On the question of if it’s ok to use an outside aid to generate random numbers when you play a competitive match of Yomi, the answer is DEFINITELY NOT. But first, let’s turn to a different question.
Instead of RNG, imagine if the question were “is it ok to yell racial slurs at the opponent during a tournament?” Then someone says you probably shouldn’t be able to. But someone else says “how can we really define a racial slur though? It’s a gray area. You can’t stop all references to that. Also how can we even define yelling? It’s not like we’ll have decibel meters detecting some exact loudness level. Since it can’t be banned, it should be allowed.”
That’s not how tournament floor rules work though. There’s a distinction between rules inside a game system and tournament floor rules, which are about handling the border between humans in real life and the game system. Inside a game system, you need hard rules like “you can’t use a certain card, it’s banned.” You either 100% have that card or you don’t. There’s no gray area and we demand that it be this way and not have rules like “you can’t use a certain card too much.” But tournament floor rules often must be less than 100% perfect because there’s no choice.
The issue about yelling racial slurs really can’t be defined 100% perfectly and fairly, and it involves a judgment call. But that is not a basis to delete the rule. If we did delete that rule then it’s saying “yelling racial slurs is now completely legal in our tournaments.” It could be a transformational change. Before this, if you simply observed a tournament, it would look normal. After, it could be that the status quo becomes yelling at the top of your lungs constantly for 1 hour straight during every match. Imagine an observer watching this new-normal.
A second quick example is collusion amongst tournament players. Imagine a group of tournament players get together and trade wins/losses in a particular way to manipulate the results of the tournament. Is this ok? No, it destroys the integrity of the tournament so thoroughly that it makes the entire event pointless to even hold in the first place. It must be banned. And yet it’s not 100% enforceable. It’s actually very hard to enforce at all. That doesn’t mean you should delete the rule though. If you did, you’d be in the situation where you say “tournament bracket manipulation and collusion is totally fine! Go ahead!!!” And this would be transformational: you’d go from that being very rare problem to it being a standard state of affairs that most tournaments are ruined.
In a competitive Yomi match, you should use your own brain to decide things. You should not outsource those decisions to another person (like ask them how to play) or to an object (such as a piece of electronics that gives you access to real a real RNG). Don’t do that. You’d be warned, then banned from any of our official events in a heartbeat. It’s definitely against the rules (in this case, the floor rules not the in-game rules).
The reason, I have just explained. If it were NOT against the rules, it would be a transformational change in that an observer would see the status quo is that everyone is looking up random numbers on a computer or something instead of making decisions by themselves. It means something about the point of “yomi” itself is lost. Instead of having an interesting “conversation” between your subconscious decisions and your opponent’s, you aren’t. You would have short-circuited this and outsourced important decisions rather than making them yourself. If you want to play the game competitively, then you should make the decisions yourself. Making decisions isn’t just “part of the game,” it’s the central to the core of the game.
In addition to it being clearly banned in official events, I think it should general looked down by the community. Yeah you COULD use an RNG aid when you play, but if I found out you did, I would instantly not care about your results or performance in that match. Or…in any match ever again if it seemed like you relied on this cheat all the time. It would be nice if that was the general community view too. It’s a lot more interesting to look at match results from people who actually make all their own decisions when playing the game. That’s the culture that we should be after.
This is so important to me that it’s actually a factor in whether we’d support Yomi further with more products and software and events and so on. If it’s going to be a thing where the community decides to use RNG aids all the time, it’s just not worth supporting more. In any case, we’re in real financial difficulty now paying for the Fantasy Strike fighting game, but in the back of my mind I think about doing more with Yomi someday. But if the game is just going to devolve into people looking up random numbers, that is not interesting enough of a game to support further. In addition to being crappy in that it removes one of the core skills the game is about, it also just looks stupid to observers and makes it harder to promote the game or get new people interested in it.
Hopefully you all enjoy making the decisions in a game yourselves and this isn’t much of an issue.