League of Legends Tournament: LGBT Players Have "Unfair Advantage" - Update

RedEyesBlackGamer

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inu-kun said:
Entitled said:
CrystalShadow said:
Not that banning trans-people alone is particularly fair, but at least you can follow the reasoning involved (however flawed the logic behind it may be.)
But banning lesbians and bisexuals? That makes very little sense on any level...
They are not banning "lesbians" or "trans-people", but the bakla [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla].

The clear distinction between heterosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals, is a modern western concept that the Philippines don't happen to entirely share.
So the real story here is, "people don't understand different culture, blames them for discrimination"

Especially ironic seeing SJW already gearing up and mentioning racism.
And Riot Games is based in the US and their main demographic is the 18-30 crowd, which a majority of favor LGBT rights. It would shock me that no one at that organization stopped to think about what Riots' thoughts on this would be. Does anyone think Wizards wouldn't immediately drop a sponsor or tourney site if they tried something like this?
 

elvor0

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Queen Michael said:
Could someone please explain why people like me are supposed to have an unfair advantage?
You might confuzzle their silly little heads and shake their confidence thus stopping them from playing at peak ability, clearly! Though to be fair, I'm not entirely sure if the trans blanket here includes executive transvestitism or is limited to post op transexuals/people who identify as the opposite gender.

OT: Banning Gay or Bi is insane. If anything it would give your team a disadvantage, cos I don't know you were eying up the jubblies on the other team when you were supposed to be paying attention to the game.

However, to play devils advocate, I would say that not allowing the situation where a team of guys just strolls up and says "yeah we all identify as women", thus negating the point that's at an all female tournement to be kind of fair enough. Post op Transexuals are fine, but there's no measuring stick of how genuine a guy saying "I'm a girl" is. You could identify as female all you like, but it wouldn't make it so.
 

Doom972

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Strazdas said:
Doom972 said:
Strazdas said:
Doom972 said:
How do they even enforce this? Do they ask participants what their sexual orientation when they register? That alone sounds offensive to anyone regardless of sexual orientation.
uh, what? asking your sexual orientation is offensive? this is exacly whats wrong with the whole "offense" culture.
Context is everything. When answering this question is a condition in order to participate in a video game tournament, it is offensive to many people who don't like answering very personal questions for strangers.

Anyway, it looks like their intention was to prevent genetically male participants from joining the tournament, and that they eventually decided to just make it all-inclusive and allow everyone who identifies as female to join.
In the words of Stefen Fry - well, so fucking what?

It does not matter what is "offensive". "offensive" is meaningless, nothing more than pointless whine. All it says is "i dont like it therefore noone should". If you have a tournament that is discriminating against non-females, then its perfectly reasonable to expect it to ask you if you are a female.
We seem to have a misunderstanding here. Asking about sexual orientation doesn't mean asking "Are you male or female?", which is a reasonable question. Asking about sexual orientation means asking "Are you straight or gay?".
 

spartan231490

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Well, technically, they do have an advantage. Male brains have a shorter response time to visual stimuli, so would a transgender female. That said, I'm not sure that 200-300 milliseconds is all that much of an advantage in league of legends. If it was, I imagine LCS teams with more men would win more often.
 

Lightknight

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EDIT: whoa, their argument is against all LGBT players. I thought it was just about Transgendered females. No idea where they got the idea that a Lesbian would have an unfair advantage over a heterosexual female. Take the below commentary on the advantage that transgendered females have over typical females with that in mind.

Xiado said:
What the fuck does being transgender have to do with not being able to play a video game against players of their identified gender?
At first I thought this was ridiculously silly that they were distinguishing gender as if it were a physical sport. Just like you. But when I saw your post I suddenly remembered, males are known to have evolved an advantage in reaction time that is not overcome with practice (even comparing athletes).

Article comparing Olympic Sprinters' reaction times. [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026141] Interestingly enough, they started with a hypothesis that they had to retract (that changing the jump-start threshold would make the reaction times similar, instead they found that men still had the advantage by a fair margin).

