll it up posting their ignorant garbage. If the competitive players ever do come into a topic that isn;t theirs they are generally well mannered and logical in their posts. Please the next time you make an edit remember that some people know more things about on-line message boards then you.
  • Don't assume. I've been to SWF, and, in fact, it's a major cause for the creation of this article. The main problem with the SHFG's there is that they see themselves as completely blameless - they're right, so thus everyone else must be ignorant and foolish. Which is completely obvious from what you just said. Again, you're only proving the necessity for an article like this to exist. Like I said, there are Scrubs in the Smash Community, but that doesn't mean that they're the only overly serious egotists there. You, on the other hand, are starting to troll yourself, if you're the one who keeps changing the article to remove the criticism - if you can't take the criticism, then you're probably in the wrong place.
    • Longfellow: I've been in the community since 2002 (Masked Sheik, I'm called) and have always tried to be the guy who bends over backwards for the visiting newbie. My take: no one side is to blame. It's a communication gap that leads to these kinds of arguments. In 2003 on Game FA Qs and Smashboards there was a huge flame war on the existence of tiers. It was conducted by longtime members of both boards so it's not like the war was between a xenophobic community and the outsiders, as people see it today. But this war is where we got our shorthand for arguing tiers, and arguing anything really: we're snappy, we're confrontational, and we're quick to produce a stern essay to defend our points. Our style worked on a group of motivated shit-stirrers against whom the lines had already been drawn, but that was then and now we mostly get ragtag novices wandering in who think we're awfully defensive about our whole "competitive gaming" thing. In a way, we are: years of flames wars hardened us. Also, you wouldn't believe how many people arrive to announce they're the best at Melee. You would kick them too.
    • But when you get down to it, there's not a single member of the SSBM board on Game FA Qs who would tell you, "You're playing wrong if you play with items, time, banned stages, etc." We take very seriously the notion that casual is a legit way to play. If nothing else, it gets reasonable casuals on our side when the anti-competitive crowd comes knkocking. So when this article says competitive Melee players denounce all casual play, well, that's pernicious misinformation. As for the claim that if you go on Hyrule Temple you're worse than people who ban it: sorry, but that's Truth in Television. Competitive players don't go on Hyrule because it's a Game-Breaker, and if you aren't competitive you almost certainly aren't as good.
    • Known Unknown: I've never been to Gamefaqs - the Smash section is based off of experience on Smashboards, and, as noted, it's a minority. An extraordinarily vocal minority, but a minority one the less. Most people are like you, willing to live and let live, but there are those who are antagonistic about it.
• It seems you can't take any criticism, I am changing the selection to make it more factual in that the SHFG actually never harass people unless they are trolled or egged on. while you change it to make the Smash community look like a bunch of assholes, I know that some of the Smash community are SHFG but it does not have the largest. There's no point in arguing, I realize this. Like most people on the site it appears that you cannot handle changes to articles if they don't suit what you think they should be.
  • Not really. Reading and rereading it, it looks more like you just changed it to remove all criticism of tournament players (or, should I say, SHFG's, since most tourney players aren't them), instead pinning all the problems on "ignorant Scrubs," with the implication that any SHFG behavior is actually a justified response, since everything is actually caused by others. Having spend a fair bit of time at SWF, I know that this isn't the case, you can often see SHFG activity anywhere anyone with a casual mindset makes a post, with the idea that being a casual automatically makes you a Scrub, I suppose. The way the rest of the paragraph is phrased, however, it is specifically about how the tournament rules tend to go to people's heads, and, in fact, the last part is a continuation of the first, specifically referring to the SHFG problem. If it seems one sided for that reason, well, there you go. It's not one sided because it's blaming one side, it only seems that way because it specifically describing one half of the problem.

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Zeke: Cut:

• Joe Quesada managed to expand this out to comics. One More Day, need more be said?

