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Cheating in Vanguard

Bushiroad suck at policing it, so you could probably realistically do it.

Personally I’m not one to cheat, largely because I lack the sneakiness to pull it off convincingly but also because I wouldn’t even know why I would even start, because I’m not horrifically insecure about myself.

Nonetheless, for the most part I refuse to have anything to do with other supposed champions and I care for no-one else’s campaign of conquest but my own. If I enter any tournament at all, it’s to test myself, not necessarily because I want to head anywhere like Worlds (I barely attended Nationals after I forgot to book a taxi, for Christ’s sake). You can blame the sheer number of cheaters at these major events for that.

Obviously, if you’re going to have a huge organised event, the larger the number of players, the larger the number of cheaters. That’s common sense. What is frankly baffling to me is that every video I’ve watched of a major Vanguard event has always involved something incredibly shady, the most blatant being forgetting the negative parts of skills on the cards. I refuse to believe that anybody who consistently tops in Vanguard, or any card game, frankly, is not cheating. But I’m not here to talk about them. I’m talking about Vanguard specifically.

What pisses me off about the cheating in Vanguard especially is quite a list. For starters, there’s the desire to even do it at all. Because the chance-based aspect of it (the triggers) is what sticks out the most, it makes people incredibly insecure and feel as though even a total scrublord can rob them of a win. And I suppose that is true in a fashion, but that could be said of virtually every game. You also need to realise that Vanguard is actually a game that has an absurdly low skill ceiling. I myself dominated locals by simple virtue of not listening to popular opinion and trying to get as many facts straight as I could. Very little changed about how I played before, just some deck choices. That’s how the community seems to operate: only what is agreed upon by popular consensus actually gets taught, which is unfortunate because they’re usually wrong. That’s my secret: I knew the flaws in everyone else’s secrets and I took them to town. I still play this way, actually.

But probably the part that pisses me off the most is how the people who are supposed to police the fucking thing have pretty much no self-awareness at all, and that’s usually because they’re just some unfortunate fuckers who got picked off the street, given the basics and told to keep shit together. How the fuck are they supposed to catch cheaters if they don’t even know what to start looking for? The cheating players can get around side-effects if the opponent isn’t aware of it and neither is the judge, and for newbies the entire idea of cheating sounds implausible to them because they don’t know all the tricks and assume the judges have a clue.

What’s even worse is that anyone who even skirts on the edges of competitive have realised this as well. So these people cheat because they know that no-one knows how to catch them. One or two are caught by actually savvy people and get barred, but I choose to believe they are outliers. I have accidentally cheated before in a tournament setting (though no higher than local) but I still got allowed to take the win simply because my opponent didn’t ask. He thought I was right. And that’s why Bushiroad need to hire some actual fucking judges: because they is no sodding way these people can be trusted to police themselves. They don’t know shit because the playerbase is composed of people who used crap ideas as the foundation and don’t think critically enough (and I mean that in both senses of the phrase, 12 Crit master race, yo). I mean, look at the whole Brexit situation for fuck’s sake.

For that reason, I’ve basically set myself a rule that I always keep no matter the situation: if they do something that is deemed by you to be completely unnecessary such as power-shuffling, assume they are cheating and call a judge. Admittedly this is not something I exercise often as my primary competitive experience is in Team League where a vast majority of people there are just ‘glad to be here’ and wouldn’t even know HOW to cheat, but it never hurts. I also research a lot. I’m not going to forget the Bellog clause any time soon, believe you me.

I have however heard rumours that some of the European Continentals finalists were accusing each other of cheating, which I found somewhat amusing. That is largely the reason why I would base an entire professional career on solo performances: at least then if I lose I can blame it on actual chance and not because someone else was not savvy enough to do more than just cut. I’ve faced one of the finalists and I suspect I only won because I actually shuffled their deck while my teammates didn’t.

As a rule of thumb, I tend to assume the worst from strangers that I haven’t played before. I’ve gotten enough shit from playing online on a sim that has no means to police rules to know that any player that isn’t about as smart as an inbred slug with Alzheimer’s is almost certainly cheating. I do try not to think of people as bad guys. I honestly do. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, as the saying goes. Admittedly that basically means I STILL have no faith in the vanguard community as a whole, but at least it’s for a slightly less shitty reason. That’s why I want Cardfight Online to come out: because it’s bound by rules. And also because it means I can assert dominance without leaving the house and actually interacting with people. Nowadays I prefer face-to-face, because then I can cut and shuffle decks. I urge all honest players to do the same, and also never assume the opponent is going to be as honest as you. There is a lot of room to cheat in this game because of negligence on both the parts of players and judges.

The best I can hope for if I enter anything major is simply don’t cheat, and don’t be cheated. And to that end, that’s one of the main reasons I’m now maining G1 rush. Don’t do a lot, and don’t let the opponent abuse skills a lot either. GB1 especially. Get rekt hackers.

I may main G1 rush this Nationals, yell at me for it at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com

I have a Twitter account now. Drop me a line if you really have nothing better to do!