Compilation of studies in a Clemson course regarding reaction time. [http://biae.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/lab/110/reaction.htm] The segment on differences by sex are below.

"Gender. At the risk of being politically incorrect, in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006). The last study is remarkable because it included over 7400 subjects. Bellis (1933) reported that mean time to press a key in response to a light was 220 msec for males and 260 msec for females; for sound the difference was 190 msec (males) to 200 msec (females). In comparison, Engel (1972) reported a reaction time to sound of 227 msec (male) to 242 msec (female). However, things may be changing--Silverman (2006) reported evidence that the male advantage in visual reaction time is getting smaller (especially outside the US), possibly because more women are participating in driving and fast-action sports. Spierer et al. (2010) reported that when male soccer players were compared with female lacrosse players, males were able to respond faster to both visual and auditory stimuli. They said that the male advantage was greatest when using visual stimuli. Botwinick and Thompson (1966) found that almost all of the male-female difference was accounted for by the lag between the presentation of the stimulus and the beginning of muscle contraction. Muscle contraction times were the same for males and females. In a surprising finding, Szinnai et al. (2005) found that gradual dehydration (loss of 2.6% of body weight over a 7-day period) caused females to have lengthened choice reaction time, but males to have shortened choice reaction times. Adam et al. (1999) reported that males use a more complex strategy than females. Barral and Debu (2004) found that while men were faster than women at aiming at a target, the women were more accurate. Bayless et al. (2012) found that when a choice reaction time task was made more challenging for rats by weak stimuli and distraction, male rats tended to "jump the gun" and make premature responses, but female rats were more likely to miss valid stimuli. Note that this study used rats, not humans. Jevas and Yan (2001) reported that age-related deterioration in reaction time was the same in men and women. "

So... I'm astounded to learn that men do actually have an advantage in certain types of games. If league of legends requires rapid reaction times then they actually weren't necessarily wrong to claim this as an unfair advantage to have in a women's tournament. I've never played the game so I don't know how necessary reaction time is. Looks like a top-down RTS style game so I wouldn't think it'd matter that much but at a professional level? Maybe. I'm not the one to know. The primary question is how much of an advantage is reaction time (e.g. how do male teams fare against female teams at upper levels of competition)?

Wow, I learn something new every day. I was absolutely planning to come out of the gate ridiculing them for their decision but it appears that their caving to pressures was potentially at the expense of a level playing field. Maybe there are too few transgendered individuals playing it to make a difference? What's more is that actual skill can vary so much as to easily make the faster reaction time less important against a more skilled player.

We're in a delicate position where we (society) want transgendered individuals to be treated like the gender they identify as and with all the respect that demands while also knowing that they can never truly be physically the other gender unless science advances drastically beyond hormonal supplementation and surgical alterations. It's potentially unfair to ignore that they are different and intellectually dishonest. But I understand the conflict of interests in that we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or make anyone feel like something is wrong with them. But in all honesty, they represent a third or fourth gender/sex combination rather than one of the traditional binary representation.
 

Risingblade

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Strazdas said:
Risingblade said:
The reason is because there are barely any female players in the tournament leagues. Pretty much 0 in the world championships, so pretty much the idea was probably to get more women involved in pro play.
so instead of having sports where the best people win we must have sports that made sure that a number of females win because gender quotas.
What the hell is wrong with you? There's already a league for the best teams in the world, the whole point of these tournaments is to give attention to female players. We can easily have both.
 

eatenbyagrue

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On behalf of the people in this country, I apologize and am ready to accept your scorn. We are all assholes.

Seriously though, speaking from experience, Filipino LoL players are the worst. Far as I can tell, they're the only people in the world who will taunt you for having the money to buy skins. And champions. Because most of them just use the free champions.
 