Gimme a break. One More Day is already bashed on all the appropriate pages, so now we're gonna start throwing it at other tropes and seeing if it sticks?

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Kingogtheingdaw: I seriosuly think we should divide this article into two separate ones or massivly prune it. This trope is about hardcore gamers who are utter douches to people who do not play like them. This hasn't stopped it to get Flanderised into "Pro who doesn't agree with me" "tournament pro who knows AT, regardless of how kind they are" or "Guy who takes things seriosuly while being a dick, even if it has nothing to do with video games".

Transformers? Comic books? Cheat codes? People who bash stupid WMG? Non-video game examples? People who ask to prolong the match? People who don't wanna play with items? Not to mention all of the troper tales are: "People get angry at me for being a selfish dick and not turining off items for once because god forbid any one play w/o item!"

These do not represent this trope in any way shape or form! This has been flanderised as much as Magnificent bastard. We seriosuly need to either: 1) Prune this page and troper tales or B) Make two different tropes entirely.

• Known Unknown: Good point. I periodically prune the article, removing examples that are basic complaining about tournament techniques people you don't like, or complaining that people online tend to use a certain strategy without actually pointing out their obnoxious attitudes, which, as you said, the trope is about, as well as altering things that are too emotionally charged or subjective. But I don't catch everything. I'd say the main thing to do is to make sure things like that are cut down as soon as they come up (though I miss the older things since I only check the history). A widescale sweep of the article is probably the best thing, but, due to chronic laziness, I've been putting it off. That said, most of the examples, while many of them are all over the place, have some basis in this trope even if they do veer into complaining, and, in my sweep, I'll focus on bringing those out.

• Kingogtheingdaw I cut large chunks of this article that did not have to do anything with this trope. I didn't purge the tabletop section or card games as I have no clue as to how those games work. Let's see how long it will take before someone adds them or makes newer and possibly more stupid examples.
  • Known Unknown: Actually, after looking it over, much of what you cut was relevant. Not everything, but a fair bit of it. In any case, they will be dealt with full scale in due time, but the ones I put back appear to still be examples, if not vague and straddling the line.
• Kingogtheingdaw: The problem with a lot of them is that most of the examples are about how people complain about how to play a preticular game (I lost) rather then belittling others for playing in a less competitive way. I suppose I was being very literal when I deleted them, but I still think we should divide the article in two different tropes. Perhaps renaming the new one The Whinebag???

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• Regiment: Cut

  • In this case, I don't think any but the most extreme SHFG would object to using codes or such for trivial matters, goofing around, or what not. It's when it starts affecting the game that words start flying one way or another. Ironically, this troper has seen some SHF Gs object because people -aren't- using codes in games that either encourage them or otherwise have codes that are a part of gameplay (more or less).

for Natter.

Also, my two cents on the above debates: This trope is inherently negative, as is Scrub. However, both the Scrub and the SHFG are not just people that have a particular play style; they are people that have a specific play style and have no tolerance whatsoever for anything that deviates from their play style. The SHFG is basically the evil mirror universe version of the Scrub; both declare various tactics broken, but where the Scrub declares them Dis Continuity, the SHFG decides that they are the only viable tactics.

Or: Just because you have a particular playstyle doesn't make you a Scrub or a SHFG. That line is crossed when you adopt a holier-than-thou attitude about it. A gamer who likes playing Smash Bros. with Fox on Final Destination with no items isn't a SHFG. He becomes a SHFG when he attacks people who don't play that way. The SHFG is a Scrub that thinks his game is Serious Business.

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Ao Bman 05: I am not sure whether this is okay to discuss this or not, or if anyone cares... But I am not liking the name of this trope, it seems too wordy to me and it doesn't seem to match the meaning of it. Might it be possible to give this a more fitting name? Around the net, people tend to call these sort of people on the interwebs either Poop Sockers, Tourney Fags, Mouthbreather, or something I thought up after reading the trope examples, Final Destination Dweeb/Dork (FDD).

