Frosty Faustings 2XKO Tournament Causes a Stir in the FGC

This year's Frosty Faustings has been quite an event, but whether people think it's great or terrible will vary a lot depending on who you ask. For example, a lot of Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising players seemingly walked away disappointed with how their game was treated.

While there were some concerns about the seeding and the common issue of venue struggling to keep up with event's popularity, the crux of the issue was during the Granblue's top 8 finals.

At one moment, 5 out of 6 screens were occupied with the broadcast of 2XKO's top 24 bracket, while GBVSR had one screen for their top 8 with really bad audio on top of that.

The tweet from Crystal Hakurei pointed out this out along with other issues, like the aforementioned seeding and audio, but also the game being moved to the side ballroom, while the main stage had games with fewer entrants. The latter ended up being a blessing in disguise, as the side venue was noticeably less crowded, but overall, these posts really took off as they represented a sentiment felt by much of the game's community.

The sentiment in question was that Granblue is treated as a lesser game in the NA FGC. All despite this game having a big competitive community, lots of entrants at the events throughout the years, and overall sizable presence.

Naturally, this whole situation led to quite a few rather hasty reactions and conclusions that were directed at 2XKO. Like this tweet, which seems to imply that Riot is using their money and influence to essentially force their presence onto the scene.

However, the more time passed, the more obvious it became that the whole "5 monitors" situation was a significant exaggeration. Kensou, among a few others, pointed out that 2XKO only had 5 screens for a brief moment, and only because the Guilty Gear Strive bracket was in the process of setting things up.

After that, it was 1 screen for GBVSR, 3 for 2XKO, and 2 for Guilty Gear Strive. Is that unfair? Yeah, probably. A balanced 2-2-2 setup would be fair to everyone, but it's important to represent the real picture and not one that only existed for a brief moment. 

Even if the final set-up could've been better, it doesn't seem reasonable to imply that Riot somehow strong-armed their way into getting just one more screen from other games. In all likelihood, it's somehow connected with how setups are organized, or comes down to 2XKO getting more entrants. It makes sense that a game that had more registrations will have more people at the venue who want to watch it, so giving them an extra screen would be a logical thing to do.

That in itself became a second major topic of the controversy. In response to Granblue players going after 2XKO, the fans of 2XKO went after Granblue and started pointing out that their game had much more entrants, 874 versus 411 to be exact, over twice as many.

The FGC did what it does best and went in on this point in more detail. Pointing out that 2XKO tournament was sponsored by Riot directly, which led to an attractive looking 50k USD prize pool alongside free entry. Naturally, any tournament that you can enter for free will have more registrations. And it will also have way more DQs.

When looking at the stats, it becomes clear that in spite of nearly 1k entrants, roughly a third resulted in DQs, with many players not even playing a single set before getting disqualified. This still leaves 2XKO with a sizable number of players, but does somewhat negate the argument that 2XKO is simply much more popular and therefore deserves special treatment.

In the end, it all ended up being a big overreaction on both sides, which isn't helped by the social media's bias towards negativity and aggressive discourse. There haven't been any valid reasons to say that Riot's involvement in the FGC or Frosty Faustings in particular is malicious in any way. 

Riot as a company is far from commendable, but the game itself was made by passionate industry vets, and there's no room to imply that Riot's money did anything to undermine or harm other games at the event.

Going back to Crystal Hakurei, she also reassessed the situation after the dust has settled, leaving with a more grounded overview of the good and the bad of the recent Frosty Faustings.