Ishigami

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jurnag12 said:
Which would exclude transwomen who choose not to or have not yet undergone genital reconstruction, and provide an entry for transmen and any bloke with severe damage to their genitals.
Which is A.) the point and B.) taking everything literally is not clever.

jurnag12 said:
Which defeats the point of a women-only tournament.
No it doesn't, it enforces it.

jurnag12 said:
Not to mention that essentially asking people to show you their junk so you can check their gender is a breach of privacy and an all-around awful thing to do.
My suggestion is to ignore the gender and use the sexes which yields a binary solution.
How this can be done or even should be done is not relevant. What is relevant is that I favor clear and simple rules that piss people off over a blurry mess that still pisses people off.
If someone wants to separate women from men then they should simply do it and not fuck around. They already discriminate against about 49 to 48% of the population might as well add another 1 to 2% and do it thoroughly.
 

Scarim Coral

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So err do they think a LGBT player is some kind of an OP player?

Yes I read the update but I still wanted to comment the above statement!
 

Lightknight

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Scarim Coral said:
So err do they think a LGBT player is some kind of an OP player?

Yes I read the update but I still wanted to comment the above statement!
The only apparent justification is with the T of LGBT(don't know why they include LGB in the topic). Specifically transgendered females (born physically male but identify as the female gender) since males have a faster reaction time than women.

It's not that they're necessarily OP. It's just that it's an unfair advantage in a women's tourney. Just like we have a surprisingly large number of transgendered female champions in women's sports (tennis, golf, UFC, track). Some advantages don't go away just because you identify as something else and even if you've been receiving hormonal supplementation.

But the LGB part of LGBT? No idea what they're thinking.
 

eatenbyagrue

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Scarim Coral said:
So err do they think a LGBT player is some kind of an OP player?

Yes I read the update but I still wanted to comment the above statement!
Blame it on Filipinos not being very enlightened. There's still a lot of misconceptions about how non-straight, non-cis people work, something that isn't helped by the fact that Filipinos are very much under the control of the Catholic Church (or rather, the Catholic Bishop's Conference of the Philippines), which tends to enforce extremely conservative ideals, to the point of fighting a government law that would introduce Sex Education to the secondary school curriculum. You laugh, but their interference has held this law up since the early 90s.

On a strange note though, most Filipinos aren't as virulently anti-homosexual like how I've seen other people in other countries so we're fairly progressive in that regard.
 

Scarim Coral

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eatenbyagrue said:
Scarim Coral said:
So err do they think a LGBT player is some kind of an OP player?

Yes I read the update but I still wanted to comment the above statement!
Blame it on Filipinos not being very enlightened. There's still a lot of misconceptions about how non-straight, non-cis people work, something that isn't helped by the fact that Filipinos are very much under the control of the Catholic Church (or rather, the Catholic Bishop's Conference of the Philippines), which tends to enforce extremely conservative ideals, to the point of fighting a government law that would introduce Sex Education to the secondary school curriculum. You laugh, but their interference has held this law up since the early 90s.

On a strange note though, most Filipinos aren't as virulently anti-homosexual like how I've seen other people in other countries so we're fairly progressive in that regard.
Sounds to me that Pope Francis should visit that conference-
http://eamel.tumblr.com/post/109598613573/smexyaspie-beccapaintmore-stressfracture-d
(Scroll down to read that he denounced homosexual people.)
 

eatenbyagrue

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Scarim Coral said:
eatenbyagrue said:
Scarim Coral said:
So err do they think a LGBT player is some kind of an OP player?

Yes I read the update but I still wanted to comment the above statement!
Blame it on Filipinos not being very enlightened. There's still a lot of misconceptions about how non-straight, non-cis people work, something that isn't helped by the fact that Filipinos are very much under the control of the Catholic Church (or rather, the Catholic Bishop's Conference of the Philippines), which tends to enforce extremely conservative ideals, to the point of fighting a government law that would introduce Sex Education to the secondary school curriculum. You laugh, but their interference has held this law up since the early 90s.