• Kingogtheingdaw FDD is too Smash specific, it needs to be more generalized. On the other hand I do believe that Tourney fag is a much more suitable name. It will help keep the Flanderisation out.

Regiment: Strong veto on "tourneyfags" or anything else significantly offensive. "PoopSockers" describes a different sort of behavior (more obsessive than controlling), and "mouthbreathers" doesn't actually describe anything. I like "Stop Having Fun" Guys, since the trope's supposed to be about fans and fandoms that select a "hardcore" play style and tell people who play for fun "Stop having fun, guys!" I have to agree that "Final Destination" anything is too specific.

• Ao Bman 05: How about Kill Joy Sticks or Kill Joy Pricks (Killjoy+Joysticks+Pricks) then? Not offensive and it sounds a bit gamer related. It doesn't have to replace SHF Gs, but the trope probably needs an easier to word/use term to describe itself.

• Kingogtheingdaw: The problem witht he name SHFG is that idiots post shit that relates nothing to the trope like Transformers and "real life examples" the name should st least be called nothing witht he word Tourney or nothing along the lines of that. Also to Regiment, the only fandom that can be considered "SHFG" is Video Games. Not any fandom.
  • Falcon Pain: Where does that last assertion come from? The way I've seen it defined, a SHFG can arguably be found in any competitive activity. Since someone eliminated all of the examples from the page for the moment as being Troper Tales, I will point out that the first two media-based SHFG characters I can think of off the top of my head, first season Hakuoh from Duel Masters and Paul from Pokemon, do not play video games at all.

  • Kingogtheingdaw: The fact this is in video game tropes.

  • Falcon Pain: I was under the impression that the category was used because the trope is heavily associated with video games, not because it should be limited to them.

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• Kingogtheingdaw: Why are 90% of the examples Troper tales? This should be like the scrubs page which has no examples and just a troper tales, in fact I think I'll remedy that
  • Known Unknown: You know, I'm generally not a fan of the Forum's Fix It section, but, since the Discussion page for this trope is really not the best place to have a discussion (since it's so cluttered full of... stuff), I'm going to have to ask that we take that to the forums before, I dunno, deleting the whole page. I'll keep it the way it is for now, but, if there's no discussion about in the forums soon, I'm going not only make it myself, but put everything back the way it was until the problem is resolved through discussion.

• Known Unknown: Ninjacrat, stop deleting the examples. You keep citing the forum as your reasoning, but the forum discussion A) is stagnated, B) only had six people respond, myself included, and C) didn't come to a real conclusion anyway. You're free to contribute the conversation, I notice that you're not one of the six people there anyway, but stop deleting the examples until the forum actually decides something. And leave the page quote alone.

• Some Sort Of Troper: To try and provide an alternative method of getting input here is the forum thread and here is a poll on what to do.

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• Various Things: It may be a risk for me to wade into a discussion page as established as this one is, on a subject as heated as this one can be, for a page that's obviously currently undergoing significant changes... But regarding the Rhythm [Action!] games section, Trigger Happy author/Edge columnist Steven Poole recently wrote a decent, reasonably balanced article on the merits of Guitar Hero vs Real Guitar. Not that he's the first to make many of those points, but I'm wondering if there's any room for a link to that column in this article?

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• Sofos: Added an alternative pic. Think it's funny
  • Removed it, the current one is better
    • Headcase: The current one is more fitting for Scrubs. Hell if I'm changing it though. For this trope, I'd have just a screenshot of Final Destination Akuma Actually I have no idea what I'd have.
    • Actually Sofos, put back the picture that you put up, for the little time it was around it was better then the other.

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Rebochan: I just pulled a metric ton of natter, This Troper, and Conversation In The Main Page. I'd normally quote it all here, but there was just so much...there's a Troper Tales page for a reason, guys!