On a strange note though, most Filipinos aren't as virulently anti-homosexual like how I've seen other people in other countries so we're fairly progressive in that regard.
Sounds to me that Pope Francis should visit that conference-
http://eamel.tumblr.com/post/109598613573/smexyaspie-beccapaintmore-stressfracture-d
(Scroll down to read that he denounced homosexual people.)
He was actually in the country a few weeks ago, and did in fact have a conference with them. They just didn't listen. And living hear, you become desensitized to just how bad the clergy is here: they've been known to not only protect and cover up priests who've committed rape, they also threaten and bully the families of the abused to buy their silence. They actively oppose politicians who attempt to modernize pretty much anything in the country, take bribes from other politicians for their support, and have done everything they can to antagonize the Muslim population (there's a significant number of Muslims living in the country, mostly concentrated in the southern part)
 

Ickorus

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Queen Michael said:
Could someone please explain why people like me are supposed to have an unfair advantage?
The clause exists to make sure guys don't enter the tournament by pretending to be transgendered and wipe out the female competition.

Because women are worse at video games apparently.
 

Aaron Sylvester

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This is somewhat vaguely true to some extent, although very poorly thought/worded from the tournament organiser.

For example, imagine if you had a female-only Street Fighter IV tournament...and this person was allowed to enter:



Ricky Ortiz is a top 10 player currently in the process of becoming a transgender female. I have absolutely no doubts he/she would DESTROY all cis-female players who entered said tournament. Not even the slightest doubt. It would be extremely unfair in all definition of the word.

It's somewhat similar to the issue of transgender females being allowed to enter female sports competitions.

Ickorus said:
Because women are worse at video games apparently.
There's no lack of evidence for this. What contributes to it is of course up for debate (e.g. they feel pressured not to enter, or whatever)...but as it currently stands women are almost non-existent at higher levels of tournament play in most (if not all) genres.
 

VectorSlip

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Could someone who is more LoL-literate enlighten me. First of all Im glad they reversed the ruling but im just confused on why there are apparently separate male and female tournaments.

To preface my only experience with e-sports is basically the recent SMITE world championships and what they basically did was have a bunch of competitions and the teams that won those went to worlds. Is it the same thing in LoL or not? From what I gathered ITT there were only men at the LoL world championships whenever that happened and because of that the female tournaments were made to give female teams... exposure?

Do you have to rack up popularity points or something to qualify for LoL worlds? Or do the winners of female only tourneys get send to bigger tourneys and eventually sent to worlds? Or do they compete against the male only tourney winners first before going to a mixed tourney before going to worlds?

Or are these female only tourneys wholly disconnected from the worlds qualifying process and are just one off things and the worlds qualifiers are already mixed tourneys with their own ladder? If they're just one shot things then how do they help? And if the female players only get to scrim and compete against other female players aren't they still missing out on valuable experience since they aren't getting a feel for how the top male players who went to worlds play?

I just don't really understand what is going on.
 

Risingblade

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VectorSlip said:
Could someone who is more LoL-literate enlighten me. First of all Im glad they reversed the ruling but im just confused on why there are apparently separate male and female tournaments.

To preface my only experience with e-sports is basically the recent SMITE world championships and what they basically did was have a bunch of competitions and the teams that won those went to worlds. Is it the same thing in LoL or not? From what I gathered ITT there were only men at the LoL world championships whenever that happened and because of that the female tournaments were made to give female teams... exposure?

Do you have to rack up popularity points or something to qualify for LoL worlds? Or do the winners of female only tourneys get send to bigger tourneys and eventually sent to worlds? Or do they compete against the male only tourney winners first before going to a mixed tourney before going to worlds?

Or are these female only tourneys wholly disconnected from the worlds qualifying process and are just one off things and the worlds qualifiers are already mixed tourneys with their own ladder? If they're just one shot things then how do they help? And if the female players only get to scrim and compete against other female players aren't they still missing out on valuable experience since they aren't getting a feel for how the top male players who went to worlds play?

I just don't really understand what is going on.
Ok I shall try to explain it to the best of my ability .-.

You don't need to the popularity to go to worlds, you need it to get picked up by one of the big teams or to get your team sponsored. A lot of teams have players imported from other regions, traded from other teams etc. Now most of these world class teams live and play together in house, so you could imagine how awkward it could be for a female to live in a house with a bunch of other guys.

This tournament isn't associated with worlds at all, you need to qualify for the LCS League to be able to play for the chance at going to worlds. So the point of this tourney is pretty much to showcase talent, maybe get a female team started that might possibly be able to qualify for the big leagues.
 

McElroy

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VectorSlip said:
Could someone who is more LoL-literate enlighten me. First of all Im glad they reversed the ruling but im just confused on why there are apparently separate male and female tournaments.

To preface my only experience with e-sports is basically the recent SMITE world championships and what they basically did was have a bunch of competitions and the teams that won those went to worlds. Is it the same thing in LoL or not? From what I gathered ITT there were only men at the LoL world championships whenever that happened and because of that the female tournaments were made to give female teams... exposure?

Do you have to rack up popularity points or something to qualify for LoL worlds? Or do the winners of female only tourneys get send to bigger tourneys and eventually sent to worlds? Or do they compete against the male only tourney winners first before going to a mixed tourney before going to worlds?

Or are these female only tourneys wholly disconnected from the worlds qualifying process and are just one off things and the worlds qualifiers are already mixed tourneys with their own ladder? If they're just one shot things then how do they help? And if the female players only get to scrim and compete against other female players aren't they still missing out on valuable experience since they aren't getting a feel for how the top male players who went to worlds play?

I just don't really understand what is going on.
Adding to the other reply, I haven't even heard of any other girl-only tournament series apart from this Iron Solari League. I bet it's not the only one out there, but still. It's still way far away from being a pro tournament, the winning team gets about 100 dollars' worth of pesos (minus the entry fee, and then it's of course dealt five ways). It's this reporting of its half-assed ruling that makes it remarkable in any way. There are probably hundreds of tournaments in other parts of Asia hosted by dozens of different entities and all of them might have the craziest rules, but we don't hear about them here since all the info is in Chinese or Korean or Japanese and so on (this is just a hunch, I could be wrong). But Garena Philippines has its esports page in English, and it's not too hard to find out this is the second ISL tournament we're all talking about! Nobody gave a flying donkey about the first tournament with its ruling being "Only Girl Summoners are allowed to join." Maybe they had to turn away a transwoman back then (again, just a hunch), three weeks ago and felt bad for it thus making the rule that they now changed. It's the translation oversight that made this into such grand news.

Just look at the fb comments here: http://esports.garena.ph/newsArticle.php?contentid=00000586&cat=NEWS&subcat=LEAGUE%20OF%20LEGENDS February 2015, the end of innocence. One shoddy ruling and alas the presses were halted and clickbait was created.
 

eatenbyagrue

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McElroy said:
VectorSlip said:
Could someone who is more LoL-literate enlighten me. First of all Im glad they reversed the ruling but im just confused on why there are apparently separate male and female tournaments.

To preface my only experience with e-sports is basically the recent SMITE world championships and what they basically did was have a bunch of competitions and the teams that won those went to worlds. Is it the same thing in LoL or not? From what I gathered ITT there were only men at the LoL world championships whenever that happened and because of that the female tournaments were made to give female teams... exposure?

Do you have to rack up popularity points or something to qualify for LoL worlds? Or do the winners of female only tourneys get send to bigger tourneys and eventually sent to worlds? Or do they compete against the male only tourney winners first before going to a mixed tourney before going to worlds?

Or are these female only tourneys wholly disconnected from the worlds qualifying process and are just one off things and the worlds qualifiers are already mixed tourneys with their own ladder? If they're just one shot things then how do they help? And if the female players only get to scrim and compete against other female players aren't they still missing out on valuable experience since they aren't getting a feel for how the top male players who went to worlds play?