Kingogtheingdaw: I salute thou

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Dalantia: Killed the lines on the paper. Did not copy/paste them, for which I grumble briefly at myself. But, ultimately, that paper on Cities? Cannot be taken seriously, as it was, in essence, griefing funded by research dollars - there were no control characters, purely a single concentrated effort to be as big an asshole as possible to a community, no ethics examinations, nothing that makes it good research instead of just trying to cherry-pick the results one wants.

I'm pretty sure that both this and Scrub are just 2 sides of a poor description of people that are most commonly called Tourneyfags, (warning, links to Encyclopedia Dramatica, which is NSFW) or the more PC version, tourneytards.

• Known Unknown: ... I'm not sure how to respond to that beyond hoping it's a joke. In any case, Encyclopedia Dramatica lumps the two together, but I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be. And I'm almost entirely sure that little Encyclopedia Dramatica has should be taken seriously.

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• I'm confused by what seems to be two different tropes on this page, mixed together:
  • "My way is the right way, stop trying something new even if it is workable or wins".
  • "Play to win. If fun is something other than winning, then you are doing it wrong".

These are not identical, but both of them are seen in the examples. Putting down a magic deck because it's not "the best" (even if it wins), or playing old games on the original hardware instead of an emulator, or only playing MODS, are examples of "My way is the right way".

From the opening: "You'll always see this kind of player arguing that the debated Game Breaker is completely and utterly legitimate. After all, it's not about playing, it's about winning, right?". In fact, the play-to-win people do NOT play the game breakers — I think it's "Kyu" in Street Fighter that is so overpowered that no other character has any chance at all, and the "play to win" people do not play that — apparently, there is a line when the only counter to X is X itself.

• Known Unknown, alright, lets take that bit by bit. First, "Kyu?" Don't you mean "Ryu?" Or are you talking about "Akuma, who is, in fact, banned?" The whole "playing with Game Breakers" bit is a reference to Super Smash Brothers.
  • Anyway, the trope is a mixture of the two things you said, as the typical "Stop Having Fun" Guy generally expresses both those opinions, though it is more the first than the second. It's "My way is the right way, and, if you're not playing my way, you're not playing to win, and thus you are doing it wrong." Note that in that "playing to win" is often seen as synonymous with "playing my way," and thus you're both doing it wrong and not "playing to win" if you don't play that way.
  • Tsunde Ray: I wanna launch a YKTTW that's the converse of this trope, where if you're playing seriously, you're perceived as not playing for fun and thus playing the game in a meaningless way. I've had run-ins with people who think I'm silly for playing Tetris on a serious level, caring about Guitar Hero's scoring, and trying to speedrun games, even though I don't mind people who don't do any of that.

—-

Pannic: Changed the section on Team Fortress 2, as it was becoming filled with random troper tales, and trimmed it down to the basics of people who whine about crits and bodyshots, and the TFC vets who think TF 2's been consolized.

—-

Neofcon: the real life section, though funny and true to an extent, I dont se the connection with his trope. It doesn't naturally deal with people who are "pro" at certain things and seem to flanderize the aspect of this trope which sounds more like disproportionate accusations than anything relating to "way you're doing it is wrong" or w/e the meaning of this trope has mutated to.

—-

Kingogtheingdaw: -> I guess you could go through the single player campaign to unlock all the characters for your friends, but by the time you play with them you have become THAT GUY. Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about, you know, THAT GUY, the guy who beats everyone mercilessly because he plays by himself, the loser. And THAT GUY gets so bored that he goes off to play with other THAT GUYS just to get a challenge, and when that happens CONGRATS! You're a fanboy! Go get in line to get your t-shirts and cat ears!

— Yahtzee on Super Smash Bros. Brawl Is not SHFG's, this exemplifies tyhe common stereotype that SHFG = people who are good at a game.

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TsundeRay: To whoever was asking what happened to IANMTU — it got nuked because people were abusing potholes to it.

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Known Unknown: Massive cleanup done. Ironically, after all of that, the article's still pretty long.