I just don't really understand what is going on.
Adding to the other reply, I haven't even heard of any other girl-only tournament series apart from this Iron Solari League. I bet it's not the only one out there, but still. It's still way far away from being a pro tournament, the winning team gets about 100 dollars' worth of pesos (minus the entry fee, and then it's of course dealt five ways). It's this reporting of its half-assed ruling that makes it remarkable in any way. There are probably hundreds of tournaments in other parts of Asia hosted by dozens of different entities and all of them might have the craziest rules, but we don't hear about them here since all the info is in Chinese or Korean or Japanese and so on (this is just a hunch, I could be wrong). But Garena Philippines has its esports page in English, and it's not too hard to find out this is the second ISL tournament we're all talking about! Nobody gave a flying donkey about the first tournament with its ruling being "Only Girl Summoners are allowed to join." Maybe they had to turn away a transwoman back then (again, just a hunch), three weeks ago and felt bad for it thus making the rule that they now changed. It's the translation oversight that made this into such grand news.

Just look at the fb comments here: http://esports.garena.ph/newsArticle.php?contentid=00000586&cat=NEWS&subcat=LEAGUE%20OF%20LEGENDS February 2015, the end of innocence. One shoddy ruling and alas the presses were halted and clickbait was created.
It comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what a trans-person is here. Blame it on people here not really being that well-educated.

That said, I heard that the reason they had to do a "Girls Only" tournament is that LoL is apparently really popular with girls (and I do see that: I'd say there's an equal ratio of men:women playing whenever I see people at internet cafes)
 

VectorSlip

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Risingblade said:
Ok I shall try to explain it to the best of my ability .-.

You don't need to the popularity to go to worlds, you need it to get picked up by one of the big teams or to get your team sponsored. A lot of teams have players imported from other regions, traded from other teams etc. Now most of these world class teams live and play together in house, so you could imagine how awkward it could be for a female to live in a house with a bunch of other guys.

This tournament isn't associated with worlds at all, you need to qualify for the LCS League to be able to play for the chance at going to worlds. So the point of this tourney is pretty much to showcase talent, maybe get a female team started that might possibly be able to qualify for the big leagues.
Oh, so its like the combine that happened recently with smite. Basically they opened up sign up sheets and you made a team and played against other teams that signed up while coaches and scouts and such looked at your play and evaluated you. Coincidentally a similar discussion sprung up about the issue of making a girls only combine. The overwhelming majority opinion was that it was counterproductive. That women should be encouraged to participate in the regular tourney and combines so that their skill could be properly evaluated against all other players of all genders. That standouts will be standouts and get picked up if they truly deserve it. Smite is much, much smaller than LoL so that can lead to some extreme differences in situation but I tend to agree with that sentiment.

McElroy said:
Adding to the other reply, I haven't even heard of any other girl-only tournament series apart from this Iron Solari League. I bet it's not the only one out there, but still. It's still way far away from being a pro tournament, the winning team gets about 100 dollars' worth of pesos (minus the entry fee, and then it's of course dealt five ways). It's this reporting of its half-assed ruling that makes it remarkable in any way. There are probably hundreds of tournaments in other parts of Asia hosted by dozens of different entities and all of them might have the craziest rules, but we don't hear about them here since all the info is in Chinese or Korean or Japanese and so on (this is just a hunch, I could be wrong). But Garena Philippines has its esports page in English, and it's not too hard to find out this is the second ISL tournament we're all talking about! Nobody gave a flying donkey about the first tournament with its ruling being "Only Girl Summoners are allowed to join." Maybe they had to turn away a transwoman back then (again, just a hunch), three weeks ago and felt bad for it thus making the rule that they now changed. It's the translation oversight that made this into such grand news.

Just look at the fb comments here: http://esports.garena.ph/newsArticle.php?contentid=00000586&cat=NEWS&subcat=LEAGUE%20OF%20LEGENDS February 2015, the end of innocence. One shoddy ruling and alas the presses were halted and clickbait was created.
Yeah, I've read about the "Balka" mistranslation situation that lead to this situation catching fire, and I do think that is unfortunate. Im sure the organizers had the best of intentions but things got flubbed up along the way. But it all seems to be water under the bridge now.