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BritBllt: So as not to natter up the article, I'll just comment here. One of the entries referenced a blog...

• Do you want to have fun playing RPGs? James Raggi considers you inferior. "Inferior" is perhaps too nice a word; "the scum of the earth" is a more accurate way of putting it. He even put up an followup to the article insulting anybody who was linked to it from this wiki.

I clicked the link, read a bit, and damn... I mean, damn. I especially gawked at this line...

People who do this are the most important part of any hobby. You want to be a casual gamer? Fine. But don't expect the same level of deference and respect that a lifer is going to get.

Dude, we're talking playing tabletop rpg's. This isn't the Olympics. No waiter at a fancy restaurant is going to go "ooh, monsieur is ze level 87 archmage - ze private balcony awaits!"

Anyway, with zat, ahem, that said - great example!

Unknown Troper: Why is Team Fortress Classic on the list? The only people who complain about how TF 2 is worse because it requires less skill to play are people trying to troll others using their Flanderized idea of what a TFC player is like. Whoever added this example is an idiot who's crying over how he got trolled.

• Known Unknown: Oddly enough, in trying to explain why the example doesn't fit, you basically stated exactly what the trope is about. The example stays. Also ironic that your reason for deleting it was that "it doesn't happen," when you acknowledge here that it does.

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The Jackal: Opposing the cut. Yes, there's a lot of Natter and whining and it may need an Example Sectionectomy, but these people exist just like Scrubs exist and we need a page on them.

Falcon Pain: Regarding the "I Hate Fun" article:

• As for the follow-up article, it's mostly a clarification of his position in the first article, with a comment mentioning that he still gets hits on the original article from TV Tropes. No ridicule involved.

That's not what that part is referencing. It refers to a comment he added to the top of the article, which he later removed around the time he wrote the followup article, almost literally saying "you losers actually follow links from TV Tropes?"

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Longfellow: Couldn't we write articles for reasonable tourneygoers (and casual players)? That way we don't smear nice guys by comparing them to assholes on either side. It also gives us a good shorthand whenever we want to talk about a game's competitive scene when adding tropes. For instance, Roy in Super Smash Bros Melee is a Mighty Glacier to a casual but a Fragile Speedster to a pro. It would be nice to pothole such examples to "Competitive Player" or something.

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TheCuza: You know, a lot of these examples are "This beat me, so it's cheap." type of stuff, which is more of a Scrub thing to say than an SHFG thing. Anything a SHFG thought was cheap he'd probably use himself to make winning easier. I say we give the Scrub page some examples. How about you?

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I'm not too sure what this example is doing in the Meta section:

• If you draw art for fun, even if you decide to develop as an artist or draw your own style (Which takes far more skill than copying something you saw in real life to the tee), then the pretentious artist crowds will find you the scum of the earth. God forbid you ever draw something that even resembles something that isn't ultra-realistic or bland and emotionless. If the council of Pretentious Waffle Defense catches you committing the crime of drawing manga or anything that resembles it in the least bit (This includes basing it more off the artstyle of Silver-age comic books), then you must vow to burn all your art and never ever ever pick up a single piece of art supplies at all. Trying to draw your own style to stand out amongst the zillions of anime-clones, ultra-realistic, and emotionless "dark" art is an unforgivable sin and you will never develop as an artist since you are automatically shit for not conforming and drawing realistic or abstract art. Immelmann had drawn a comic that captures the majority of artists of these types and hits it right on the dot.

Mostly because it has nothing to do with gaming at all, and at least partly because it's so chock-full of hyperbole and completely lacking in any specific examples that it feels more like a Troper Tale from some butthurt 14-year-old on Deviant ART than anything else.

• Got that right. Should be deleted except for the two good points that follow it.

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Master Inferno: I really don't see the problem with items in competitive Smash Bros. It sounds like a case of "How dare they fudge up my carefully concocted strategy because they got lucky". OH GODFUCKING WELL, unexpected stuff happens, get over it.

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Adumbro Deus: Two things

1. We need a "Playing to Win" guy trope, because it seems like too much of the examples fall into that.

2. Smash should not be the picture example.

Use the XKCD picture that's the trope namer. Why? Cause smashers remove that stuff for a good reason in competitive play, the "fun stages" that are banned are banned because either a character or characters are too strong on that stage, or it's got effects that are amazingly disruptive to competitive play. On the other hand, basically you're getting an almost toss-up. I guess the best example is Hyrule temple, I play fox and hit you with one laser, now I can run around the stage and you'll never catch me cause it's a GIANT CIRCLE, and when money's on the line wouldn't you? Calling people out for using a legit tactic makes you a Scrub, and if you wanna ban it, it's incredibly difficult to make a ban discrete and enforceable, so banning the stage is more effective.

Furthermore, all competitive smashers (well, almost all, it got old for me a long time ago) enjoy playing the party game version, I've seen more then a few Hyrule Temple, pokeballs and bombs on high friendlies, including played by top pros. Almost nobody is gonna berate people for playing the game with items, just not competitively.

The point being that while the game CAN thrive on the chaos it creates, it's got enough depth that it's able to stand up on it's own without needing the "watching a trainwreck" factor. Which means that what we really need is to divide this trope.

Heck, I'd put the people who say that "smash should only be played with all items, Hyrule temple, etc" are just as much "stop having fun guys" as people who berate people who don't play "no items, fox only, final destination". Btw, the "no items, fox only, final destination" guys do actually exist, and this troper personally remembers several long conversations explaining that there are other neutral stages in tournament play for good reason, FD is not that balanced.

Master Inferno, you realize that tournaments are intended to select for skill? Why then would you purposefully use tournament settings to increase the randomness and therefore make it select for skill at a lower rate? Nothing wrong with playing like that, but random selection is a funny way to run a tournament.

Known Unknown: Well, arguably it takes more skill to adapt with a rapidly changing situation than to perfect a strategy on a stagnant field, but more to the point - you definitely have a point about the pic, and arguably our "playing to win" trope is Serious Business, arguably. In any case this trope is about when players take their particular "play to win" mentality as the only one that matters and arrogantly ridicule and belittle those who don't, and the Smash community perfected that (hell, even the practice of dismissing casuals as having a wholly "play for fun" mentality could qualify as a form of that (hmpf - as if casuals don't try to win and tournament players don't try to have fun - both sides are relatively annoying). Problem is this trope can become a dumping ground for "people who only like to play a certain way" which it isn't.

Adumbro Deus: You're correct, it does, it takes more skill to consistently win with rapidly changing conditions, so in a situation where we're trying to separate by skill as accurately as possible, why is it a good idea take have something that pushes the win rate of all players closer to 50%?

Regardless, the point is that smashers don't do that as a whole, certainly some do, but the majority of the scorn towards items play if for the suggestion it should be the competitive standard, Brawl even has a relatively well-attended side tournament format known as Items Standard Play. Most of the "we hate items and everyone who plays with them, grrr" attitude attributed to smash is a myth. Not that there aren't players like that, but it's a vocal minority.

As far as play to win, not really, "playing to win" is a very very specific mentality, wanting to win and "playing to win" are very different things. "Playing to Win" is outlined in Sirlin's book, and everyone who doesn't fit the description is playing for love of the game in some form.

Regardless, would anyone object if I did a major clean-up of this page, removing the specific pokes at tournament players in general and just talk about the people who feel like they must control how everyone else plays?

• Known Unknown: Don't worry, I already know that. I'm not trying to debate the "play to win" lifestyle with you. This trope isn't about that mentality, it's about being condescending - and even though most players in any game aren't like this, it was influenced by the faction that are, which tend to be very vocal - and it was directly influenced by antics on Smashboards.